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The armies of the British East India Company. While the search for trade took the British East India Company to India, it was its armies that kept it there, both as a trader and later as a ruling power. The story of those armies is complex, but each of the presidencies had its own army raised in India. It was the French Compagnie des Indes Orientales, not the British, that made two crucial discoveries. One was that Indians could be hired as soldiers for far less than Europeans and that they made excellent soldiers if given modern European military discipline and weapons. The other discovery was that it was possible to gain influence and even control at the courts of Indian princes through the use of the armies to support activities of the princes or their rivals. In addition to its own armies, the British East India Company had regiments and officers from the English army sent to assist them. All these armies were paid for by the company from its Indian profits. The superiority of its military forces was demonstrated in a number of conflicts in South India with the Indian princes, especially the nawāb of Arcot, but also by its defeat of the French forces in various engagements from 1740 to 1748, and then, more decisively during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), when the English effectively excluded France from India. While the seizure of power by the company in Bengal was partly due to financial and political intrigue, its armies were always the potent force that established and maintained its power.
Regime change in Bengal.
The appointment of Sirajud- Dawla as nawāb, the Mughal governor of Bengal, in 1756 marked a new direction in the history of modern India. His predecessor had given the British East India Company trading privileges that exempted its traders from certain taxes, but the company had grossly abused them, hindering Indian merchants and depriving the government of revenue. The company had also increased the fortifications around Calcutta. When Siraj-ud-Dawla was appointed in 1756, he understood, perhaps better than any other Indian ruler, the danger the British East India Company posed. The capture of Calcutta in 1756 by his army created one of the most famous episodes in the Indo-British relationship, when British captives were imprisoned in a small room overnight and many of them died because of the heat and overcrowding. This event passed into British historical myth as “the Black Hole of Calcutta,” becoming a symbol of the barbarity of Indians, with Siraj being pictured as a monster of cruelty, a threat to his own people as well as to the English traders. The decision was made, therefore, to replace him with a ruler who would be an ally of the company. At the battle of Plassey in 1757 the company’s army, under Colonel Robert Clive, defeated and killed Siraj, replacing him with their candidate. One of the greatest Indian merchants of the time, Jagat Seth, had also helped in the overthrow, hoping to profit from a British victory, though he was in turn cheated by Clive. The company had hoped to rule through the new nawāb, but they soon found, in their terminology, that he was “disloyal” and had to be replaced.
The next important move in the transfer of political power came in 1764, when the company’s army defeated the combined armies of the nawāb of Bengal and the Mughal emperor at the battle of Buxar. Then, in 1765, the company’s agents forced the emperor to give them control of the revenue systems of the heavily populated areas of Bengal, Orissa, and Bihar. This meant that the British East India Company had become the largest territorial power in India, and that it would be able to use the tax revenues of a vast area of India to buy the goods for its export trade. These events fundamentally altered the position of the British in India.
For the people of Bengal, the next decade was a bitter time, when the Mughal system of administration collapsed. The English were ignorant of the complexities of the system, but eager to extort as much money as possible from the peasants and Indian merchants. They were guided by the remnants of the old system, which were equally corrupt and rapacious. The effect of these years on the land and its people was summed up by one of the company’s servants in a report to London in 1769. “It must give pain to an Englishman,” he wrote, “to have reason to think that since the accession of the Company to the Diwani the condition of the people has been worse than it was before. . . . This fine Country, which flourished under the most despotic and arbitrary government, is verging towards its Ruin” (Muir, pp. 92–93). Such reports, of which there were many, of what the British were doing in India to its people led to great criticism of the British East India Company. There was also a fear that the company’s servants, like Clive and others, returning to England with their great ill-gotten fortunes, would buy their way into Parliament. The result was the passing of regulations to control the company, culminating in a series of acts, including what is known as Pitt’s India Act of 1784, which gave Parliament control over the company’s affairs in London but left the administration of the India territories in the hands of the company. Indians had no role in this first constitutional act, but its linkage to the constitution of independent India in 1950 is direct. The three Residencies were linked under a governor-general, appointed with the approval of British government. The first appointee was Warren Hastings (1774–1783), one of the most famous names in Indo- British history, who carried on wars against the Indian powers that substantially increased British power.
The major changes in the administrative structure that tightened British control while moving India toward a Western state model—albeit an authoritarian one— began during the governor-generalship of Lord Cornwallis (1786–1793), the British general who had been defeated by the American rebels at Yorktown in 1781. The central issue for the Bengal government was the establishment of a revenue system for the collection of taxes on agricultural land, the major source of revenue. There were three main problems to be solved. The first was to decide who actually owned the land: the rulers; the zamindars, or tax officials; or the peasants. There was an enormous discussion as the officials studied the Mughal records, and in the end it was decided, largely because it was the simplest thing to do, that the zamindars would be recognized as the “owners” of the land. The second problem was the amount that the zamindars had to pay in taxes, and it was agreed that the current assessments would be accepted, with some adjustments. The third issue was the duration of the assessment: would it be fixed for a ten-year period, or would it be annually variable. Again, it seemed simplest to decide that the amount they were paying in 1793 would be fixed as the permanent tax. Probably, in the short run, this was good for the government, assuring a fixed income, and it was certainly good for the zamindars, as they became a wealthy class as land increased in value. The peasants were left, however, without protection as zamindars increased their rents at will. The Bengal system was not introduced elsewhere; various systems, such as direct taxation of the peasants or of the village, were used as British collectors realized that there were many different systems of land taxation in the different regions of India.
Another great change of the last decade of the eighteenth century was the establishment of a new kind of bureaucracy that would eventually be uniform throughout India. By this time, there was widespread belief among Englishmen that Indians could not be trusted with positions of influence and control. This belief was based partly on experiences with Indian tax officials after 1765 but also on the growing prejudice that both Hindu and Muslim societies were so corrupt that Indians could not be employed at the highest levels of government. As a result, after 1793, only British were employed in higher posts. This new Indian civil service, extremely well-paid, with security of tenure and the ability to retire to England in late middle age, was very attractive to sons of the English middle classes. The army, strengthened by new technology and new discipline, followed the same pattern, with only Europeans being commissioned as officers. Eurasians, people of mixed parentage were also excluded. It became, however, one of the best and one of the largest standing armies in the world in the nineteenth century. This new ruling class was remarkably small, with about two thousand in the civil service and fifty thousand British officers and men in the army, for a population that in 1850 probably numbered about 200 million. Its rule was only made possible by the hundreds of thousands of Indians who served in the lower ranks of both the civil and military services.
Important changes were also introduced in the legal system. At first, the British tried to work through existing Indian laws and systems of courts, but they soon discovered that the legal system was particularistic to regions and that what they thought were Hindu law codes were abstract principles and ideal religious practices that had never been uniformly followed. By the end of the eighteenth century, English law began to be applied and an English system of courts was created, with the judges of the higher courts all being British. Here, as elsewhere, Indians were divested of real authority, and specifically Indian laws disappeared, with one very important exception. Personal law, that is, matters relating to marriage, inheritance, and adoption, were defined by religious usage: Hindu practices for Hindus, Muslim usages for Muslims, and Christian ones for Christians. This remains one of the most controversial aspects of the British legal inheritance.
