CHAPTER I
GROWTH OF THE EMPIRE
“I AM sure that I can save the country, and that no one else can.” So spoke the great William Pitt, afterwards Lord Chatham, not boastfully, but with that consciousness of power, and that clear prevision of great events, which sometimes come to men inspired by a lofty mission. William Pitt more than redeemed his pledge. He directed the administration of his country from 1757 to 1761, and, singularly enough, these five years mark the rise of the modern British Empire. England’s ally, Frederick the Great, won the battle of Rossbach in 1757, made Prussia, and humbled France. Wolfe took Quebec in 1759, and the whole of Canada was conquered from the French in 1760. Clive won the battle of Plassy in 1757, and Eyre Coote crushed the French power in India in 1761. Within five years England’s greatness as a world power was assured; France was humbled in Europe, and effaced in Asia and in America.
Our story concerns itself with the growth of the British Empire in India, or rather with the economic condition of the people under that Empire. And it will enable us to trace the economic history of the people more clearly if we briefly review in this preliminary chapter those great political events which led to the steady rise and expansion of the British power during the period of eighty years which forms the subject of this volume, from the battle of Plassey in 1757 to the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837.
Three generations of British statesmen and administrators laboured to extend and consolidate the Indian Empire within these eighty years, and each generation had a distinct and characteristic policy of its own. The first was the age of Clive and Warren Hastings, an age of bold adventurers and arduous struggles, which made a Company of traders a great territorial power in India. This age ended with Pitt’s India Act of 1784 and the retirement of Warren Hastings from India in the following year. The second age was the age of Cornwallis, Wellesley, and Lord Hastings, the age of the final wars with Mysore and the Mahrattas, which made the Company the supreme power in India. This age ended with the annexation of the province of Bombay in 1817, and the capture of the last of the Peshwas in the following year. The third age was an age of peace, retrenchment, and administrative reforms, the age of Munro, Elphinstone, and Bentinck, whose names are more gratefully cherished in India to the present day than the names of warriors and conquerors. This age ended with the arrival of Lord Auckland in India in 1836, and the accession of Queen Victoria in the following year.
I. — THE PERIOD OF CLIVE AND WARREN HASTINGS, ENDING 1785.
The East India Company was founded in 1600 with a capital of £70,000. The Company built Fort St. George
in Madras in 1639; bought the island of Bombay from King Charles II., and removed their factories to that place in 1687; and made their Bengal headquarters in Calcutta in 1700. The French had a settlement at Pondicherry, south of Madras, and another at Chandranagar, north of Calcutta.
The wars of Frederick the Great found the English and the French opposed to each other in the battlefields of Europe, Asia, and America, for well nigh twenty years, from 1744 to 1763. The servants of the English and the French Companies eagerly took up the contest in India, made alliances with Indian princes, besieged each other’s commercial settlements, and evinced in the East those bitter jealousies which divided them in the West. The three wars between the English and the French, which were carried on in India within these twenty years, are known as the Karnatic wars.
In the first Karnatic war the French had decidedly the advantage. They took Madras from the English, and they beat back the army of the Nawab of the Karnatic which came to retake the town. Madras was, however, restored to the British by the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.
Dupleix, the Director-General of the French Company, was, however, fired by a lofty ambition to make his countrymen supreme in India; and for a time his success was complete. He helped an Indian ally to become Nizam of the Deccan, and he enabled another ally to become Nawab of the Karnatic. He was thus the most powerful “king-maker” in Southern India, and the influence of the British seemed completely annihilated. The genius of Robert Clive now turned the scales. He first distinguished himself by recovering and holding Arcot, the capital of the Karnatic, for a rival Nawab, an ally of the British. The second Karnatic war was at last concluded; the ally of the British remained Nawab of the Karnatic, and the ally of the French remained Nizam of the Deccan. There was thus a balance of power between the two European nations in Southern India, and the French obtained the whole of the eastern seaboard, called the Northern Circars, from the Nizam.
