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A History of India - Book Summary - Indian History - Hermann Rothermund - PART IV, Summaries of Indian History

In 1534 the Turks had reached Basra and could thus control the entire caravan route from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean.

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him an assured income. Private merchants could cut in on this trade under a royal lease, which diminished the king’s profit somewhat but also placed the entire risk of the voyage on the shoulders of the private investor. This arrangement was predominant in the second half of the sixteenth century when Venetian trade had revived in the Mediterranean and the Portuguese king looked upon his pepper monopoly as a kind of money estate which could be mortgaged to the highest bidder. In fact, the ‘Casa da India’—the administration of the royal monopoly—went bankrupt in 1560 because the king had used this method of mortgaging his assets too liberally. Another source of income which became as important to the Portuguese king as the pepper monopoly was the sale of the offices of captains and customs collectors in the Indian Ocean strongholds. In 1534 the Turks had reached Basra and could thus control the entire caravan route from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. They then became the trading partners of Venice, just as the Egyptian Mameluks had been at an earlier date. Instead of tightening their grip at the throat of Venice, the Portuguese now preferred to collect customs at Hormuz and other places. The offices of those who collected these customs were auctioned by the king at short intervals, usually three years. So this was another royal money estate which yielded income without any risk. In this way the king became a rent receiver rather than a royal entrepreneur. This tendency was even more accentuated when Philip II of Spain inherited the Portuguese throne in

  1. He spent some time in Lisbon after claiming the Portuguese heritage, and could have revamped the Portuguese maritime empire. However, he soon returned to Spain and used the royal money estates of Portugal to fill coffers frequently depleted by a succession of bankruptcies. He forced his creditors, among them the German merchant bankers Fugger and Welser, to take over the pepper monopoly on terms which he dictated to them. The ideal solution for him would have been for them to take over the import monopoly and the entire distribution while giving him a share amounting to about twice the import price as an annuity. But soon after Philip’s final bankruptcy and death the pepper monopoly became almost worthless as ships from the Mediterranean brought pepper to Lisbon at a cheaper rate. At this stage only the Portuguese customs at stations around the Indian Ocean still yielded a good income, whereas the pepper trade once more passed into the hands of the Mediterranean merchants. However, this transitional period of a revived Mediterranean trade was very brief: the Dutch invaded the Indian Ocean with dramatic speed at the beginning of the seventeenth century, just as the Portuguese had done a hundred years earlier. For the Indian landpower the presence of the European seapowers in the Indian Ocean remained politically insignificant. Seapower intervention in the affairs of Indian rulers was of only marginal importance. The case of the sultan of Gujarat, who turned to the Portuguese for help after his

defeat by Humayun, was an isolated incident. Once Akbar had reconquered Gujarat in 1574 and had incorporated it into the Mughal empire, there was no repetition of Portuguese intervention: the Portuguese even had to leave their trading post at Hugli when Akbar drove them out of it. He made no further moves against them, although he did send a message to Shah Abbas of Persia—who doubted Akbar’s faith in Islam— that they should make common cause against the Portuguese infidels. As traders the Portuguese were generally well received by the Indian rulers who granted them the same rights as they did to other merchants but nevertheless disliked their monopsonistic practices. Therefore the appearance of European competitors in the ports of the Indian Ocean was also welcomed, because these newcomers could be played off against the Portuguese. Their potential for intervention in the affairs of the landpowers was underrated: a century of experience of the Portuguese seemed to have shown that these Europeans stuck to the sea and would not be able to do much on land. Actually, a military expedition into the interior of the country was in any case highly unlikely, because the monsoon brought the ships to the Indian shores only during a few months of the year and thus the supply lines would be cut quickly by nature itself. Indeed, it was only later, when the Europeans trained Indian mercenaries whom they paid with money brought to India by their ships, that their potential for intervention increased by leaps and bounds. The Portuguese remained satisfied with strongholds on the coast and never made the sort of daring expedition into the interior of India as had prompted their unfortunate young King Sebastian in Morocco, so causing his death on the battlefield of Kasr-al-Kabir in 1578. It seems that the future of Portugal died with Sebastian on that battlefield. The great drive of the Portuguese to rule the seas was broken; they now merely clung on to what they had gained.

