The Impact of the East India Company
The profound changes in the world order that resulted in the subjection of most of Asia to European colonial rule, economic domination and varying degrees of political interference began in India. By 1750 the Mughal Empire was in a state of collapse, although emperors in name continued to preside over a court at Delhi and to provide forms of historical legitimacy to events over which they had no control.  | | The British Library | | European sightseers visiting the Taj Mahal at Agra, by a Mughal artist, mid-eighteenth century. (BL shelf-mark OIOC Or.2157, f.611v) |
During civil wars after 1748 Sind, Gujarat, Oudh and Bengal broke away from any effective Mughal control.
From trade to empire
The emergence of regional states throughout India brought opportunities undreamt of by mere traders as the English Company became a participant in the power politics of the successors to the empire. France, which had established its Compagnie des Indes in 1664 although it was only a serious player from the 1720s, and Britain extended their European wars to North America, to the Indian Ocean and to southern India. Between 1744 and 1761, by which point the French had been defeated, they confronted each other directly at sea and on land, and indirectly as allies of rival claimants to the thrones of Arcot and Hyderabad. The Royal Navy became a presence in the Indian Ocean. The Company, initially at Madras, raised its own army of Indian soldiers.
In 1756 Siraj-ud-Daula, the new young Nawab of Bengal, took the Company's settlement at Calcutta following a refusal to stop strengthening its fortifications against possible French attack. A force from Madras under Robert Clive recaptured the city and at Plassey in June 1757 defeated the Nawab. Mir Jafar, an elderly general, was installed in his place in return for a personal payment to Clive of £234,000. Ambition and greed fuelled episodes of king-making to serve British interests. Mir Jafar was deposed by the Company in 1760 in favour of the supposedly more pliable Mir Kasim, who paid £200,000 to the Bengal Council for the privilege. He turned out not to be so pliable and went to war against the Company in alliance with the Emperor at Delhi and the ruler of Oudh.
The British victory at Buxar in 1764 was followed in 1765 by the Treaty of Allahabad, which gave formal Mughal recognition to the Company's assumption of the diwani of Bengal. A trading company was now responsible for the civil, judicial and revenue administration of India's richest province, with some 20 million inhabitants. The bleeding of Bengal and the process that created the British Raj had begun. an collaboration at all levels and by the ever-expanding strength of the Bengal, Madras and Bombay Armies, tens of thousands of volunteer Indian soldiers commanded by a British officer cadre and assisted by regular British Army units posted to India at the Company's expense. The trade continued, but the Company was no longer a supplicant at Indian courts and ports. Over time the whole economic structure of the sub-continent came to serve the needs of the new rulers.
The next 70 years or so have been characterised by recent historians as the 'hybrid' Raj. The Company's servants, transforming themselves from merchants into administrators, judges, revenue collectors and soldiers, eagerly adopted the manners and life styles of their Mughal predecessors, played out in the Indian-built stuccoed and classical-columned Palladian mansions of Calcutta, the 'city of palaces', or at client courts like Lucknow. Administrative, judicial and revenue responsibilities demanded a deeper knowledge of both Hindu and Muslim India. Company servants and army officers became the new patrons of Indian artists and craftsmen, and the intricacies of Indian classical and modern languages began to be explored.
Back home in Britain
The most visible effects of Asian trade on Britain were, of course, the gradual evolution of new consumer tastes and the growth of mass markets for commodities previously unknown. The pepper and spices that began the trade were nothing new, the English East India Company's activities simply made them more widely available and affordable. It was Indian textiles that had the first major impact. Their wonderful workmanship, colour-fastness and comparative cheapness ensured their rapid success, and by the second half of the seventeenth century they were the most valuable part of the Company's trade into London.  | | The British Library | | East India House, Leadenhall Street, London, by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, c.1825. The building, opened in 1799, was designed by Robert Jupp. (BL shelf-mark OIOC WD.2881) |
Chintz, muslins and innumerable other varieties were seized upon for clothing of all kinds, bed covers, hangings, curtains and other house furnishings.
Welcomed initially as an alternative to linen imports from mainland Europe, the formidable competition they offered both to traditional woollen manufactures and to England's growing silk-weaving industry caused serious agitation in the 1690s. The Company's raw silk imports from Persia and elsewhere had fed the looms of Huguenot refugees from France who settled mainly in the Spitalfields area of London and at Canterbury. The arrival of Chinese-type silk textiles from Tonkin and then mainland China was seen as such a threat that rioting weavers attacked East India House in January 1697. In 1700 an alliance of weavers, dyers, linen-drapers and commercial rivals produced an Act of Parliament prohibiting the use and wearing of Asian textiles. The Company's immediate response was to concentrate upon re-export, but protectionist legislation had little effect against market forces and the popularity of Asian textiles continued throughout the eighteenth century.
