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‘A Theatre of Disputes’: The East India Company Election of 1764 as the Founding of British India

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 42; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03086534.2014.895134

1743-9329

Spencer A. Leonard,

Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East

AbstractThe East India Company stockholders' election of its Court of Directors for the upcoming year in 1764 crystallised the basic factional and ideological divisions that characterised the ‘India Question’ in the crucial first decade and a half of the post-Plassey era. Scarcely noted by historians, who have failed to seriously address the political constitution of the empire in India, the Company election of 1764 arguably merits pride of place over other near contemporaneous events, such as the 1764 Battle of Buxar or the 1765 acceptance by the Company of the diwani, the right to collect the revenues of Bengal, as the true founding of the British Empire in India. Certainly neither the Battle of Buxar (and the subsequent conquest Awadh) nor the acceptance of the diwani can be fully understood apart from a recognition of the very different politics behind each. Recognising the importance of the 1764 Company election in this sense involves understanding that politics emanating from Britain, and not simply the sub-imperialism associated with private trade, provided the fundamental precondition for the despotism and illiberal political economy of the emerging Company state in Bengal. If this is lost sight of we risk incomprehension of the most basic impetus of the military events and, indeed, of the economic developments on which historians have chiefly focused hitherto. Notes[1] Noteworthy new research on the Company includes Bowen, Business of Empire; Stern, The Company State; Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India; Wilson, The Domination of Strangers. In addition to these, the popular histories by Keay (Honourable Company) and Robins (Corporation that Changed the World) merit mention.[2] On Bengal, the standard works are Marshall's East Indian Fortunes and Bengal: British Bridgehead. The only book to deal with metropolitan politics in recent decades is Bowen, Revenue and Reform.[3] Most recent are: Chaudhury, From Prosperity to Decline and The Prelude to Empire; also Ray, The Felt Community. Sen, Empire of Free Trade, represents a historical anthropological variant of neo-nationalism.[4] See Dirks, Scandal of Empire; Chatterjee, Black Hole of Empire. Both rely heavily on the writings of Marshall, even as they attempt to reverse his interpretation. Chatterjee's reflections on the early colonial period in general are of great interest; see n. 26 and 35.[5] For the Company's significance in an earlier revolutionary crisis, see Pincus 1688, esp. ch. 12. Pincus argues that, despite the thoroughgoing change brought about by the Glorious Revolution, the East India Company remained a ‘Tory stronghold’ (393). Cf. Stern, Company State. Wilson, Sense of the People, grasps how the American crisis in these years was bound up with a wider crisis of the British revolution.[6] For the 1758 election, see Sutherland, East India Company, ch. 3; McGilvary, Guardian of the East India Company, 46–49.[7] On George and John Johnstone, see Rothschild, Inner Life of Empires.[8] ‘We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind. While we were doing it, that is in the eighteenth century, we did not allow it to affect our imaginations or in any degree to change our ways of thinking; nor have we ceased to think of ourselves as simply a race inhabiting an island off the northern coast of the Continent of Europe.’ Seeley, Expansion of England, 8.[9] Marshall, ‘British Expansion in India’ and East Indian Fortunes.[10] This view is embodied in the influential volumes of the New Cambridge History of India: Marshall, Bengal: British Bridgehead; Bayly, Indian Society.[11] Guha, Rule of Property for Bengal.[12] For the view that private trade imperialism was buried in obscurity because it was so ‘scandalous’, see Dirks, Scandal of Empire.[13] Bowen, ‘The “Little Parliament”’; and Revenue and Reform.[14] Karl Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’, New York Daily Tribune, 25 June 1853, in Marx on India, 17.[15] On the Seven Years War as imperial crisis, see Anderson, Crucible of War; Colley, Britons, ch. 3.[16] Dodwell, Clive and Dupleix; Martineau, Dupleix et l'Inde Francaise; Nichol, ‘British in India’.[17] Both standard works on the subject, Bowen, Revenue and Reform, and Sutherland, East India Company, treat the question of metropolitan politics largely in isolation from developments in the empire.[18] Wilson, Sense of the People, 189.[19] Ibid., 193.[20] Entick et al., General History, vol. 2, 382. Entick was a close associate of Alderman William Beckford and was well established in radical London circles. See Peters, ‘The ‘Monitor’ on the Constitution’ and Pitt and Popularity, 13 n. 27.