British Empire Unit: Nearly losing an empire: the British in India, 1829-50
Clarification of Content
The role of the East India Company and the Governor General; the importance of Bengal and the Company Army.
William Sleeman’s campaign against Thagi: the drive against Sati and female infanticide; the impact of
missionaries.
The Indian Rebellion: the reforms of Dalhousie; the annexation of Awadh; outbreak and events in Meerut,
Cawnpore and Delhi; the siege and relief of Lucknow; reasons why the British retained control.
Key Questions
To what extent did the British control India in 1829?
What were the causes and significance of the clash of cultures between the British and the Indians?
What were the immediate causes of outbreak of rebellion in 1857 and why where the British able to retain
control of India?
Key Question One
The Mughal (or Mogul) Empire ruled most of India and Pakistan in the 16th and 17th centuries. Consolidated
Islam in South Asia. The Mughal Empire grew out of descendants of the Mongol Empire who were living in
Turkestan in the 15th century. They had become Muslims and assimilated the culture of the Middle East, while
keeping elements of their Far Eastern roots. They retained the great military skill and cunning of their Mongol
ancestors, and were among the first Western military leaders to use guns.
Mughals, led by Emperor Babur, invaded India across the north-west frontier, they held the Indo-Gangetic Plain.
Official language was Persian. The Empire he founded was a sophisticated civilisation based on religious
toleration. It was a mixture of Persian, Mongol and Indian culture. They adapted existing social structures
without attempting fundamental change of society.
The Mughals were Muslims who ruled a country with a large Hindu majority. However, for much of their empire
they allowed Hindus to reach senior government or military positions.
In 1600 Britain was producing about 2% of the world’s goods and services, while India was generating about
25%.
The Mughals brought many changes to India:
Centralised government that brought together many smaller kingdoms
Delegated government with respect for human rights
Persian art and culture
Persian language mixed with Arabic and Hindi to create Urdu
Periods of great religious tolerance
A style of architecture (e.g. the Taj Mahal)
A system of education that took account of pupils' needs and culture
However, poor financial management by future emperors, a lack of tolerance and extremism contributed to the
decline of Mughal power in the eighteenth century and this was exploited by the British. The collapse of the
Mughal Empire left a power vacuum, which the British filled.
The East India Company
An English company formed for the exploitation of trade with East and Southeast Asia and India. Granted a royal
charter by Elizabeth I on 31st December 1600, giving it a monopoly on trade with India. Led to regular trading
between Britain and India.
The EIC included a group of London merchants, attracted by Eastern prospects and hoping to make their
fortunes. The primary purpose was trade in spices, with a secondary purpose of securing cottons for sale to the
spice growers. Bulk trading which worked on competitive principles and was dependent on political goodwill.
, The company established fortified trading posts in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta and traded with the Mughals.
As Mughal power declined and was challenged by the native Marathas, the Company was drawn into treaties
and military activity to protect its interests.
In the early 1700s the European nations became very interested in controlling the country, seeing the conflict as
an opportunity to increase their own influence there. The Dutch, French and British realized that by helping
certain Indian princes, providing weapons and soldiers, they could affect the outcomes of the wars as they
wanted. Then, when the kingdom they helped was successful, they demanded rewards from the prince in the
form of land or goods. With the permission of local Indian rulers, the traders began to set up more permanent
bases along the Indian coast as trading stations. They were surrounded by huge fences and protected by armed
soldiers.
The East India Trading Company acted as an agent of British imperialism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, India was governed as a private empire by the Company, subject to
overall control by the British government. The general policy of the Company was to introduce European
practices to India.
18th and 19th centuries, Britain attempted to regulate and assert authority over the Company as a result of
corruption and financial instability. A series of measures were passed by the British Government between 1773
and 1830 known as East India Company Acts, to regulate the government of India.
By 1829, the British government had asserted its power over the Company.
The Company’s relationship with the subcontinent remained fluid and dependent on local alliances (with Indian
princes), which exploited the end of Mughal control. It maintained its own army. The British did not conquer
India; they collaborated with existing power-holders and benefited from their divisions and weaknesses.
Early attempts at civil administration resulted in the Indian Rebellion/ Indian Mutiny (1857), which threatened
Britain’s Indian Empire.
In 2018, an Indian economist named Utsa Patnaik calculated that Britain took a total of nearly $45 trillion from
India between 1765 and 1938. The EIC collected taxes in India, used the money to buy Indian goods and sold
them all over the world.
The Diversity of the Subcontinent
Subcontinent divided into three distinct geographical areas: the Indo-Gangetic Plain, the Himalayas and the
southern plateau.
