India and the British Industrial Revolution

PART TWO

CHAPTER II

INDIA AND THE BRITISH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Before Plassy.

That India played a very definite part in the success of the British Industrial Revolution, is a fact almost universally acknowledged; yet how great a part India played in making for the industrial and economic prosperity of Great Britain is known to very few. It is our purpose to discuss that point in this chapter.

Let us consider first the respective economic positions of India and England at the time when the Industrial Revolution was brought about by the invention of the steam engine and of mechanical contrivances for the spinning and weaving of cloth.

We have already given the reader an idea, in the introductory chapter, of the economic prosperity of India in pre-British days. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, India had enormous wealth; the treasuries of her rulers were full of money, bullion and precious stones of fabulous value; her industries and manufactures flourished, and she exported large quantities of goods in return for payment in gold and silver. Her trade with Asia, Europe and Africa was extensive, and she made enormous profits from the sale of her manufactured goods. Her cotton muslins, manufactured silks, woollen shawls, brass and bronzes had made her famous, all through Asia and Europe.

For centuries, the maritime nations of Europe had been trying to find a sea route to India in order to profit by trading with her and possibly with the motive of eventually conquering her. The discovery of America was only an accident. The goal which Columbus had in view was India. It is well known how, after Columbus, the Dutch and the Portuguese navigators kept up their search for a sea route to India until the efforts of Vasco da Gama bore fruit when he discovered the route around the Cape of Good Hope. For a long time before the East India Company was founded the Portuguese and the Dutch shippers had been making enormous profits from the Indian trade. The East India Company began its operations in 1603. In the first eighty years of its enterprise the company made a profit of 171 per cent. per annum on its investment. The details of its imports and exports show that while it took raw silk, fine calicoes, indigo, cloves and mace from India, it brought to India only bullion. It was in 1613 that the British East India traders first incorporated themselves into a sort of joint stock concern. Writing of that time, J. Bruce says¹ that the continent of India was “the seat of the most extensive and splendid monarchies on the surface of the globe.”

In the four years following the incorporation, the character of the trade of the East India Company remained unchanged, though its profits were greatly reduced, reaching the modest figure of 87½ per cent.

Then came the embassy of Sir Thomas Roe in 1614 which resulted in the grant by the Mogul Emperor of Delhi, to the East India Company, of “the liberty of trading and establishing factories in any part of the Mogul dominions; Surat, Bengal and Sindh being particularly named.”

At that time the Dutch and the Portuguese claimed the monopoly of the Eastern trade. The English Company had several naval encounters and military engagements with them in parts of Asia. In India, these Portuguese and Dutch traders maintained forts and garrisons by which they not only protected their factories but established a certain prestige in the eyes of the native rulers, which helped them in their business. The English wanted to follow their example and plant forts and garrisons as well, but Sir Thomas Roe persuaded them not to do so, on the ground that the expense of doing so would reduce their profits.

We are told that in 1617 “Cloths of India could best be obtained at Surat, though nothing could be disposed of, in return, except China goods, spices and money.”² For more than a century and a half, the English trade in India consisted mainly of the export of cotton and silk goods, indigo and spices in return for bullion. During this period India imported practically nothing. Bruce says that “on the average of ten years, from 1747 to 1757, £562,423 bullion was exported to India, but after that year bullion was no longer exported there.”³

How the East India Company made enormous profits (perfectly legitimate) from this trade is told by all the historians of the time. Macaulay says:⁴

“The company enjoyed during the greater part of the reign of Charles II, a prosperity to which the history of trade scarcely furnished any parallel and which excited the wonder, the cupidity and the envious animosity of the whole capital (London). . . . During the twenty-three years that followed the Restoration the value of the annual imports from that rich and popular district (the Delta of the Ganges) increased from £8000 to £300,000.” And he adds that “the gains of the body (i.e., the company) were almost incredible . . . the profits were such that in 1676 every proprietor received as a bonus a quantity of stock equal to that which he held. On the capital thus doubled were paid, during five years, dividends amounting to an average of 20 per cent. annually.”

In 1677 the price of the stock was 245 for every one hundred. In 1681 it rose to 300 and later to 360 and 500. The only limitations to the profits of the company were the exactions of the English crown, the demands of the English Exchequer, and the dishonesty of its servants.

At that time the balance of trade was entirely in favour of India. The British historian, Orme, in his “Historical Fragments” says that the manufacture of cotton goods was almost universal throughout India. The rupee, which now sells for 1s. 4d., was then worth 2s. 8d. Such was the economic condition of India.

