SCRIPT - The British Conquest of India (1798-1806) III. Colonial Reorganization

 

The British Conquest of India (1798-1806)

III. Colonial Reorganization

 

Hi, and welcome to Strategy Stuff. This is Part III of a five-part series on how, between 1798 and 1807, Britain and its East India Company established a hegemony over India through conquest.

In the last Part, the chief official of British India, Richard Wellesley the Earl of Mornington, had just conquered the south Indian power of Mysore and suppressed the resistance of its feudal lords. Now, with unquestioned authority over their territory, Mornington and his reform-minded colleagues began to use that authority to reorganize feudal Indian society along ‘rational’ Enlightenment principles, not just to render India more accessible to European exploitation, but also to increase the subcontinent’s level of development. Both were ultimately meant to achieve what Mornington had promised his skeptical bosses back in London: a boost to the profit of the East India Company and its shareholders.

 

6. Societal Reorganization

Mornington had come to British India with two policy directions in mind: first, territorial expansion, and second, reorganizing Indian society to establish a quote-unquote ‘rational’ and Europeanized order. As a recently-conquered territory, Mysore was the perfect testing ground for both. First came the territorial expansion: accordingly, the British first annexed Mysore’s coastline, then awarded border territories to Hyderabad and the Maratha Empire. The remainder was to be turned into a subsidiary ally – and now British officials were free to focus on their other work of societal reorganization.

So what was the British goal here? As mentioned in Part I of the video series, British Reformists, following Enlightenment philosophy, believed that the purpose of government was to establish a ‘rational’ order over society. Furthermore, they equated ‘rational’ order with the rule of the landed gentry, whose status as both educated aristocrats and local leaders meant that they would best understand and act in the collective interest. This was in contrast to the partisan tyranny that the British associated with central bureaucracies, exemplified in Revolutionary France where society was being repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt depending on who controlled Paris at the time. But before British Reformists could even start on their ambition, they first had to answer a basic question: who actually belonged to the Indian landed gentry?

In some places, the answer was obvious. Swathes of annexed territory were given to those who had helped the British, while the original Hindu dynasty was restored in subsidiary Mysore alongside the lords that Tipu Sultan had repressed. But in the rest of rural India, the British had the choice of several groups, all of whom held some power under feudalism. There were village leaders whom indigenous rulers had designated to collect tax; village scribes who were designated to audit the collection of the tax; and otherwise unconnected officials whose pay the tax had been earmarked for. Communal, clan and religious organizations also had a say in village governance, not to mention the various exiles who now petitioned the new regime to restore their former status.

Faced with this complicated social mosaic that they had neither the understanding nor manpower to fully oversee, the British ultimately decided to boil it all down to two principles which, not entirely coincidentally, also structured power in rural Britain. First, local leadership and gentryhood would be reserved for those who owned the most local land. Secondly and more significantly, whether somebody owned land or not depended on whether they had the legal documents that proved their ownership.

From a present-day perspective, an emphasis on written documentation might seem like the hallmark of a ‘modern’ or ‘rational’ legal system. But the rough imposition of this principle upon a largely illiterate society with its own pre-existing feudal traditions inevitably had huge social repercussions.

Here, the British insistence on documentation unsurprisingly favored people with access to such things. First, there were the village leaders who, while often illiterate, were rich enough to pay for scribes; second, there was the caste of literate scribes, who were now in an ideal position to demonstrate or even forge land claims; and third, there was the caste of equally-literate Brahmins who could now also secure and expand the holdings of their religious institutions.

Thanks to the new principles set out by British Reformism, from here on out all three groups, as the new gentry class of India, would not only cement their position at the top of the social and caste hierarchy, but – similar to the enclosure movement that was gaining steam in Britain at the time – they would also abuse their literacy advantage to expropriate land that, under feudalism, was commonly- or independently-owned. All this would largely come at the expense of the illiterate peasants and lower castes, whose unwritten rights and traditions largely went unrecognized under the British legal system. As a result, most were either forced out onto increasingly-unproductive lands, or else became tenant farmers who now had to pay rent to the gentry, on top of their existing burdens.