Crazes for coffee and tea
Coffee was the next commodity to sweep the country. The drink, with its associated world of the coffee-house, had been encountered by traders to the Levant. The first coffee-house in London was opened in 1657 by a merchant retired from the Smyrna trade. Within six years there were 83, rising to almost 500 in London alone by the early 1700s. Coffee-houses became important venues for exclusively male social and business intercourse, in rooms full of tobacco smoke where newspapers and pamphlets were freely available. Different establishments evolved their own particular styles and clienteles.  | |
| Thinking Points | | | - Consider the activities of global businesses in the twenty-first century. What similarities are there with the operations of the English East India Company?
- Are there parallels between the political activities of today's multinationals and of the Company two centuries ago?
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Deals were struck, businesses were founded and political groupings were forged in the ambience of the coffee-house. But coffee, which was brought in by the Company from Mokha in the Yemen, was soon overtaken by the craze for tea and the Company's cargoes were largely re-exported to coffee-drinking northern Europe.
Tea began as an exotic fashion among the elite that spread through the whole of Britain. By the late eighteenth century it had become the universal daily drink of even the poorest industrial and agricultural workers, taken black and strong, with milk, and cheap sugar from the West Indies. The leisured classes evolved their own essentially feminine and domestic version of the `tea ceremony', accompanied by the new imports of Chinese porcelain--teapots, cups and saucers, sugar bowls, milk jugs, slop dishes and dainty plates for sugar and spice confections.
The growing wealth generated by the Company also had an economic and physical impact on London, by 1700 the largest city in Europe. The diffused profits of the trade played their part in its great series of speculative-built expansions westwards into the elegant squares and terraces successively of Covent Garden, Soho, St James's, Bloomsbury, Mayfair and St Marylebone, where the products of Asia became the consumer staples of upper- and middle-class life, and shopping emerged as a leisure activity. The Company's trade was a major generator of employment in London. Its massive warehouses loomed over the eastern side of the city. Its old wooden headquarters in Leadenhall Street was transformed into a great commercial mansion. Shipbuilding for the trade, with seamen to man the ships, involved thousands along the river, and between 1803 and 1806 the ship owners built the East India Docks at Blackwall.
The British Library | 'A view of the East India Docks', by William Daniell, 1808. The view is taken looking south to the Greenwich peninsula, with the sweep of the river around the Isle of Dogs at the right. (BL shelf-mark OIOC P838) |
Reaction and regulation
The Company had always needed friends at court and in Parliament, not least to fight off challenges to its monopoly of trade to Asia. Opposition in the late seventeenth century that even saw the sanctioning of a rival `New Company' in 1698 was seen off by a negotiated merger in 1709, coupled with an expansion of the shareholding membership. Serious objections to the Company's activities re-emerged after the take-over of Bengal. Society at home was accustomed to embracing the self-made man,  | | The British Library | | Warren Hastings, by a Mughal artist, c.1782. (BL shelf-mark OIOC Or.6633, f.67r) |
returning from distant parts of the world to set himself up with a country estate, a town house and perhaps a seat in Parliament--it could even accommodate the occasional millionaire. But the new 'nabobs' of the Company's service were returning with fortunes equalling those of the landed aristocracy without, it would appear, either too much effort or ability. A corrupt political system at Westminster combined jealousy with morality to curb the corruption of Company rule in India.
The Regulating Act of 1773 introduced changes in the election of the Directors of the Company and made Calcutta the seat of government, under a governor-general in council. Warren Hastings, the president in office, assumed the new title and responsibilities. Charles James Fox introduced an India Bill in 1783 that would have transferred the entire government and patronage of the Company to a Parliamentary Board of Commissioners for the Affairs of India. After his administration fell, William Pitt's revised act of 1784 limited the Board to revision and control of the Company's political decisions, leaving its trade and patronage untouched. Robert Clive managed to escape relatively unscathed. It was Warren Hastings who was called to answer to the new morality. Returning to England in 1785, he was impeached on charges of mismanagement in a spectacular show trial at Westminster. The spectacle and the excitement gradually faded as the trial dragged on from 1788 to 1795, when he was finally acquitted.
In 1813 the Company's monopoly of Asian trade was limited to China. The China monopoly was abolished in 1833. After 231 years the Company's trading days were over, yet it lingered on as the proxy administrator of British rule in Asia. The shattering revolt of its Bengal Army in 1857 was followed by final abolition in 1858 and the British Crown assumed the mantle of a British Raj.
This session is adapted from pp.98--118 of Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia 1600-1834 by Anthony Farrington, published by The British Library, 2002. |
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