Contents:

Topic: Page
:
Introduction 2
What is British conquest? 3
British conquest of India & Bengal 4
11
Consequences of British conquest over India & Bengal; a study from political & socio-
economic views:

Conclusion 23
References 24

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INTRODUCTION:
The British conquest over the world is a very important factor in world history. Britain ruled all over
the world more than 200 years. The impact & consequences of British conquest is also can be a
interesting study.Specialy the British conquest over India & Bengal is a important part of the world
history. In the next pages we will discuss about the consequences of British conquest over India &
Bengal with a view of political & socio-economic.

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WHAT IS BRTISH CONQUEST?
The War Begins: The fueding between English and French settlers in New France began in the early
17th century, mainly over the great fish bearing territories Acadia and Newfoundland. The English
began to raid French colonies and eventually destroyed Port Royal and captured Samuel De
Champlains settlement.

The French colonies had little support from their mother countries and a very poor economy system
thanks to the mercantile theory, whereas Britain had pretty much all the support they needed from
their mother countries. The 13 colonies were also much more populated than New France.

After many years of fighting including three intercolonial wars, they came to the fourth and biggest
intercolonial war - The Seven Years War. It took place in 1756, and ended in 1763. French did not
supply New France with alot of support from overseas, but that was mainly because Britian had the
route blocked off by their navy.

For four years the battles raged on, untill French general Montcalm and British general Wolfe took
their armies and met for a final battle at the plains of Abraham. The battle was fierce but the french
were defeated. Both generals died on the battlefield. In 1763 the war was officialy over with the
signing of the treaty of Paris.

Technologies used:The weapons used in the British Conquest were muskets, bayonnets, swords,
cannons, and ships provided by the Navy.

Uniforms: The uniforms used in this war varied. The British troops wore elegant long red waist
coats, with frilled white collars. They had white collars and black boots.

The French wore similar uniforms except instead of red coats, they wore royal blue coats with blue
cuffs and collars.

War Tactics:The tactics that the French and British used was mainly standing in rows and letting off
shots at each other one at a time. It was quite a strange method, seeing as it was organized so that one
side would shoot, and than the other; it was like a game.

Causes and Consequences: The causes of The Wars Of The Conquest were mainly over
domination of more land and control of fish and fur bearing regions. There was also alot of wars
between France and Britain in Europe so naturally there would be conflicts in their oversees
colonies. The consequences of this war were very hard on the French Canadiens, seeing as they lost
alot of their territory, became British subjects, and french immigrants were not allowed to come live
there. The treaty of Paris gave the British much more land, and New France now became British
North America.

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Page | 4
BRITISH CONQUEST OF INDIA & BENGAL:

India, the largest, the longest dominated and exploited of British conquests, the richest field of
investment, the source of incalculable plunder and profit, the base of Asiatic expansion, the
inexhaustible reservoir of material and human resources for British wars, the focus of all British
strategic aims, the pivot of the Empire, and the bulwark of British world domination, offers, after 200
years of subjection, the most complete demonstration of the workings and results of the colonial
system of modern imperialism.

Every European colonizing power directed its first efforts toward India, and the bitterest struggles for
the glittering prize were fought on the battlefields of Europe and India alike. The success of Britain
in defeating her continental rivals, as well as the native rulers of India, and the consolidation of her
domination in India paved the way for her subsequent world supremacy. The conquest and
exploitation of India was one of the main bases of capitalist development in Britain, giving direct
support to her whole social and political structure. The plunder of India was a main source of the
primitive accumulation of capital which made possible the English industrial revolution. The
exploitation of the Indian market and of Indian raw materials provided the basis of British industrial
expansion in the 19th century. Today India provides a field of investment for a quarter of British
overseas capital holdings, and sends to Britain roughly 150 million pounds sterling annually, as
tribute, in various forms.

After 200 years of imperialist rule, India presents a picture of poverty and misery of the masses,
which is without equal in the world the more striking because up to the 18th century the economic
condition of India was relatively advanced and Indian methods of production and of industrial and
commercial organization could compare with those of any part of the world; and because of the vast
natural wealth and resources of the country, which cannot be utilized and developed under the
imperialist system.

European capitalist penetration of India began with the Portuguese establishment of their factory in
Calicut. The British (1600), Dutch (1602) and the French (1664) formed their trading companies in
the course of the 17th century. British direct rule dates from the middle of the 1801 century.

The British conquest of India, carried out piecemeal, and in the most ruthless, vindictive and
deceitful manner, differed from every previous conquest of India in that, while earlier foreign
conquerors left untouched the traditional economy, British imperialism broke down the whole
framework of Indian society.

The Process of Destruction:

The first steps of this destruction were carried out by (a) the East India Companys colossal direct
plunder, (b) by the British neglect of irrigation and public works, (c) by the wrecking of the Indian
land system and its replacement by a system of landlordism and individual land holding, (d) by the
direct prohibition and heavy duties on the export of Indian manufactures to Europe, and to England.

But it was the operations of 19th century British industrial capitalism and the governmental policies
initiated by it in India that decisively broke up the Indian economic structure. The industrial

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capitalists of Britain had a clear cut aim in India to reduce it to an agricultural colony of British
capitalism, supplying ran materials and absorbing its manufactured goods.

Britain captured and developed the Indian market for her industrial goods on the basis of the
technical superiority of English machine industry (for which the Indian plunder had provided the
accumulated capital), while utilizing at the same time the state power to block the export of Indian
goods to Europe and permit the free entry of British goods to India. The destruction and collapse of
Indian manufactures in the unequal struggle against British competition was the inevitable result.
The ruin of millions of artisans and craftsmen was not accompanied by any growth of newer forms
of industry, and the old urban centers of Indian manufactures (Dacca, Murshidabad, Surat) were
depopulated and laid waste.

The work of destruction was not confined to the towns. The handloom and the spinning wheel were
the pivots of the structure of Indian society which was based on the domestic union of agricultural
and manufacturing pursuits.

British steam and science uprooted over the whole surface of Hindustan the union between
agricultural and manufacturing industry. The British intruder, who broke up the Indian handloom
and destroyed the spinning wheel struck at the roots of the Indian society, in destroying the balance
of the village economy. Thereby Britain produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only
social revolution ever heard of in Asia, actuated in this matter only by the vilest interests, and
stupid in her manner of enforcing them.

To consolidate the conquest of India, and to develop the Indian market and Indian resources for
exploitation by the British capitalist class as a whole, the East India Company was replaced in 1858
by direct governmental administration. After a century of neglect of the most elementary functions of
government, the British inaugurated a process of the active development of the country by (a)
building a network of railroads, (b) by the development of roads, (c) the introduction of the electric
telegraph and of a uniform postal system, (d) by giving the benefits of Western education to a limited
class of Indians, and (e) by the introduction of the European banking system into India. While
opening up India for commercial penetration, and supplying a market for British iron, steel and
engineering industries, this process of development especially the construction of railways laid
the foundations of a new stage the development of British capital investments in India.

Finance Capital and Plunder:

The last decades of the 19th century and the first of the 20th were marked by the imperialist export
of finance capital from the countries of Western Europe and North America to every corner of the
globe and by the conquest and exploitation of all the backward countries through the colonial system.
Between 1880 and 1914 the major European powers and the USA had carved up the whole world
into colonies and spheres of exploitation.

This period of modern imperialist expansion was marked in India by an intensification of British
exploitation, and a corresponding change in its character, wherein the finance-capitalist exploitation
of India came to dominate all other methods. Nevertheless the new basis of exploitation did not
replace the already established forms of plunder and industrial and trading exploitation, but was
auxiliary and parallel to these processes.

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British capitalist investment in India developed at a rapid pace in the second half of the 19th century,
with expansion of railway construction, and also with the establishment of tea, coffee and rubber
plantations and other minor enterprises.

