This rich and important book deals with the ideology of empire, not at the level at which intellectuals in Britain engaged in debates about first principles, as in much of Eric Stokes's classic The English Utilitarians and India.Footnote 1 It is concerned with the ways in which men in India who were engaged in ruling a newly conquered province sought to relate what they were doing to the ‘conventions, norms and modes of legitimation’ of their own time (p. vii). Such men were only too aware that they were accountable, at several months sailing time, not only to the Company's directors in Leadenhall Street, but also to a public in Britain. This was the age of parliamentary inquiries, trials by impeachment and major British statutes trying to legislate for Indian governance. In the face of much adverse criticism, men in Bengal sought to justify their actions. For future generations, the justification would involve concepts of some sort of mission by those who saw themselves as agents of a higher level of civilisation to bring improvement, as it was understood in Britain, to those on a lower level. Although British people in Bengal were rarely in doubt about the superiority of British institutions, belief in their universal applicability to different societies was generally alien to eighteenth-century views of the world. The new British rulers of Bengal adopted a rather different idiom to justify their rule.
Travers describes this as ‘constitutional restoration’ (p. 9). The underlying assumption was that all societies that had developed beyond savagery had institutions defined by a constitution that was appropriate to that society's particular needs. Only the most hard-nosed Tories or resolutely sceptical philosophers denied that England had an ancient constitution, even if there was much debate about its origins and early history. In the case of India, as with other Asian societies, later degeneration, usually attributed to a debilitating climate and environment or to the pernicious effects of Islam, meant that the ancient constitution, often thought to have been flourishing under the great Mughal Emperors, such as Akbar, or even under the first autonomous Nawabs of Bengal, had been overlaid with despotic practices. Public spirit had been extinguished and Indian regimes were now incapable of restoring what had been lost. This was a role that their British conquerors were ready to assume, to the applause, they hoped, of audiences at home. Warren Hastings, at least, who believed that there was such a thing as Indian ‘public opinion’, was also concerned with doing ‘honor on my reputation in India’.Footnote 2 Quite what they were to restore was, however, by no means self-evident. Different interpretations of India's ancient constitution, heavily tinged with differing British assumptions and also reflecting the varied agendas of Indian informants, competed against one another in often embittered debate.
These debates are the theme of Travers's book. He traces the complex pattern of their evolution over some 30 years, in response to pressures both in India, where the first attempts to provide good governance seemed to be manifestly failing, and from Britain, where failure was harshly judged leading to demands for reforms.
For eighteenth-century Europeans, political authority in India meant one thing above all others: the power to levy taxation, mostly on the produce of the land. The fabled wealth of Indian rulers was presumed to have been based on their capacity to extract wealth from their subjects. Properly managed, Indian taxation should generate resources that would greatly augment the trading capital of the East India companies. From the later seventeenth century, the British company had sought taxation rights over limited areas around its settlements. After 1757, resources on a scale that dwarfed all previous acquisitions passed into British hands in Bengal, culminating in 1765 in the famous grant of the diwani, or the fiscal administration for the whole province. Early British assumptions seem to have been that Bengal was a naturally rich province from which an ample flow of revenue could be realised without serious difficulty were it not for the rapacity and corruption of Indian revenue collectors who siphoned off much of what was due to the Company. Such mal-administration was presumed to be the inevitable consequence of the despotic system of government operated by Bengal's rulers. Closer involvement by European agents of the Company under a regime that would not countenance oppression of its subjects seemed to be the obvious solution. The efficacy of European intervention had apparently been demonstrated by the high revenue yields extracted from districts ceded to the Company in 1760. Within a few years of the diwani grant, however, the Company found itself mired in what Travers calls ‘The Crisis of Bengal’.
It was becoming apparent that the cornucopia of Bengal's revenues was being severely stretched to provide funds adequate for the Company's ever-growing needs for an expanded trade, for a very large army and for expensive wars waged by the other presidencies. Revenue yields were not meeting expectations. Assumptions about the prosperity of Bengal and the ease with which revenue could be collected were proving to be fallacious. Even if Bengal had great natural endowments, its economy appeared to be declining under the British. The devastating famine of 1769–1770 was the clearest evidence of this. Successful revenue collection seemed to require much more than simply curbing the corruption of those who collected it. Closer involvement was revealing something of the complexity of Bengal society. There were many claims to rights to the produce of the land between those who cultivated it and the state. The most pressing of such claims were those of the zamindars, who rendered revenue directly to the Company. Rural prosperity seemed to depend on striking balances between claims. It was also impossible to keep the administration of the law, most obviously concerning rights to land, separate from the collection of the revenue. The Company must concern itself with the courts and with the law that they used.
