A Distant Sovereignty

National Imperialism and the Origins of British India

Sudipta Sen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134903092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In this broad study of British rule in India during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Sudipta Sen takes up this dual agenda, sketching out the interrelationships between nationalism, imperialism, and identity formation as they played out in both England and South Asia.

1
The State and Its Colonial Frontiers

The Georgian State in India

Histories of the British Empire and the Commonwealth have seldom wavered from the general rule that while the theater of empire is staged overseas, forces that shape the nation-state belong rightfully at home. This historiographical insularity of the English state is important not only for the purpose of a national historical narrative that would relegate empire to the peripheries, but also to perpetuate the idea that rule in the colonies was founded on the raw logic of economic exploitation, was reared on indigenous institutions and practices, and remained secluded from significant developments of the state and civil society on the domestic front. This chapter presents a view of the eighteenth-century English state from the colonial end of its compass, attempting to show how commercial expansionism in India during the Georgian period presupposed a more or less coherent ideology of rule. A particular incarnation of that state can be found in the beginnings of British dominion over India. Although this period has usually been seen as dominated by the concerns of trade and mercantilist expansion, it can be shown that the economic objectives of colonial rule, plainly manifest as they were for contemporaries, were never far from their juridical and moral implications. The early colonial regime attempted to replicate in India a political economy that would shore up Britain's long-standing pursuit of wealth and strategic advantage and secure the exclusion of national rivals on the European continent in that part of the hemisphere.

An argument for homologous state formation at home and in the colony may unsettle, perhaps, the given national boundaries of historical reckoning. Yet a reconsideration of the historiographical reach of Great Britain, long after J. G. A. Pocock's invitation to a radical expansion of British history to involve the Scottish, the Irish, and the wider Atlantic world, would in itself be nothing new.¹ This, however, is part of an account of particular forms of knowledge and rule that traveled to later eighteenth-century India, pointing to an intimate connection that would, I hope, question and revise the division of historiographical labor between histories of England, the British Empire, and colonial India, and at a stretch, Ireland in the seventeenth and Scotland in the eighteenth century. This chapter concentrates on two related themes, namely, the English provenance² of the state established in eastern India by the East India Company, and implications of overseas imperial expansion for the nation-state at home.

Historians of the British Empire, even in recent times, have been rather hard put to reconcile specific interests of rule in the colony to the overall dictates of empire, or, to employ C. A. Bayly's terms, the "reactive and pragmatic aspects of colonial policy" to "authoritarian and ideological British imperialism."³ Histories of the particular colonies, especially after the breakup of empire in the last century, have generally followed the outlines of the postcolonial nation-state, while wide-ranging histories of the British Empire have remained at odds with the domestic and national histories of England and Britain. A related problem has been that of chronology: Did colonial settlement precede or follow imperial objectives? In the case of India, which was never to become a settler colony, how did the contingencies of trade and war translate into the notion of a long-term dependency?

Such contradictions between the instrumentality of colonial rule and the ideology of empire, I shall argue, are not too difficult to reconcile. For one thing, empire, nation, and the monopoly of chartered corporations were implied simultaneously in colonial conquest. The attention in this chapter is thus on the infrastructure of the company-state itself, as a conduit of extraterritorial state-building. The viability of colonial expansion, particularly in the eighteenth century, cannot be conceived without the profound ideological and cultural mandate of the Hanoverian state, articulated and imposed—as Corrigan and Sayer demonstrate convincingly—through the institutions of parliamentary sovereignty, private and public property, natural rights of man, and the primacy of law.⁴ My usage of the term "colonial," it should be added, thus follows not necessarily the linear chronology of military conquest and expansion, but along the terms of a certain regime of political reasoning inherent in the mercantilist commercial drive, a whole ensemble of articulations, measures, and policies both eristic and faithful to a certain vision of power and authority (what Foucault might call a dispositif) whose directions are marked at both ends: the parliamentary process in England as well as the quotidian administrative routines of the first phase of rule in the Indian interior.

