J. Wilson-Wilson
From thes to thes, the East India Company attempted to conquer parts of India for one purpose only: to raise revenue.
Indian regimes did sometimes invite the British to settle in their territory in order to act as a bulwark against competitors Robert Clive, who would later establish the Company's control over Bengal, first made his name as part of a Company force acting as mercenaries for the Mughals.
But though the Company did maintain relationships with Indian rulers within the Mughal and Maratha systems, they were often fractious, It was a world of shifting loyalties and alliances, in which competing Indian regimes, as well as the British and for a time the French, were jostling for power.
After a string of defeats at the hands of Mughal and Maratha forces foryears, Robert Clive established British sovereignty over Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in.
The Company finally got the special status it had craved, and assumed revenueraising powers, Now that it had real power, it was not about to show any kind of flexibility, Wilson excoriates the Company's actions in Bengal in the subsequent decades, arguing that the breakdown of the consensual political system in place under the Mughals, combined with the impatient focus on the collection of revenue at all costs, was a major cause of the Bengal famine of.
Wilson estimates thatmillion died in this famine others put the figure as high asmillion, As Wilson notes, such a devastating famine hadn't occurred in Bengal since, when the Mughal conquest of Bengal had only just began even the bad harvests ofanddid not create large mortality rates.
Even after the famine had occurred, the East India Company offered no relief, It "evaded the responsibility that Indians or, for that matter, the British in Britain thought were a consequence of sovereign power", Wilson writes, in line with his overarching thesis.
The East India Company attracted considerable criticism from within Britain over the next few decades as it continued to acquire territory.
Criticism was primarily directed at the corruption of Company officials, but concerns about the welfare of Indians were sometimes raised, Reforms were therefore periodically proposed, At times, they weren't enacted, and those reforms that were enacted were counterproductive, The reason for this, Wilson posits, is that 'reform' was only ever an attempt to regain control of events, so as not to lose power.
For example, toward the end of the eighteenth century, the liberal conservative philosopher Edmund Burke and the GovernorGeneral of India Warren Hastings both believed that India had been better ruled before the British conquest, but differed as to how the situation should be remedied.
Wilson's exposition of their views is fascinating, Suffice it to say, Burke won the argument, leading to a new system that was implemented in thes in Eastern India, predominantly in rural areas.
Yet:
In the north, west and south of India,
meanwhile, the East India Company conquered territory betweenand, as a result of its "unrivaled ability to borrow money from global money markets" to fund warfare.
Indeed, "British expansion was funded by debt", But the expansion also led to what Wilson calls a "chaotic conglomeration of different establishments" there were at least four different kinds of regime in India by.
This leads Wilson on to provide a fascinating account of the attempt to exploit utilitarian principles to centralize power in India.
Thoughth and earlyth Century liberal intellectuals such as Adam Smith, Burke and Bentham were all critics of imperialism the latter objecting to it on utilitarian grounds, by thes their successors worked in concert with Tory imperialists such as Elphinestone, Metcalfe and Malcolm to formulate a system which, if implemented at home, "would have alarmed the most autocratic Tory in Britain".
As per usual, "it was justified on the basis that British rule was under threat in India in a way it wasn't in the British Isles" while liberals and Whigs opposed the authoritarianism of Tsarist Russia and Metternichian Austria at home, they thought that Britain should emulate Russian practices in India.
With centralization came a number of projects which later imperial apologists would use to attempt to defend the British presence in India.
But even these projects were not part of an attempt to transform India, Wilson compellingly demolishes the mythology surrounding the construction of the railways and the slow and halting development of legal reform, The construction of the railways was carried out "to protect the Company's power in India from challenge", not to improve lives the "advantages that public works bestowed on Indian society were very limited.
. . Neither railways nor irrigation systems had much of an impact on the livelihood of most Indian workers, . . Most importantly, they did not prevent famine",
Railways, in other words, were just another way to project the Company's power and sovereignty, and weren't emblematic of a wider attempt to remake India in Britain's image, or to proselytize Christianity, which some observers of the Indian rebellion ofsuggested was the cause of the discontent.