The holdings of British capital in India developed not on the basis of the export of British capital, but
rather through the plunder of the Indian people, which was reinvested in India, as a rich source of
interest. The sterling debt of the Indian government, which includes more than one-third of the total
holdings of British capital, has been manipulated to include the cost of every imperial undertaking
(including wars for the subjugation of India, and other colonial wars) which could conceivably be
charged to India. The colossal amount of this debt bears no relation to the costs of the public works
schemes carried out, and of railway construction (themselves multiplied by wasteful spending). At
the same time, the almost continuous excess of the value of Indian exports to Britain over that of
imports, has left no room for a real export of capital to India. Nevertheless, the volume of British
holdings in India today exceeds one billion pounds sterling.

With the post-war weakening of Britains share of the Indian market (Britains share of Indian
imports dropped from 63 per cent to 29 per cent between 1913 and 1937), in the face of foreign
competition and the rise of Indian especially cotton industry, British imperialism has
consolidated its financial stranglehold on the Indian economy as its chief source of profit in India.
The proportion of Britains total overseas investment which has been placed in India has risen from
11 per cent in 1911 to 25 per cent in 1937. Despite this, there has been since 1927 (with the collapse
of the post-war boom and the general crisis) a sharp drop in the actual volume of British capital
newly invested in India, which reflects the general stagnation of the economic development of India.

The capital investments of Britain in India have never led to the industrialization of India on a scale
proportionate to their volume. The colossal waste involved in the railway construction of the last
century, and the unproductive expenditure which swelled Indias public debt, first created the glaring
disproportion between the size of British investments and the slow economic development of the
country. Up to 1914 97 per cent of British capital invested in India was devoted to purposes of
government (i.e., wars, the heavy costs of bureaucratic administration, levies for costly durbars, etc.),
transport plantations, and finance. These investments served as auxiliaries to the commercial
penetration of India and its exploitation as a source of raw materials and a market for British goods,
and did not lead to the development of modern industry in India on any commensurable scale.

Industrial Growth Hindered by Britain:

The industrial development of India which has taken place in recent times bears no relation to Indian
needs. The vast resources of India have never been tapped. The rate of industrial advance, far lower
than that of other large non-European countries, has not, even in modern times, kept pace with the
decline of Indian handicrafts with the result that from 1911 to 1931 there has been a reduction in
the proportion of the population dependent on industry (including domestic industry).

The growth of Indian industry has been greatly impeded by British imperialism, for fear of
competition with home industries, by administrative neglect, by a hostile tariff policy and by
unfavorable currency manipulations. Until 1914 this policy of opposition to industrial development
in Indian was openly followed, particularly by the removal of import duties on competing British
goods. The brief and half-hearted reversal of policy after 1914 and during the period when British

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capital flowed in to share in the profits of the post-war boom, was nullified by the later raising of the
exchange rates, which disastrously hit Indian exports.

Under these conditions, the development of modern industry in India has taken place at a very slow
rate, and in lop-sided fashion, chiefly in light industry. The basis necessary for real industrial
development heavy industry has never been laid. Until 1914, large organized production in India
was represented chiefly by the cotton, jute and coal mining industries, and by the tea, rubber and
coffee plantations. The post-war period, when foreign competition was reduced, was marked by a
short and feverish boom, which led to the development of other industries, including steel and iron,
cement, manganese and other minor types. This period was utilized by British capital, which during
the years 1921 to 1923 flowed in at an average annual rate of over thirty million pounds sterling. But
the brief post-war boom was followed by a period of stagnation and decline, prolonged by the
currency policy of the government, and finally intensified by the world crisis of 1929-1931 which
signified the entry of world capitalism itself into a period of decline.

Indian industry today shows no indication of recovery. The scope of the industrialization undertaken
for defense purposes during the present imperialist war is not meant to include an all-sided
development of Indian industry, but will be restricted to the strategic needs of British imperialism.
Such an all-sided development of industry is excluded by the conditions of imperialist exploitation
itself, by the direct hostility of the government to Indian industrial development, by the
determination of Britain to maintain its share of the Indian market and, above all, by the insoluble
problems of the home market caused by the extreme impoverishment of the agricultural population
under imperialism. The industrialization of India, on which her future depends, cannot be carried out
without the overthrow of imperialism and a sweeping transformation of agrarian relations.

Despite the hostility of imperialism to the industrialization of India, it is British and not Indian
capital that has always held the dominant place in Indian industry, not only through the decisively
greater volume of its investments in industry, but also through its financial stranglehold on the whole
Indian economy. The Indian capitalist class, whose growth was mainly connected with the
development of the cotton industry, has never been able to shake off the controlling power of British
finance capital. The paid-up capital of joint stock companies registered in India was in 1914 only Rs
80 crores, which is a measure of the belatedness and weakness of Indian capital. Today the figure has
risen to over Rs 300 crores. The permeation of British capital into companies registered in India
reduces the importance of this figure, which in any case cannot compare with the total paid-up
capital of foreign (mainly British) companies operating in India, which exceeds 700 million pounds
sterling.

British Capital Dominates:

Despite the advance of Indian capital, British capital remains in effectively monopolist domination in
banking, commerce, exchange and insurance, in shipping, in the tea, coffee, and rubber plantations
and in the jute industry. In iron and steel, Indian capital has been forced to come to terms with British
capital, and even in the cotton industry, the home of Indian capital, the control of British capital,
through the managing agency system, is very great. Already in 1928 (before the economic crisis),
English managing agents controlled the actual majority of the capital of cotton companies (50.3 per
cent). The economic depression which affected Indian industry after 1924 and especially after 1929),

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and the bankruptcy liquidations and difficulties of many Indian firms which had arisen in the post-
war period, were utilized by British capital to strengthen its hold on Indian industry.

Most decisive for the controlling power of British finance capital is the role of the foreign banking
system, working in conjunction with the governments financial and exchange policies. Financial
power remains monopolized in British hands, through the Reserve Bank of India, the Imperial Bank
and the big exchange banks. The Indian joint-stock banks hold less than one-third of the bank
deposits in India and are themselves being invaded by British capital.

The Indian capitalist class, therefore, despite its growth in recent times, remains essentially
dependent upon and an agency of British finance capital, performing a subsidiary role in the
exploitation of India. Despite its dreams of industrialization and of a broadened base of exploitation
for itself, the Indian bourgeoisie, shackled as it is to imperialism, cannot play the historic role of the
West European bourgeoisie in liberating and developing the productive forces. The industrial
advance of India demands absolutely the overthrow of imperialism, with which Indian bourgeois
interests are indissolubly bound, and the overthrow of which they will be bound to resist.

Nevertheless, the rising productive forces in India are straining against the fetters of imperialism and
of the obsolete economic structure which it maintains and protects. This conflict finds its expression,
not only in the industrial stagnation, but in a much sharper way in the agrarian crisis, which is the
index of the bankruptcy of imperialist economy, and the main driving force toward revolution.

Agriculture and the Land System:

Britain relegated to India the role of an agricultural appendage to imperialism. The ravages of Indian
industries carried out in the 19th century at once drove the population of the ruined industrial centers
back to the land, and ruined the livelihood of millions of artisans in the villages. The overcrowding
of agriculture which resulted has reached a stage today when three-fourths of the entire Indian
population is solely dependent on the land, and where the proportion of land available for cultivation
has fallen to less than 1 acres per head of the agrarian population. The effect of this exaggerated
disequilibrium in the company is further aggravated by the stagnation and deterioration of agriculture
itself, for which as well the British are directly responsible through their disruption of the village
economy, their iniquitous exactions of land revenue, their expropriation of the peasantry, their
creation of parasitic forces in semi-feudal landlordism, and their notorious neglect of public works
on the land, which have been from time immemorial the function of the government and without
which, in India, the cultivation of the soil cannot be carried on. The criminal indifference of the
government and the suffocating parasitism of the landlords are responsible for the incredibly low
productivity and exhaustion of the soil, for the primitive agricultural technique, for the waste of labor
in fragmented holdings, for the neglect of cultivable soil (of which 35 per cent is left waste in India
and Burma), and the recent actual shrinkage in the area under cultivation, while the population is on
the increase. These conditions, which have depressed the vast majority or the rural population to a
level of unspeakable poverty, and chronic semi-starvation, and led to a state of permanent
agricultural crisis, are inevitably paving the way for a sweeping revolution, as their only outcome
and solution.

