#19 Understanding Colonialism: Indian Colonialism: A Special Case from 1600 to 1914

Colonisation across the world was the precursor to wealth creation and industrialisation in Europe. Colonisation continued apace during the 19th century, the beginnings of industrialisation in Western Europe and North America. It is the argument of these blogs that the struggle between the colonising nations was at the very heart of the global wars that began in 1914.

The previous blogs have attempted to indicate and make sense of what the colonisation of different states had in common. I have indicted the following emerging themes:

· Foreign dictatorial rule,

· The impoverishment of the conquered populations,

· The monopolisation of trade,

· Taxation as a key process of surplus extraction,

· Racism as the ideology of rule (this is perhaps except for Russian colonialism which had its own dynamic),

· The decimation of the domestic populations as in the case of the northern and southern American continent as they are now termed

There is much which is not detailed in these blogs. I have not elaborated on French, Dutch or Portuguese and Spanish colonisation, which while all had their peculiarities they all followed much of the above-mentioned generalised themes.

Ireland was a special case. The English first colonised Catholic Ireland in the 11th and 12th centuries in a successful attempt to stop the French and Spanish invading England via Irish ports. England learned how to colonise through their long experience in Ireland: how to exploit and impoverish the people; still make money from land and labour, and how to suppress revolts with brutality. The colonisations of Australia and New Zealand were also special cases, with their near-complete destruction of indigenous peoples.

Was colonisation an essential prerequisite for the establishment of modern capitalism? This question remains contentious. It used to be assumed that colonisation would bring other ‘native’ peoples into the Western so-called ‘modern world’. It used to be called the ‘the civilising mission’, sincerely believed at the time; no one dares mentions these terms today. Instead, the word ‘modernisation’ is found in many historian’s lexicons without defining its meaning. I think the key issue is whether Europeans and North Americans could have created scientific, industrial societies without the wealth first created through pillaging the land of others? These questions are pertinent. To the world today, there are many ways we could have, and still do, create wealth without the unimaginable suffering that occurred during the centuries between 1500 and 1945.

Japan, for example, showed that it was possible to change rapidly as well as move towards industrialisation. Of course, once Japan had taken the first steps towards industrialisation, she then adopted aggressive colonial policies similar to that of Europeans. But Japan was the one ancient but developed nation that managed to create its internal revolution, leading to Japanese industrialisation without being colonised first. In the late 19th century other states tried, but never made sufficient political change to achieve such a transition. I will deal with the case of Japan later in greater detail in later blogs.

This blog and the following five address some of these issues in more detail. First I turn to the case of colonisation in the subcontinent of India.

India: 1600 to 1914

Key dates:

· 1600 - East India Company receives its Royal Charter

· 1619 - First Anglo-Dutch Peace Treaty

· 1659 - Accession of Aurangzeb as Mughal Emperor

· 1757 - Battle of Plessey

· 1773 - Opium trade declared a company monopoly

· 1857 - First Indian war for independence

Colonisation in the Indian subcontinent was a different experience when compared to the invasions in the Americas or Russia. In 1600, the Indian subcontinent (that is modern-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar) was an ancient civilisation of huge diversity. The whole country had a centralised government run by the Mughals, alongside some 500 distinct but powerful and equally ancient kingdoms. Unlike the Chinese, the Indian Mughals had to work hard to maintain their authority among these varied kingdoms where there was a sophisticated rural industrial economy exporting many commodities, including cotton goods of incredible quality. Indian goods had travelled the old silk routes hundreds of years before the arrival of the Europeans. She was a heavily populated land, with an economy well in advance of anything in Europe at the time. There is plenty of evidence that alongside the mainly rural population was a well-developed system of traders, bankers and artisans.

The years around 1600 represent the point in time when Europeans, specifically the English, Dutch and French, began to create monopoly companies to trade in Asia. The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama had arrived in the Indies over 100 years earlier to find new trade routes, as the Ottomans had attempted to monopolise them in the 15th and 16th centuries.