The third Karnatic war ended in the complete destruction of the French power. Lally, the patriotic but impulsive leader of the French, besieged the fort of Madras, but failed to take it. He was then beaten by Eyre Coote in the battle of Wandewash in 1761, and the French settlement of Pondicherry was taken by the British after an obstinate defence. Pondicherry was restored by the Peace of Paris in 1763, but the power of the French in India had been irrevocably extinguished. After 1763, the British had no European rivals in India.
Great events had in the meantime taken place in Bengal. Suraj-ud-Dawla, Nawab of Bengal, had taken Calcutta in 1756 from the English, and most of the English prisoners died in one hot summer night in a small and ill-ventilated prison-room, known as the Black Hole. Clive, on his return from Europe, recovered Calcutta in the following year; made peace with the Nawab; and then entered into a secret conspiracy against him. When everything was ready, he marched against the Nawab; defeated him in the battle of Plassy in 1757; and thus virtually conquered Bengal. Clive also conquered the Northern Circars from the French; and thus made the East India Company a great territorial power in India before he sailed for Europe in 1760.
The Nawabs of Bengal had now become mere puppets in the hands of the Company’s servants. Mir Jafar was set up as Nawab after the battle of Plassy, and was deposed in 1760, when Mir Kasim was made
Nawab. This last was a strong ruler, and tried to check the abuses of the Company’s servants in the inland trade of Bengal. A war followed; Mir Kasim was beaten and fled; and Mir Jafar was once more made Nawab. The feeble old man died shortly after, and his illegitimate son was then hastily set up as the nominal ruler of Bengal. The administration of Bengal was in the utmost disorder; the people were grievously oppressed.
Clive came to India for the third and last time in 1765, and initiated a new and a memorable policy. The feeble descendant of the Emperor of Delhi was now a homeless wanderer, but was still recognised as the titular Sovereign of India. All the kings and chiefs in the vast continent still owned nominal allegiance to him; all pretended to derive from him their power in the kingdoms and provinces which they conquered by force of arms. Clive imitated this example. He had conquered Bengal by force of arms in 1757; in 1765 he obtained from the Emperor of Delhi a charter making the East India Company the Dewan or administrators of that province. The East India Company thus obtained a legal status, and also formally took upon themselves the responsibility of administering the province which they had conquered eight years before. Lord Clive effected some other reforms in civil and military administration, and finally left India in 1767.
His scheme of administration did not succeed. The people of Bengal were grievously oppressed under the dual government of the Nawab and the Company; the revenues failed; and a serious famine carried off one-third of the population of Bengal in 1770–71.
In Madras the British authorities had got themselves involved in a war with Haidar Ali, the most capable military commander that India produced in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Haidar Ali devastated the Karnatic, and appeared within a few miles of Madras. The Council was struck with panic, and made peace with the terrible invader in 1769.
The British Parliament passed a measure called the Regulating Act of 1773 to improve the state of affairs in India. This Act gave a parliamentary title to the Company’s administration in India, and created the post of a Governor-General for all the Company’s possessions in that country. Warren Hastings, who was then Governor of Bengal, became the first Governor-General in 1774.
There was no abler Englishman in India at that time than Warren Hastings, and none who knew the country and its people more intimately. He had come out to India, almost as a boy, in 1750; he had protested against the abuse of power by his own countrymen both in Bengal and in Madras; and he was animated by a sincere desire, as he was now invested with the power, to improve the administration. But his financial difficulties, the opposition in his own Council led by Philip Francis, his frequent wars, and his own despotic instincts, led him to arbitrary acts which formed the subjects of his subsequent impeachment in the British Parliament.
Hastings stopped the stipulated tribute to the Emperor of Delhi; he took away the Emperor’s possessions at Kora and Allahabad, and sold them to the Nawab of Oudh for £500,000; and he lent an English brigade to the same Nawab to crush the Rohillas for another sum of £400,000.