As Wilson contends:
Indeed, the legal reforms that were proposed back in thes weren't enacted until thes ands, Though they were heavily biased against Indians, their purpose was, again, to allow the British to hold onto power, not to moralise.
Although the reforms of thes had conceded that Indians should be able to take official positions in society, the reality was that any attempt by Indians to gain a foothold in the legal profession and the judiciary was fiercely resisted.
It was against this backdrop of defeat in the rebellion and continued exclusion from positions of power that Indians started to promote selfreliance.
Selfreliance was distinct from selfrule: in this period of Indian resistance to British rule, Indians began to rely on their own parallel institutions and organisations, especially after famines in thes ands killing millions further emphasised the apathy of the British.
It was in the economic sphere that Indian efforts would have a lasting impact, Many Indians were incensed by the prevalence of poverty in India, Some attribute this to a drain of wealth from India to Britain, but this is not entirely accurate, Wilson argues, While it is true that Indian producers were starved of resources, this is because the agency houses and the imperial bureaucracy "blocked Indian access to global capital markets" and "insisted on maintaining rigid racial barriers".
There was a ban on Indianmade steel in place until, with restrictions on the mining of coal and iron ore also in place.
Thus, Indians began to rely on their own sources of capital and their own financial institutions, creating a number of banks that continue to operate to this day.
Indian entrepreneurs subsequently relied on these networks, As Wilson writes:
At times, selfreliance coincided with selfrule, India's 'native states', which constitutedof the total area of India and included aroundof India's population, were ruled by Indian princes with minimal British involvement, except in matters of defence.
Wilson writes that these areas:
This corroborates recent papers by economic historians which suggest that areas of India ruled directly by the British "did not invest as much as native states in physical and human capital.
" For example, the native state of Travancore announced a policy of free primary education as early ascompulsory primary education was first introduced in the native state of Baroda in, while the British passed a compulsory education act in the nearby Central Provinces only in, due to pressure from Indian politicians.
Overall, estimates suggest that the native states invested twice as much in education than the areas under direct British rule,
However, the highly controversial partition of Bengal inreversed inemphasized to many Indians that selfreliance, which was bearing fruit, was not going to be enough.
Selfrule was needed throughout India,
Once again, imperial bureaucrats were anxious to act quickly to preserve the empire, They only differed on how to achieve this: the Tories thought that any concessions would lead to the downfall of the empire, but the Liberals took power in.
Viceroy Harding wrote inthat demands for more democracy would have to be satisfied,
"Liberal imperialism", however, was always going to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, As Wilson points out, the MontaguChelmsford reforms, which introduced a degree of democracy into India's political system, "still retained some of the authoritarian and despotic attributes of the previous system".
The Amritsar Massacre ofwas triggered by laws which allowed for detention without trial and arrest without warrant, It was condoned by much of the imperial bureaucracy, emphasising that the imperial regime still intended to suppress dissent by force,
Despite the contradictions of liberal imperialism, Indian politicians did take advantage of the semblance of democracy, rapidly improving medical infrastructure, introducing compulsory primary education, and constructing hydroelectric schemes.
Nevertheless, the demand for further democracy could not be held off for long, and elected politicians were given full control of provincial governments in the mids, with a powersharing executive.
This was just another "compromised effort to stave off crisis", Wilson argues: the purpose of the reforms was to fragment India and prevent the establishment of a central, national, democratic government.
British treatment of Indian soldiers during WWII would only intensify calls for selfgovernment, which Churchills government begrudgingly promised would be implemented after the war as a selfgoverning 'dominion' like Canada.
Indian society was mobilized for one final push against the Japanese, But after the war, “the fragility of the British presence in India was obvious”, It was impossible for the British to again use force to counter Indian resistance,
After independence, with the British out of the way, the selfreliance and institutionbuilding that Wilson expertly illustrates earlier on in the book was finally able to take hold across the whole of India:
Wrapping up his thesis, Wilson points to the abrupt departure of the British as evidence that British power was only maintained for its own sake.