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The characteristic process of imperialism, the expropriation of the colonial population from the land,
was carried out by the British under cover of legal forms, which in effect transformed the eternal
land system of the Indian village commune into an inextricable amalgam of feudal and semi-feudal
rights and tenures. The British introduced into India the great desideratum of Asiatic society
private property in the land, making in this connection a series of unsuccessful and really absurd
(and in effect really infamous) experiments in economics. In Bengal they created a caricature of
English landed property on a large scale; in South-eastern India a caricature of small allotment
property; in the Northwest they transformed to the utmost of their ability the Indian commune with
common ownership of the land, into a caricature of itself.

The aims which guided the British transformation of the Indian land system were twofold firstly, to
guarantee the effective collection of their extortionate land revenues, which rose steeply from the
time of the conquest (from four million pounds sterling in 1800 to fifteen million in 1857, to twenty-
three million in 1936-37); and in the second place to create a social basis within India for
imperialism, by the creation of Indian landed interests deeply interested in the continuance of
British dominion. It is above all the still unbroken alliance between British imperialism and Indian
landlordism that links up the overthrow of imperialism with the agrarian revolution in India.

Landlordism was created and fostered by the British, not only in the provinces of temporary and
permanent Zemindari, Bengal, UP, Bihar, Punjaub), but also in the Ryotwari areas (including
Bombay, Madras, etc.), where the processes of mortgage and subletting have caused analogous
developments. In many parts of India, sub-infeudation and sub-letting have been carried to fantastic
lengths, so that the cultivator of the soil is despoiled by an increasing army of functionless
intermediaries, in addition to the big parasites and the government itself. A great proportion of the
real cultivators of the soil are without rights of any kind and remain unaffected even by the
temporary legislation by which the government has sought to stave off the impending crisis. Even in
the Ryotwari areas, where settlement was originally made with the cultivators themselves, the latter
have been dispossessed to a great extent by money-lenders and others.

From the beginning, landlordism under British rule has been parasitic in character, since landlords
neither supply agricultural capital, not control farming operations. Today landlordism, taken in
conjunction with its superstructure of sub-infeudation and sub-letting, is the most effective barrier to
the development of modern large-scale agriculture.

Imperialism, a Reactionary Fetter:

The penetration of finance capital in the agrarian field. which characterizes the recent period, far
from freeing the productive forces from the incubus of feudalism, or introducing modern productive
technique, has taken place for the most part within the framework of feudal and semi-feudal
relations, and become enmeshed with feudal forms of exploitation. The net result has been to add to
the burdens of the peasantry by decisively accelerating their expropriation from the land, and by
crushing them under a load of debt which amounted in 1937 to 1,350,000,000 pounds. The money-
lenders exactions and confiscations, together with the payments demanded by the government and
the landlords extortions, form for the peasantry a triple scourge which has reduced the greater
proportion of cultivators in India to the status of unprotected tenants, sharecroppers and landless
wage laborers. Capitalist inroads have sharply accelerated the differentiation of classes within rural

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society, increasing the numbers of parasite rent-receivers on the one hand and of propertyless
elements on the other, as a comparison of the 1921 with the 1931 census figures illustrates:

Non-cultivating proprietors taking rent 1921, 3.7 millions; 1931, 4 millions.

Agricultural laborers (i.e., landless elements, sub-tenants and wage laborers) 1921, 21.7 millions;
1931, 33 millions.

The particularly rapid growth of parasitic landlordism in recent times, as well as the sharp rise in
rural debt (from 400,000,000 pounds in 1921 to 1,350,000,000 in 1937), is really the reflection of the
invasion of moneyed interests, big and small, in the agrarian field, having failed to find effective out-
lets for investment in productive industry. Thus the direct plunder of the peasantry of the early
British period has given place to a network of forms of exploitation of modern finance capital, with
its host of subsidiary parasites in the Indian economy. The Indian capitalist class, no less than the
British government and the semi-feudal landlords, are tied to the existing order of rural society, and
interested in its perpetuation.

Nevertheless the abolition of landlordism in all its forms, in defiance of all these vested interests, the
abolition of rural debt, and the unencumbered transfer of the land to the cultivators themselves, is the
basic social task of the Indian revolution, and the absolute prerequisite of agricultural advance in
India.

British imperialism, in the epoch of declining world capitalism, has become the most powerful
reactionary force in India, buttressing in turn all other forms of reaction. Its failure to develop the
productive forces in India through industrialization, and the chronic stagnation and decay of
agriculture under its rule, make its continued existence incompatible with the advancement of India,
and render its overthrow an historical inevitability. To maintain its rule in India, in the face of the
rising tide of mass revolt, British imperialism uses all the weapons of bureaucratic and military
repression with increasing viciousness. Nevertheless the day of reckoning cannot be long postponed.
The solution of the terrible problems of the toiling millions of India demand the overthrow and
elimination of British imperialism, which is the foremost task of the coming Indian revolution.

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CONSEQUENCES OF BRTISH CONQUEST OVER INDIA & BENGAL;A STUDY
FROM SOCIO-ECONOMIC & POLITICAL VIEWS:

Accounts of the early stages of British expansion in India have tended to emphasise its unplanned
and opportunistic character; they have often seen the motors of expansion lying within unstable
Indian states or in the need of the East India Company to meet the costs of fast-growing armies.
Reviewing the evidence from Bengal between 1757 and 1772, this article argues that a distinctive
kind of frontier patriotism generated in the East India Company's Indian settlements constituted an
important ideological context for its conquests. Company servants routinely derided Indian rulers as
Asiatic despots, or 'faithless' Muslims. Their sense of Indian rulers as degenerate and corrupt both
fuelled military aggression, and also made some Britons suppose that the East India Company could
effect rapid reforms in Bengal, drawing out previously untapped surpluses from the agrarian base. At
the same time, the need to forge alliances within the old regime encouraged some Company officials
to adopt a more conciliatory tone, and to imagine that viable systems of political order existed within
the traditions of the Mughal empire.

Three decades ago, P.J. Marshall published an important essay on the early stages of British
imperial expansion in India, focusing on the period 1757-84. He stressed the role of contingency,
opportunism, incoherent ambitions and unplanned outcomes in the early stages of British conquests.
He argued that East India Company directors and British ministers wished in general to avoid
expensive military entanglements, and there was no 'coherent drive for empire by men actually in
India'.Rather, the move 'from military ascendancy to domination of territory' was a chaotic process in
which the Company's appetite for commercial privileges, and above all for money to pay for its
armies, gradually destroyed the fabric of Indian states.

A few years later, the publication of Edward Said's famous work, Orientalism, sparked renewed
interest in the ideological origins of British imperialism. Said's thesis that Western knowledge about
the 'East' was a kind of 'discourse', aimed at 'dominating, restructuring and having authority over the
Orient', was cautiously received by historians of British India. In one of the earliest responses to
Said, Marshall and Williams resisted the idea 'that western oriental scholarship became the handmaid
of imperialism', or 'that knowledge of Asia generated new conquests' in any direct sense. They
acknowledged, however, that 'assumptions generally held about Asians at the end of the eighteenth
century increased European confidence in the exercise of power in Asia'.In several illuminating
essays, Marshall explored shifts in British perceptions of themselves and of Asia which accompanied
and over time worked to legitimise imperial expansion.In this view, initial British inhibitions about
'Asiatic' empire, associated with the threats of luxury and despotism, gave way to a new imperial
confidence in the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. India was tamed as an object of
British knowledge by its incorporation into the emerging hierarchies of the Scottish enlightenment,
while the British grew into a new sense of themselves as a 'free though conquering people'.

Yet the East India Company's conquest of Bengal in the 1750s and 1760s appeared to predate this
new imperial confidence. Meanwhile, new studies on Indian regional states tended to emphasise the
local Indian rather than wider imperial contexts for the Company's expansion. British territorial
growth was seen as part of wider processes internal to Indian society, notably the rise of commercial

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groups in centralising military-fiscal states.According to C.A. Bayly, the 'British were sucked into
the Indian economy by the dynamic of its political economy as much as by their own relentless drive
for profit'.This kind of argument seemed to reinforce the idea of the Company's conquests as
haphazard, contingent responses to local Indian events.