The English settlement of eastern India, the Bengal presidency, founded along with its counterparts in Madras and Bombay, began to assert its political autonomy against indigenous powers during the first decades of the eighteenth century, and between 1757 and 1763 laid the early foundations of a mercantilist regime in defense of its commercial enterprise. In these years, during the much maligned rule of the East India Company in the chartered colony of Bengal, a certain species of statehood was undoubtedly being forged, although within the limits of what some contemporary observers regarded as "indirect rule." In the documentary thicket of debates on the legitimacy of rule, fair and free trade, monopolies and corruption, in parliamentary speeches and accusations, and in the endless number of pamphlets and petitions on foreign and inland trade, one can well detect the first drafts of a colonial state laid out by traders and financiers.

The Indian subcontinent, to be sure, was not the only place where a chartered company was operating from England and engaging in trade, pillage, and military confrontations with the indigenous population.⁵ The specific history of the East India Company in India can be understood only in the broader transatlantic context of other competing overseas chartered corporations such as the Royal African Company, which dealt directly and indirectly in ivory and slaves on the African coasts, and the Hudson's Bay Company, which traded in fur in North America. Such products were thus in direct competition with spice, cloth, saltpeter, and indigo from India. The extension of the Seven Years War into the Indian Ocean and the subcontinent catapulted the East India Company and its army in India into political prominence. With the relinquishing of sovereignty to America and the fear of a national and imperial rival in France, questions of colonial possession and settlement in India took on a much-heightened importance for the British nation, especially in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, when the Indian seaboard became pivotal to imperial expansion in Asia and Africa.

Along with fields of national contention opened up by overseas ventures, the experience of the so-called "First Empire" at home would prove formative in India. The final union of Scotland, particularly the subjugation of the Highlands after Culloden, the military survey of William Roy (comparable to his colleague James Rennell's survey of India), and the passing of the Abolition of Heritable Jurisdiction Act in 1747, were thus events of paramount importance to the future of Britain's Indian possessions. Between 1784 and 1801, Henry Dundas, the law advocate of Scotland, became the unofficial secretary of state and whip hand on the Board of Control: a body consisting of six privy councillors appointed by the Crown that reserved all political power in India, including the privilege of recalling British officers, and oversaw annexation and possession abroad.⁶ The exercise of patronage in India by the directors of the Company made it possible to recruit Scotsmen into the Indian service. Toward the end of the eighteenth century not only Dundas, but Charles Grant, Hugh Inglis, and David Scott were all responsible for providing many of Jacobite background with careers in India.⁷

Dundas, held culpable by many contemporaries for the "Scotticization of India," was singularly influential during the passage of Pitt's India Bill leading to the India Act of 1784, instrumental in the reception and management of administrative problems posed by early British India, and, as the "unofficial minister for India," was one of the main advocates of British imperial expansion.⁸ The period of William Pitt's ministry was crucial to the outcome of debates about the nature of Crown and parliamentary control over Indian affairs. Much of this was a fight between Company directors and the board over the strings of patronage, and it was the fiercely defended monopoly of the Company that narrowly defeated Dundas's move to reduce the Company's army and send regular Crown troops to the east, although he adamantly declared that the board had the power to apply the entire revenue of India to its defense, leaving the Company "a sixpence for their invest-ments."⁹ Despite strong Whiggish currents in favor of direct accountability of rule and patronage in India to Parliament, during these years the task ruling of India was left in substance to the Court of Directors and the governor general, while both were held directly answerable to the board. This was a lasting framework for the Indian empire in the years to come.

In India, notions of military, societal, and racial superiority on the part of East India Company administrators played a central role in the conception of a viable commercial system. What on the surface may appear as novel or deviant aspects of colonial administration thrust upon it by the force of circumstance turn out on closer inspection to be strikingly consistent with the overall paradigm of political culture in contemporary England. And further, the extended colonial sphere in effect lent an unprecedented coherence to some of the shared institutions of rule. The very context of an unfamiliar and alien society in which the East India Company ran its corporation and government thus throws into sharp relief the regulations, practices, signs, rituals, theorems, and documentary culture of the Georgian state in its struggle to incorporate the contingency of rule and administration in the distant colony.

Chartered Rights

Ever since the declaration of a Commonwealth whose commercial interests at sea had to be defended from Continental powers, trade and settlement had been commanding a growing public and national interest in England. An act passed as early as the tenth year of Queen Anne's reign, for instance, was designed to encourage the East India Company "to proceed in their trade, and to make such lasting settlements for the support and maintenance thereof for the benefit of the nation."¹⁰ During the period of colonial wars in the second half of the eighteenth century, as the East India question began to receive increasing attention in parliamentary politics, a prolonged battle of opinions raged about the precise relationship between the Company, Crown, parliament and nation, and the question of juridical precedent for territorial acquisitions overseas. The sovereignty of chartered corporations, especially in the aftermath of the American secession, had become a matter of intense debate.