Let us now consider the economic condition of England. “In the sixteenth century,” says Robertson, “England was a backward country, and capitalists seeking investments looked towards it from all the monetary centres.”

“Early in the seventeenth century,” says Mill, “the English, whose country, oppressed by misgovernment or scourged by civil war, afforded little capital to extend trade, or protect it, were unequal competitors of the Dutch.”

By the end of the seventeenth century, conditions had become alarmingly acute, not only in England, but throughout Europe, as has been shown by Brooks Adams. Adams says that towards the close of the seventeenth century Europe appeared to be on the brink of a contraction of money, due partly to the constant drain to Asia and the increasing demands of commerce. From the reign of Augustus commerce between Europe and Asia had usually favoured Asia. The lack of money led to a considerable depreciation of currency in England.

Speaking of the time of the Revolution Ruding says: “At that time the diminution of the value of money and counterfeiting had been so excessive that what was good silver was worth scarcely one-half of the current value, and a great part of the coins was only iron, brass, or copper plated, and some no more than washed over.”

In the decade between 1710–1720 the actual export of bullion by the East India Company averaged £4,344,000.

The story of how England supplied her needs at this time is one of the most dramatic pages of history. As Jevons has observed, " Asia is the great reservoir and sink of the precious metals." From time immemorial the oriental custom has been to hoard, and from the Mogul blazing with the diamonds of Golconda, to the peasant starving on his wretched pittance, every Hindu had, in former days, a treasure stored away against a day of trouble. " These hoards, the savings of millions of human beings for centuries, the English seized and took to London, as the Romans had taken the spoils of Greece and Pontus to Italy. What the value of the treasure was, no man can estimate but it must have been many millions of pounds — a vast sum in proportion to the stock of the precious metals then owned by Europeans."⁵

We have already pointed out on the authority of Bruce that the last export of bullion from England to India took place in 1757, the year in which the battle of Plassy was fought. After that, bullion was no longer exported to India. " From this period on, the export of bullion to China very considerably decreased and it was only sent occasionally after the supply from India failed. This circumstance was explained in every letter sent by the directors to their servants at Madras and Bengal, which contained instructions to them to collect as much bullion as they could, to be ready for ships which would come out from Madras and China, and by the answers to the letters specifying the quantity sent by the different vessels."⁶

The circumstances in India at that time were very favourable to the collection of bullion by the servants of the East India Company. In the words of Macaulay, “Treasure flowed to England in oceans;” and what was lacking in England to make the fullest possible use of the mechanical inventions made by Watt and others, was supplied by India. The influx of Indian treasure added considerably to England’s cash capital.

Brooks Adams remarks that after Plassy the Bengal plunder began to arrive in London and, “the effect appears to have been instantaneous, for all authorities agree that the Industrial Revolution — the current which divided the nineteenth century from all antecedent time — began with the year 1760.”

It is an historic fact that prior to that time the machinery used for spinning cotton in Lancashire was as simple as it was in India. It was in 1760 that the flying-shuttle was invented. Hargreave invented the spinning jenny in 1764, Compton invented the mule in 1779, Cartwright in 1795 patented the power-loom, and Watt brought his steam engine to completion in 1768. Had these inventions been matured fifty years before the influx of Indian treasure and the expansion of credit which followed such masses of capital, they and their inventors would probably have perished for want of sufficient money to set them going, for it should be borne in mind that the factory system was not the father of the industrial revolution but the child thereof. In short, the accumulated masses of Indian treasure liberated the machines to furnish an outlet for the movement of the time. Adams points out how agriculture also was impelled by this new force.

A credit system based on Indian metal sprang up in England, and the agriculturists who could borrow, imported cattle and improved tillage. This movement resulted in increasing the value of land. The wastes were enclosed, thus making the position of the yeomanry almost unbearable and provoking the far-reaching social revolution of the time.

England, favoured as she was with coal and iron mines and with credit, the easy vehicle of energy, soon dominated the European and American market and even undersold Hindu labour at Calcutta.

It is clear then that the “Industrial Revolution,” the foundation on which England’s economic prosperity was built up, was made possible only by the influx of Indian treasure, and that but for this capital, not loaned, but taken, and bearing no interest, the ascendency of the steam engine and mechanical appliances for mass production, might have remained unutilised. England’s gain was India’s loss, — a loss of treasure more than enough to starve her industries and retard the progress of agriculture. No country, however rich or resourceful, could bear such a drain unharmed.