The Bombay Government had got themselves involved in difficulties with the Mahrattas, then the greatest power in India. There were two claimants to the post of Peshwa or the head of the Mahratta confederacy; the Bombay Government entered into a treaty to help one of them, and thus began the first Mahratta war. The British troops distinguished them-selves by capturing Amadabad and Gwalior, but the war failed in its object. The ally of the British retired on a pension, but Salsette and some other islands were added to the British possessions by the peace of 1782.
A second war with Mysore had broken out with the great Haidar Ali of Mysore. He was defeated in four engagements by Sir Eyre Coote, who had, twenty years before, beaten the French at Wandewash; but Haidar Ali succeeded in safely withdrawing his troops from each battlefield, and his strength was not broken. On the other hand, by his excellent manoeuvres, he surrounded two British detachments, commanded by Colonel Baillie and Colonel Brathwaite, and completely destroyed them. But Haidar Ali died in 1782, and the war ended in a peace with his son, Tipu Sultan, in 1783.
On the death of the Nawab of Oudh in 1775, Warren Hastings had obtained a cession of the state of Benares from his successor; and the Raja of Benares thus became a British vassal. Hastings demanded large contributions from the Raja in addition to the stipulated tribute; imposed a heavy fine; arrested and confined him; and drove his subjects to rebellion. The Raja was deposed, and a relation of his was made Raja on condition of paying an enhanced tribute.
The new Nawab of Oudh was also called upon to pay the arrears due from him; and as he pleaded inability, he was helped to rob his mother and his grandmother of their treasures, until over a million sterling was obtained to pay the debt. Assignments of the land revenue to British creditors, both in Oudh and in Madras, caused much hardship to the people; and in Bengal, Warren Hastings disregarded the hereditary rights of Zemindars or landlords, and sold their estates by auction to get an enhanced revenue for the Company.
All these acts cast a shadow over the administration of Warren Hastings. Pitt’s India Act was passed in 1784, and for the first time placed the Company’s administration in India under the control of the Crown. Warren Hastings left India in the following year.
Such is, briefly, the history of the rise of British power in India down to 1785. The three wars with the French which made the British nation supreme in the Karnatic, the two wars with Suraj-ud-Dawla and Mir Kasim which made them masters of Bengal, and the first struggles with Mysore and the Mahrattas, were the leading military transactions which engaged the generation of Clive and Hastings in India. Bengal, the Northern Circars, and Benares, together with small tracts of country round Madras and Bombay, were the extent of the Company’s actual possessions in India when Warren Hastings left the country in 1785.
II. — THE PERIOD OF CORNWALLIS, WELLESLEY, AND LORD HASTINGS, 1785-1817.
Pitt’s India Act was passed on the 13th August 1784. All civil, military, and revenue affairs of the Company were placed under the superintendence of six Commissioners appointed by the Crown. There was a sincere desire to improve the administration of India, and to relieve the people from that oppression and misgovernment under which they had suffered during the first period of British rule. The Directors of the Company themselves wished to put their house in order. They sent out Lord Cornwallis, a nobleman of high character and generous instincts, as Governor-General after Warren Hastings, and they gave him definite instructions to permanently fix the State demand from the land, so as to leave the people a motive for making agricultural improvements and to better their own condition.
There was a gleam of sunshine in India after an age of darkness and storms. Lord Cornwallis did not belie the expectations that had been formed of him. He improved the administration; he forced the Company to give adequate pay to their servants, and made them honest officers; he founded the Civil Service of India as it exists to this day. He was involved in one war only — with Tipu Sultan of Mysore; he captured the capital of the Sultan, and then made peace after annexing some of his territory and reducing his power. Before he left India in 1793, Cornwallis made a Permanent Zemindari Settlement of the land revenues of Bengal, a measure which has done more to secure the prosperity and happiness of British subjects in India than any other single measure of the British Government.
The East India Company’s charter was renewed in 1793. Indian affairs were discussed in Parliament, and all the principal provisions of Pitt’s India Act of 1784 were maintained. But the East India Company were now required to provide 3000 tons of shipping to other merchants trading in the East. This was the first breach made in the Company’s monopoly. Sir John Shore, afterwards Lord Teignmouth, succeeded Lord Cornwallis as Governor-General, and pursued the peaceful policy of his predecessor. And he extended to Benares the Permanent Settlement of the land revenues which Cornwallis had granted to Bengal.