The East India Company's monopoly of trade and territorial possessions in India had been historically obtained through letters patent under the royal seal, which granted it leave as a corporation to make requisite laws, constitutions, and ordinances for the effective and beneficial administration of its trading settlements. In his celebrated speech on the East India Bill, Burke described such patents as "public instruments" guaranteeing natural rights in the same manner as all "chartered rights of men" were sanctioned through inviolate historical examples such as the Magna Carta. More important, there was no confusion on the point that such rights had been rightfully purchased. As Burke saw it: "they belong to the Company in the surest manner; and they are secured to that body by every sort of public sanction. They are stamped by the faith of the King; they are stamped by the faith of the parliament; they have been bought for money, for money honestly and fairly paid...."¹¹

The monopoly of the Company was expected to yield for England an annual territorial revenue of seven million pounds sterling, command over an army of sixty thousand men, and disposal of the lives and fortunes of thirty million inhabitants. Hardinge, legal counsel for the directors, asserted that the exclusive trade and revenue was indeed the very property of the Company.¹² Territorial sovereignty in the colony, in the last instance, was contractual, held in return for public funds and trust, and the promise of revenue. In prevalent legal terms, the right of a corporation to hold territory overseas, granted by charter, was akin to the powers of "acquiring, purchasing, and possessing lands and hereditaments within the realm."¹³

Advocates of colonization, however, were not content with a mere contractual definition for rule or the conveyance of sovereignty. A far more grand historical and imperial precedent was the case of Classical Rome. Thomas Pownall, a prominent member of Parliament and onetime governor of Massachusetts Bay, cited as precedent the Roman Senate's declaration of responsibilities towards Macedonia and Illyricum.¹⁴ Comparing clause by clause the letters patent for the Virginia and Rhode Island companies to the East India Company charter, he declared a general principle by which colonists had a natural and historical right to acquire, lawfully hold, and possess colonies, plantations, settlements, and factories on the edges or beyond the pale of known civilization {in partibus exteris and caeteris). Pownall, it should be pointed out, was one of the strongest advocates of a firm colonial policy and, along with Sir George Colebrooke (chairman of the Company) and Robert Clive, sought to bring Britain's North American and East Indian possessions within one consistent imperial policy.¹⁵ There were many others who were skeptical of commitments beyond narrowly perceived speculative and financial concerns, but even these rested on written instruments of trade that clearly entailed rudiments of overseas administration and the possibility of forcible acquisition. Colonial trading corporations were given abundant leave to acquire, purchase, and possess lands, property, and stock, govern territories, regulate emigration and settlement, conduct war and peace with native adversaries, and run civil and military administration. The Tory radical William Cobbett railed against the augmented powers of the Company consolidated under Pitt and Dundas.¹⁶ The Company, he argued, was allowed by charter to create a quantity of stock and thus make loans and pay in dividends the interest on money raised, just like the ministry. It had thus become, in fact, "a sort of under-government" aided by the India revenue, with its defense and administration under the supervision of "the mother government at West-minster."¹⁷ "Thus set out in the world," Cobbett exhorted, "this company of sovereigns, furnished, at once, with dominions, subjects, taxes, and a funded debt."¹⁸

Attempts to vindicate or disprove the Company's right by charter thus provide a crucial trail of documents that ends in the Houses of Parliament and a certain trajectory of debates through which remote events of the Indian colony were periodically visited as routine and customary matters of the state, setting an imperial precedence for years to come. Thus, by the second half of the eighteenth century—ironically enough, at the height of the Company's notoriety—the moral-juridical discourse about the limits and responsibilities of colonial intervention had attained considerable maturity in the public eye. Without such a discursive arena, Burke's...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The State and Its Colonial Frontiers
• Chapter 2 History as Imperial Lesson
• Chapter 3 Invasive Prospects
• Chapter 4 Domesticity and Dominion
• Chapter 5 The Decline of Intimacy
• Afterword
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index