The wound inflicted by wholesale exportation of India’s wealth, was deepened by the way in which the treasure was collected. The wealth which England derived from India and invested in her industries at home, or otherwise used to her profit, may be classified thus:

1. Tributes and gratuities obtained from Indian rulers and potentates, in the name of, and for the East India Company.
2. Taxes raised from the people in the name of, and for the East India Company.
3. The profits of internal trade carried on by the servants of the East India Company in their own interests.
4. Bribes and gratuities obtained from the Native rulers, their relatives and connections who had any dealings with the East India Company. Some of these emoluments were obtained openly, others surreptitiously and by extortion.

Part of the money thus raised went to England in the shape of goods purchased from India for sale in England and elsewhere; the rest went in cash. For better understanding, the period may be considered under two divisions:

1. The economic effects of the battle of Plassy, 1757–60, under the governorship of Clive, and the revolutions and changes that took place in Bengal, 1760–65, during the absence of Clive in England.
2. Clive’s second administration, 1765–67.

Effects of Plassy.

The victory of Plassy was followed by a treaty with Mir Jaffar by which the latter agreed to pay to the East India Company about one and three-quarters millions pounds sterling, in cash, besides large tracts of land in permanent ownership.⁷ In his “Essay on Clive,” Macaulay has left a graphic description of the “shower of wealth” that began to fall after Plassy.

Within less than three years from this treaty, Mir Jaffar was declared a failure; during his rule, the greed and rapacity of the servants of the Company found full play, and Bengal was in a condition of anarchy. This state of things was the direct result of the conduct of the Company’s servants. Muir says:

“The only persons who profited by these conditions were the individual servants of the Company, who found no check or control exercised over their high-handed pursuit of private profit.”⁸

A change being necessary, Mir Jaffar was deposed, and his son-in-law, Mir Kassim, installed as Nabob. In return for this service, he ceded to the British three of the most prosperous districts of Bengal,—Burdwan, Midnapur and Chittagong,—in lieu of paying the army, which he was unable to do, his revenues being sadly depleted by the ravages and piratical demands of his masters, the servants of the Company. He also agreed to pay the balance of Mir Jaffar’s unpaid account, and gave an extra present of five lacs of rupees, £50,000 to help pay the expenses of the Company’s wars in the south. The amount given in presents to the English officers on this occasion totalled £200,269, —of which the governor took £58,333. Mir Kassim met his engagements with the Company, and in less than two years, had faithfully discharged his obligations.

Mir Kassim proved an unexpected set back to the designs of the British merchants. In place of being a mere tool in their hands, he turned out to be a far more efficient ruler than Mir Jaffar, and brought about a great improvement in conditions. But in the language of Professor Muir:

“He was never given a fair chance. From the outset he was an object of suspicion and hostility on the part of the majority of the Calcutta Council. They disliked the change from the nerveless rule of Mir Jaffar, because it interfered with their profits; and especially they resented the attempt to levy tolls on the trade carried on for their profit by the Indian gomastas.”

Governor Verelst has left it on record that:

“A trade was carried on without payment of duties, in the prosecution of which infinite oppressions were committed. English agents or Gomastahs, not contented with injuring the people, trampled on the authority of government, binding and punishing the Nabob’s officers whenever they presumed to interfere. This was the immediate cause of the war with Meer Cossim.”⁹

A corroboration of this is furnished by the letter of Warren Hastings to the Governor on April 25, 1762:

“I beg leave to lay before you a grievance which loudly calls for redress, and will, unless duly attended to, render ineffectual any endeavours to create a firm and lasting harmony between the Nabob and the Company. I mean the oppression committed under the sanction of the English name. . . . I have been surprised to meet with several English flags flying in places which I have passed, and on the river I do not believe I passed a boat without one. By whatever title they have been assumed (for I could trust to the information of my eyes without stopping to ask questions), I am sure their frequency can bode no good to the Nabob’s revenues, the quiet of the country, or the honour of our nation, but eventually tends to lessen each of them. A party of Sepoys who were on the march before us afforded sufficient proofs of the rapacious and insolent spirit of those people where they are left to their own discretion. Many complaints against them were made me on the road, and most of the petty towns and Serais were deserted at our approach and the shops shut up from the apprehensions of the same treatment from us. You are sensible, sir, that it is from such little irregularities, too trivial perhaps for public complaint and continually repeated, that the country people are habituated to entertain the most unfavourable notions of our government.”¹⁰