Still, however imperfectly, the British now had their landed gentry, so the next step was to incentivize this class to cooperate with the overarching goal of colonial exploitation. In most cases, this was done via a basic bargain: if the gentry would facilitate British administration and especially help collect British taxes, the British would step back and let them assume near-unchecked powers over local life. This was a marked shift from feudal practice, where rulers often intervened in favor of the peasants to balance out the feudal lords.

The British bargain not only coopted the gentry into being a free local government for British India, but was also aligned with what Reformists initially saw as the ideal societal order. As a result, throughout this period British India de-centralized power at the local level, undoing much of the progress that indigenous states had made in reducing the power of the feudal lords. Many British officials trumpeted this process as a ‘gift’ to the Indian populace, seeing it as removing the onerous burdens of the quote-unquote ‘corrupt’ indigenous governments. In reality, Indian peasants quickly discovered that these were replaced by the even more onerous burdens of the local gentry, ranging from extortionate rents to compulsory services to making the poor pay the lion’s share of the local tax quota.

So the local gentry wasn’t as socially responsible as idealized, but that wasn’t meant to be the only upside to a Reformist order. In freeing the gentry from the arbitrary demands of central government, British Reformists also expected that the former would now proactively develop their lands, leading to an improvement in the British Indian economy – as well as for EIC profits.

This thinking lay behind another social innovation that the British sought to implement in India: secure property rights. Under Indian feudalism, lords were not guaranteed ownership over their lands; instead, they only had a grant from the ruler, who technically could revoke it at any time. To the British, such a system was inherently arbitrary and discouraged the gentry from making long-term improvements to their lands, so they sought to rectify this via yet another bargain with them.

The most famous example of such a bargain was the so-called ‘Permanent Settlement’ of Bengal in the 1790s, where the British pledged never to arbitrarily expropriate gentry land, so long as the gentry again paid the land tax on time. In fact, the EIC even agreed never to increase the land tax, which might seem counter-intuitive for exploitation, but this was because the British expected that, thanks to the guarantees contained within the Permanent Settlement, the gentry would now feel secure enough to develop Bengal into a significant market for taxable EIC goods!

Just like the emphasis on documentation, secure property rights are regarded as a hallmark for a ‘modern’ or ‘rational’ economy. But the rough way in which the British implemented this concept in Bengal again led to huge repercussions that ultimately contributed to a major failure of expectations.

The problem again lay in the Reformist over-idealization of what the gentry was willing to do. More so than in Europe, India’s agricultural productivity depended on a well-maintained irrigation infrastructure to manage the often-unpredictable monsoons. Under feudalism, the ruler was responsible for their maintenance, but now the British believed that, having introduced secure property rights, they could pass on this burden onto the newly-incentivized gentry instead.

In doing so, they overlooked the basic economic failure – albeit poorly understood at the time – known as the ‘free-rider problem’. Since the presence of irrigation infrastructure provided equal benefits to everyone regardless of contribution, every gentleman was incentivized to shirk responsibility for its maintenance and rely on others to contribute instead. So eventually, nobody maintained anything, and the result was general agricultural decay and a steep decline in peasant conditions.

By the time Governor-General Mornington was in charge during the 1800s, the impoverishment of the Bengal peasantry was already too embarrassing for the British to replicate the Permanent Settlement for southern India. Instead, officials introduced an adjusted system where the EIC, rather than letting the gentry seize everything, would instead keep some of the land to directly rent it out to peasants.

For this system to work, the EIC had to know what land it actually owned, and so Mornington’s officials – including his brother Wellington – began surveying every land plot under their control, kicking off a monster project that would take almost 7 decades to finish. As a side-effect, this would also give British India an unprecedented amount of data on the subcontinent, laying the groundwork for ‘modern’ policymaking based on analysis of objective evidence, which marked yet another step in the ‘Europeanization’ of South Asian government.