The rise of Dutch and British seapower

At about the same time as the future of the Portuguese began to wane the future of the Dutch emerged under most adverse circumstances. The union of the seven Dutch provinces was accomplished in 1579 and in the midst of their freedom struggle against their Spanish overlords, who were by then also ruling Portugal, the Dutch dared to invade the Indian Ocean in such a big way that the earlier Portuguese achievements were immediately dwarfed by their success. Several favourable preconditions accounted for this Dutch success. The Dutch had a good educational system and had made much headway in science and technology. This enabled them to acquire nautical information from the Portuguese and to improve upon it in many ways. Although they themselves were later to prove quite secretive about their nautical knowledge, they were past masters at collecting useful

later he was sent to London to defend the Dutch claim to the exclusive control of the Indonesian spice islands. The Dutch, so he argued, had to refuse all other powers an access to them because only in this way could the Dutch be compensated for the protection which they furnished. Whereas the Dutch jealously guarded their territorial control in Indonesia at a very early stage, they showed no such ambitions in India. This was perhaps due to the fact that they procured textiles to an increasing extent in India and these were not covered by a monopoly. The textile trade, which became more important to the Dutch, required methods of control other than the physical occupation of the area of production. It was more important in this case to tie down producers and middlemen by means of credit and advances and to organise the acquisition of the right type of textiles which were popular with customers abroad. The factories of the East India Companies, both Dutch and British, experienced a great deal of structural change as they adapted to the textile trade. Initially, such factories were expected only to store goods for the annual shipment; in due course, however, they became centres whose influence extended far into the interior of the country as they placed orders, distributed patterns, granted and supervised credit, etc. The Dutch, who had many factories on India’s east coast, were also represented at the court of the sultan of Golconda whose realm was an important source of textiles for them. The British more or less followed Dutch precedent, and as they had no access to the spice islands they concentrated on India and on the textile trade to an ever-increasing extent. None the less, in the seventeenth century they were still lagging behind the Dutch even in this field.

The revolution of international maritime trade

The invasion of the Indian Ocean by the West European East India Companies brought about a revolution in international trade which the Portuguese had never accomplished. The flow of commodities in the Mediterranean was completely reversed. The trade of the Levant, following its revival in the late sixteenth century which had meant that ships with spices were even sent from there to Lisbon, experienced a sudden decline. West European ships now supplied the ports of the Levant with the goods which had been sent from there to the West only a few years earlier. Venice suffered the same decline, and was soon no more than a regional port of Italy. Asian maritime trade was not as immediately affected by this trade revolution as the Mediterranean trade was. There were great Indian shipowners who dispatched so many ships every year to the ports of Arabia and of the Persian Gulf that they easily outnumbered all the European ships in the Indian Ocean at that time. The Dutch participated in this Indian Ocean trade, too. Just as they were Europe’s biggest shipping agents, they now offered their services to Asian merchants

to an ever-increasing extent. If these merchants did not have ships of their own they were glad to entrust their goods to Europeans whose ships were armed and could thus defend themselves against ubiquitous piracy. Actually, European piracy also increased in the Indian Ocean as individual ‘entrepreneurs’ were quick to learn their nautical and commercial lessons. Not all of the European interlopers were pirates— some of them simply earned a living in the ‘country trade’, as the intra- Asian trade was called. The British private traders were very active in this field, and though the East India Company officially decried the activities of these ‘interlopers’—who crossed the Asian seas without any respect for monopoly rights granted by royal charter—there emerged a kind of symbiosis between them and the company. The East India Company concentrated on the intercontinental trade, and the ‘country traders’ made their deals with the servants of the company and made use of the infrastructure and the protective network provided by the company without contributing to its maintenance. This gave them a comparative advantage in the intra-Asian trade and the company did well in specialising in the intercontinental connection and leaving the ‘country trade’ to others. This specialisation was fostered by a characteristic feature of the British East India Company. Unlike the Dutch company which owned a huge fleet of ships, the British company had given up the policy of building and owning its own ships after a period of initial experimentation; instead, it had adopted the method of leasing ships from private shipowners. Fluctuations in the volume of trade could thus be easily met by hiring fewer ships and the risk of maintaining the vessels had to be borne by the private shipowners. These people tried their best to stay in business by offering the company better and faster ships, for which they could charge high freight rates. These specialised and expensive ships were perfectly suited for the intercontinental run, but their employment in the ‘country trade’ would have been a waste of money as their freight rates were too high and their speed not much use for the trade between Asian ports. Only if such a ship had missed the monsoon and was forced to stay in Asian waters would an owner try to reduce his losses by arranging for an intra-Asian voyage. In general, however, the company insisted on a strict observance of the timetable which was fixed for the intercontinental traffic. The captains of these expensive and well-equipped intercontinental ships were about the best-paid employees of their day. They also enjoyed the privilege of taking on board some precious goods on their own account, which gave them a handsome profit in addition to their salary. Many captains also held a share in the ship they commanded. This was, therefore, a very attractive career for intelligent and enterprising people. The British nautical elite was made up of such men, an elite which greatly contributed to British seapower. The specialisation and division of labour which characterised the British system made it much more flexible and

