The British in India - Consolidation & Polarisation

After the departure of Hastings in 1785, his two most important successors as Governor-General were Lord Cornwallis and Lord Wellesley. The first was a conservative reformer who was keen to bring restraint to the administration of India, the second was a military expansionist whose defeat of the French consolidated the region as the Jewel in the Crown of the newly expanded British Empire.

For Cornwallis, the British had to show their superiority to the local population by example and his paternalistic attitude combined rule of law with the exclusion from government posts of all Indians. His recognition that a British dominated system of government should serve the Indian public was still motivated by British interest. Relieved that rains had averted a famine, he wrote that 'there is now I trust no danger of losing the inhabitants, or of much failure in the revenue'. He improved gaols, reformed the coinage, suppressed child slavery, limited patronage amongst the whites and insisted on large salaries for their posts so that plunder could be discouraged. After the war against Tipu Sultan he stunned his own officers by leaving the ruler of Mysore on his throne. Of course this was a political move which blocked Tipu's rivals whilst forcing the ruler to concede large territorial amd financial claims to the British.

For Wellesley, elder brother of the Duke of Wellington, the conflicts in India with both Tipu Sultan and the French allowed the British to dominate the region completely. Wellesley conquered more territory in India than Napoleon did in Europe. Tipu Sultan had promised a holy war of vengeance since his defeat by Cornwallis and this led to his demonisation by the British as a savage monster. Certainly the ruler of Mysore had a reputation for cruelty, but moral attacks from the masters of the slave trade were nothing but hypocrisy. The ruler of Mysore was celebrated by his own subjects as cultured and fair, while he possessed a superb French-trained army and a magnificent palace. This then was the prize for the British forces when they won the battle of Seringapatam. Piers Brendon notes that 'Loot was a Hindi word but the British soon adopted it,' and the Tiger of Mysore's palace was duly ransacked. Wellesley wanted to 'heap kingdoms upon kingdoms, victory upon victory, revenue upon revenue' and with the help of his brother, he extended British dominance after the defeat the Maratha Confederacy. An extravagant Governor-General, Wellesley constructed a new neo-classical Government House which cost £170,000. His rude and dominant attitude towards the local white community which saw him encase himself in ceremonial majesty was, in itself, a reflection of the feelings now held by the whites towards the Indians.

Native culture was now seen as inferior by a white community that had institutionalised discrimination throughout their administration. The success that the British had won in India had also created a greater insecurity that they might lose it all, so they endeavoured to shore up their new power by establishing themselves as the superior caste. Throughout the region there was a clear polarisation in Indian society that could be seen in the stark contrast between the opulent White part of Calcutta and the festering conditions of its 'Black Town.'

The East India Company - Conquest & Plunder

Unlike the American and West Indies Colonies, the British expansion in India was down to force of arms rather than through the settlement of white colonisers. India was taken into the British Empire gradually over decades as increasingly valuable trading posts became protected by ever-greater numbers of soldiers. As the riches of the subcontinent were exploited more and more, military alliances were formed with local rulers and divisions amongst the Mughals and their rivals were exploited to the East India Company's advantage. Lord Bryce described the emerging British Raj as having 'a permanently military character' and by the 1770s the East India Company had over 100,000 men under arms. Yet the constant strand throughout the period was the fear amongst the comparatively tiny white garrison that what had been won by force could be lost by force.

Originally Queen Elizabeth had given the East India Company its charter in 1600 and it would grow to become the main power in India within the next 200 years. Gradually overtaking competitors like the Dutch East Indian Company, they established their outposts on the fringes of the Mughal Empire in order to trade in spices. The 17th Century was a golden age for Mughal culture and the Mughals had more opulent cities than Europe. However the standard of Mughal Emperor declined in the 18th Century as power struggles erupted and, as Macaulay described, successive incumbents 'sauntered away life in secluded palaces, chewing bang (cannabis), fondling concubines, and listening to buffoons.' Internal revolts combined with Persian and Afghan invasions meant that the disordered land was ripe for the British and the French to exploit. In making alliances with local rulers, the East India Company could gain control of further commerce which paid for more sepoys (native soldiers) to conquer further territory, which in turn gave more tax revenue and yet more commercial gains. With a superior navy and better military leadership the British outdid the French easily and by 1761 had crushed their allies and controlled Bengal.

Yet the East India Company was only interested in commercial gain and not in administration. This meant that the province of Bengal was plundered by the tyrannical Company men who were to build vast palaces and extract valuable gifts, before returning home to scandalise society with their ill-gotten gains. Piers Brendon supposes that they may have been 'rendered callous by their own likely fate: about 60 per cent of the Company's appointees died before they could get back to England'. However, vast fortunes were made for the surviving Company employees whilst the province collapsed into famine and death. Between 1773 and 1774 around 5 million people starved to death: one third of Bengal's population. Less people meant less tax revenue and the East India Company's share price began to fall. In 1784 the India Act saw the government take control away from the Company; in 1788 Governor-General Hastings himself was impeached by the House of Lords under charges of misgovernment and corruption.