The empire "left no purpose, culture or ideology", It came, and it went, .
a good analysis of the nature of british power in indian subcontinent, the book is well researched and gives detail about the progression of conquest of india by the east india company.
One can derive the conclusion from the book that the hold of british over india was always precarious and full of anxiety.
The book is worth reading A very well researched account of the East India Company's power climb in India, replacing the already fragile and disintegrating Mughal rule.
It is noteworthy that there were a few able administrators in the Company who were willing to place the interests of their country Britain or India ahead of personal greed.
The book also shines a light on the many Indians who readily "collaborated" with the Company officials to further their own business/personal interests, thus facilitating the "divide and rule" policy usually attributed solely to the ruling powers.
Human behaviour does not change through the annals of time! A fresh look at British rule in India, It makes some interesting and insightful observations and analysis of the nature and scope of Raj, emphasizing the often contradictory approach of British rule oscillating between paranoid paralysis and moments of extreme violence.
The author also argues that this was result of the failure to create longterm relationships with Indian society,
An interesting read, Shortlisted for the LongmanHistory Today Prize in, The Chaos of Empire is a gem of a book, fully deserving of the praise it has received from historians, economists and journalists.
I was alerted to its existence when reading the blog of a prominent American economist, but it seems that outside the world of academia and journalism, few have heard of it, in contrast to works by William Dalrymple among others.
The major complaints about the book seem to concern the author's academic style of writing, but for my part I thought that the writing was engaging.
Dr Wilson is a historian at King's College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, This book, the product of years of meticulous and painstaking research drawing on primary and secondary literature, presents the thesis that the British Empire in India had no real purpose except to maintain its grip on territory through force and violence.
Contrary to the asseverations of both apologists for and critics of the despotic regime, the British did not have a mission to transform India.
As Wilson writes:
This book has challenged these myths of imperial purpose and power propagated on both the political left and the right.
Looking at empire from the bottomup, through the real lives of its functionaries and subjects, we see how imperial power was rarely exercised to put grand purposes into practice.
Its operation was driven instead by narrow interests and visceral passions, most importantly the desire to maintain British sovereign institutions in India for its own sake.
. . It left no purpose, culture or ideology,
From thes to thes, the East India Company attempted to conquer parts of India for one purpose only: to raise revenue.
Indian regimes did sometimes invite the British to settle in their territory in order to act as a bulwark against competitors Robert Clive, who would later establish the Company's control over Bengal, first made his name as part of a Company force acting as mercenaries for the Mughals.
But though the Company did maintain relationships with Indian rulers within the Mughal and Maratha systems, they were often fractious, It was a world of shifting loyalties and alliances, in which competing Indian regimes, as well as the British and for a time the French, were jostling for power.
After a string of defeats at the hands of Mughal and Maratha forces foryears, Robert Clive established British sovereignty over Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in.
The Company finally got the special status it had craved, and assumed revenueraising powers, Now that it had real power, it was not about to show any kind of flexibility, Wilson excoriates the Company's actions in Bengal in the subsequent decades, arguing that the breakdown of the consensual political system in place under the Mughals, combined with the impatient focus on the collection of revenue at all costs, was a major cause of the Bengal famine of.
Wilson estimates thatmillion died in this famine others put the figure as high asmillion, As Wilson notes, such a devastating famine hadn't occurred in Bengal since, when the Mughal conquest of Bengal had only just began even the bad harvests ofanddid not create large mortality rates.
Even after the famine had occurred, the East India Company offered no relief, It "evaded the responsibility that Indians or, for that matter, the British in Britain thought were a consequence of sovereign power", Wilson writes, in line with his overarching thesis.
The East India Company attracted considerable criticism from within Britain over the next few decades as it continued to acquire territory.
Criticism was primarily directed at the corruption of Company officials, but concerns about the welfare of Indians were sometimes raised, Reforms were therefore periodically proposed, At times, they weren't enacted, and those reforms that were enacted were counterproductive, The reason for this, Wilson posits, is that 'reform' was only ever an attempt to regain control of events, so as not to lose power.