A French viceroy, De la Haye, appeared with a fleet of nine ships off the coast of India so as to demonstrate the power of his king. This was the time of the third Anglo-Dutch war and, therefore, De la Haye hoped for British support against the Dutch in India. But the governor of Madras turned him down, saying that the wars of his king were of no concern to him as he had to obey only the orders of the directors of his company. The bold Frenchman thereupon tried to tackle the Dutch single-handed, but he suffered a miserable defeat, lost all his ships and was sent back to Europe as a prisoner on a Dutch ship. After this misadventure nothing much was heard about the French East India Company for some time. It was only due to the quiet endeavour of one man, François Martin, that the French East India Company gained a foothold in India at all. Martin had arrived in India in 1668 and had died there in 1706, without ever having left the country in all those years. The French settlement at Pondichery owes its origin to this unique man. His observations and experiences provided guidelines for those ambitious Frenchmen who tried to build a French empire in India in the eighteenth century—the resourceful Governor Dupleix, the daring Admiral La Bourdonnais, and the diplomatic General de Bussy. The commercial success of the French East India Company was much more limited than the imperial vision of those great Frenchmen. Colbert’s son and successor, the Marquis de Seignelay, had re-established the company in 1685 along lines which were much more in keeping with French practice. The board of directors consisted exclusively of highranking government officers who received an assured dividend of 10 per cent on the capital which they had subscribed. The trade was managed with bureaucratic precision. The company owned twelve ships, four of which returned from India every year. In peacetime the company could thus make some profit, although it was debarred from the lucrative textile trade because of French mercantilist policy. However, the frequent interruption of this trade due to European wars drove the company to the verge of bankruptcy. It was only when the great financial wizard, John Law, merged the French West Indies Company and the French East India Company in 1719 that France caught up with the new pattern of international trade, which linked Indian Ocean trade with transatlantic trade. The new Compagnie des Indes prospered in this way and also attracted merchant capital which had been lacking at earlier stages.

The European powers and the declining Mughal empire

Europe was the scene of many wars in the first two decades of the eighteenth century: the War of the Spanish Succession, the Nordic War, the war against the Turks. In comparison, the next two decades were rather peaceful. England enjoyed prosperity and stability under the great prime