Although Hastings had been relatively respectful of Indian culture and had seized less riches personally than previous Governor-Generals, the perpetual warfare of his regime was not only costly to Britain; his self-made nabobs that had corrupted the elites of India were now seen as spreading their immorality to British society with many buying rotten borough parliamentary seats. This meant that his never-ending trial would see the British debating the very nature of their new Empire with the great debater Burke accusing Hastings of being 'a ravenous vulture devouring the carcases of the dead.' However, key witnesses were to contract amnesia when it came to providing evidence of Hastings personal culpability in corruption and he was acquitted in 1795. By then, any collective guilt surrounding imperial adventure had been overtaken by a new centralised zeal that insisted that Indians were uncivilized, their culture backward and that India must be 'ruled by an absolute power.'

Source:

Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781 - 1997.

Sugar & Slaves - The British West Indies

Britain was anxious not to lose its Caribbean possessions and prized such territory so highly that its government had almost swapped the whole of Canada for Guadeloupe in 1763! The reason for was for the muscovado crop - the raw brown sugar that was used to produce the sweet sugar that the British now craved for their puddings and which rotted their teeth.

Slaves were used to produce the sugar and it was Britain who dominated the slave trade, shipping their 'black ivory' across the Atlantic Ocean. By 1807, half of Britain's long distance shipping was engaged in the trade and it is estimated that around 12 million Africans were transported between the 16th and 18th Centuries, with one fifth of these people dying en route. An infamous incident saw the Captain of the Zong running short of water and throwing 132 slaves overboard so that insurance value could be claimed. In the subsequent court case the ship's owners lost, but only on the subject of property as Chief Justice Mansfield likened the crime to that of killing horses.

Viewed as inferior beings, the captured Africans were inspected like cattle and then bought, branded and manacled for their two month journey across the Atlantic. One of the few slaves to record his experiences, Olaudah Equiano felt imprisoned in a 'world of bad spirits'. The slaves were crammed into a space smaller than a coffin and had to wallow in their own excrement whilst suffering from disease and malnutrition as the irons ate into their flesh. Skeletal and ill, the survivors were then sold on to plantation owners where a new form of hell began. The exhausting process of producing sugar meant an existence of toil and punishment.

Samuel Johnson described the main West Indian colony of Jamaica as 'a place of great wealth and dreadful wickedness, a den of tyrants and a dungeon of slaves'. He also stated that he drank to 'the next insurrection of Negroes in the West Indies'.

The white plantation owners grew extravagantly rich amongst this suffering. Many planters indulged in the sexual exploitation of their female slaves and, whilst flogging was widespread throughout British society, it was taken to torturous extremes when punishing the slaves. Even worse than the specific instances of cruelty was the mental horror that each slave faced. In comparison with the slaves of the Roman Empire, these people had no chance of obtaining freedom and were denied the most important life-sustaining quality of all:hope.

The campaign for the abolition of the Slave trade went from being a popular moral issue to a sustained political movement in late 18th and early 19th Century Britain. Delayed by the repressive reaction to the American and French Revolutions, the eventual victory of this campaign was in itself a triumph for humanitarianism. However, swelled by victory against the French and by new territorial gains across the globe, this empire would use such a triumph to engender a moral righteousness that insisted that the British were now intent on civilising the entire world.

Source:

Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781 - 1997.

Lord Sandwich loses the 13 colonies.

The Royal Navy was unable to relieve the British forces commanded by General Cornwallis at the decisive battle of Yorktown which decided the American War of Independence. Admiral Graves did not have the proper ships, the proper supplies or the ability to recover in time from a recent defeat by the French at Chesapeake Bay. The man who was ultimately responsible for this was the First Lord of the Admiralty in North's administration, Lord Sandwich.

David Hume, the Scottish philosopher and an intellectual celebrity of the time, commented that Lord Sandwich had spent several weeks trout fishing at Newbury 'with two or three ladies of pleasure..at a time when the fate of the British Empire is in dependance, and in dependance on him.'

One wonders if any of those ladies managed to land a brown trout, or whether Lord Sandwich was content to bait his hook whilst gossiping about a naval administration that was racked with political rivalry, blatant corruption and strategical ineptitude. Indeed, the Royal Navy's officer corps was riddled with aristocrats more concerned with supposed status and honour. Under Lord Sandwich's rather lax command, this particular campaign had shown up British naval commanders as unable to take decisive action during battles and incapable of developing new tactics.

Compounding the flagrant incompetence of the officers was the poor standard of the Royal navy's regular seamen: half of them had been press-ganged into the navy against their will! The other half were paupers with no other work opportunities to choose from. Forced to volunteer for a job with terrible pay, disgusting food and cruel discipline, they would then be exposed to deadly diseases such as scurvy and yellow fever.

"Our fleets, which are defrauded by injustice, are first manned by violence and then maintained by cruelty," admitted Admiral Edward Grog Vernon.

Of course there were other contributing factors to the loss of the thirteen colonies, from the galvanising issue of taxation without representation as well as the military support that George Washington received from the French, to the very nature of this embryonic empire that sought to exploit whilst spreading the self-defeating concept of liberty; however, this case of naval mismanagement is a perfect example of the type of aristocratic blunders that would characterise the British Empire throughout its history.

On the other hand, it is also important to note that the next generation of Royal Navy officers would learn from these costly mistakes and would go on to attain the stunning naval successes of the 1790s and the early 19th Century which would do so much to establish the British Empire properly.

Sources:

1. Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781 - 1997.

2. Citizendium on the American Revolution.