More recently, a revival of interest in global connections and imperial structures has sparked new
work on the imperial dimensions of British expansion in India. For example, Bayly related John
Brewer's concept of a centralising 'military-fiscal' state in eighteenth-century Britain to the territorial
expansion of the East India Company in India after the 1750s. According to this view the Company
incorporated certain features of the domestic state, notably 'a rigorous tradition of administrative
accountancy' and 'an ideology of transcendent law and sovereignty' which gave it an 'expansionist
impetus' in its relations with other Indian states.Bayly noted how Company officials tended to
convert grants of trading rights by Mughal emperors into claims of legal immunity which
undermined the kingly status of Mughal provincial governors. He also related Britons' inflated sense
of their 'rights' vis- -vis Indian rulers to the conventional exclusivity of the 'laws of England', and
deep-seated notions that Muslims 'had no real rights with regard to Christian property and
privileges'.Marshall, too, has argued that the Company in Bengal was behaving in analogous ways to
the British parliamentary state in its aggressive pursuit of 'commercial advantage, military security,
and clearly recognized authority'.

This article will argue that none of these approaches has yet sufficiently accounted for the distinctive
kind of 'frontier patriotism' generated in the East India Company's Indian settlements in the
eighteenth century. Whereas in Europe, eighteenth-century Britons tended to define their national
identity by contrast with the Catholic monarchy of France, on the coasts of India, 'free-born' Britons
opposed themselves to 'Asiatic despots', and British Christians contrasted their own righteousness
with the depravity of 'infidels', especially 'faithless Moors'.Deeply entrenched assumptions about
Indian politics, notably the idea of Asiatic despotism and its connotations of native depravity,
constituted an important ideological context for British actions during the conquests of Bengal.
Company servants tended to interpret Indian politics through the prism of ideas about Asiatic
despotism; and the perceived threat of cruel and tyrannical Asiatic rulers became a flexible
justification for British aggression. It was the sudden meshing of commercial, military and
ideological pressures for territorial expansion that best explains how the East India Company
emerged by the 1770s as the unabashed sovereigns of Bengal.

My emphasis on the patriotism of the frontier does not seek to resurrect a hard distinction between
'periphery' and 'centre', or to argue that the Company's Indian conquests were entirely the work of
Britons in India floating free from domestic authorities.The six-month sailing time between London
and Calcutta did give a certain flexibility and autonomy to the Company's 'men on the spot'.
Directors often fretted about rising military costs, and argued on occasion for 'pacifick measures' in
dealing with Indian rulers.Few senior officials, either directors or servants in India, appear to have
imagined that the collapse of regional state of Bengal would be so swift as it turned out. At key
moments, however, the directors proved themselves willing accomplices in the Company's territorial
expansion, and were eager to reap the benefits of new territorial revenues.Moreover, in an era when
returning Company servants themselves played an increasing role in the Company's Court of
Directors in London, the lines between the periphery and centre were increasingly blurred.

My account suggests that a style of 'othering' familiar from Said's notion of 'orientalism' was one
important strand in British attitudes to Indian states and officials in the era of imperial expansion.
British perceptions of themselves as uniquely secure in 'liberty and property' under the conventions
of their 'ancient constitution' took on an explosive dynamic in India given the shared belief among

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Britons, and indeed among Europeans in general, that Asiatic regimes were essentially
despotic.Britons may not yet have understood inter-racial relations in terms of the rigid civilisational
or racist hierarchies of the nineteenth century, but the poles of liberty and despotism gave British
attitudes to 'blacks' a sharp edge that was only made sharper by the conflicts of mid-century.

Yet this stark picture of polar identities, while capturing an important element in the eighteenth-
century picture, falls short of a complete account of the ideological origins of the Company's
conquests. The critique of Asiatic despotism always lay close to the surface, but the East India
Company' conquests emerged through a tense process not just of conflict but also accommodation
with Indian rulers, involving a series of uneasy alliances with Mughal Emperors, Nawabs of Bengal
and other scions of the old order. Hence, the political language of Company servants veered between
the stark oppositionism implied by some theories of Asiatic despotism, and more conciliatory
gestures. Asiatic despotism was itself a complex and fluid idea containing within it intimations of
order and even benevolence, as well as cruelty and tyranny. The ideological origins of the colonial
state in India thus bore the traces of what Sara Suleri has called 'the necessary intimacies between
ruler and ruled' that worked against 'the rhetoric of binarism'.The Company's political lexicon was
marked by contradictory urges, to distinguish itself from its Asiatic context on the one hand, and to
naturalise and justify itself as a new kind of Asiatic empire on the other.

What Sanjay Subrahmanyam has termed 'the topoi of Oriental Despotism: absence of laws, arbitrary
royal power and a penchant for blood-lust, absence of private property' had deep roots in the political
culture of western Europe.The device of Oriental or (more usually in eighteenth-century sources)
Asiatic despotism, was fuelled by European conflicts with expansive and powerful Muslim
kingdoms and empires in the medieval and early modern eras, and it became a standard conceptual
weapon in the armouries of European traders perched perilously on the fringes of the great Muslim
empires in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Asiatic despotism achieved its most extensive
philosophical analysis in the works of Montesquieu and Boulanger in the mid-eighteenth
century.While both authors applied the concept of despotism to Asiatic peoples from Turkey to
China, relating it to the 'enervating' effects of hot climates, they also emphasised the role of religion,
especially Islam, in promoting fear and slavishness in Asiatic populations.Theories of Asiatic
despotism thus drew on anti-Muslim Christian polemics to spread the image of 'faithless Moors'.

Armchair exponents of the idea of Asiatic despotism in Europe often framed their accounts as
oblique attacks on European monarchies. As James Tracy has argued, the cruder versions of Asiatic
autocracy were liable to revision by those Europeans, traders and travellers who actually observed
the complex workings of Asian states and empires at close quarters.Yet, even in the Asian contact
zones, new information about Asian states was filtered through established and durable prejudices.
The prominence of Asiatic despotism in the lexicon of the English East India Company can be
gauged from Robert Orme's short treatise on the 'General Idea of the Government and People of
Indostan' written in 1753.Orme had served as a civilian servant of the East India Company on the
fringes of the Mughal empire in Bengal since 1743. His account of Indian government recited
standard European critiques of the Mughal empire, notably Francois Bernier's famous claim (in his
Travels in the Mogul Empire) that 'all the lands belong to the king'.Orme listed the 'many and
dreadful vices' of the 'Moors' or Muslims, who apparently divided up almost 'the whole wealth of this
vast territory'. The government was a system of plunder, and all around Orme saw 'the dispiriting
effects of that fear which reigns throughout, and without which a despotick power would reign no
more'. The Gentoos were timorous and slavish subjects of the Muslim emperors; 'the sway of a
despotic government has taught them the necessity of patience'.

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All signs of prosperity or institutions not easily fitted into the category of despotism were explained
away by Orme as the product of accidental causes. For example, the success of Indian textile
manufactures was attributed to the extraordinary suppleness of Indian hands, and by the avarice of
rulers which led them to offer protection to merchants, even European merchants. The resilience of
the native populations was a function of the great natural fertility of the soil.And the common
practice of inheritance of property was merely a prudential concession by despotic rulers,
undermined by the extreme venality of the civil courts. It sometimes happened, according to Orme,
that rapacious Muslims, once they had vanquished their enemies and achieved sole power, became
more magnanimous and moderate. Such a ruler, he thought, was Alivardi Khan, the current Nawab of
Bengal, who 'has always persisted to live the husband of one wife', thus avoiding the enervation of
the haram.Orme was aware that the powers of the Delhi emperors were often severely compromised
in their distant provinces by the regional power of magnates like Alivardi Khan. But this peripheral
weakness did not mitigate the woes of despotism; rather, according to Orme, it made them worse,
leading to internecine conflict and 'deplorable devastations, as no other nation in the universe is
subject to'.Orme's treatise ended on a self-congratulatory note; the 'horrid impieties' of infidels
illuminated the 'glories' of Christianity, and 'the sons of Liberty may here behold the mighty ills to
which the slaves of a despotic power must be subject'.