But despite all the work, however, Mornington’s new Reformist system still failed to meet expectations. This time, it was not over-idealism which was to blame, but instead cold, hard politics. The British Indian gentry rightly saw these surveys and direct rentals as an attempt to curb or bypass their power, and so, just like in feudal times, they mobilized in opposition, threatening disobedience or even rebellion. By this time, British officials were fully aware of how the gentry abused the peasantry – though they still blamed it on ‘corruption’ rather than on anything they themselves did – but at the same time, the British also understood that their rule over India was easiest achieved if they kept to the initial gentry bargains. So the British re-diluted their system to favor the gentry, most notably by placing the latter back in charge of collecting the rents, and as a result, southern India also spiraled into a cycle of rural abuse, debt and peasant misery.

Behind these repeated policy and social failures was the EIC’s fundamental need to exploit the subcontinent for profit: the Company demanded high taxes from both the gentry and peasantry, with little relief even during times of severe economic crisis. But the way colonial exploitation worked was significantly more sophisticated than the ‘orgy of pillage’ that British rule is often caricatured as. Rather, just like colonial America, British officials used India as a ‘policy lab’ where they could experiment with local society and, hopefully, find ways to improve administration efficiency or stimulate development. After all, it was much better to fatten the golden goose than to kill it outright, and to that end the British introduced various social innovations whose worth is still recognized today as part of South Asia’s transition into so-called ‘modernity’.

In that case, why did British colonialism in India fall so short of the Reformist ideal, especially given the British success in developing colonial America? Perhaps the biggest difference is that, unlike in America, the British had neither the capability nor the intention to erase South Indian indigenous society and start off with a ‘blank slate’. That meant that, instead of societal construction, the British in India were trying to do societal reorganization, a task whose complexity was arguably beyond the capabilities of any government at the time. When British Indian officials tried to implement their pro-gentry utopia, they neither had the knowledge to fully appreciate the ramifications of their policies, nor the administrative capacity to ensure that the local gentry conformed to their expectations. As such, instead of British policies changing Indian society towards Reformist ideals, British policies instead were used by local elites to intensify India’s feudal and hierarchical structures.

The result was an India that was the opposite of what Reformists intended. Rural abuse and underinvestment became commonplace, and in their wake came misery, debt slavery, and famine. In the coming decades, frequent war, British imports and finally industrial restrictions would further add to the subcontinent’s woes, ultimately leading to deurbanization, stagnation and grinding poverty. As an example, the tax revenue Tipu Sultan collected from Mysore in 1799 would not be reached again until 1860.

Many British Indian officials were genuinely upset at these results, which implied that British rule was inferior to what had come before. But there was no question of returning to feudalism, nor of stopping colonial exploitation: instead, the only solution was further reform, and already in Mornington’s day, many had begun to argue that India’s condition would improve once Parliament abolished the EIC’s monopoly over subcontinental trade. In any case, the British were also hard at work reforming India’s regional order, as Mornington endeavored to replace the existing feudal hierarchy with a new, Europeanized and British-led one.

 

7. Regional Reorganization (1799-1802)

In two short years, Mornington had eliminated two of India’s top indigenous powers: Hyderabad through vassalization, Mysore through conquest. This feat was more than enough to place him amongst the subcontinent’s greatest conquerors, but the Governor-General’s ambitions, much like his French contemporary Napoleon, were boundless. In fact, shortly after the conquest of Mysore, Mornington received something that he interpreted as an insulting reminder of his insignificance: Prime Minister Pitt and the British Government had honored him with a new aristocratic title, but it was one under the less-prestigious Peerage of Ireland, rather than that of Great Britain.