minister Robert Walpole, and in France the regime of Cardinal Fleury produced a similar atmosphere. Therefore the representatives of both powers enjoyed a quiet time during which they could concentrate on consolidating their respective bases in India. In India itself, meanwhile, this was the period of the dissolution of the Mughal empire. Baji Rao and Nadir Shah raided Delhi and in Bengal a highly competent Mughal governor, Murshid Quli Khan, ruled as if he were an independent prince. Murshid, a Brahmin converted to Islam, had had a meteoric administrative career in the service of the Great Mughal. Following the eclipse of Delhi, he did pretty much what he liked. He built a new capital of Bengal, Murshidabad, and annexed Bihar and Orissa. He organised an efficient centralised administration, eliminated many of the Mughal fiefs and collected the revenue in cash. It may sound paradoxical, but it was he who prepared the ground for British rule in India. Without his efficient system of administration and a large revenue in cash, Bengal would have been useless to the British. Of course, while Murshid was still alive, the British remained marginal figures in Bengal and were entirely dependent on his pleasure. In 1717 the East India Company had been granted the privilege of free trade and free coinage in Bengal by the Great Mughal, but this grant was an empty promise as far as Murshid was concerned. In order to get along with him, the British had to deal with Murshid’s banker, Fatehchand, called Jagat Sheth (‘Merchant of the World’). Jagat Sheth obstructed the British by denying them free access to the Mughal mint. He made a good profit by controlling access to the mint and buying up silver at prices dictated by him. But the British wisely decided to work with him and not against him. In this way they gained a key position in the trade of Bengal by making clever use of the existing power structure. In western India the British position was quite different. Gujarat was of prime importance for international trade, but there was no Murshid Quli Khan in that province, and the dissolution of the Mughal empire immediately affected this region. Surat, the great port of the empire, lost its importance within a few decades. Many merchants fled from this proud imperial port to Bombay where the British offered protection against Mughal and Maratha depredations. Bombay had a good natural port, but its connection with the hinterland was blocked by the Western Ghats and, therefore, it was much less suited for international trade than Surat. Nevertheless, the Indian merchants preferred a safe port to a place where one’s life and property were at stake, as the death of Muhammad Ali in 1733 had so clearly shown to everybody concerned. The tragic fate of this last great merchant of Surat stands in striking contrast with the good fortune of his Bengal contemporary, Jagat Sheth. Muhammad Ali had inherited a veritable trading empire from his grandfather, Abdul Ghaffur. Dozens of ships carried his goods to all the

armed ships and fortified factories were able to insulate themselves—very well indeed. Moreover, they could easily shift the scene of their operations to areas which appeared more attractive and profitable. Thus the British trade with Bengal, which was rather marginal in the seventeenth century, suddenly increased in the eighteenth. The boom of British trade with Bengal began in the second decade of the eighteenth century. In the first years of that decade the British sent annually about £150,000 to Bengal; in the last years the total was about £250,000. Altogether about £2m were transferred to Bengal in the 1710s yet this great influx of silver did not lead to a price inflation. There were several reasons for this. First, many of the Mughal officers as well as the great merchants transferred funds from Bengal to northern India. Furthermore, the increasing cash base of the land revenue tied down a great deal of money in the countryside, where it circulated rather slowly. Due to the decay of the central power of the Great Mughal at Delhi, it became more and more difficult for him to get his share of the revenue from Bengal. Later the British were to profit from this situation when, in the second half of the eighteenth century, they extracted the silver from Bengal which they had pumped in in the early 1700s. The increasing trade with Bengal also led to the erection of British factories in the interior of the country, where the agents of the company established direct contact with the weavers and so influenced the process of production. Even British artisans were sent to Bengal in order to train their Indian counterparts in the art of producing for the European market. The changing currents of European fashion demanded that the Indian producers adapted their output to the latest fashion as quickly as possible. In spite of this demand there was no investment in the means and methods of production. The weavers remained poor, and the middlemen made the profit. In due course the British eliminated these Indian middlemen and sent their own agents directly to the weavers. The rulers of Bengal regarded these British activities with mixed feelings: while greatly appreciating the stream of silver which the British brought into the country, they looked askance at the fortified factories and the increasing participation of the foreigners in the inland trade. Even a strong ruler like Alivardi Khan, who governed Bengal from 1740 to 1756, feared the influence of the British and did not trust them. But in his lifetime they could not subvert the political order in Bengal and had to operate within the limits imposed upon them. However, when Alivardi Khan’s weak and impetuous successor demanded that the British should remove their fortifications, they defied his order, repulsed his subsequent attack and defeated him. He had feared that the East India Company would grow into a state within the state; now this state within the state soon took over the state itself. The British seapower became an Indian landpower.