Lord Mornington, afterwards Marquis of Wellesley, succeeded Sir John Shore, and arrived in India in 1798. The wars of Napoleon Bonaparte now influenced British policy in India, as the wars of Frederick the Great had done in the previous generation. William Pitt was subsidising the great Powers of Europe to maintain armies against Napoleon. Wellesley was a friend of Pitt and an apt pupil. He introduced the policy of subsidies in India, but with an important variation. It would be useless to pay subsidies to the Indian princes to maintain their inefficient armies; Wellesley, therefore, obtained subsidies from them to maintain contingents of the British army in their dominions. This at once brought money to the Company, and kept the Indian princes under British control; and this policy is known as the policy of “subsidiary alliances.”
The restless Tipu Sultan of Mysore had opened negotiations with the French and must be crushed. A fourth war was therefore undertaken against Mysore, and Tipu fell in the defence of his capital in 1799. Portions of Mysore were annexed by the conquerors. A portion was offered to the Mahrattas if they would form a subsidiary alliance, but they declined. Another portion was given to the Nizam of the Deccan, but was subsequently taken over by Wellesley in lieu of the annual subsidy which the Nizam was to pay for the British contingent. What remained of Mysore was formed into a little kingdom, and the old Hindu house was restored.
Weaker States were dealt with more summarily, and Wellesley was not very particular in his methods. The Nawab of Surat died in 1799; Wellesley made his brother retire on pension, and annexed his State. The Rajah of Tanjore was set aside; his brother resigned his powers to the British, and retired on pension. The Nawab of the Karnatic died in 1801, and his successor declined to abdicate; another prince was set up in his place, gave his kingdom to the British, and retired on pension. The boy-Nawab of Farakkabad was about to attain his majority; he was made to transfer the State to the British, and retired on pension. The Nawab of Oudh was asked either to make over the civil and military administration of his kingdom to the British, or to enter into a subsidiary alliance ceding one-half of his kingdom for the maintenance of the British contingent. He was compelled to accept the latter proposal, and ceded Allahabad and other districts to the British in 1801.
One great power in India still remained-the Mahrattas. Fortunately for Lord Wellesley, the Peshwa, or head of the Mahratta confederacy, was hard pressed by other Mahratta chiefs, and was compelled to seek British aid. A subsidiary alliance was concluded in 1802, and the Peshwa was placed on his throne by the help of British troops. The other Mahratta chiefs, Sindia, Holkar, and Bhonsla, were taken aback by this introduction of British power in their dominions, and then followed what is known as the second Mahratta war. General Wellesley, afterwards the famous Duke of Wellington, crushed the armies of Sindia and Bhonsla in the battles of Assye and Argaon in 1803, and Lord Lake triumphantly entered Delhi in the same year, and defeated Sindia’s troops at Laswari. But Holkar, who was playing a waiting game, now joined in; and the interminable war with the many-headed Mahratta confederacy was still going on, when the alarmed Directors of the Company recalled their too warlike Governor-General, and once more sent out Lord Cornwallis to restore peace in India.
The great Pro-Consul of the East hastened to pay a visit to the great Commoner of England, whose European policy had so much shaped his own in India. And Wellesley arrived only in time to see William Pitt on his death-bed. Pitt had failed to conclude the European wars, as Wellesley had failed to end the Indian wars. “Roll up that map,” Pitt had said, pointing to a map of Europe, “it will not be wanted these ten years.” There was a touching meeting between the bed-ridden Prime Minister and the recalled Governor-General; it was the last interview which Pitt gave any one before his death. The wars had a further course to run; in Europe they were concluded in 1815; in India, in 1817.