Such views were nurtured not only by philosophical theories of Asiatic despotism, but also through
long years of disputing over trading rights with increasingly powerful and independent Nawabs
(Mughal provincial governors) of Bengal. From the late seventeenth century, the Company had tried
to achieve a kind of 'extra-territorial' status for its trading station in Calcutta, beyond the reach of the
Nawab's customs collectors and judicial authorities.The Company as zamindar (land-holder) of
Calcutta appointed Indian law officers and revenue officials independent of the Nawabs, as well as
administering English law to its own population. It sought to consolidate its independent authority
through the grant of a farman or imperial order of 1717, securing (as the British thought) trade free
of duty from the port of Calcutta, and also unrestricted access for the British and their Indian agents
to the markets and industrial producers of Bengal.Robert Orme ominously noted that during the reign
of Alivardi Khan in Bengal (1740-56), 'the pay of a very numerous standing army has obliged him to
be more rapacious than any of his predecessors', imposing 'dearer exactions' on merchants.
Meanwhile, even in 1753, Orme was already dismissive of 'the rudeness of the military art in
Indostan'.

Orme's text evoked the combustible state of the Company's operations in Bengal in the 1750s, as
hostile British traders, dismissive of the moral and military character of Indian government, yet
fearful of the 'rapaciousness' of Asiatic despots, confronted the expanding military-fiscal state of the
Nawabs. The events leading to the Company's conquest of Bengal arose from one of many stand-offs
between the Company and the provincial Nawabs over trading dues and privileges. The differences
in 1756-57 from previous conflicts were first the Company's new military capacities diverted from
war with the French in south India, and second the existence of powerful disaffected elements within
the Bengal government who were willing to support Robert Clive as he took the Company's revenge
on Siraj-ud-daula. Clive justified his deposing Siraj-ud-daula after the battle of Plassey (1757) in part
through Siraj's attempt to foster an alliance with the French at Chandannagar.Robert Orme's massive
history of the 'military transactions' of the British in India placed the Company's endeavours as part
of a wider struggle for military glory in the era of the Seven Years War.But Company servants,
mainly close associates of Clive, who publicised the Bengal 'revolutions' through histories and
pamphlets published in Britain, also emphasised the degraded nature of Siraj-ud-daula and his polity,
drawing on a stock of existing stereotypes about Asiatic despots.

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Several of these histories recycled the Company official J.Z. Holwell's tale of the 'Black Hole' of
Calcutta, when over a hundred Britons and others allegedly suffocated to death under the watch of
the Nawab's troops.The Black Hole incident reinforced the view of the Nawabs as illegitimate
usurpers of sovereign powers of the Mughal emperors; they were degraded players in a long drama
of corruption, in which manly Tartar invaders had been gradually effeminised by the sultry climate of
India. Luke Scrafton, a close ally of Robert Clive, admitted that his own treatise on Indian affairs had
'altogether given the Moors a detestable character'; but he was 'sorry to say that it is so universally
true, that I never knew above two or three exceptions'.In the view of another Company servant,
William Watts, once Mughal governors no longer feared the controlling hand of the emperors in
Delhi, they began an orgy of unregulated plunder, and little tyrannies multiplied all over India; a
'kind of anarchy' overtook India, and 'there is scarcely any such thing as legal authority subsisting in
any part of the empire'. Thus, the Company was forced to arms to defend their longstanding trading
rights established by imperial orders under the old Mughal 'constitution'.

This amalgam of invective directed against Indian rulers, and the idea of post-Mughal lawlessness,
would continue to justify British encroachments on the regional state of Bengal. The notion of the
Indian 'Moors' or Muslims in particular as a designing, villainous and cruel people suffused the
correspondence of Robert Clive, who played such a prominent role in the conquest.To Britons like
Clive, despotism was not merely an external feature of the Indian polity; it was personal, deep-seated
and psychological. It enslaved both rulers and ruled to their worst fears and passions. Yet, somewhat
incongruously, given the rhetoric of despotism and degradation, Clive and his friends concluded their
exertions of 1756-57 by restoring a new Nawab, Mir Jafar, to the government of Bengal - with
provision for substantial compensation for the British for losses sustained in the war, new territorial
accessions around Calcutta, and a slice of the valuable trade in salt-petre.This settlement reflected the
practical limits still of the Company's fledgling military power, the reluctance of parsimonious
directors to support large conquests, and Clive's own sense that 'so large a sovereignty may possibly
be an object too extensive for a mercantile company'.The shift from coastal traders to territorial
governors required a transformation in the self-perception of the Company as well as military force;
most Company servants and directors, continued to conceive of the Company as part of a 'maritime
empire', with small territorial enclaves as revenues giving security for trade.

Yet there is much to be said for Marshall's view that, whatever the conservative intentions of the
British 'revolutionaries' of 1757, they had in fact 'fatally undermined the authority of the Bengal
Nawabs'.Clive's letters revealed his eagerness to pursue further opportunities for more 'aggrandizing'
projects in the future. Moreover, bolstered by the Company's new military might, British private
traders invaded the internal markets of Bengal with new gusto, undermining the Nawab's customs
revenues and structures of local government. Within a couple of years the Company's temporary
governor at Calcutta, J.Z. Holwell, survivor of the Black Hole, was plotting to unseat Mir Jafar, and
in 1760 his successor Henry Vansittart did so. Some of Clive's allies later argued that this second
'revolution' was the crucial point of no return, and opened the floodgates to later wars and
annexations.But Holwell and Vansittart argued that Mir Jafar was incapable of raising sufficient
revenues to meet the Company's military costs; moreover they tarred him with the familiar brush of
despotism, arguing that he had cruelly murdered his predecessors' family.

Thus, as Company governors worked to restore relations between the Company and a new breed of
Nawabs after 1757, the widely held notion of despotism was an uncertain basis for political trust.
Together with the new burdens of military costs, plus the rapidly expanding purview of British
private traders eager to assert their own independence from the Nawab's officials, the related ideas of
despotism and 'the faithless Moor' became flexible, all-purpose justifications of expansion. The last
Nawab who aspired to a real measure of autonomy, Nawab Mir Qasim (1760-63), was supported up

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to a point by the Company governor in Calcutta, Henry Vansittart, but was persistently undermined
by other Company servants determined not to submit to what they viewed as a corrupt and
threatening native government. In 1760 Mir Qasim granted extensive territorial revenues in south
Bengal to the Company and tried to reconstitute his authority on a more independent basis to the
north.Yet, British traders, notably those ensconced in the valuable markets of Patna in Bihar, refused
to submit to the Nawab's authority to regulate themselves or their Indian agents.

As the Company's council met to discuss strained relations with the Nawab in March 1763, the issue
for Company servants was one of authority, and not just duties on trade. A crucial source of
contention was the use of dastaks or trade passes by Company servants and their agents to secure
effective immunity from the Nawab's tax collectors. Governor Vansittart argued, and was later
supported by the directors, that dastaks should apply only to the Company's official import and
export trades, not to the voluminous 'private trades' of Company servants. Nearly all of his council in
Calcutta disagreed, and Vansittart's attempt to reach an entente with the Nawab was doomed. The
majority argued, not just that dastaks were an established right of Company servants, but that they
were indispensable to protect them from the depredations of corrupt Nawabi officials. One council
member, Mr Marriott, argued that the 'rapacious and tyrannical' character of the native government
was 'well-known to everyone'. Mr Cartier suggested that 'the government in every part of Indostan'
was 'in all respects oppressive and venal'. Even Governor Vansittart, who argued for supporting the
authority of the Nawab, was reluctant to submit the commercial agents of the English to the
jurisdiction of the native courts; 'the nature of the people is such, that it would be dangerous to admit
it'.The message of the council was clear. Free Britons would not subject themselves to Asiatic
despots; to remain a free people in a land of despotism, it seemed, it was necessary to become
conquerors.