Company servants had to wrestle with these complexities in an atmosphere of bitter recrimination. They quarrelled among themselves as to why things were going wrong and they were vilified in Britain. The high expectations held out to the British public of a flow of wealth were not being fulfilled. By 1772, far being an asset, Bengal was becoming a drain on British public finance, at a time when great private fortunes were being sent to Britain. Indian voices were added to the clamour. Muhammad Reza Khan, for instance, who had managed the diwani revenues under the Company since 1765, criticised his employers for ill-considered innovations in a system of revenue management under the Nawabs which, as he later wrote, had ensured that ‘The ryots tho not rich were content. The Zemindars and Talookdars were father and friend to the people . . . The lands were well cultivated and the Zemindars and Talookdars found their interest in encouraging it and promoting an increase in inhabitants’.Footnote 3 Polemical works published in Britain made similar points. They drew favourable comparisons between Mughal rule and the damage being inflicted by the new Company regime. Reform could not be evaded. The Company must accept greater involvement, but it must try to act with the grain of old established institutions rather than disrupting them. As Travers puts it, ‘Resuscitating the sinews of the old Mughal constitution appeared to offer a solution to the Company's present troubles which would fit in with the British penchant for ancient constitutions’ (p. 65).
The enacting of reforms was entrusted to Warren Hastings, governor of Bengal from 1772. Travers's account of his administration is particularly illuminating. Whatever else he may have intended, Hastings had, first and foremost, to restore Bengal to solvency. A high level of revenue must therefore be maintained before anything else. Beyond that, Travers sees Hastings as, on the one hand, determined to consolidate the Company's authority as the ultimate sovereign power in Bengal, while on the other hand, ‘making grand gestures designed to legitimize the Company's government as steward of an ancient constitution’ (p. 101). Please mention the publisher names for all book references in this section. Hastings recognised, for instance, that zamindars had hereditary rights but he insisted that the ruler could in the last resort dispossess them. In attempting to remodel the judiciary of Bengal, Hastings usurped the jurisdiction of the Nawabs by placing their nizamat criminal courts under the Company's authority, as well as the diwani ones. The provision that Hindu and Islamic law would be used throughout the Company's courts attracted much publicity in Britain. A benevolent British regime was said to be giving back their laws – ‘the Shaster’ – to grateful Hindus. Hastings took great pride in commissioning the translation of legal texts for the benefit of European judges. His judicial regulations were, he was told, warmly approved by ministers in Britain. He had been ‘exactly beforehand with them in every respect’ of what they hoped for.Footnote 4 Yet for all his respect for ancient institutions, Travers shows that Hastings still insisted on the Company's unfettered sovereign power. ‘Mughal legality, either with regard to land rights or Muslim law, was provisional and subordinate to the reserved and absolute powers of sovereignty’ vested in the East India Company and its governor (pp. 139–140). The courts, like the administration of revenue, were to be subject to the Company's ultimate control. Hastings personally revised the decisions of the Muslim law officers on occasions.
From 1774 Hastings's authority over the government of Bengal came under sustained attack from new members of the Supreme Council sent out from Britain. The most articulate of his opponents was Philip Francis. He is the subject of one of Travers's chapters in which he presents a new and arresting interpretation of Francis. Travers sees him neither as the irresponsible conspirator driven by personal ambition of so much of the older historiography, nor primarily as the physiocratic philosophe of Ranajit Guha's A Rule of Property for Bengal,Footnote 5 but as an exponent of ‘a powerful stream of British oppositionist ideology concerned with the erosion of public virtue and constitutional rights through executive abuses’ (p. 142), which Travers traces back to Bolingbroke and the opposition to Walpole, but was probably more immediately derived from William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, whose cause (on the entirely reasonable assumption that Francis was ‘Junius’) he had strongly supported in Britain. To Francis, Hastings's claims to discretionary sovereign powers in his dealings with Indians were precisely the kind of executive abuses that he deplored. His Patriot sense of virtue was also outraged by allegations that Hastings exploited his office to his own pecuniary advantage. Francis produced an alternative plan for the reform of British government in Bengal, which was also based on theories about an ancient Indian constitution. He too drew from the views of Muhammad Reza Khan. He came to believe that at their best the Mughals had bound themselves to respect the property rights of their Hindu subjects, particularly those of the zamindars, whom he envisaged as landed gentry. Zamindars were ‘vital links in the chain of “subordination in society through which the operations of the government descend, by regular and easy gradations from the summit to the base”’ (p. 174). The Company must strictly respect their hereditary rights and not seek to levy the highest possible revenue from them. The lands from which they collected revenue should be regarded as their personal estates and what they paid should be fixed at a moderate rate forever. This had been the best Mughal practice and it would restore the prosperity of Bengal, so badly shattered by predatory Company invasions of property rights. In Travers's neat summary of what was at stake, ‘Hastings's absolutist interpretation of Mughal sovereignty, tempered by ancient legal traditions, provoked Francis's assertion of an ancient constitution of property’ (p. 207).