Meanwhile, there was temporary peace in India. Cornwallis died in India shortly after his arrival, and his successors, Sir John Barlow and Lord Minto, left the Mahrattas alone. The East India Company’s charter was renewed once more in 1813, but their monopoly of trade with India was abolished. Trade with the East, which had been granted to the Company by the charter of Elizabeth in 1600, was now opened to all British traders, except only with regard to China tea.
When Lord Moira, afterwards Marquis of Hastings, succeeded Lord Minto in 1813, the time had come for a final contest with the Mahrattas. A war with Nepal brought in some Himalayan territory to the Company, and a war was undertaken to crush the Pindarees — swarms of Afghan, Jat, and Mahratta condottieri — who offered their services to any chief who paid them, and often plundered villages on their own account. Last came the third and conclusive war with the Mahrattas. The Peshwa had formed a subsidiary alliance with the British in 1802, but chafed under the restraint. At last he threw off all disguise, and other Mahratta chiefs joined him. But the Peshwa was beaten at Khirki, Bhonsla’s army was defeated at Sitabaldi, and Holkar’s army was crushed by Sir John Malcolm at Mehidpur. The Peshwa’s dominions were annexed in 1817 and formed into the province of Bombay; and he himself was captured in the following year, and retired on a pension. Minor Mahratta chiefs, Sindia and Holkar, Bhonsla and the Gaekwar, were allowed to rule in their own States under the imperial power of England.
Such is briefly the history of the political and military transactions of the second period of British rule in India. The Permanent Settlement of the land revenues, which was concluded in Bengal in 1793, and extended to Benares in 1795, and to the Northern Circars and other tracts between 1802 and 1805, stands out as the most notable and the most beneficent act of civil administration within this period. The final quelling of the power of Mysore and the Mahrattas is the leading political achievement of the same period.
III.—PERIOD OF MUNRO, ELPHINSTONE, AND BENTINCK, 1817—1837.
We now enter upon a period of peace, retrenchment, and reform, in Europe and in India. The nations of Europe were tired of the Napoleonic wars, and enjoyed a long term of peace after the battle of Waterloo. Everywhere there was an endeavour to effect reforms and to secure civil rights for the people. In France this continual struggle ended in the Revolution of 1830. In England it secured the Reform Act of 1832. Belgium separated itself from Holland and formed its own national government. In Germany and in Italy there were movements after national unity and national independence. Greece became independent in 1830. Slavery was abolished in 1833. The spirit of the times was for reforms and for bettering the condition of the people everywhere, and this spirit inspired the policy of the administrators in India.
Lord Hastings established the Hindu College of Calcutta in 1817, and was succeeded by Lord Amherst in 1823 as Governor-General. A short Burmese war brought in Assam, Arracan, and Tenasserim to the Company’s dominions in 1826, and two years after Lord William Bentinck arrived in Calcutta as Governor-General. He, too, made some additions to the British territory, by annexing Coorg and taking over the administration of Mysore in 1830. But these few annexations were the least important features of the period we are now describing; the great civil reforms connected with the names of Munro, Elphinstone, and Bentinck, characterise the age.
The system of judicial administration organised by Warren Hastings and Cornwallis had failed, because the people of the country had been excluded from any real share in the administrative work. Judicial work fell into arrear; the delay in the disposal of cases by British judges amounted to a failure of justice. Crimes multiplied in the Company’s dominions, and the measures adopted for employing secret informers and arresting men on suspicion aggravated the evil. Lord Minto wrote in 1810 that robbery, accompanied by murder, was prevailing in every part of Bengal. It was then that the ablest servants of the Company perceived the necessity of entrusting a larger share of administrative work in India to the people themselves. “In a civilised, populous country like India,” wrote Sir Henry Strachey, Judge of Calcutta, “justice can be well dispensed only through the natives themselves.”
Thomas Munro was the first Englishman in India who reduced this principle into practice, and who initiated a policy of trust and confidence in the people. He had come out to India as a young soldier in 1780; he had fought in the wars with Haidar Ali, and had distinguished himself in the revenue settlements made in the tracts of country acquired from Mysore and from the Deccan in 1793, 1799, and 1800. He had come to India a second time in 1814 as the head of a Commission to revise and improve the judicial system of Madras, and had passed those famous Regulations which gave a wider employment to the people of India in responsible administrative work. Munro came out to India for the third and last time as Governor of Madras in 1820; he effected the Ryotwari Land Settlement of Madras; and he died in India in July 1827, loved and lamented by the people for whom he had worked all his life.