After Mir Qasim was toppled in a bloody war, Robert Clive (returning as governor in 1765) agreed
that the only path to British security in Bengal was clear military ascendancy and the utter
dependency of the Nawab. 'All must belong either to the Company or to the Nabob', Clive and his
Select Committee at Calcutta argued, to avoid 'the fatal effects of future revolutions'.Yet it was one
thing to castigate native regimes as corrupt; it was quite another to imagine how a small group of
British traders could govern Bengal more successfully. What had happened after 1757 was that
British claims to 'extra-territoriality', a kind of insulated autonomy within the Indian state system,
had expanded outwards from Calcutta, into the multitude of new factories and outposts established
during the 'post-Plassey plunder'. Yet these claims by Company traders to extra-territoriality now
clashed not only with the authority of the Nawabs but also with conventional British notions of good
order. As Governor Vansittart had argued, British traders operating outside the rule of law - either
Indian or British - could themselves potentially become engrossers and oppressors, violating the
'natural rights' of Indian merchants to profit from their internal trades, as well as fomenting costly
disputes and jeopardising the security of the Company.The challenge from the mid-1760s was to
reconcile the expectations and prejudices of an expanding Company service, the need to conciliate at
least some parts of the indigenous administration, the reticence of the Company's directors, and
conventional notions of legitimate sovereign authority.

After the initial conquest, British understandings of Indian politics entered a new phase, as Company
officials sought alliances within the old Mughal order. What Robert Clive in fact did in 1765 was to
draw on another tradition of British thinking about Indian government. While the Nawabs were
usually seen as cruel despots, the British had sometimes viewed the Mughal emperors themselves as
legitimate sovereigns; despots, yes, but despots limited by the traditions of Islamic law and by the
need to tolerate and incorporate Hindu property holders. According to Luke Scrafton, for example,
the Mughals were governed by written laws and respected landed property; and before the 1730s,

Page | 17
'there was scarcely a better administered government in the world'. In this view, the worst excesses of
despotism followed only from the decline of the centralised power of the emperors. The East India
Company had, after all, based its own trading rights and land tenures on legal documents obtained
from emperors in Delhi; now, as governors and directors tried to restrict the explosive 'private' trade
of their own servants, they defended the right of Indian rulers under the 'Mughal constitution' to
regulate internal trade and revenues.

From this point of view, the attempt by the young Mughal prince, who crowned himself Shah Alam
II in 1759, to rescue his fortunes by repeated invasions of eastern India was a Godsend for the
British.It enabled Robert Clive to dispense with the Nawabs while maintaining what appeared to be
the legitimate forms of Mughal government. In 1765 Clive assumed the diwani (revenues rights) of
Bengal for the Company, by grant from the captive emperor. One powerful rationale for collecting
the Bengal revenues as diwan under the Mughal empire, was the perceived need to limit the
Company's liabilities in Europe, vis- -vis hostile European nations, and also the British government,
which claimed a right to the Bengal revenues as resulting from conquest by British subjects.But the
diwani was something more than a mask of power designed to dupe European governments and
legitimise the Company government in the eyes of Indians. Clive was also enacting a longstanding
British view of Indian politics, that Bengal had been best governed under the old constitution of the
Mughal empire, before the usurpations of the Nawabs. Clive agreed to pay the emperor a substantial
annual tribute of Rs. 26,000,000, which was about one-tenth of the Bengal land revenues.By
appointing Indian deputy governors to manage Bengal under the watchful eyes of Calcutta and under
the authority of the emperor, Clive hoped to have the best of all worlds, neutralising the threat of the
Nawabs, while deploying the Company army and traditional forms of Mughal authority to collect
sufficient land revenues to pay for the Company's investment and military costs, while limiting the
depredations of both Indian officials and British traders.

The directors endorsed Clive's decision to delegate the territorial administration to Indian deputies,
thus, as they thought, 'preserving the ancient form of government'.Yet the professed allegiance to the
'ancient form' of Mughal government always sat uneasily alongside ideas of Asiatic despotism and
Muslim faithlessness.Some Company servants regarded their own administration of the Calcutta
lands, and other southern districts ceded by the Nawabs, as laboratories for a new improved brand of
territorial government. In the 24 Parganas, ceded to the Company in 1758, the British made large
increases in revenue by setting aside the old zamindars, farming out lands and making detailed
surveys.Among the new farmers was J.Z. Holwell, who became a major advocate of British
intervention in territorial government. In 1764 he argued that a 'chain of frauds runs through the
revenues of the whole [Mughal] empire'; and though 'the times are not yet right for so great a grasp',
'it is certain were we the Suba [governor] of the provinces, the Emperor would regularly receive
more than double what these provinces ever produced to him, and that the East India Company
would become, in a short time, the richest body of subjects in the world'.It is noteworthy that even
Holwell, as an advocate of British reforms, thought that such interventions would occur within the
continuing framework of the Mughal empire. Holwell repeated his expansive claims about the land
revenues before a parliamentary committee in 1767, after the assumption of the diwani. Freed from
the depredations and frauds of Indian middlemen, so he thought, peasants would flourish and the
government would be able to collect perhaps three or four times current revenues from the
land.Holwell's view was extreme, but many Company men believed that a more rational
administration would improve the Bengal revenues.

The period between the granting of the diwani in 1765 and the arrival as governor of Warren
Hastings in 1772 was crucial in the imaginative transition from the old model of 'maritime empire'
within the framework of Mughal sovereignty, to a new sense of the Company as sovereigns of

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Bengal. In 1765, Clive was confident that the revenues of the diwani territories would yield a
comfortable surplus of about 1,500,000 to pay for military costs and the commercial investment;
yet his predictions were confounded as the Company's liabilities increased at a faster rate than its
revenues. Vast expenditures on the new fort at Calcutta, war in south India in 1768, rising dividends
for investors in London, and an annual tribute of 400,000 paid to the British government after 1767,
all contributed to a growing financial crisis for the Company, leading to its near bankruptcy in
London in 1772.The effect of this crisis in England was to stimulate calls for government
intervention in Indian affairs. William Bolts, a dismissed Company servant and well-known advocate
for new legislation to extend the protection of parliament to 'his Majesty's newly-acquired Asiatic
subjects', denounced the Company's posture as diwan of Bengal under the 'Great Mogul' as a sham,
arguing that the 'whole country was in a state of anarchy' that was being shamefully exploited by the
'European Bashaws' of the Company.

Within Bengal, however, Company officials increasingly blamed their own fiscal problems on the
maladministration of Indian officials in the diwani territories.Once again, the rhetoric of Asiatic
despotism, with its implications of systemic corruption, peculation and fraud was a powerful weapon
in the hands of acquisitive Company servants. As before, Company officials in Bengal disagreed
about the extent to which they should reform or preserve the old institutions of the Nawabi. For
example, Governor Verelst (1767-69) continued to support the Naib (Indian deputy governor) in
Murshidabad, using him to check the power of British traders, and resisting calls by other Company
servants for more aggressive reforms.What is striking, however, despite these tactical and factional
disputes, is the degree of consensus among Company officials both in London and in Bengal that
Indian systems of government were degenerate. Thus, when Verelst was forced by his fellow
councillors to appoint British 'Supervisors' to reform local government the diwani districts, his
'Instructions' to the Supervisors painted an image of the native government as rotten to the core,
listing a catalogue of abuses suffered by the Bengal peasants. Commenting on the administration of
justice, he wrote, 'it is difficult to determine whether the original customs or the degenerate manners
of the Mussulmen has most contributed to confound the principles of right and wrong in these
provinces. Certain it is that almost every decision of theirs is a corrupt bargain with the highest
bidder.'At the same time, the directors wrote to Bengal demanding further interventions in the diwani
territories excoriating Indian officials in similarly dismissive language.Meanwhile, the large tributes
promised by Lord Clive to the Emperor Shah Alam and the leading Mughal officials in Bengal were
left either unpaid or drastically reduced.