The controversy was never to be resolved in favour of one side or the other. To most British opinion the issues simply became irrelevant to the actual government of Bengal. Bengal was acquiring a new constitution, which, while trying to preserve many Indian forms, was unmistakably based on British principles and not on Indian origins.
In a most interesting chapter, Travers shows how the royal judges of the new Supreme Court raised questions that called into question the validity of claims that the Company derived its authority from an ancient Indian constitution. Sir Elijah Impey, the Chief Justice, accepted that the Company's courts should administer Indian law, but insisted that this must not be used to cover what as a British judge he regarded as abuses. Decisions by supposedly corrupt Indian law officers that went against ‘natural justice and common sense’ could not be allowed to stand (p. 196). His principle that natural law, equity or ‘good conscience’ should be applied to Indian legal processes was to be reiterated in the Cornwallis judicial reforms. As applied by British judges, however, ‘good conscience’ was likely to embody assumptions that were alien to the law that the judge was administering. A kind of hybrid in which the forms of Indian law were interpreted on British principles would eventually emerge. The demotion of the ‘corrupt’ Indian law officer in favour of the ‘incorruptible’ British judge revealed what was in Travers's view a fundamental flaw in all attempts at constitutional restoration. The British fully recognised that Indian constitutional arrangements or legal systems did not exist simply in texts or enactments, which if properly translated would be an infallible guide to foreign rulers. As was the case with the British constitution and the English common law, they were also embodied in an evolving corpus of custom and convention applied appropriately in differing circumstances. A just ruler or a properly qualified judge must have experience and learning to do this. In ignorant foreign hands distortion was virtually inevitable. Yet suspicions about the ultimate loyalty or the integrity of Indians, who had the knowledge and expertise that British officials inevitably lacked, frustrated their professed wish to govern Bengal as its most enlightened past rulers might have done. Such intentions were undermined by ‘the persistent unwillingness of new British rulers to devolve too much power or too many profits to Indian subordinates’ (p. 224).
Jon Wilson, from whose thesis Travers has clearly benefited, takes the story further. He shows how British efforts to acquaint themselves with custom and ‘the local historical continuities of Indian society’, whose importance they fully recognised, failed because of their lack of knowledge of Indian ‘political and juridical traditions’ and their remoteness from people who had been brought up in these traditions. They ultimately concluded that there was no way of knowing custom with any certainty. By the early nineteenth century, British judges saw no alternative to doing justice according to their own digests and codes of Indian law, through which they embarked on ‘a conscious attempt to rationalize and reconstruct . . . Indian jurisprudence’.Footnote 6 Constitutional restoration ceased to be an objective.
The intervention of the Supreme Court brought into the open another issue which was even more damaging to concepts of governance according to an ancient Indian constitution. The Court, which owed its existence to a British act of parliament, had no doubts that Bengal was a dominion of the crown and that the Company ruled it subject to the authority of parliament. In resisting the jurisdictional claims of the Court, the Company concurred in this view by petitioning the House of Commons and obtaining a statute (the Bengal Judicature Act of 1781, 21 Geo. III, c. 70). This act, largely the work of Edmund Burke, limited the scope of the Supreme Court and strongly enjoined that the Company's courts should observe Indian laws and customs. The implication that the Company's courts derived their authority from ‘parliamentary statute rather than Mughal precedent’ was, however, clear (p. 206). Indian ‘tradition’ was again to be enforced by British statute in Pitt's India Act of 1784. The Company was to establish on ‘principles of moderation and justice, according to the laws and constitution of India, the permanent rules by which their respective tributes, rents and services, shall be in future rendered and paid . . . by . . . the Rajahs, Zemindars, Polygars, Talookdars and other native landowners’.Footnote 7 A permanent settlement of the revenue to be paid by those deemed to be landowners was indeed enacted in Bengal in 1793. But whether this was or was not in accordance with ‘the laws and constitution of India’ was not a matter that greatly concerned its architects by then. Francis had advocated such a settlement, but, as Travers puts it, the new settlement was no longer seen, as Francis had intended, ‘as a reversion to the pure forms of the Mughal constitution’. It was conceived ‘as a break with the confusing, unstable history of property rights under the despotic rule of the Mughals’ (p. 236). The British saw no need to worry themselves unduly about restoring the Indian past. They must use their sovereign powers to enforce their own sense of what was best for Indians. In the words of one of the Company's propagandists, whom Travers quotes, this meant ‘engrafting’ on ‘Asiatic institutions, degrees of the mild maxims of the British government and laws’ (p. 246). An idealised ancient Indian constitution was to receive its last and perhaps most memorable exposition in Edmund Burke's denunciation of Hastings in the impeachment from 1788. In Burke's view ‘the known provincial constitutions of Hindoostan’ ensured that power was exercised ‘under a law, as clear, as explicit, and as learned, as ours’.Footnote 8 The British, Burke insisted, were bound by those constitutions and those laws. In this respect, however, as in many others, the impeachment was fighting old battles no longer relevant to the future of British India. Travers concludes that ‘[t]he idea of the ancient Mughal constitution had proved a necessary device’ in the early stages of empire. Yet it had also become one that it was ‘necessary to discard when it proved an ideological handicap for the restless exigencies of empire’ (p. 248).