What Sir Thomas Munro did in Madras, Mountstuart Elphinstone did in Bombay. Younger than Munro by eighteen years, he too came to India in early life in 1796, distinguished himself in his work, and was a sort of political secretary to the Duke of Wellington when he won the battle of Assye in 1803. He was selected by Lord Minto for a mission to Afghanistan in 1808, and wrote the first and perhaps the only standard work on the Afghans and their country. Returning to Poona as Resident in the Peshwa’s court in 1811, he took an important part in the last Mahratta war of 1817; and his great experience in Mahratta affairs led to his appointment as Governor of Bombay in 1819, after the Mahratta dominions had been annexed. For eight years he performed the duties of this high office; he codified the Regulations of Bombay, gave a wider employment to the people of India in administrative work, and spread education in the province. He retired from Bombay in November 1827, a few months after the death of Sir Thomas Munro in Madras.
Therefore, when Bentinck arrived in India in 1828 as Governor-General, the work of reform had been more than half done. Bentinck’s early career was eventful. He had gone out as Governor of Madras early in the nineteenth century, but had been recalled on the occurrence of a mutiny. Plunging into European politics, he had captured Genoa in 1814, restored to it its old constitution, and conceived the idea of a free and united Italy. Fourteen years after he came to India as Governor-General at the mature age of fifty-four.
The Regulations recommended by Munro had been passed in Madras, and had virtually transferred the administration of civil justice to Indian judges; and Elphinstone had effected similar reforms in Bombay. Lord William Bentinck entrusted the administration of civil justice in Bengal to Indian judges, fixing their powers and emoluments on a liberal and comprehensive scale, and appointed Indian deputy collectors to assist European collectors in revenue administration. The more extended employment of the people of India in the work of administration enabled Lord William Bentinck to change an annual deficit of a million to a surplus of two millions. A reformed Mahalwari Settlement in Northern India was begun in 1833, and a Ryotwari Settlement in Bombay in 1835.
The East India Company’s charter was renewed in 1833 on the condition that they should give up trade altogether, and should henceforth be only administrators and rulers of India. And it was provided at the same time that no native of India “shall by reason only of his religion, place of birth, descent, colour, or any of them, be disabled from holding any place, office, or employment.”
Sir Charles Metcalfe acted as Governor General after Bentinck, and was succeeded by Lord Auckland, who arrived in 1836; and in the following year Queen Victoria ascended the throne of the British Empire.
The date of the accession of the Great Queen is a memorable and convenient historical date for all countries forming the British Empire. But in India, as will appear from the foregoing narrative, it really marks the end of one historical epoch, and the commencement of another. Before 1837, the provinces of Bengal, Madras, Bombay, and the fairest tracts of Northern India, had passed under British rule. The great Civil Service of India had been organised. After many failures and unsuccessful experiments, the judicial administration of the country had been formed on a satisfactory basis. The still more difficult problem of land revenue administration had been settled, wisely or unwisely, in Bengal in 1793, in Madras in 1820, in Northern India in 1833, in Bombay in 1835. Peace had been secured all over the country. The Company had ceased to be traders in 1833, and stood forth as rulers and administrators of India. English colleges had been opened in Calcutta in 1817, and in Bombay in 1834; the liberty of the press had been granted in 1836. Communication by steam had been opened between Europe and India; retrenchment in expenditure had been effected; an annual surplus had been secured; a wider field of administrative work had been opened out for the people. The good of the people of India was recognised, at least in principle, as the great aim of the British Government. The people responded to this desire; there was an intellectual awakening among them; there were signs of progress and advancement. There is, therefore, a natural pause in the history of India about 1837, and with that date closes our present narrative of eighty years’ British work in India.