From the protests of the Nabob of Bengal we quote only one extract, viz., the one contained in his letter written in May, 1762:

“In every Perganah, every village, and every factory, they (the Company’s Gomastahs) buy and sell salt, betel-nut, ghee, rice, straw, bamboos, fish, gunnies, ginger, sugar, tobacco, opium, and many other things, more than I can write, and which I think it needless to mention. They forcibly take away the goods and commodities of the Reiats, merchants, etc., for a fourth part of their value; and by ways of violence and oppressions they oblige the Reiats, etc., to give five rupees for goods which are worth but one rupee. . . . The officers of every district have desisted from the exercise of their functions; so that by means of these oppressions, and my being deprived of my duties, I suffer a yearly loss of nearly twenty-five lakhs of Rupees. . . . By the grace of God, I neither have transgressed, nor do, nor will transgress the treaty and agreement which I have made; why then do the chiefs of the Englishmen render my government contemptible and employ themselves in bringing a loss upon me?”¹¹

But a more graphic description is to be found in a letter from Sergeant Brago:

“A gentleman sends a Gomastah here to buy or sell; he immediately looks upon himself as sufficient to force every inhabitant either to buy his goods or sell him theirs; and on refusal (in case of non-capacity) a flogging or confinement immediately ensues. This is not sufficient even when willing, but a second force is made use of, which is to engross the different branches of trade to themselves, and not to suffer any person to buy or sell the articles they trade in; and if the country people do it, then a repetition of their authority is put in practise; and again, what things they purchase, they think the least they can do is to take them for a considerable deal less than another merchant, and oftentimes refuse paying that; and my interfering occasions an immediate complaint. These, and many other oppressions more than can be related, which are daily used by the Bengal Gomastahs, is the reason that this place (Backerjunj, a prosperous Bengal district) is growing destitute of inhabitants; every day numbers leave the town to seek a residence more safe, and the very markets, which before afforded plenty, do hardly now produce anything of use, their peons being allowed to force poor people; and if the Zemindar offers to prevent it, he is threatened to be used in the same manner. Before, justice was given in the public Catcheree, but now every Gomastah is become a judge, and every one’s house a Catcheree; they even pass sentences on the Zemindars themselves, and draw money from them by pretended injuries, such as a quarrel with some of the peons, or their having, as they assert, stole something, which is more likely to have been taken by their own people.”¹²

One more quotation from William Bolts, an English merchant, and we have done with this part of this sad story:

“It may with truth be now said that the whole inland trade of the country, as at present conducted, and that of the Company’s investment for Europe in a more peculiar degree, has been one continued scene of oppression; the baneful effects of which are severely felt by every weaver and manufacturer in the country, every article produced being made a monopoly; in which the English, with their Banyans and black Gomastahs, arbitrarily decide what quantities of goods each manufacturer shall deliver, and the prices he shall receive for them. . . . Upon the Gomastah’s arrival at the Aurung, or manufacturing town, he fixes upon a habitation which he calls his Catcherry; to which, by his peons and hircarahs, he summons the brokers, called dallals and pykars, together with the weavers, whom, after receipt of the money despatched by his masters, he makes to sign a bond for the delivery of a certain quantity of goods, at a certain time and price, and pays them a certain part of the money in advance. The assent of the poor weaver is in general not deemed necessary; for the Gomastahs, when employed on the Company’s investment, frequently make them sign what they please; and upon the weavers refusing to take the money offered, it has been known they have had it tied in their girdles, and they have been sent away with a flogging. . . . A number of these weavers are generally also registered in the books of the Company’s Gomastahs, and not permitted to work for any others, being transferred from one to another as so many slaves, subject to the tyranny and roguery of each succeeding Gomastah. . . . The roguery practised in this department is beyond imagination; but all terminates in the defrauding of the poor weaver; for the prices which the Company’s Gomastahs, and in confederacy with them the Jachendars (examiners of fabrics) fix upon the goods, are in all places at least 15 per cent., and some even 40 per cent. less than the goods so manufactured would sell in the public bazaar or market upon free sale. . . . Weavers, also, upon their inability to perform such agreements as have been forced upon them by the Company’s agents, universally known in Bengal by the name of Mutchulcahs, have had their goods seized and sold on the spot to make good the deficiency; and the winders of raw silk, called Negoads, have been treated also with such injustice, that instances have been known of their cutting off their thumbs to prevent their being forced to wind silk.”