This attempt to summarise the argument of Travers's book, even at some length, no doubt misrepresents crucial issues and inevitably misses many of its subtleties and nuances. It is not only a work of impressive archival research but Travers is extremely sensitive to the historiography of his subject. Of the many contributions that he makes to taking forward that historiography, two areas seem especially to merit closer examination as being in the forefront of current debate about early British rule. The first is the nature of the connections between Britain and India and of the influences that passed between them. The second is the role of Indians in shaping the early colonial regime, especially as sources of information.
British–Indian Connections
The interconnectedness of Britain and India is a central theme of Travers's book. In his view, ‘the politics of colonial state-formation’ need to be related to ‘broader shifts in the political culture of the British empire’ (p. 142). This is very much in accord with current trends in British imperial history. An ‘insistence upon a connection between what went on “out there” and what goes on “in here”' is a hallmark of the ‘new’ imperial historians,Footnote 9 although it is by no means unique to them.
A pattern of connections crossing continents was traced with consummate skill by Dame Lucy Sutherland in her The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics, published in 1952. Her world was personified by the rogue Lauchlin Macleane, who flitted between Britain and India in attempts to make away with other peoples' money. She showed how the Company, which because of its financial power and contribution to the British economy, had always been involved in national politics, became much more deeply involved as a consequence of its imperial expansion. This involvement spread to India. Men with great interests to guard, such as Clive with his income from the grant of a jagir or Paul Benfield with his investment in loans to the Nawab of Arcot, sought protection for them from making alliances with political groups in Britain. In return, they offered the support of such political influence as they might have, including in some cases a following in the House of Commons, and extended their patronage to politically well-connected protégés sent out to India. At another level, the importance of the new empire to Britain's position in the world was such that governments felt increasingly compelled to intervene to regulate the Company's affairs. This was the work of the heroes of Sutherland's book, the practical men of affairs, such as Charles Jenkinson, John Robinson or Henry Dundas. Men in office in India, like Hastings or Francis, had no alternative to trying to cultivate the good opinion of politicians and ministers on whom the success of their careers now depended.
The Indian engagement of the national politicians, as depicted in Sutherland's great book, tended to be either opportunistic, seeking political advantage, or managerial, trying to establish an effective working relationship between state and Company. She recognised that questions of Indian governance were much discussed in newspapers and in pamphlets, but tended to see these as the productions of ‘returned [Company] servants bent on justifying their own actions or attacking those of others’.Footnote 10 In general, she seems to have taken the view that the controversies which men in India brought back to Britain were inspired by little more than personal antagonisms and frustrated ambitions for fame and fortune, nurtured in the ‘heat, isolation and disease of eighteenth-century Bengal’.Footnote 11 As might be expected from a close, if by no means uncritical, associate of Sir Lewis Namier, Dame Lucy saw little ideological commitment to principles of Indian governance either among the Company servants in India or the politicians in Britain, with the conspicuous exception of Edmund Burke, who, she readily accepts, later transcended the political opportunism of his early approaches to the Company's problems to bring ‘the effects of humanitarian anger to bear on the future of India’ in his assault on Warren Hastings.Footnote 12
In recent years, more attention has been given to the ideological issues raised for contemporaries by the sudden acquisition of empire in India.Footnote 13 Concerns about how the wealth and power derived from Indian empire might affect the balance of the constitution or of the corruption and luxury thought to have been unleashed on Britain by ‘nabob’ fortunes have long been recognised, but there is evidence that the principles on which India should be governed were also being extensively debated. The polemics of returned Company servants might well be self-interested, but it was possible to see issues of principle behind their disagreements. A wider public began to concern themselves with these issues. In his Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics 1757–1773, Huw Bowen points out that some of the questions central to Travers's book were being discussed in the House of Commons. In 1772, for instance, the Commons began what was to be a ‘long-running debate on the desirability of transferring anglicized notions of behaviour and conduct through the administration of justice to the Muslim and Hindu population of India’.Footnote 14 As Hastings's correspondent told him, ministers were concerned with the way in which justice was to be administered in Bengal. Lord North publicly commended Hastings's reforms in the Commons in the debates on what came to be known as his Regulating Act of 1773.Footnote 15
The luminaries of what can be called the British Enlightenment, notably the Scots Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, David Hume and William Robertson, were also generally interested in and well read about India, incorporating Indian material into their works on conjectural history or human development. Smith included a scathing indictment of the principles on which the Company conducted its rule in the Wealth of Nations.Footnote 16 Polemical pamphleteers, notably Clive's enemy John Johnstone, buttressed their proposals for the future government of Bengal with references to the theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment.Footnote 17 The Company employed Sir James Steuart, an esteemed political economist, to advise it on the economic problems of Bengal.Footnote 18 Some bright young men in Bengal, including the not so young Philip Francis, as Ranajit Guha pointed out in 1963,Footnote 19 were well versed in Enlightenment theory.