THE STRUGGLE FOR SUPREMACY IN INDIA

The decline of the Mughal empire in the eighteenth century led to a resurgence of regional powers in India. Actually, India had been dominated by regional powers rather than by centralised empires during most of the country’s history so this development was not at all unusual. With the hindsight of post-colonial India and of the freedom movement, the eighteenth century has usually been characterised as a period of national decadence and chaos which naturally led to foreign domination. If we look at the eighteenth century in its own terms, we see a number of regional regimes which copy the style of the declining central power and consolidate their rule in this way. This is just what had happened after the decline of the Gupta empire when numerous regional kingdoms emerged which reflected the style of the earlier imperial dynasty. The nawab (governor) of Bengal was the first one who asserted his independence, the nawab of Oudh soon followed, and the vesir of the Mughal empire, Nizam-ul-Mulk, left Delhi and established a dynasty of his own in Hyderabad on the Deccan. The Marathas conquered most of western India, and the South was dominated by several petty rulers whose predecessors had been governors in the Vijayanagar empire. Around the middle of the eighteenth century this new regional division seemed to be more or less an accepted fact. The European powers were still sticking to the maritime periphery of India, they controlled no major part of Indian territory and their potential for military intervention was rather modest. Indian rulers were much more concerned with the raids of the Afghan Ahmad Shah Durrani, who invaded the Indian plains repeatedly in the 1750s, just as Baber had done in his time. The real problem of this period was that the Mughal empire, though defunct, did not cease to exist. The Great Mughal still resided in Delhi and everybody tried to manipulate him. Baji Rao is reputed to have said the way to fell a tree is to cut the trunk—then the branches will come down by themselves. The trunk of the Mughal power, however, was not cut, although it was precariously hollow. Mughal supremacy was no longer respected and ambitious rulers dreamed of becoming heirs to that supremacy: nobody suspected that a European power would claim this heritage.

European military intervention: infantry versus cavalry

The first indications of the growing potential for military intervention by European powers came during the 1744–8 war between the British and the French. The two antagonists were engaged in a global struggle for supremacy which was to last the best part of twenty years (1744–63). In Europe this struggle was suspended from 1748 to 1755; in America and Asia, however, it continued unabated. With the new regional power

and soon the troops of the two East India companies shot at each other or at a variety of Indian enemies in this way. Initially, Dupleix was not at all keen to get involved in this warfare. When the war started in Europe he actually offered to his British colleagues in India that they should come to an agreement to keep the peace in India. The British were willing to accept this offer, but indicated that such an understanding would not be binding on the royal troops about to be stationed in India. Thus Dupleix was forced into hostilities. He was so successful to begin with that it seemed as if the French were going to win the war in India. He called upon the daring Admiral La Bourdonnais, who had organised a small but very effective French navy in the Indian Ocean. In fact, La Bourdonnais was more of a pirate than a regular naval officer. His navy was his own enterprise. Thus when he managed to capture Madras from the British with Dupleix’s support, he was willing to give it back to them if they paid a high ransom. Dupleix, on the other hand, insisted that it should be kept by the French; thereupon La Bourdonnais left India in a huff. Dupleix had to return Madras to the British as a condition of the peace treaty of 1748. However, both he and his British adversaries kept enough troops at hand to continue the game of warfare at which they had become so adept. They were also practically invited by Indian rulers to take sides with them in dynastic infighting or campaigns of regional conquest. When the 1748 peace treaty was signed in Europe the old Nizam-ul- Mulk died in Hyderabad and his sons started fighting for the succession in true Mughal style. Parallel to this dynastic fight there was a similar one between two sons of the nawab of Arcot, who had been a Mughal governor and had subsequently enjoyed a quasi-independent status under the suzerainty of the nizam of Hyderabad. The French and the British joined the fray, and thus there were two alliances each composed of one Hyderabad prince, one Arcot prince and one European power. These two alliances waged war against each other for some time. Finally the French ally succeeded in Hyderabad, whereas the British ally succeeded in Arcot and established his independence from Hyderabad’s jurisdiction. A young British clerk in the service of the East India Company, Robert Clive, had greatly distinguished himself in this campaign by capturing Arcot and defending this town against the much more numerous forces of the enemy in 1751. Dupleix, however, thought that, because the French protégé had become nizam of Hyderabad, he had won the war; when this nizam died in 1751 the French general, de Bussy, managed to install another French protégé as his successor. Subsequently, de Bussy warded off a Maratha attack on this protégé’s realm; he was rewarded by being granted four districts on the east coast whose revenues he could use to pay his troops. De Bussy and his master, Dupleix, seemed to have succeeded in securing a major role in Indian politics for the French. In Paris, however, the