By 1600, the rising European powers began to compete for the same trade with their own national monopoly companies, each producing an East India Company. These were monopoly companies in the sense that they resisted other nationals from their country trading in the region. They competed against each other; hence the growth of competitive colonialism on a European scale. The French, Dutch, English and Portuguese were also competing on a national scale. Competitive colonialism was first played out on the Indian continent, and then in Europe.

Many historians have emphasised how these new companies were the harbingers of modern capitalist companies in that they were able to draw finance from a range of individuals who were paid a dividend from profits. What distinguished these companies at the time was that they were fully armed. Each trading ship had a full complement of armed men. Each company was a profit-making enterprise while at the same time representing their national monarch in Europe. The long distances and the inability to communicate back home made these new companies war-making as well as commercial enterprises.

For the first 150 years of European encroachment, the continent of India was self-sufficient and did not wish to trade with the west for goods. This alone provides a good indication of just how far advanced Indian economic development was compared with Europe. From 1600 to the 1750s, Europeans arrived with gold and silver (largely from the Americas) to buy Indian spices, jewellery and cotton that they would sell on into Europe.

The British Empire in India

The story changes radically after 1763 when Robert Clive's trading expedition invaded and defeated the Mughal Empire, which controlled Bengal and to a lesser extent parts of Northern India. Although the story is encapsulated to reduce a complex process, many English historians have seen the defeat of the Mughal Empire as a huge success. It was certainly the beginning of the enrichment of England at the expense of India.

India had a sophisticated and rural industrial population in the 1750s, estimated at 190 million people, probably ten times the size of Britain. Clive’s defeat of the Mughals provided his forces with taxes from the peasants of Bengal, a rice-growing region with well-irrigated land. In the towns were traders and banking institutions, able to sell and trade their cotton and other produce over long distances. The Mughal taxes were originally not used just to enrich the local landlords and kingly establishments, but to provide grain reserves for the people during periods of drought and famine. Reading about these ancient princely states shows us their legitimacy as rulers as they provided services for their peoples. Once these ancient systems of government had been overthrown, the scene was set for intense exploitation and impoverishment.

The entire subcontinent had long been ruled by some 500 princely states, each with their armed forces and relations with their peasant populations. Over the following 100 years, each state would be conquered by the East India Company’s armed forces but forced to continue to rule under British tutelage. They were denied their armies and forced to collect taxes from their population on behalf of the company, in effect becoming vassals. Each court of kings and nobles was subservient to Empress Victoria in the 19th century.

The East India Company became in effect a privately owned business whose purpose had been changed to conquer and then rule a vast continent. It achieved this by first removing all the existing legitimate armed forces from local command and stationing the same armed men under English commanders. The company became in part a business of tax collectors, using the old system of tax collection under their jurisdiction. The armed forces were thus paid for from local taxes. So large was the tax burden to pay armed men that there was little left for anything else.

Britain, as a small island, never had the resources to directly control any part of the world. But once they had colonised India, they had a huge body of armed men which could be deployed anywhere, hence India's role in the British imperial imagination. English people in India were ‘on the make’, both during the East Indian Company days and later when the British state took over colonial control after 1857. As the Indian born novelist Abir Mukherjee notes in A Rising Man:

“Any old English man with enough brains and an eye for opportunity could turn up penniless in Bengal and ... end up as rich as a prince.”

India provided financial opportunities for colonialists for over 200 years. Throughout this time some became very rich indeed. Clive was the first of many who bought themselves estates on their return to Britain. Some bought seats in the British Parliament, a place that became heavily represented by people who had made fortunes in India.

The East India Company rapidly deindustrialised India and transformed a long history of rural industry. The Company began by putting tariffs on Indian exports. This was especially important for the British cotton trade, as India provided the British with a vast monopoly market for cheap cotton goods. So, the existing Indian cotton trade had to be dismantled. By the early 19th century the English were able to import raw Indian cotton and to export cheap cotton goods made in the British Midlands. The initial success of the English industrial revolution was based on this cotton export trade at the expense of Indian manufacturers, and of course slaves in the Americas producing the raw material.