As India became an issue with contentious ideological implications in Britain, British people invested with power in Bengal, young as they often were when they left Britain, were likely to bring with them assumptions current at home. Such assumptions no doubt varied according to their own political dispositions. In general they are said to have subscribed to ‘Whig political philosophy’ and to have been committed to ‘governing principles’, which included ‘the security of private property, the rule of law and the idea of “improvement”’.Footnote 20 These are unexceptionable propositions, but somewhat unspecific. Travers believes that we can go further. He is not much interested in high Enlightenment theorising, but urges closer analysis of differing brands of Whig belief, an obvious necessity since virtually everybody who was actively involved in politics in the period would have described himself as a Whig. Please indicate the specific point being cross-referred to here so that the final page can be set.
Whigs came in many varieties. Travers places Francis between ‘the lofty paternalism’ of the grandees of the Rockingham parliamentary connection and the metropolitan radicals associated with John Wilkes and relates his enthusiasm for securing the property rights of the Bengal zamindars to his ‘slightly dated’ ‘civic-humanist emphasis on landed property as the basis of political virtue’. Hence he ‘found in the zamindar a species of landed property that suggested a distinctive form of Asiatic political virtue’ (pp. 148–150). On his return to Britain, Francis was very closely associated with Edmund Burke, who adopted his diagnosis of the evils of the Company's rule and of the necessary remedies, including, above all, the exemplary punishment of Hastings. Francis's political affinities were, however, generally well to the left of Burke's and he broke with him, taking Fox's side over the French Revolution.
Lord Cornwallis, formally the author of the Permanent Settlement, is usually portrayed as a very conventional aristocratic Whig, seeking to create improving English landlords in Bengal. His political beliefs may well have been more complex than are commonly assumed. For Travers, however, he pushed ‘the Company state’ towards becoming ‘a highly authoritarian structure of government’ (p. 244). This is characteristic of what has been seen as Cornwallis's role in ‘Britain's new imperial age’ of the wars against revolutionary France in which ‘the language of private civic virtue, which earlier in the century was the pride of the country gentleman, was now applied to a salaried and more carefully trained bureaucracy’.Footnote 21 In other words, Whiggism in an age of revolution had lost its fear of the executive. The case of William Jones illustrates the transformation in India of yet another brand of Whiggism. In Britain, Jones was a much more extreme radical than Philip Francis. Although he disclaimed the name, he was in all practical terms a republican. For him ‘a pure republick’ was ‘the only rational and manly form of government, where manners and circumstances render it practicable’.Footnote 22 Yet he sought an appointment in India from the crown and on his way to Calcutta he assured his friends that he would not preach subversive doctrines ‘to the Indians, who must and will be governed by absolute power’.Footnote 23 In sharp contrast to Sir Elijah Impey, who felt he had a clear mandate to remedy abuses, Jones gave the Company's regime no trouble. There is much evidence of the ferment of popular Whig beliefs among the mass of the Company servants, army officers and Europeans in private employment. They noisily claimed ‘the rights of Englishmen’, which included trial by jury, freedom of the press, exemption from clauses in Pitt's India Act which they regarded as discriminating against them, and the right to flog their Indian employees. A clerk of the works who had been convicted by the Supreme Court for doing just that was known as ‘the Wilkes of India’.Footnote 24 Comparisons were being made between the assertions of British opinion in Calcutta and the turmoil in the 13 colonies (p. 186).Footnote 25