directors of the Compagnie des Indes took a different view of these activities. The trade of the company had completely stopped during the war and had hardly revived after the peace treaty of 1748. The military exploits of Dupleix and de Bussy seemed to be examples of foolish extravagance, as far as the directors were concerned. They therefore fired Dupleix and sent one of the directors to India: he liquidated most of the French possessions there and arrived at an agreement with the British which was very much in their favour. When this happened—in 1754—the French could not have foreseen that the Seven Years War would soon precipitate another global confrontation with the British. In the interests of cutting the losses of the Compagnie des Indes the measures adopted at the time appeared to be prudent and well considered. The warmongers were made scapegoats, La Bourdonnais was imprisoned; Dupleix died a pauper in France; only de Bussy stayed on in India—but his military potential was now greatly restricted, as he had been forced by his French masters to relinquish the four districts which the nizam had bestowed upon him.

Robert Clive and the Diwani of Bengal

At the same time as Dupleix left India the young hero of Arcot, Robert Clive, also returned home. Whereas Dupleix was doomed, however, Clive hoped for a political career and aspired to a seat in Parliament. At just 29 years of age he had acquired enough money in India to invest in an electoral campaign: he won the election but lost his mandate when the result was declared invalid. Having spent most of his savings in this political enterprise, he was now forced to return to India in order to recoup his losses: he saw to it that he got a commission as a lieutenant colonel before embarking for India once more. Clive reached Madras just as the news was received that the nawab of Bengal had attacked the British factories there and he was dispatched with some company troops in order to relieve Calcutta. Siraj-ud-Daula, the young nawab of Bengal, had succeeded his great-uncle, Alivardi Khan, in 1756 and had ordered the British to dismantle their fortifications which had been constructed without due permission. Clive arrived in Calcutta just in time, but his military operations were initially not very successful and he had a hard time establishing his credentials with the British officers there. Furthermore, the royal troops who accompanied him and his company troops thought of themselves as very much superior to those mercenaries: consequently, they obeyed his orders only grudgingly. Clive finally managed to relieve the British factories and to capture the French factory at Chandernagar in addition; he also concluded his negotiations with the nawab and should have returned to Madras when his mission was accomplished. He disobeyed those instructions. After having indulged in a secret intrigue with Mir Jaffar, the commander of the nawab’s troops, Clive

forces in India, they dispatched an arrogant general, Lally, who had no experience of the country at all. The British defeated him in 1760 at the battle of Wandiwash, near Madras. He was made a scapegoat in France and was executed. The dream of an Inde française died with him. From an Indian point of view all these dramatic events were still rather marginal. The battle of Plassey was a mere skirmish compared to the Indian battles of that time and the battle of Wandiwash was an encounter between the British and the French: no Indian interests were involved there. The power of the Marathas was at its zenith in 1760 and their military endeavours dwarfed all these European exploits. Balaji Baji Rao, the Peshwa who had ruled in Pune since 1740, though not a great warrior was a very competent administrator. His brother Raghunath led the Maratha army in North India and had repelled the Afghan Ahmad Shah Durrani several times. Ahmad Shah returned again and again, however, and finally—in 1761—the Peshwa sent an enormous army to the north which was supposed to meet the Afghan invader on the traditional Indian battlefield of Panipat, where Baber had triumphed over the sultan of Delhi by means of superior firepower and a very flexible strategy. This time the Afghan won his victory over the Marathas for similar reasons. The Maratha general, Sadashiv Rao, relied too much on his heavy field artillery which he had firmly installed on the battlefield. He then got bogged down in a lengthy war of attrition and Ahmad Shah won the final battle by making use of light field artillery mounted on the backs of camels. After his victory Ahmad Shah returned to Afghanistan while the defeated Maratha army returned to the south. The Peshwa died of grief after this defeat. The paradoxical feature of this great decisive battle of 1761 was that nothing was actually decided by it at the time. With hindsight, it seems to be very clear that the two main contestants for supremacy in India, the Afghans and the Marathas, had neutralised one another in that year and that the British, who had just entrenched themselves in Bengal and had defeated their French rivals at Wandiwash, were bound to benefit from this situation. To contemporary eyes, however, another ruler appeared to be the most immediate beneficiary of the outcome of the battle of Panipat: Shuja- ud-Daula, the nawab of Oudh. He was not only the governor of the largest and most central province of the Mughal empire, he had also attained the position of vezir and the young Great Mughal, Shah Alam, was under his tutelage. Shuja-ud-Daula seemed to emerge as the ruler of North India and had he been able to consolidate his position, the history of the British in India would have been very different. He decided to challenge the British when he was asked for military support by the nawab of Bengal, Mir Kasim. The British had established a regime of reckless plunder in Bengal following the departure of Clive. After emptying Mir Jaffar’s treasury they had seen to it that his richer relative, Mir Kasim, became nawab. After being thoroughly mulcted, Mir Kasim