Cotton was only one product the British monopolised in India. Another was opium, which had been a peasant crop grown for local use. The English state in India monopolised it from 1773. Large factories were erected, and peasants were instructed to bring their opium to the factory where it was weighed and paid for at prices controlled by the factory. Once processed, the finished opium was parcelled up; then it was auctioned off to English merchants who sold it into China. Here we see the origins of trade in narcotics, supported by both the British and Indian states.

A busy stacking room in the opium factory at Patna, India. Lithograph after W. S. Sherwill, c. 1850. By Wellcome Images Gallery: Wellcome Collection gallery (2018-03-21) CC-BY-4.0, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Indian peasants received little in return. The money they received was a take-it-or-leave-it price, and they needed it to pay taxes for the land they used. When demand was high, collectors demanded higher taxes, requiring a larger volume of opium sales. Peasants often borrowed money to pay these taxes which was yet another route to impoverishment.

Famine conditions, due to drought or other weather conditions, had been a fact of life for rural peoples since time began, and different societies across the world had found methods to deal with it. Before colonisation, Indian famine relief varied widely across the region, but a practice of all rulers was to reduce rural taxes in whole or in part. All princely states considered it their duty to protect their subjects; their legitimacy depended on it. The British colonists did not consider that famine relief was part of their duty and justified this thinking through the ideological works of Malthus, who was writing in the early 19th century. British rules argued that famine was brought about by God to reduce excess populations.

We should not be surprised by this profoundly inhuman attitude. After all, it was not until the first decade of the 20th century that the British state began to make provisions for its own population. Before that, there were the workhouses for the poor with their scant provisions for the hungry. European 19th-century views about poverty were bound up with ideas about the deserving and undeserving poor. It was unlikely, when they had so little respect for their people, that they would make provision for those whom they had argued was morally and racially inferior.

An East India Company Viceroy in 1770 neatly summaries the British view:

“The task of saving life irrespective of cost is one which is beyond our power to undertake. The embarrassment of debt and weight on taxation consequence on the expense thereby would soon become more fatal than the famine itself.”

The consequences were unremitting. The first famine was recorded soon after the East India Company took the reins of power in Bengal in 1769-70. One-third of the population was said to have perished. There were famines in 1824-25, 1832-33 and 1853 to 1855. It was said that about 25 million people died in these famines. It is hard to say how such figures were compiled, but the figures for life expectancy in three large different districts between 1881 and 1911 vary from 12 to 34 years of age. As infant mortality was very high, the numbers are most likely to be over-estimated.

There is one clear point to be made. The entire continent of India was heavily populated with sophisticated traditions of government. When the Portuguese and then the British, French and Dutch first arrived in the early 17th century, they all found dynamic sophisticated peoples, with a long-written history. All kinds of domestic conflicts were to be found across the entire region. Generally, people’s standards of living at this time, from everything we know, were relatively high. From their art, architecture, education, religion and so on we have enough to know that there was a great civilisation here. The only thing the Europeans possessed that was superior was the sophistication of arms: weapons to kill and defeat enemies. These were sufficient to conquer a civilisation, and within 100 years to impoverish the India peoples and bring them to their knees.

Recommended Reading

Indian History:

Bias among Indian historians is different from those in Russia. English historians have until recently considered Indian colonisation their country’s greatest achievement. These views are rapidly changing now. Indians themselves are writing their history, with some excellent research. Not surprisingly, there are deep disagreements. The Indian subcontinent is huge and there remains much to learn, not least that Indian civilisation is very old indeed.

#19 Understanding Colonialism: Indian Colonialism: A Special Case from 1600 to 1914

India: 1600 to 1914

The British Empire in India

Recommended Reading

#20 Understanding Colonialism: Russian Colonisation: Another Special Case

#18 Understanding Colonialism: Death and Impoverishment Part III