Where did Hastings stand in the range of Whig possibilities? Was he a Whig at all? These are very difficult questions to answer. A lifetime's exposure to the great Hastings archive, no doubt with insufficient attention and a deficient capacity for close reading, has revealed very little to me that is explicitly political. An outsider in the British political world, Hastings's allegiances of necessity shifted throughout his career. He owed his appointment to the government of Lord North. When that government tried to recall him, the Rockingham group in opposition took up his cause. From 1780 the North administration again gave him their full support. The governments that succeeded North wished to be rid of Hastings and when he returned to Britain he found the Foxite Whigs his bitter enemies, largely thanks to Burke. Sadly for him, the Pitt administration chose to distance themselves from him; so he faced the impeachment process without organised political support. Certain individuals were, however, strongly committed to him, notably the great lawyers, Lord Thurlow and Lord Mansfield. This may or may not be indicative of his political inclinations which Travers identifies. Hastings's version of the Mughal constitution included an ‘absolutist theory of the Mughal prerogative’. Thus his wrangles with Francis ‘tended to echo disputes about . . . the issue of the royal prerogative and its limits’ (p. 23). Did Hastings have the same views about the prerogative powers of the British crown as he had about the prerogative of Indian rulers, including himself, to alter legal decisions or to dispossess landowners? The evidence is inconclusive. In his schemes for the future of British India he showed none of the usual Whig inhibitions about the direct involvement of the crown,Footnote 26 but he wrote on occasions of the ‘natural rights’ of Indians. Contemporaries would certainly have regarded his champions, Thurlow and Mansfield, as upholders of the royal prerogative.
Travers has strong grounds for urging us to see the British world in Europe, America and Asia as an integrated one across which political ideologies flowed freely. There were, however, limits to its integration. These limits were, for instance, starkly revealed at the end of the American War, during which American and Irish Whigs seemed to be united in a common cause with the British opposition Whig connections against the government of Lord North. When North was overthrown in 1782, the British Whig leaders confidently anticipated that the British empire would be reconstituted on Whig principles under their leadership. They were entirely mistaken. The Americans and the Irish had their own agendas.Footnote 27 India also imposed its agendas on those serving there, whatever their political dispositions, as the case of William Jones starkly demonstrates. British India was already becoming the largely politically introverted world that it was to be in the nineteenth century. During his sojourn at Bombay from 1804 to 1811, Sir James Mackintosh, another notable Whig lawyer and man of letters, found official European society politically inert. ‘Every Englishman who resides here very long has, I fear, his mind emasculated by submission or corrupted by despotic power’.Footnote 28 In the early nineteenth century, however, a few Europeans not in official employ together with at least one very notable Indian intellectual, Raja Rammohan Roy, were espousing a version of Liberalism whose inspiration came from Continental Europe and America as well as from Britain. Rammohan was also rooting his ideas in notions of an ancient Hindu constitution.Footnote 29
In assessing the suppositions with which British Whigs in India approached the government of Bengal, Travers stresses the commitment of all shades of opinion, certainly including Francis and Hastings, to the sovereign power with which they believed that the Company was vested. A number of historians have drawn attention to the powerful hold on the British in India of doctrines of a unitary sovereignty, notably C.A. Bayly, as when, in doing me the honour of linking my name with that of Sir John Seeley, he pointed out that a ‘strong interpretation of practical sovereignty powered forward the Company's boarders’ [sic], making it very difficult for it to share or devolve power.Footnote 30 For historical reasons, insistence on unfettered sovereignty was especially prevalent among the British in Bengal.Footnote 31 Such doctrines, most famously expounded by Blackstone, were deeply embedded in later eighteenth-century British political culture and were orthodox Whig ones. The Rockingham Whigs were responsible for the Declaratory Act of 1766, declaring parliamentary sovereignty over America. Doctrines of sovereignty were applied throughout the empire, provoking resistance in both America and Ireland. In India too, as many historians, including Travers, have shown, British concepts of a unitary sovereignty ‘contrasted sharply with the fluid pattern of shared sovereignty which characterized the Mughal empire and other pre-colonial states in South Asia’ (p. 23).