fled to Shuja-ud-Daula. Together they led a large army to the east and confronted the British at Baksar, southwestern Bihar, in 1764. Hector Munro, the commander of the British troops, won the battle; Shuja-ud- Daula was chased all the way to his capital, Lakhnau (Lucknow), and was taken prisoner by the British. In subsequent years he became the main instrument for the establishment of British rule in India. Thus the battle of Baksar decided what the battle of Panipat had failed to settle. After the major contenders had eliminated each other the British won the crucial round in the struggle for supremacy in India. Clive returned to India and the East India Company assumed the Diwani of Bengal; Shuja-ud-Daula was reinstated in Oudh and had to give some territory to the Great Mughal at Allahabad, where he lived on as a British pensioner. Clive’s doubts about the suitability of the East India Company for the task of the civil administration of Bengal were certainly justified. The two years he spend in India on his third and last assignment (1765–7) did not give him much time for a reorganisation of the administrative machinery of the company, which was, after all, geared exclusively to commercial purposes. Corruption was rampant among the company’s officers, who plundered Bengal to their hearts’ content. Clive himself was certainly not averse to lining his pockets: he disapproved of corruption not on moral grounds, but for strategic reasons. Corruption is individualistic and undermines collective discipline. Therefore Clive had the bright idea of organising a collective plunder of Bengal by means of a company formed by the servants of the East India Company in Bengal, which would have had a monopoly of the inland trade of Bengal and provided a handsome income to all its members. Bound by this common interest they would have maintained the collective discipline which was necessary for the preservation of British power. However, this plan did not materialise and corruption remained chaotic and undisciplined. The British were lucky that no major challenger appeared on the Indian scene in the wake of Clive’s final departure. Otherwise, their future empire could still have been nipped in the bud. The brilliant young Peshwa Madhav Rao, a great warrior like his ancestor Baji Rao, said at that time that the British had put a ring around India so as to put pressure on the country from all sides. But nobody was able to break that ring: even Madhav Rao would have been unable to do so, although he consolidated the power of the Peshwa once again and achieved several important military successes. Initially, Madhav Rao had a hard time in asserting himself against his ambitious uncle, Raghunath, who was in league with the British. Madhav Rao’s aide in this struggle was his diplomatic minister, Nana Phadnavis, who was similarly later to check Raghunath’s ambitions following Madhav Rao’s early death. Instead of concentrating on the defence against the British, Madhav Rao had to turn his attention to another great challenger who appeared in southern India at that time: Haider Ali of Mysore.

