As part of the prestigious Worlds of the East India Company monograph series, G. J. Bryant's book The Emergence of British Power in India 1600–1784 stands as a closely researched and very detailed narrative history of Britons located in India during the 1744–84 period. As he asserts from the beginning, his approach has become neglected, focusing as it does on the military and political plans and deeds of British men in India. He dismisses other approaches as “imposing a more fashionable structuralist framework on events based on generalist social scientific concepts” (p. ix). Yet, Bryant subtitles his book A Grand Strategic Interpretation. Indeed, he devotes much of his introduction to the concept of “grand strategy,” which he defines as “the formulation of political aims and their implementation by peaceful and/or military means” (p. ix, expanded in n. 5). While none of his original British sources actually used that term, Bryant does scores of times, as both a noun and an adjective: for example, a grand strategy “perspective” (p. 39), “stance” (p. 45), and “vision” (p. 50). Overall, Bryant argues that senior officials of the English East India Company in India were forced by financial motivations and immediate reactions to local events to conquer India unintentionally.
His book is organized around the three broad phases in the process of how some Britons in India gradually realized that they were inadvertently creating early colonial rule. Prior to 1744, the East India Company in London and in India sought profits almost exclusively, with no grand strategy. But it “became involved” (p. 6) and was “sucked into” (p. 29) politics and wars despite itself, Bryant asserts. He repeatedly uses the phrase “found itself” (e.g., pp. 1, 24) to describe the East India Company's “unpremeditated” (p. 319) participation in what became colonialism. Much of the military and political maneuvering that he describes during this phase took place in south India against the French, but with Indian regional rulers in the background.
During Bryant's second phase, from 1744–61, the British, especially a few officials in Calcutta like Robert Clive, began to have an “awakening consciousness” (p. 2) of the need for a grand strategy, even if they did not fully realize or articulate this. This period includes the famous 1757 battle of Plassey that spread the East India Company's military power and administrative control (if not legal sovereignty) over the rich provinces of Bengal and Bihar. Bryant's second phase ends when the pensioned Mughal emperor, whom he describes as a “maverick imperial adventurer” (p. 168), appointed the East India Company as Diwan, or revenue-collecting Mughal imperial official, over Bengal and Bihar.
Bryant then focuses during his third phase on military and political events emanating from all three presidency capitals: Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. For instance, some British officials in Madras “eventually indulged in unrealistic expansionist grand strategic fantasies” (p. 192). Bryant ends this phase in 1784, when the British Parliament passed Pitt's India Act, asserting its supervision over the East India Company's military and political policies and actions. But many of the reasons for this endpoint lay in London, outside the scope of Bryant's closely focused narrative on campaigns in India. So the book ends somewhat abruptly, with “a general consensus between the Directors in London and its senior servants in India that the Company should accept [its] current territorial limits” (pp. 327–28). Yet, as Bryant acknowledges, British policies and actions in India “somehow morphed into an increasingly imperialist adventure” (p. 6). So, his study leaves open the questions of how and why the East India Company went on to conquer all of South Asia over the next seven decades.
Throughout, Bryant's narrative provides blow-by-blow accounts of each British martial and diplomatic campaign. He provides no more than a footnote referencing the concept of “sub-imperialism” (p. 6n17), which P. J. Marshall and various other scholars have used effectively to analyze this same process of European officers and officials on the colonial frontier making military and political assertions that were not authorized by their home government.Footnote 18 Similarly, Bryant does not even mention the substantial scholarship about patterns of British “indirect rule” that would also have provided further insight into the policies and actions that he narrates so extensively.
Readers who are interested in the specific military and political events of this transitional period when British colonialism really began in India will find much rich detail in Bryant's study. His writing is clear and well-supported by his very close reading of British records and contemporary British accounts about their own policies and deeds, as well as their descriptions of some Indian rulers. This book has much to recommend it for specialists in British military or political history in early colonial India.