The uses to which the Company directed its sovereign powers were no doubt in general terms to promote objectives such as the security of property, the rule of law and improvement. There was, however, a contrast between the sweeping powers claimed and the constraints which were often accepted on their actual use. British Whigs in India did not see themselves as the standard bearers of a universal modernity in whose name they were bound to reshape India. Travers wisely reminds us ‘that “modern” European empires had their toots in “early modern” conceptions of politics in which provenance, lineage and custom remained crucial markers of legitimacy’ (pp. 17–18). Constitutional restoration was thus more acceptable than constitutional innovation. Underlying this caution about innovation was less a specifically ‘Orientalist’ respect for Indian culture, often rightly attributed to Hastings, than an acceptance of the validity of the traditions and institutions of any society organised beyond a certain level. These traditions and institutions embodied the ‘spirit’ of that society, a concept most commonly associated with the very widely cited Montesquieu, and had evolved in a way that was uniquely appropriate to it. Questions of propagating a ‘higher’ but alien religion in India had hardly arisen as yet, but it is not surprising that when they did arise, Hastings strongly opposed any plans for supporting Christian missions, and Francis, Cornwallis and Jones showed no interest in them. Systems of law were, however, of overwhelming concern to eighteenth-century opinion. The Company's servants generally saw it as their duty to apply indigenous systems of law based on knowledge both of canonical texts and of custom. To them such a ‘model of law suggested an analogy with the English common law, as ancient custom proved in the reasoning of the courts’ (p. 125). The Company might claim a sovereign legislative authority but plans to use this authority to rationalise or to codify the law lay far in the future.
Indian Participation in the New Order
It is a central tenet of Travers's book that the project for constitutional restoration in the early years of British rule over Bengal was not simply imposed upon an inert conquered population but ‘was shaped by the encounter with the hierarchies, conventions and ideals of indigenous politics’ (p. 14). In other words, Indians had some input into the way in which the new system evolved and came to be depicted by Europeans.
Such encounters took place at several levels. The Company's governing Council was given written or oral advice by the most senior Indian revenue officers, above all by Muhammad Reza Khan,Footnote 32 who had largely managed the diwani revenues in the early years after 1765. As British involvement became more intrusive, the Khan tried to frustrate innovation in the name of preserving the essentials of an older order. As C.A. Bayly has put it, he and men like him saw themselves as ‘physicians of the state’, whose primary loyalty was to the Mughal Emperor, however diminished he might now be in practice. They saw their duty as being to try to ensure that the British adhered ‘to established principles in matters of revenue management and justice’.Footnote 33 Muhammad Reza Khan offered suggestions and criticisms of Hastings's new system of judicial administration of 1772. Deprived of office and placed in confinement by Hastings, in 1775 he set out his views on the Bengal revenue system to Francis and his allies with trenchant criticisms of current British practice. There is, however, no way in which Muhammad Reza Khan can be regarded as an equal partner in the reshaping of Bengal's institutions. Although he is likely to have had some influence on Philip Francis's plans for the management of the Bengal revenues, his advice was more often than not rejected. He clearly lost his struggle to preserve what he regarded as proper Mughal practices in the government of Bengal. Yet, as Travers points out, the objectives of the British and of the officials trained in the Mughal tradition ‘intersected’. Their determination to demonstrate the superiority of old ways of governance gave added credibility to the concept of an ancient constitution for which the British were searching (p. 20).
The role of Hindu pandits or Muslim maulavis as providers of information on legal matters is more briefly mentioned in the book. They staffed the Company's courts and a group of pandits were responsible for producing the Code of Gentoo Laws, or, Ordinations of the Pundits, which attracted much interest when it was published in Britain in 1776. Pandits instructed William Jones in Sanskrit and under his direction worked on what became his digest of Hindu law, eventually finished and published by Henry Thomas Colebrooke in 1797–1798. Rosane Rocher's penetrating scholarship has identified individual pandits and revealed something of their lives.Footnote 34 She indicates a similar pattern of unequal relations as that between the Company's officials and the great Muslim law officers. Even William Jones was deeply suspicious of the capacity and integrity of most pandits. His intention in learning Sanskrit and making authentic translations was to limit the pandits' scope for giving misleading advice to the European judges. The pandits, who depended on the patronage of the wealthy, had little alternative to accepting a sometimes humiliating relationship with the British, who were an indispensable source of patronage, paying salaries and making grants of rent-free land. Service with the British became ‘a way of life’ for many of them.Footnote 35 Yet their concerns too ‘intersected’ with those of the British at a higher level. It was their hereditary duty to instruct rulers in the proper administration of the law. The British may have been obtuse and insensitive rulers, but they still had to be instructed. Another case of intersecting British and Indian concerns has been explored in a valuable recent study of the first British attempts to produce a Bengali grammar and printed Bengali texts. This shows their early efforts to have been a ‘coproduction of complementary skills’, British and Indian, ‘rather than the simple playing out of the imposition of European technology through the rigid grids of the colonizer and the colonized’. Men like Nathaniel Halhed and Charles Wilkins were dependent on the skill of Indian scribes, scholars and skilled artisans. In return, the pandits were able to gain official countenance for their formal and somewhat Sanskitised versions of Bengali.Footnote 36
Travers also includes a useful section (presented at greater length in his Cambridge Ph.D. thesis) on how Company officials came to intervene in administration at a local level. He illustrates this with an account of George Vansittart (brother of the former governor, Henry Vansittart) in Midnapur in southwest Bengal and in Dinajpur in the north. At Midnapur, Vansittart evidently started with the common British assumption that the Company's revenue could be much increased if the claims of various intermediaries to a share of it were curbed. Experience taught him, however, that the Company had to take account of the interests of such people. Travers concludes from the Midnapur case that ‘By the late 1760s British understandings were not only being shaped by theorists and pamphleteers in Calcutta and London, but also by day-to-day negotiations in the districts of Bengal’ (p. 92). He draws similar conclusions from Vansittart's posting to a very different area, the great zamindari of Dinajpur in northern Bengal. Here the Company's desire to bring about change was frustrated by its ‘continuing dependence . . . on local power holders’ (p. 97).