[21] Watts, Memoirs of the Revolution, 131–32.[22] Ibid., 4–5.[23] Ibid., 5.[24] Orme, ‘General Idea’, 391–454.[25] See, inter alia, Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 63–64; Hussain, Jurisprudence of Emergency, 50–56; Peers, ‘Conquest Narratives’; Sen, Distant Sovereignty, 27–56. The exception to this consensus is Eaton, who, citing Orme, notes ‘passages like this are often cited as representative of … British “colonial discourse”. … [However,] rather than bringing ideas that were “inherently” European, men like Orme appear to have appropriated and assimilated values and attitudes that were already present in India.’ Eaton, Rise of Islam, 168–69 n. 29.[26] For a liberal critique of imperialism, a critique that draws heavily on the debate whose initial phase is treated here, see Raynal, Philosophic History; Smith, Wealth of Nations. Thinkers of a still expansive, if pre-industrial, ‘commercial society’, Raynal and Smith castigate the imperialism of their day, especially the Company's imperialism, not for disrupting or encroaching upon native society, but for failing to be transformative and integrative of both Bengali and British society. For the distinctiveness of such an ‘early modern antiabsolutist political tendency’, see Chatterjee, Black Hole of Empire, 155–58.[27] Orme, ‘General Idea’, 425.[28] Ibid., 402.[29] Ibid., 405.[30] Ibid., 417.[31] Entick et al., General History, vol. 1, ‘Dedication to the Right Honourable William Pitt….A Man Honoured by his King, Revered by his People, Dreaded by our Enemies,’ frontispiece n.p.[32] Anon., ‘Life and Character of Robert Orme’, 46. For an extensive treatment of those debates, see Gupta, Sirajuddaulah, 85–89.[33] Letter from the Select Committee of Fort Saint George to the Select Committee of Fort William, 13 October, 1756, published in Hill, Bengal in 1756–57, vol. 1, 239, emphasis added.[34] Orme's ‘Dissertation on the Establishments made by Mahomedan Conquerors in Indostan’, the explicitly ideological preface to his Historical Fragments, registers little or no ideological change from his ‘General Idea’ written a decade before. Though Orme's book did not appear, as Clive hoped it might, in time to influence the outcome of the election of 1763, it did come out towards the end of that year. It represents the most considered work to emerge from the Clive camp before the change in 1764. For Clive's disappointment in the delay and his anxiety to see the finished work, see Clive to Walsh 4 Sept. 1763 in the Fowke Family Collection in OIOC at the British Library, Eur Mss D546/5. For Clive's later break with Orme, see Tammita-Delgoda, ‘“Nabob, Historian, and Orientalist”’, ch. 6.[35] Of the liberalism of the early nineteenth century, Partha Chatterjee has remarked that ‘postulating a linear narrative’ from the Company period to ‘the nationalist and democratic movements of the twentieth century’ can only to serve to make the former ‘seem foolhardy, or else even more ignobly, a fall from radical promises to shameful compromise’. Chatterjee, Black Hole of Empire, 157.[36] In their general letter of 28 Dec. 1759, the Calcutta Council, all of whom were preparing to depart the country, let go of the pretence of obedience and decried the ‘unprovoked and general asperity’ of recent letters from London, declaring their tone to be ‘unworthy of yourselves and us in whatever relation considered, whether as masters to servants, or gentlemen to gentlemen’. The same letter spoke of ‘indiscriminate favours’ bestowed on favourites and ‘undeserved censures’ directed at others. Clive's famous letter to Pitt is dated 1 Jan. 1759 almost a year before. Clive's Letter to Pitt is published in Malcolm, Life of Clive, vol. 2, 119–25 where it is wrongly dated as 7 Jan. 1759. The offending letter to London from Clive's council is in Sinha, Fort William—India House Correspondence, vol. 2, 433–68.[37] Remarks on the Tenth Article, 1.[38] North Briton Extraordinary 4 July 1763, reprinted in [Wilkes], North Briton, 131, passim. For a contrary reading of the 1763 election, see Sutherland, ‘The East India Company and the Peace of Paris’, 79–90, and The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics, ch. 4.[39] West to Newcastle 14 April 1763, quoted in Namier, The Structure of Politics, 289.[40] Scrafton, Reflections on the Government.[41] Ibid., 101.[42] On the political economic basis of Pitt's following, see Welland, ‘Commercial Interest and Political Allegiance’, 174.[43] Quoted from an uncatalogued typescript copy of Laurence Sulivan's papers in the possession of Sulivan's descendant, Martin de Bertadano.[44] ‘A Letter from a Proprietor of India Stock to his Friend in the Country, a Proprietor’, The Gazetteer and London Daily Advertiser, 22 Feb. 1764.[45] This claim is based on general impressions gained from London newspapers from the first half of 1764.[46] The Gazetteer and London Daily Advertiser, 5 April 1764.