The inhabitants’ religions were Hindi, Muslim, Sikh and Buddhist.
There were six main languages and over 200 different dialects spoken.
East India Company emerged as the surprise winners in the battles between local power-holders. Company
power increased and they became responsible for civil and legal administration of vast amounts of Indian
territory and millions of native Indians.
Their new role raised questions regarding the way in which these new subjects should be governed and the
objectives of the Company and the British as imperialists.
Company Presidencies
During the 18th century the East India Company had three armies on the field, one for each of the company
presidencies (Bengal, Madras, Bombay). The armies were to protect the Company’s trading interests and support
local collaborators.
The three presidencies grew out of the Company’s expansion from the original factories in Calcutta, Madras and
Bombay.
, Company presidency – the three administrative branches of the EIC established first as trading posts and
growing to control territorial acquisitions, fanning out from the original factories in Bombay, Calcutta and
Madras
The power struggle of the 18th century between Britain and France was fought in India by the Company armies.
By the 19th century Britain was the only serious western contender in the subcontinent.
The Battle of Plassey
From 1746, the British Company and the French East India Company fought for advantage in India. Known as the
Carnatic Wars.
In 1755, Siraj ud-Daulah became Nawab of Bengal and adopted a pro-French policy. He overran British trading
posts, including Calcutta in 1756, where British prisoners were allegedly left to die in the infamous "black hole of
Calcutta.“ 146 British prisoners were herded into a tiny black hole at Fort William and left there overnight.
Suffocating and with little water, only 23 survived until the morning.
Lieutenant Colonel Robert Clive was sent from Madras to retake Calcutta, securing Fort William in January 1757
with around 3000 troops against an army of 40,000. He began plotting the overthrow of the Siraj to secure the
Company’s interests in India. According to Clive, he lost 18 men, while he estimated the nawab’s dead as around
500. Siraj-ad-daula was killed by his own people and Mir Jafar replaced him.
Clive, who was now effectively master of Bengal, skilfully bolstered Mir Jafar’s apparent authority while keeping
him on leading strings. The skirmish at Plassey was critical to the East India Company’s triumph over its French
rivals and, in the longer term, to the establishment of British rule in India.
Victory for the British East India Company in the Battle of Plassey was the start of nearly two centuries of British
rule in India. This victory and the victory at the Battle of Buxar in 1764 allowed Britain to expand further into
India, taking over Bengal and Bihar, some of the richest parts of India.
After his victory, Clive transferred to the EIC treasury no less than £2.5m seized from the defeated rulers of
Bengal – in today’s currency, around £23m for Clive and £250m for the company. The entire contents of the
Bengal treasury were simply loaded into 100 boats and punted down the Ganges from the Nawab of Bengal’s
palace to Fort William, the company’s Calcutta headquarters.
Scene from August 1765, when the young Mughal emperor Shah Alam, exiled from Delhi and defeated by East
India Company troops, was forced into what we would now call an act of involuntary privatisation.
The scroll is an order to dismiss his own Mughal revenue officials in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, and replace them
with a set of English traders appointed by Robert Clive – the new governor of Bengal – and the directors of the
EIC, who the document describes as “the high and mighty, the noblest of exalted nobles, the chief of illustrious
warriors, our faithful servants and sincere well-wishers, worthy of our royal favours, the English Company”.
The collecting of Mughal taxes was henceforth subcontracted to a powerful multinational corporation, whose
revenue-collecting operations were protected by its own private army.
It was at this moment that the East India Company (EIC) ceased to be a conventional corporation, trading in silks
and spices, and became something much more unusual. Within a few years, 250 company clerks backed by the
military force of 20,000 locally recruited Indian soldiers had become the effective rulers of Bengal. An
international corporation was transforming itself into an aggressive colonial power.
Bengal’s wealth rapidly drained into Britain, while its prosperous weavers and artisans were coerced “like so
many slaves” by their new masters, and its markets flooded with British products. A proportion of the loot of
Bengal went directly into Clive’s pocket. He returned to Britain with a personal fortune – then valued at
£234,000 – that made him the richest self-made man in Europe. Before long the province, already devastated by
war, was struck down by the famine of 1769, then further ruined by high taxation.
Later, the British dignified the document by calling it the Treaty of Allahabad, though Clive had dictated the
terms and a terrified Shah Alam had simply waved them through. As the contemporary Mughal historian Sayyid
Ghulam Husain Khan put it: “A business of such magnitude, as left neither pretence nor subterfuge, and which at