service. He joined this service in 1750 as a young clerk in Calcutta, in 1756 he was head of the factory at Kosimbazar and had been imprisoned by the nawab, the next year he was sent as the company’s agent to the court of the new nawab, and in 1764 he had returned to Britain. Five years later he was appointed as a member of the council of the governor of Madras, where he was in charge of the company storehouses. His knowledge of India and of Indian languages, his diplomatic skills and his experience in commercial activities made him an excellent candidate for the post of governor of Bengal: he was duly appointed at the age of 39. Even so, nobody could have predicted at that time that this man would almost single-handedly turn the wheel of fortune in favour of the British during the subsequent fourteen years of his remarkable career. The tasks which Hastings faced when he assumed office in Bengal were crushing. Only one year earlier the great famine of 1770 had decimated the population of Bengal and just at this juncture the board of directors in London insisted that the company should ‘stand forth as Diwan’ (i.e. assume direct responsibility for the civil administration of Bengal). So far the governor of Bengal had delegated this work to an Indian deputy (naib diwan) who carried on his business in the old style of the nawabs. This naib diwan had his office in Murshidabad, where the provincial treasury was also maintained until Hastings ordered its transfer to Calcutta. Except for some assertion of British control, however, Hastings could not reform the revenue administration all at once. Moreover, much of his attention was claimed by foreign policy (i.e. relations with Indian rulers). The nawab of Oudh was fighting sometimes against the Marathas and sometimes against the Rohillas, an Afghan clan settled in northern India— and the British frequently joined in the fray. The Great Mughal, who had resided at Allahabad under direct British control, had been lured back to Delhi by the Marathas’ promise that they would restore him to his old position of supremacy. The Great Mughal as an instrument of the Marathas could be quite dangerous to the British. Hastings stopped British payments to the Great Mughal; at the same time he gave his backing to the nawab of Oudh, with whom he concluded an alliance—thus enabling him to beat the Rohillas and to annex their territory. When Shuja-ud-Daula died in 1775 his successor, Asaf-ud-Daula, was forced by Hastings to surrender the area around Benares (Varanasi) to the British: thus Oudh’s acquisitions in the west were paid for in terms of losses in the east. British landpower expanded, Hastings having no scruples about interfering with the affairs of Indian rulers—a fact which Edmund Burke was later to hold against him when he demanded his impeachment in Parliament. Hastings’ methods were no doubt incompatible with the standards of Parliament: as much as MPs were willing to decry his methods, however, no move was made to restore the territories acquired by Hastings to the respective Indian rulers.

In his first years as governor general, Hastings was greatly handicapped in his decisions by the four members of his council who had come directly from London. These men made him feel that they knew much better than he did and regularly outvoted him. It was only when Philip Francis, the most brilliant and most arrogant member, returned to Britain in 1780 that Hastings could recover some freedom of action. Francis was convinced that he would have been a much better governor general than Hastings, and he obstructed Hastings’ policy to a great extent. In spite of such obstructions, Hastings managed to pursue his own course rather successfully. He interfered not only with the affairs of his immediate neighbours, but also looked after western India where the governor of Bombay had tied British fortunes to the fate of the ambitious Raghunath, against whom Nana Phadnavis had marshalled the joint forces of the other Maratha leaders. The decisive battle took place in 1779 and Raghunath’s army, together with the forces of the governor of Bombay, were defeated by the Marathas before British reinforcements from Bengal could reach the battlefield. Hastings reacted quickly and decided to teach the most important Maratha leader, Mahadaji Scindia of Gwalior, a lesson that he would not forget. In 1781 British troops were sent to Gwalior. They captured Mahadaji’s stronghold and when the Maratha leader returned to it they defeated his army. Thereupon Mahadaji came to terms with Hastings and concluded an alliance with the British. In 1782 the British and the Marathas signed the peace treaty of Salbei. Mahadaji thus emerged as the key figure of Indian politics. As long as Hastings remained in India Mahadaji did not raise his hand against the British: it was only after Hastings had left that Mahadaji briefly assumed a position of eminence unimaginable to Maratha leaders either before or after him. The peace treaty of Salbei with which the British returned to the Marathas the territories in western India which Raghunath had given away to them has to be seen in the context of British relations with Haider Ali. After Haider had imposed his peace treaty in 1769 on the British, he had again rallied his forces in order to drive the British out of India once and for all. He was the only Indian ruler who did not look upon the British as merely one factor in the struggle for supremacy in India: uniquely, Haider saw them as the decisive threat to India in general, and had made up his mind to get rid of them at all costs. The events of 1778, when the British and the French were once more at war with each other and when the British were also challenged by the Marathas, seemed auspicious for his plan. He moved against the British in South India with an army far larger than any army which he had mobilised so far. Even Hector Munro—the victor of Baksar—and Eyre Coote—the victor of Wandiwash—whom Hastings had sent to defeat him, were not able to do so. Therefore the peace treaty of Salbei served the important purpose of protecting the British in the west so that they had a free hand in the south. Haider got