Of course, Company servants were themselves increasingly vulnerable in Britain to the charge that
they had become 'European Bashaws', corrupted by the general climate of despotism. In the
arguments of William Bolts, for example, disasters like the massive Bengal famine of 1769-70 were
understood in the context of the Company's monopolistic tyranny over Indian trades and
revenues.British critics of the Company like Bolts and Alexander Dow contrasted the contemporary
economic decline of Bengal with its prosperity under the old Mughal empire. Dow's 'History of
Hindustan' used Persian histories of the Mughals to argue that Asiatic despotism was 'not so terrible
in its nature, as men born in free countries are apt to imagine', and that the wisdom of successive
emperors had 'rendered Hindustan the most flourishing empire in all the world during two complete
centuries'.

Yet while the Company's critics in Britain looked back nostalgically to the 'ancient forms' of Mughal
rule, the political effect of economic crisis in Bengal was to compromise further the vulnerable
position of leading officials of the Nawab's government. Company servants tended to interpret
economic decline in Bengal in part as a function of a flawed system of Indian sovereignty that
necessitated the more assertive intervention of the Company. One important aspect of these

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economic problems was a perceived shortage of currency. Britons realised that this shortage was a
direct consequence of the Company's conquests. Flush with new territorial revenues, the Company
not only reduced its traditional imports of silver to Calcutta, but also reversed the flow of silver to
pay for its wars in south India and China tea. In the 1760s, the shortage of currency in Calcutta
undermined the Company's ability to increase its commercial investment and hence realise the profits
of expansion.To some extent, Company officials in Calcutta blamed the currency crisis on inadequate
support from the home authorities, and inordinate demands made on the Bengal treasuries.But the
debates about currency, as before about land revenues, also hinged on the alleged inefficiencies of
Indian government. It was argued that too much power had accrued to 'shroffs' or money-lenders,
who enjoyed an 'arbitrary' power over exchange rates between the different currencies of Bengal.It
was also widely thought that Indians, used to being plundered by despots, hoarded their coin in secret
stocks. British officials in Calcutta worked to reform the currency system by issuing new gold coins
from the Company's own mint.Meanwhile, the directors commissioned a treatise on the coinage of
Bengal from the leading political-economist Sir James Steuart. Steuart argued for the more assertive
intervention of the Company in the Bengal government, to fix exchange rates, facilitate the
circulation of money in a reformed revenue system, and establish property as a basis for credit.

The system of indirect rule established by Robert Clive in 1765, often referred to as 'double
government', could not long withstand the Company's financial problems and these pressures for
reform. Again the dynamic of expansion emerged from the meshing of fiscal pressures with the
critique of Indian corruption. Warren Hastings became the Company's governor in Calcutta in April
1772. Acting on orders from home to 'stand forth as Duan', Hastings arrested the Indian deputy
governors and worked to establish Calcutta as the new capital of Bengal. In March 1773, he wrote to
the chairman of the directors that 'every intermediate power is removed, and the sovereignty of the
country wholly and absolutely vested in the Company'.Over the next two years, Hastings drew up a
series of ambitious schemes for reforming the Bengal government. Power-sharing with Indian rulers
was decisively rejected, as Hastings' reforms aimed to address the economic crisis of Bengal with a
reformed system of sovereignty.

For example, Hastings may not have read James Steuart's treatise on the Bengal currency, but many
of his reforms - for example regulating interest rates, fixing the value of the sicca rupee, and
establishing a central bank - were designed in part to remedy the problem of money supply through
central government action.Hastings believed that the one of the chief purposes of his judicial reforms
would be to facilitate the liquidation of debt payments at interest.He also stopped payment of the
tribute to the Mughal emperor; this was in part a direct response to the emperor's decision, against
the Company's advice, to try to reclaim his throne in Delhi; but the payment of tribute to the Mughals
was also regarded by all theorists of the Bengal money supply as an unrequited 'drain' from
Bengal.Not the least important aspect of these debates over the balance of trade and the money
supply was the way that Bengal was increasingly being theorised as a distinct terrain of sovereignty,
and a discrete circulating system, distinct from the Mughal empire.

But the immediate justification for the Company's new attack on the Indian deputy governors in
Murshidabad was the famine of 1769-70, in which more than one fifth of the population may have
died. Again, British notions of political economy tended to regard famine as a crisis not just of nature
but of sovereignty. James Steuart himself argued that the principal object of political economy, and
hence of statesmanship, was to provide subsistence to the people.During food shortages in Britain in
the 1760s, many blamed large landlords and big grain merchants for driving up prices. In Bengal in
1769-70, Britons similarly worried that both British and Indian grain dealers were monopolising food
supplies. Most historians have emphasised how little was done by the Company, in terms of revenue
remissions or food aid, to alleviate the Bengal famine, and indeed the money that the Company was

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willing to set aside for such purposes was very small. But some Company men did see famine as a
cause for state intervention in the grain market, and British Supervisors in the districts tried (if
ineffectually) to regulate grain supplies. The famine was another occasion to attack the embattled
native administration, and finally in 1772 to charge leading Indian officials with engrossing supplies
and worsening the effects of bad harvests.Muhammad Reza Khan, the chief victim of these charges,
was eventually acquitted by the Company's investigators, yet his old power as Naib Subah or deputy
governor of Bengal was never restored.

At each stage of the Company's transformation into the sovereign of Bengal between 1757 and 1772,
the notion of Asiatic despotism, with its connotations of native depravity, was a powerful weapon in
the linguistic armoury of British officials. This observation tends to work against a view of the
Company's conquests as accidental, reluctant or (in Sir John Seeley's often quoted quip) acquired 'in
a fit of absence of mind'. Rather, British notions of Asiatic corruption gave ideological coherence and
momentum to the Company's own dramatic militarisation and territorial conquests after 1757, as the
Company fought to disarm what it thought of as hostile despots, to restabilise the old forms of
Mughal rule on its own terms, and finally to establish its own sovereignty as the necessary remedy
for a broad corruption of Indian governance.

In December 1769, a 24-year-old Company servant, Gerard Gustavus Ducarel, wrote to inform his
mother of his new appointment as a Supervisor of the large inland district of Purnea. His job would
be 'to superintend the conduct of the black people'. His conception of the role of the Supervisors was
curiously double edged. First he suggested that they would be 'lame historians and legislators most
probably'; but then he went on in a grander manner, echoing the critique of the government of the
Nawabs elaborated by the Company over many decades:

certainly it is that we have it in our Power to perform the noblest task that can be allotted to men of
honor and humanity, that of changing the condition of a people from a state of Oppression to
Happiness, and the Country from desolation to Prosperity, and that the scheme will in general have
this effect is undoubted, by the advantages English gentlemen have over Natives of this Country in
education, principles and disposition.

This quotation evokes an idealism, shaded by racialist distinctions, that has not always been
recognised by historians more preoccupied with domestic tirades against corrupt British 'Nabobs', or
seduced by an image of cosmopolitan enlightened orientalists. Fortified with his conception of
English gentility, Ducarel did the bidding of the Company in Purnea, cutting by up to half the
allowances formerly assigned to local Indian officials in his district, even though he accepted the
appalling hardship suffered by many families in the context of a raging famine.Ducarel was
confident that 'the people are in General relieved from many Burthens and Oppressions under which
they formerly labored' thanks to his checks on the power of rapacious native power-holders.

The importance of doctrines of native depravity in limiting the power of Indian officials under early
colonial rule has long been recognised, and was notably described nearly 40 years ago by P.J.
Marshall.This essay has aimed to show how theories of Asiatic corruption contributed to the
Company's grab for sovereign power in Bengal after 1757. Decades of uncomfortable relations with
the Bengal Nawabs, and the long history of theories of Asiatic despotism, had left a mark on the
imagery of the East India Company service that was more and more evident after 1757. A major
reason why Company servants thought that their take-over of the Bengal polity would ease their
fiscal crisis in the aftermath of military expansion was that the government of the Nawabs was
widely assumed to be corrupt and inefficient; hence many assumed that under a British reformed
administration, revenues from the land tax were bound to increase dramatically. In this regard, as

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Warren Hastings and a new generation of Company servants would discover, the Company had been
deceived by its own rhetoric.