But agriculture also declined in Bengal under this system.

“For the ryots, who are generally both land-holders and manufacturers, by the oppressions of Gomastahs in harassing them for goods are frequently rendered incapable of improving their lands, and even of paying their rents; for which, on the other hand, they are again chastised by the officers of the revenue, and not infrequently have by those harpies been necessitated to sell their children in order to pay their rents, or otherwise obliged to fly the country.”¹³

In fairness to Warren Hastings and the Governor Vansittart, it may be said that they recognised the force of the Nabob’s complaints and tried to persuade their colleagues in Bengal to put matters right. But self-interest and greed prevented the latter from seeing the justice of the Nabob’s complaints and the soundness of the proposals submitted by Warren Hastings and Vansittart in consultation with the Nabob to put an effective check on the company’s servants. The Council rejected these proposals and when the Nabob heard of the rejection, he in a moment of “noble indignation and under an impulse of high-minded patriotism” resolved to sacrifice his revenues by abolishing all inland duties so that his subjects might have a chance of carrying on inland trade on equal terms with the servants of the East India Company. What the English merchants wanted, however, was monopoly and not equal opportunity. They accordingly protested against this action of the Nabob and made his protest the basis of a quarrel with him which eventually led to war. “The conduct of the Company’s servants upon this occasion,” says James Mill in his “History of British India,” “furnishes one of the most remarkable instances upon record of the power of interest to extinguish all sense of justice and even of shame.”

The move resulted in the defeat of Mir Kassim, who in a fit of fury caused the English prisoners at Patna to be massacred and then left his dominions for good. Mir Jaffar, the old puppet who had a few years before been declared a failure, was again set up as Nabob, but he died shortly after, and his illegitimate son Najm-uddaula was hastily created Nabob in 1765.

On these occasions the presents which the English officers received from Mir Jaffar and his illegitimate son amounted to £500,165 and £230,356 respectively. Besides these amounts received in presents (amounting within eight years to £2,169,665) other sums amounting to £3,770,833 were claimed and obtained as “restitution” within this period.¹⁴ This amount was in addition to the income which the Company derived from the territories made over to them by the Nabobs, as well as the amounts agreed to be given under the different treaties as subsidies, gratuities and expenses of maintaining the army.

The Second Administration of Lord Clive.

When the reports of the misdoings of their servants in India reached the directors of the East India Company in London they prevailed upon Lord Clive to return to India and set matters right. They seem to have been sincerely shocked at the turn things had taken and condemned both the inland private trade carried on by their servants in defiance of old treaties, and the new treaty which had been “exacted by violence.” Clive’s views on the condition of Bengal at the time, may be gathered from the letters he wrote to the directors after his return to Bengal. In one of the letters he said:

“I shall only say that such a scene of anarchy, confusion, bribery, corruption, and extortion was never seen or heard of, in any country but Bengal; nor such and so many fortunes acquired in so unjust and rapacious a manner. The three provinces of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa, producing a clear revenue of £3,000,000 sterling, have been under the absolute management of the Company’s servants, ever since Mir Jaffar’s restoration to the subaship; and they have, both civil and military, exacted and levied contributions from every man of power and consequence, from the Nabob down to the lowest zemindar.

“The trade has been carried on by free merchants, acting as gomastas to the Company’s servants, who under the sanction of their names, have committed actions which make the name of the English stink in the nostrils of a Hindu or a Mussulman; and the Company’s servants themselves have interfered with the revenues of the Nabab, turned out and put in the officers of the government at pleasure, and made every one pay for their preferment.”¹⁵ These views were repeated, and proposals to remedy the evils were offered in another letter, which is an epoch making document and deserves extensive quotation, in any discussion of the events of these times. We give a few paragraphs below:

“Upon my arrival, I am sorry to say, I found your affairs in a condition so nearly desperate as would have alarmed any set of men whose sense of honour and duty to their employers had not been estranged by the too eager pursuit of their own advantage. The sudden, and, among many, the unwarrantable acquisition of riches, had introduced luxury in every shape and in the most pernicious excess. These two enormous evils went hand in hand together through the whole Presidency, infecting almost every member of each Department; every inferior seemed to have grasped at wealth that he might be able to assume that spirit of profusion which was now the only distinction between him and his superior. . . . It is no wonder that the lust of riches should readily embrace the proffered means of its gratification, or that the instruments of your power should avail themselves of their authority, and proceed even to extortion in those cases where simple corruption could not keep pace with their rapacity. Examples of this sort, set by superiors, could not fail of being followed in proportional degree by inferiors; the evil was contagious, and spread among the civil and military, down to the writer, the ensign, and the free merchant. . . .¹⁶