Furious, Mornington decided that he needed more ‘achievements’ in the form of conquests and annexations. But to be fair, anger was not his only reason for resuming expansion: after all, the Reformist project to ‘Europeanize’ India was in full swing, and it was hardly compatible with British India’s continued subservience to the existing feudal regional order. The only real question was: who to target first?

Sensibly, Mornington first targeted the most vulnerable members of the regional order: the subsidiary allies of the EIC. On paper, these states had no real ability to act against the British, but they were still Indian states whose idea of legitimate behavior was rooted within Indian, not European, political culture. And as mentioned in Part I, a characteristic of Indian political culture was its comparatively relaxed attitude with regards to information, with courts and officials regularly sharing news and gossip with other states, even rivals. To those used to it, this was a perfectly reasonable way to manage relations, build trust and reduce misunderstanding, and up until now, the British were willing to tolerate this practice.

Given this, it was standard for these subsidiary allies, particularly in southern India, to maintain contact with Tipu Sultan throughout the 4^th Anglo-Mysore War. But Mornington wanted an excuse, and such behavior provided the best justification – from a European perspective – for what he was about to do. Denouncing the contacts of these subsidiary allies as quote-unquote ‘treason’, Mornington demanded, as punishment, that their rulers transfer control over their entire administration to the EIC. With no real means of resistance, the rulers folded, and much of what was once only indirectly held in southern India now fell under direct British rule. A similar accusation also led to the annexation of much of the middle Ganges in northern India, with the offending contact this time being with the Afghans. In the process, the British sent out a clear signal: from here on out, subsidiary allies were to behave according to European standards of political behavior.

This was perhaps not the best advertisement for being a British subsidiary ally, but undeterred, Mornington still hoped to acquire more of them. As the case of Hyderabad showed, a succession crisis was a particularly perilous time for any Indian prince or state, and as such represented an ideal opportunity for the British to present their demands, up to and including vassalization. This time, the succession crisis was in Gujarat in western India, which was nominally part of the Maratha Empire. One son asked the British to support his succession, Mornington sent in the Bombay Army along with a subsidiary alliance request, and soon yet another slice of India came under indirect EIC control. Mornington did not neglect his Europeanizing mission: Gujarat was specifically asked to stop any further independent contact with their Maratha overlord, and instead rely on British India to transmit any future communications.

Amidst all this subcontinental activity, it can be difficult to remember that Britain was still locked in a broader struggle against Revolutionary France, but that war did occasionally intrude into Mornington’s plans. Perhaps the most significant episode occurred in late 1800, when Mornington was ordered to send a detachment to the southern island of Ceylon, where it could then operate against French, Spanish and Dutch colonies around the Indian Ocean. This was a low-risk, high-plunder job, and accordingly, Mornington again tried to place his brother Wellington in command. But this time, the payout was too high for the senior commanders to accept this patronage abuse, and Wellington was forced into a humiliating climbdown. The detachment was eventually sent to French-occupied Egypt, where it played a minor role in restoring that territory to the Ottoman Empire.

Far more important to Mornington was the situation back at the home front, since his position as Governor-General relied entirely on the continued patronage of Prime Minister Pitt. But in early 1801, Pitt abruptly resigned as Prime Minister over the fallout arising from the union of Great Britain and Ireland, and as a result Mornington’s political cover disappeared overnight.

Almost immediately, the Directors of the EIC, who as Mercantilists had always opposed Mornington’s Reformist and expansionist policies, began to interfere with the Governor-General’s plans. They vetoed his proposals for further colonial reforms, and even began removing Reformist officials from office, including another brother of the Governor-General himself! Things got so bad that in 1802, Mornington would write the first of several threatened resignations, hoping to buy some more time to fulfill just another ambition in India. And this one would, undoubtedly, be his biggest challenge to date…

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Thanks for watching the video, and please like, subscribe and hit the bell button! If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them in the comments section. This is Part III of a five-part series: Part IV will be about the Second Anglo-Maratha War.