Yet if the idea of Asiatic despotism was pervasive among Company servants, it was never
monolithic. Britons were confronted with a conundrum inherited from Montesquieu, the most
prominent theorist of despotism in the eighteenth century. On the one hand, Montesquieu made clear
his distaste for despotism, and its inherent instability; 'the principle of despotic government', he
argued, 'is endlessly corrupted because it is corrupt by its nature'. On the other hand, despotism
appeared to Montesquieu as an organic constitutional type arising from 'the climate, the religion, and
the situation or the genius of the people'.In this view, despotism was bad, but it was in some sense
natural. The British in eighteenth-century India tended to meet this conundrum by distinguishing
between the legitimate (if despotic) sovereignty of the Mughal emperors, and the illegitimate tyranny
of the provincial Nawabs. What Britons most disdained about Indian despotism was not the strength
but the weakness of Mughal sovereignty, based on the fickle emotion of fear, that had allowed
Nawabs, zamindars (land-holders) and shroffs to plunder traders and peasants. The remedy for this
kind of arbitrary power was eventually seen to lie in a strengthening of the sinews of sovereign
power by the Company. 'It is as impossible', declared Warren Hastings in 1763, 'for any state with a
divided power as with none'.Such views would help to doom early efforts at power-sharing with
Indian rulers, and offered consolation to anxious Britons as they assumed the mantle of empire.

While the theory of Asiatic despotism, and its implied absence of 'public virtue', was a powerful
stimulant of the Company's political expansion in Bengal after 1757, leading Company officials
continued to regard their government as a form of inheritance from the Mughal empire even into the
1770s and 1780s. After all, for all its supposed ills, despotism had its uses. The notion of an
entrenched, environmentally determined despotism offered one potent justification for the
authoritarian style of military rule established by the Company in Bengal. Further, the Company's
attempts to manipulate Mughal institutions of governance, and its discovery of new sources for
Mughal history, contributed to a wider European revaluation of cruder stereotypes of Asiatic
despotism. Warren Hastings, for example, defending the Company government from interference
from Britain, refuted the idea that there were no written laws in India, arguing that his judicial
reforms were designed to restore 'the ancient constitution of the province' to its 'original
principles'.Meanwhile, critics of the Company government continued to compare the modern age of
mercantile government unfavourably with the fatherly rule of benevolent Mughal despots. Hastings's
major rival on the Calcutta council in the 1770s, Philip Francis, argued that 'to recover the country,
we ought, as far as possible, to revert to its ancient political system'.Francis gave a complimentary
account of the wisdom and leniency of Mughal tax policy, which drew on Montesquieu's idea of 'the
moderation of the tribute imposed by all the Mahomedan conquerors'.The idea of despotism was thus
complex and multi-faceted. For all its potential ills, despotism was seen to have its own system of
political rationality; it could be an enlightened system of rule in the right hands. Moreover, Britons
invoked the 'spirit of the Roman precedent' to argue that the violation of Indian customs or laws, or
the introduction of English laws, would be in itself the worst kind of tyranny.

The historical constitutionalism that animated British Indian politics in the 1760s and 1770s, and
often invoked a benevolent era of ordered Mughal sovereignty, always sat uneasily with the
pervasive critique of 'Asiatic manners'. Eventually, British governors in Bengal drew a sharper line
between their own rule and their Mughal predecessors. Lord Cornwallis's self-consciously reformist
'permanent settlement' of the revenues and his elaborate code of administrative regulations were
regarded as granting 'a new constitution to so many millions of the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain',
free from the taint of arbitrary power.Separating 'judicial' powers from administration of the
revenues, and fixing the land tax demand appeared to infuse principles of British benevolence into

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Company's military despotism. In Cornwallis's system of 'rule by law', the British were discovering a
new species of imperial rule, distinct both from the old Atlantic system of English settler colonies
and slave labour, and also from the supposed despotism of the Mughals.As Nasser Hussain has
written, the new Asiatic empire 'consisted of people who were not slaves but, because deemed utterly
incapable of participating in their own rule, were not quite free subjects either'.Indians could not
aspire to the closed ranks of the 'free-born Englishman' or the 'free Briton' under early colonial rule,
but they were supposed to be grateful for being rescued from the worst excesses of Asiatic despots.

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CONCLUSION:

British conquest and dominion of India refers to the British Raj in the Indian subcontinent between
1858 and 1947. It also refers to the period of dominion, and even the region under the rule. In those
days, India in contemporary included areas directly administered by the United Kingdom, as well as
the princely states ruled by individual rulers under the supremacy of the British Crown. After 1876,
the consequential political union was officially called the Indian Empire and provided passports
under that name.

The system of governance was instituted in 1858, when the rule of the British East India Company
was given over to the Crown in the person of Queen Victoria who, in 1876, was proclaimed Empress
of India. The association of British conquest and dominion of India lasted until 1947, until the British
Indian Empire was partitioned into two sovereign dominion states, the Union of India (later the
Republic of India) and the Dominion of Pakistan. The eastern half of the Indian Empire became the
separate colony of Burma in 1937, and this regained independence in 1948.

The association of British conquest and dominion of India extended over all regions of present-day
India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Moreover, after different conquests, it included Aden Colony (from
1858 to 1937), Upper Burma (from 1886 to 1937), Lower Burma (from 1858 to 1937), British
Somaliland (briefly from 1884 to 1898), and Singapore (briefly from 1858 to 1867). The British
Crown directly administered Burma from 1937 until its independence in 1948. Among other
countries in the region, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) was ceded to the United Kingdom in 1802 following
the Treaty of Amiens. Ceylon was a British Crown Colony, but not part of British India. The
kingdoms of Nepal and Bhutan fought wars with the British and subsequently signed treaties with
them and were recognized by the British as independent states. The Kingdom of Sikkim established
as a princely state after the Anglo-Sikkimese Treaty of 1861. The British conquest and dominion of
India consisted of two divisions, British India and the Native States or Princely States.

After the 20th century, the result of British conquest on dominion of India was classified into eight
provinces that were administered either by a Governor or a Lieutenant Governor. During the partition
of Bengal (1905-1911), a new province, namely Assam and East Bengal was created as a Lieutenant
Governorship. In 1911, East Bengal was reunited with Bengal, and the new provinces in the east
formed, including the states of Assam, Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. British conquest and dominion of
India has brought about a series of changes in both socio economic scenarios. The enhancement of
education system, improvement of transport and communication and many more prospects of daily
life still bear the advantages of British conquest and dominion of India. Although several battles,
mutinies and bloodshed left the Indians devastated in urge to attain freedom, the nation also
witnessed some beneficial contents in their lifestyle.

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REFERRNCES:

# Marshall, 'British Expansion in India: A Historical Revision'

# (1993), 37.P.J. Marshall, Trade and Conquest: Studies on the Rise of British Dominance in India

# C.A. Bayly, 'The First Age of Global Expansion', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History,
26 (1998), 29-47.

# P.J. Marshall and G. Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the
Age of Enlightenment (London, 1982), 156-57.

# C.A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, New Cambridge History of India,
II.1 (Cambridge 1988).

#'Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History, c.1720-1860', Modern Asian
Studies, 22, 1 (1988), 76.

# J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688-1783 (Cambridge, MA,
1988).

# S. Sen, 'The Colonial Frontiers of the Georgian State: East India Company Rule in India', Journal
of Historical Sociology, 7 (1994), 368-92.

# K.N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660-1760
(London, 1978), 112.

# L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, 1994).

# J.D. Nichol, 'The British in India: A Study of Imperial Expansion into Bengal', Unpublished PhD
thesis, Cambridge, 1996.

# J. Malcolm, Life of Robert, Lord Clive (London, 1837), II, 302-16.

# L.S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth Century Politics (London, 1952); and J.
Gordon-Parker, 'The Directors of the East India Company, 1754-1790', Unpublished PhD, University
of Edinburgh, 1977.

# D. Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000); and for a
stimulating account of the genealogy of 'Oriental despotism' and its uses in eighteenth-century India.

# New Cambridge History of India, III.4 (Cambridge, 1995), 6-15.

# S. Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago, 1992), 3.

# R. Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of the Permanent Settlement (Paris,
1963), 25-29.

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