“The sources of tyranny and oppression, which have been opened by the European agents acting under the authority of the Company’s servants, and the numberless black agents and sub-agents acting also under them, will, I fear, be a lasting reproach to the English name in this country. . . . I have at last, however, the happiness to see the completion of an event, which, in this respect as well as in many others, must be productive of advantages hitherto unknown, and at the same time prevent abuses that have hitherto had no remedy: I mean the Dewanee, which is the superintendency of all the lands and the collection of all the revenues of the Provinces of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa. The assistance which the Great Moghul had received from our arms and treasury made him readily bestow this grant upon the Company; and it is done in the most effectual manner you can desire. The allowance for the support of the Nabob’s dignity and power, and the tribute to His Majesty (the Great Moghul) must be regularly paid; the remainder belongs to the Company. . . .

“13. Your revenues, by means of this acquisition, will, as near as I can judge, not fall far short for the ensuing year of 250 lacs of Sicca Rupees, including your former possessions of Burdwan, etc. Hereafter they will at least amount to twenty or thirty lacs more. Your civil and military expenses in time of peace can never exceed sixty lacs of Rupees; the Nabob’s allowances are already reduced to forty-two lacs, and the tribute to the King (The Great Moghul) at twenty-six; so that there will be remaining a clear gain to the Company of 122 lacs of Sicca Ruppees, or £1,650,900 sterling. . . .”¹⁷

He also submitted proposals to increase the salaries of the servants of the Company though he could not make up his mind to recommend a prohibition of private inland trade by them. In fact, such was his moral code, that on September 18, 1865, while he was probably drafting the letter of September 30, embodying his proposals about the Dewanee, he executed an indenture creating a partnership of himself and some of the other servants of the Company, to carry on joint inland trade in salt, betel-nut and tobacco for their personal profit, and so resolved was he to carry on the trade even in defiance of the order of the directors that a clause was inserted in the indenture whereby he, as president of the Bengal Council, guaranteed the continuance of this trade even if the Court of Directors in England ordered its dissolution and discontinuance.

Later on when Lord Clive was charged with having allowed his private interests to get the better of his judgment in encouraging this evil, he tried to excuse himself on the ground that it was done to benefit friends whom he had induced to accompany him to Bengal on the understanding of being allowed to make money by such trade, yet he never denied that his own personal share in the profits of the transaction was the largest.¹⁸ The directors, however, condemned the practice in the strongest terms and reiterated their disapproval of the practice which had in the past led to the acquisition of “vast fortunes” by “a scene of the most tyrannic and oppressive conduct that was ever known in any age or country.” So in their letter of May 17, 1766, they refused to sanction Clive’s scheme for continuing the private inland trade under the regulations framed by him. The trade, nevertheless, was continued for two years more under one pretence or another.

After Clive.

Lord Clive left India for the last time in 1769. In the words of Professor Muir, “Clive had no sense of responsibility for the good government of Bengal. His sole desire was to preserve the Company’s political ascendency by playing upon the weaknesses of the Nabob and his subjects.”¹⁹ In all his writings there is no hint of a belief that the Company ought to insure good government to the people of Bengal. But in the language of Brooks Adams, “the takings of Clive either for himself or for the Government were nothing compared to the wholesale spoliation which followed his departure, when Bengal was surrendered a helpless prey to a myriad of greedy officials who ‘were irresponsible and rapacious and who emptied the private hoards.’”

Speaking of the gains of Clive, Macaulay says: “As to Clive, there was no limit to his acquisition but his own moderation. The treasury of Bengal was thrown open to him. There were, well piled up, after the usage of Indian princes, immense masses of coin, among which might not seldom be detected the florins and byzants with which before any European ship had turned the Cape of Good Hope, the Venetians purchased the stuffs and spices of the East. Clive walked between heaps of gold and silver, crowned with rubies and diamonds and was at liberty to help himself.” What followed his departure is thus summed up by the same authority:

“Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness. The misgovernment of the English was carried to such a point as seems hardly compatible with the very existence of society.”