For example, toward the end of the eighteenth century, the liberal conservative philosopher Edmund Burke and the GovernorGeneral of India Warren Hastings both believed that India had been better ruled before the British conquest, but differed as to how the situation should be remedied.
Wilson's exposition of their views is fascinating, Suffice it to say, Burke won the argument, leading to a new system that was implemented in thes in Eastern India, predominantly in rural areas.
Yet:
The system undermined the negotiation and facetoface conversation which had been so essential to the politics of eighteenthcentury India.
As a result, it brought dispossession and the collapse of a once rich region's wealth, . . The new system was not designed to create a stable political order in the Indian countryside, Its aim was to defend the integrity of the East India Company from accusations in Britain of venality and vice, . . the colonial regime's new insistence on the rigidity of its revenue demand had a bad, sometimes catastrophic impact on local livelihoods, Lords did not have the money to invest in the infrastructure needed to maintain local prosperity, As a result irrigation canals silted up, roads fell into disrepair, ferry men went out of business and markets declined, Production shrank in western Bengal and Bihar,
In the north, west and south of India,
meanwhile, the East India Company conquered territory betweenand, as a result of its "unrivaled ability to borrow money from global money markets" to fund warfare.
Indeed, "British expansion was funded by debt", But the expansion also led to what Wilson calls a "chaotic conglomeration of different establishments" there were at least four different kinds of regime in India by.
This leads Wilson on to provide a fascinating account of the attempt to exploit utilitarian principles to centralize power in India.
Thoughth and earlyth Century liberal intellectuals such as Adam Smith, Burke and Bentham were all critics of imperialism the latter objecting to it on utilitarian grounds, by thes their successors worked in concert with Tory imperialists such as Elphinestone, Metcalfe and Malcolm to formulate a system which, if implemented at home, "would have alarmed the most autocratic Tory in Britain".
As per usual, "it was justified on the basis that British rule was under threat in India in a way it wasn't in the British Isles" while liberals and Whigs opposed the authoritarianism of Tsarist Russia and Metternichian Austria at home, they thought that Britain should emulate Russian practices in India.
With centralization came a number of projects which later imperial apologists would use to attempt to defend the British presence in India.
But even these projects were not part of an attempt to transform India, Wilson compellingly demolishes the mythology surrounding the construction of the railways and the slow and halting development of legal reform, The construction of the railways was carried out "to protect the Company's power in India from challenge", not to improve lives the "advantages that public works bestowed on Indian society were very limited.
. . Neither railways nor irrigation systems had much of an impact on the livelihood of most Indian workers, . . Most importantly, they did not prevent famine",
Railways, in other words, were just another way to project the Company's power and sovereignty, and weren't emblematic of a wider attempt to remake India in Britain's image, or to proselytize Christianity, which some observers of the Indian rebellion ofsuggested was the cause of the discontent.
As Wilson contends:
there is little evidence that the East India Company attempted to transform Indian society, . . nor is there any evidence that Indians rose up against efforts at reform, . . It was an insurgency against an anxious regime's counterproductive effort to hold on to power, . . driven by the East India Company's fearful effort to destroy any centres of authority in India that displayed the smallest flicker of independence.
Indeed, the legal reforms that were proposed back in thes weren't enacted until thes ands, Though they were heavily biased against Indians, their purpose was, again, to allow the British to hold onto power, not to moralise.
Although the reforms of thes had conceded that Indians should be able to take official positions in society, the reality was that any attempt by Indians to gain a foothold in the legal profession and the judiciary was fiercely resisted.
It was against this backdrop of defeat in the rebellion and continued exclusion from positions of power that Indians started to promote selfreliance.
Selfreliance was distinct from selfrule: in this period of Indian resistance to British rule, Indians began to rely on their own parallel institutions and organisations, especially after famines in thes ands killing millions further emphasised the apathy of the British.
It was in the economic sphere that Indian efforts would have a lasting impact, Many Indians were incensed by the prevalence of poverty in India, Some attribute this to a drain of wealth from India to Britain, but this is not entirely accurate, Wilson argues, While it is true that Indian producers were starved of resources, this is because the agency houses and the imperial bureaucracy "blocked Indian access to global capital markets" and "insisted on maintaining rigid racial barriers".