[47] The London Evening Post, 5 May 1764.[48] ‘To the Public’, The Gazetteer and London Daily Advertiser, 27 Feb. 1764.[49] Lawson and Lenman, ‘Robert Clive, the “‘Black Jagir”’, 801–29.[50] [Wilkes], North Briton, 1, no. 51. Speaking of Grenville's detachment from Pitt in this period, Wilkes sarcastically quotes Cicero's De Officiis I.57 to the effect that love of one's country supersedes ties of family and friendship.[51] London Evening Post, 8 Feb. 1764. This appeared in identical words in other papers.[52] ‘[George Johnstone] to the Printer’, The Gazetteer and London Daily Advertiser, 11 Feb. 64, emphasis added.[53] Scrafton Reflections on the Government, 83, 91–93, 115.[54] ‘On a Late Determination—Addressed to the Parties Concerned by a By-Stander’, The Gazetteer and London Daily Advertiser, 25 April 1764.[55] ‘To the Proprietors of East-India Stock’, The Gazetteer and London Daily Advertiser, 3 April 1764.[56] Bowen, The Business of Empire, 224–29, passim.[57] Most recently, Ray, The Felt Community, ch. 3. Ray's evidence is taken almost entirely from the writings of the Sulivanites, Vansittart and Hastings. It is therefore both too narrow and too uncritically handled to sustain his claims.[58] Bengal Secret Committee 26 April 1762 (consulted in National Archives of India Bengal Secret Consultations P/A/4, duplicate available in India Office Records).[59] Richard Barwell to the Bengal Secret Committee, n.d. under consultation dated 7 June 1762 in ibid.[60] For a treatment of private trade commensurate with what is presented here, see Watson, Foundation for Empire. Cf. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes.[61] Sulivan to Palk 22 May 1764, Bodleian Library, Ms. Eng. Hist. b.190.[62] London Evening Post, 15–17 March 1764.[63] Considerations on the Present State, 19, emphasis added.[64] London Evening Post, 10–13 March 1764.[65] Sulivan to Palk 22 May 1764, Bodleian Library, Ms. Eng. Hist. b.190.[66] Jenkinson to Grenville 1 May 1764, in Smith, Grenville Papers, vol. 2, 310.[67] See Joseph Salvador to Charles Jenkinson, 6, 7 and 8 March 1764, in Jucker, Jenkinson Papers, 271–73; George Grenville to Humphrey Morrice 10 March 1764, in Tomlinson, Additional Grenville Papers, 101; Clive to Grenville 4 March 1764, Huntington Library, HM 31631.[68] Tomlinson, Additional Grenville Papers, 102.[69] To the Proprietors of East-India Stock, Public Advertiser 2 April 1764.[70] John Pringle to Walter Scott, 19 March 1764, National Archives of Scotland, Scott of Harden Papers, GD157/2257, No. 6. Pringle and Scott were Madeira wine merchants who had enjoyed Sulivan's patronage in granting them the exclusive contract to supply that article to the Indian factories. In 1765, pursuing a course many other contractors took, they solicited Grenville to forward their interests with Rous Court. See John Pringle to Walter Scott, 14 Feb. 1765, and John Pringle to George Grenville n.d., National Archives of Scotland, GD157/2257, No. 13.[71] East India House the 4th April, 1764, Lloyd's Evening Post and British Chronicle, 5 April 1764. This Company press release was sent by Company Secretary Robert James (doubtless on Sulivan's orders) to all the London papers.[72] Salvador to Jenkinson, 8 April 1764, in Jucker, Jenkinson Papers, 281[73] Ibid.[74] Gentleman's Magazine 34 (1764), 192.[75] Ibid.[76] One Clive supporter was absent at the meeting, so that the vote on Sulivan's being chairman was actually an 11–11 tie. Rather than vote for himself to break the tie, Sulivan, mortified at the secret influence that had been exerted against him, stormed out ‘[complaining] of the uncivil usage he met with [and wishing] them all a better administration’. John Pringle to Walter Scott, 14 April 1764, National Archives of Scotland, GD157/2257, No. 8. As Sulivan himself wrote of the event, ‘I was elected and with so many friends as gave me a majority for the chair if I had voted for myself which a (perhaps false) delicacy would not suffer me to do’. Sulivan to Palk, 22 May 1764, Bodleian Library, Ms. Eng. Hist. b.190][77] Walpole to Hertford, 20 April 1764, in Lewis, Horace Walpole's Correspondence, vol. 38, 378.[78] Untitled Document (draft of a speech in the General Court from 1764), British Library Oriental and African Studies, Clive Papers, Eur Mss G37/2 Folder 2. Identified and dated on the basis of internal evidence.[79] Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 8 June 1764, in Lewis, Horace Walpole's Correspondence, vol. 22, 243.[80] St. James's Chronicle, 15 May 1764.[81] The Monitor or British Freeholder, 19 May 1764.[82] Court of Directors to the Council of Fort William, 26 April 1764, in Srinivasachari, Fort William-India House Correspondence, vol. 4, 97.[83] The Monitor or British Freeholder, 19 May 1764.[84] Lloyd's Evening Post and British Chronicle, 19 May 1764.[85] London Chronicle, 30 May 1764.[86] The Weekly Amusement or An Useful and Agreeable Miscellany of Literary Entertainment, 9 June 1764.