During the five years following Lord Clive’s retirement from the service of the East India Company the servants of the latter left nothing undone to wring out as much money as they could, by every means, from the rulers and natives of Bengal. The “trade oppression” practised during this period may better be described in the words of William Bolts, a servant of the Company, from his “Considerations on Indian Affairs,” published in 1772, a description which Professor Muir pronounces “substantially true.”²⁰

Says Mr. Bolts on page 73 of his book:

“Inconceivable oppressions and hardships have been practised towards the poor manufacturers and workmen of the Country, who are, in fact, monopolised by the Company as so many slaves. . . . Various and innumerable are the methods of oppressing the poor weavers, which are duly practised by the Company’s agents and gomastas in the country; such as by fines, imprisonments, floggings, forcing bonds from them, etc., by which the number of weavers in the country has been greatly decreased. The natural consequences whereof have been, the scarcity, dearness, and debasement of the manufactures as well as a great diminution of the revenues: and the provision of the Company’s investment has thereby now become a monopoly, to the almost entire exclusion of all others, excepting the servants of the Company highest in station, who having the management of the investment, provide as much as their consciences will let them for the Company, themselves and their favourites; excepting also the foreign Companies who are permitted to make some small investments, to prevent clamours in Europe. . . .”

In this way, the servants of the Company ruined the trade of the country, and by coercion and oppression established their monopoly.

Mr. Bolts has dealt with the situation in Bengal at great length in his book where the interested reader may pursue his investigations further.

This disposes of the first two items of what C. H. Peries in his “Industrial History of Modern England,” p. 10, calls “the plunder of India.”

The third item, the income derived from districts in possession of the Company, may be stated in the words of Mr. Verelst, one-time Governor of Bengal:

“In the provinces of Burdwan and Midnapur, of which both the property and jurisdiction were ceded to the Company by Mir Kasim in the year 1760, those evils which necessarily flowed from the bad policy of the Moorish Government had in no sort decreased. On the contrary, a plan was adopted in 1762 productive of certain ruin to the province. The lands were let by public auction for the short term of three years. Men without fortune or character became bidders at the sale; and while some of the former farmers, unwilling to relinquish their habitations, exceeded perhaps the real value in their offers, those who had nothing to lose advanced yet further, wishing at all events to obtain an immediate possession. Thus numberless harpies were let loose to plunder, whom the spoil of a miserable people enabled to complete their first year’s payment.”²¹

The net amount remitted to England by the representatives of the East India Company on account of revenues, after defraying all the civil and military charges from 1765 to 1771 amounted to a little over four million pounds sterling. The total amounts raised totalled a little over thirteen million pounds. Most of what constituted civil and military charges also went to England in one shape or another.

The whole matter was clearly put by Burke in the report of the select committee of the House of Commons appointed later to enquire into the affairs of the East India Company.

" This new system of trade, carried on through the medium of power and public revenue, very soon produced its natural effects. The loudest complaints arose among the natives, and among all the foreigners who traded in Bengal. It must have unquestionably thrown the whole mercantile system of the country into the greatest confusion. With regard to the natives, no expedient was proposed for their relief. The case was serious with respect to European powers. The Presidency plainly represented to the Directors that some agreement should be made with foreign nations for providing their investment to a certain amount, or that the deficiencies then subsisting must terminate in an open rupture with France.”²²

" Notwithstanding the famine in 1770, which wasted Bengal in a manner dreadful beyond all example, the investment, by a variety of successive expedients, many of them of the most dangerous nature and tendency, was forcibly kept up; and even in that forced and unnatural state it gathered strength almost every year. The debts contracted in the infancy of the system were gradually reduced, and the advances to contractors and manufacturers were regularly made; so that the goods from Bengal, purchased from the territorial revenues, from the sale of European goods, and from the produce of the monopolies, for the four years which ended with 1780, when the investment from the surplus revenues finally closed, were never less than a million sterling, and commonly nearer twelve hundred thousand pounds. This million is the lowest value of the goods sent to Europe for which no satisfaction is made.”²³ [The sale, to the amount of one hundred thousand pounds annually, of the export from Great Britain ought to be deducted from this million.]

“In all other countries, the revenue, following the natural course and order of things, arises out of their commerce. Here, by a mischievous inversion of that order, the whole foreign maritime trade, whether English, French, Dutch, or Danish, arises from the revenues; these are carried out of the country without producing anything to compensate so heavy a loss.”²⁴