There was a ban on Indianmade steel in place until, with restrictions on the mining of coal and iron ore also in place.
Thus, Indians began to rely on their own sources of capital and their own financial institutions, creating a number of banks that continue to operate to this day.
Indian entrepreneurs subsequently relied on these networks, As Wilson writes:
Economic growth and institutional dynamism occurred in the places that were furthest from the rule of British bureaucrats.
. . For example, Tata created a series of settlements and institutions beyond the reach of imperial power, . . Tata located India's first modern steel plant in the Chota Nagpur plateau in eastern India, building the new town of Jamshedpur betweenand.
From the beginning, the town was administered by an Indian company not the government,
At times, selfreliance coincided with selfrule, India's 'native states', which constitutedof the total area of India and included aroundof India's population, were ruled by Indian princes with minimal British involvement, except in matters of defence.
Wilson writes that these areas:
pioneered research in science, technology and the growth of banking, It was the Maharaja of Mysore, Sir Krishnaraja Wodeyar, not one of the Raj's British provincial governors, whom Jamestji Tata persuaded to open India's first Indian Institute of Science in.
India's first largescale electricitygenerating plant was built in Mysore, too, The state of Baroda launched one of India's most successful nationalist banks,
This corroborates recent papers by economic historians which suggest that areas of India ruled directly by the British "did not invest as much as native states in physical and human capital.
" For example, the native state of Travancore announced a policy of free primary education as early ascompulsory primary education was first introduced in the native state of Baroda in, while the British passed a compulsory education act in the nearby Central Provinces only in, due to pressure from Indian politicians.
Overall, estimates suggest that the native states invested twice as much in education than the areas under direct British rule,
However, the highly controversial partition of Bengal inreversed inemphasized to many Indians that selfreliance, which was bearing fruit, was not going to be enough.
Selfrule was needed throughout India,
Once again, imperial bureaucrats were anxious to act quickly to preserve the empire, They only differed on how to achieve this: the Tories thought that any concessions would lead to the downfall of the empire, but the Liberals took power in.
Viceroy Harding wrote inthat demands for more democracy would have to be satisfied,
"Liberal imperialism", however, was always going to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, As Wilson points out, the MontaguChelmsford reforms, which introduced a degree of democracy into India's political system, "still retained some of the authoritarian and despotic attributes of the previous system".
The Amritsar Massacre ofwas triggered by laws which allowed for detention without trial and arrest without warrant, It was condoned by much of the imperial bureaucracy, emphasising that the imperial regime still intended to suppress dissent by force,
Despite the contradictions of liberal imperialism, Indian politicians did take advantage of the semblance of democracy, rapidly improving medical infrastructure, introducing compulsory primary education, and constructing hydroelectric schemes.
Nevertheless, the demand for further democracy could not be held off for long, and elected politicians were given full control of provincial governments in the mids, with a powersharing executive.
This was just another "compromised effort to stave off crisis", Wilson argues: the purpose of the reforms was to fragment India and prevent the establishment of a central, national, democratic government.
British treatment of Indian soldiers during WWII would only intensify calls for selfgovernment, which Churchills government begrudgingly promised would be implemented after the war as a selfgoverning 'dominion' like Canada.
Indian society was mobilized for one final push against the Japanese, But after the war, “the fragility of the British presence in India was obvious”, It was impossible for the British to again use force to counter Indian resistance,
After independence, with the British out of the way, the selfreliance and institutionbuilding that Wilson expertly illustrates earlier on in the book was finally able to take hold across the whole of India:
newly independent India.
. . invested in science and technical education, built heavy industrial plants, founded new colleges, . . Compared to the stagnant chaos of British rule, living standards improved, . . the economy increased by only very slightly slower than the contemporary 'miracle' of France,
Wrapping up his thesis, Wilson points to the abrupt departure of the British as evidence that British power was only maintained for its own sake.
The empire "left no purpose, culture or ideology", It came, and it went, .