India Colonial Pasts and Presents

The English business endeavor to India was assigned to the East India Company, which received its monopoly rights of trade in 1600. The company included a group of London merchants fascinated by Eastern prospects, not as good as the national character of the Dutch company. Their original fund of fifty thousand was less than one-tenth of the Dutch company's funds. Its purpose, like that of the Dutch, was to trade in spices and it primarily organized on a single journey basis. These separate voyages, funded by groups of merchants within the company, were replaced in 1612 by terminable shared stocks, which covered operations over a term of years. Not until 1657 was a permanent joint stock established.

The Indians would take little other than silver in exchange for their goods, and the export of gold was a crime to England's controlling mercantilist financial system. To solve the silver problem, the English developed a system of country trade, the profits helped to pay for the yearly investment of goods for England. Madras and Gujarat supplied cotton goods, and Gujarat supplied indigo. Silk, sugar, and saltpetre for gunpowder came from Bengal, while there was a spice trade along the Malabar Coast from 1615 on a competitive basis with the Dutch and Portuguese.

There was a major change in British policy. Two causes were primarily responsible. There was a growing body of opinion within the company that only British control of India could end the constant wars and provide adequate conditions for trade. The belief was that full control of India would be economical as well as beneficial. The more undeniable critical reason was the change of European politics by the French Revolution. A new French threat to India emerged, this time over land, with Napoleon's Egyptian journey of 1798-99. To guard against a French-sponsored Russian attack, British missions were sent to Ranjit Singh, who was the Sikh ruler of the Punjab. The Treaty of Amritsar with Ranjit Singh in 1809 defined British and Sikh spheres of influence and settled relations for a generation.

All these achievements by the British were made possible by the natural disruptiveness of Hindu society, class and caste divisions, which made it oddly eager to call in unwanted foreigners to conquer the more unwelcome neighbor. The foreigners, asked in the first preference to assist in defeating a rival, were in the last resort accepted as masters in preference to supremacy by a rival. The Marathas preferred the British to the Mughals or Muslims; and the nizam preferred the British to the Marathas. Even when its Indian trade was no longer moneymaking, India gave profits to others, and its opium bought the Chinese tea, which gave the East India Company its overall profits. For the Hindu, his world was at its lowest ebb--in the Kali Yuga, or Dark Age--while the Muslim believed in enigmatic fate. The Hindu's heart was in his religion-cultural complex, and political power meant little to the ordinary Hindu as long as this remained untouched.

After the settlement of 1818, the only parts of India beyond British control were a periphery of Himalayan states to the north and a chunk of land in the northwest covering the Indus Valley, the Punjab, and Kashmir. To the northwest, British India was bounded by the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh, who added Kashmir to his state in 1819 and Peshawar in 1834. Ranjit Singh employed Hindus and Muslims besides Sikhs, but his rule was a Sikh power based on unspoken Hindu support and Muslim compliance. It used most of the revenue to support the army, which made it apparently powerful but delayed development.

At first the British were only one group of foreign traders among several, auspicious to find in the Mughals a firm government ready to promote trade. Their entry into politics was slow, first as allies of country powers, then as their practical leaders, and finally as masters. At each step they were supported by local powers that preferred British authority to that of their neighbors. It was only in the 20 years of 1798-1818 that they were deliberately imperialistic and only thereafter that they treated India as a dominated country. The effect of this was to replace the useless Mughal government and the failed Maratha heir empire with an indirect but very real domination.

Up to 1750, the effect of the East India Company's business was minor. Production of cotton and silk goods, of indigo, saltpetre, and, later, opium was encouraged in particular areas like Bengal, Gujarat, and Malwa, with some gain to the middlemen but no sign of any general rise in living standards. India was mainly agricultural, and its industries, were secondary to its whole economy. The second changed, however, with the attainment of Bengal. After 1800 there was a new factor: machine-made cotton goods from Britain. This progressively damaged the Indian handicraft industries. From about 1830 the tea industry of Assam began with coffee in the south. Coal mining was begun, but its growth, with that of the jute and cotton-machine industries, had to wait for the second half of the century. The average Indian was far more secure than before except for famine but generally was not much more wealthy. India drifted toward the status of a colonial economy, a supplier of raw materials, a market for manufactured articles, to the profit of the foreigner.

The social effects of this period were substantial. They took mainly the form of the dislocation of classes. The first upset followed the famine of 1770, when the cultivators were regularly too few for the revenue demand to be met, and farming the revenue for some time took the place of a revenue settlement. The second upset came with the permanent settlement of 1793, when the profits figure fixed was in many cases too high for the existing cultivation. By 1820 it was calculated that more than one-third of the estates had changed hands through sale for debts of land tax. The purchasers were in the main the Calcutta entrepreneurs, newly enriched by their contacts with the British. Many were runaways. The social connection between landholder and cultivator had been broken, money replacing traditional rights. In Calcutta, these renters created a fashionable and intellectual society, from which came the first significant cultural contacts with the West. It was composed of the wealthy section of the three upper Bengali castes, with such others as gained acceptance by their wealth or education. Together this educated class was known as the bhadralok.

In the north there was less disruption, though the landholders, many of whom had no title but the sword, tended to be reserved. There was a general recognition of rights and broadly of their protection. The chief victims were ruling families, who lost power, and the official aristocracy, who lost office. In the south, chiefs whom Munro evicted were largely