With many reservations and much caution Travers ultimately concludes that, however unequal or ‘asymmetrical’, the exchanges between the British and the Indians who filled offices under them or fed them with information were not totally one-sided. There were ‘overlaps and intersections’ through which Indians left their mark on British conceptions and practices (pp. 250–251). He concludes from this ‘that British imperial ideology was formed at the intersection of exported European concepts and appropriated indigenous categories that were put to new uses by the colonial state’ (p. 14). While the British exploited Indian knowledge and skills for their own purposes, Indians could try to exploit the combination of power and ignorance that characterised early British rule to foist their points of view on their masters. Their chances of success were strictly limited, but they were far from entirely helpless in face of an alien new order.
Travers thus has a close affinity with other scholars who have written of ‘dialogues’ between rulers and the ruled. Dialogue was certainly not partnership. Both sides pursued their own usually conflicting agendas. Writing of the British in Rajasthan, Norbert Peabody argues that ‘colonial power did not impose itself monolithically from outside, but arose much more dialogically from within the conditions that were manifest locally, with local agents often able to redirect the potentialities of colonial power to serve agendas at a tangent from, if not diametrically opposite to, the agendas of colonial power’.Footnote 37
Questions about Indian influences on British ideas and policies raise deeper questions about the nature of the early British regime and the strength of its hold on Bengal. After 1764, when the Company's army had defeated a formidable coalition of Mughal nobility, led by the Emperor in person and by his Wazir, the Nawab of Awadh, together with the Nawab of Bengal and several leading zamindars, there was little prospect that the regime would be overthrown.Footnote 38 The Company's control of frontier areas was tenuous and there was sporadic peasant resistance to revenue extraction. On one occasion, disorder in Calcutta involving assaults on Europeans and defiance of the orders of the Supreme Court clearly indicated the displeasure of some Calcutta Muslims with the way they were being treated.Footnote 39 The stability of the Company's rule was not, however, seriously threatened. On the other hand, if the mass of the population and the elites in particular, rarely engaged in open opposition to the Company, this cannot be taken to mean that they were passively submissive or actively collaborating with the new regime on its own terms. Travers uses the concept of ‘negotiated empire’ (p. 41) to describe a situation between outright resistance and inert compliance in which the ruled had some influence over the rulers.
‘Negotiated empires’ is a concept developed by Jack P. Greene, initially for the British imperial system in the Atlantic but later extended to other Atlantic empires. He has defined negotiated empires as being shaped by a process of negotiation between metropolitan authorities and the dominant elements in colonial societies rather than by the exertion of untrammelled metropolitan power.Footnote 40 In my The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India and America c. 1750 to 1783, I used this concept extensively in writing about Britain and the 13 colonies, but tried to apply it to Bengal as well, at the risk in so doing of debasing the precision of Greene's usage. ‘Although no doubt in a very different sense’, I wrote, ‘authority in India as well as in America required a degree of “negotiation” between rulers and ruled’ (p. 264). Rule in early British Bengal ‘involved negotiation and implied compacts’ with local elites (p. 377). This was by no means an original approach to the history of Bengal. In 1970 Philip Calkins published an important article on ‘The Formation of a Regionally Orientated Ruling Group in Bengal’.Footnote 41 He argued that effective rule by the pre-British Nawabs of Bengal depended on ‘a coalition of interests’, including high officials, major zamindars and bankers and merchants. In my volume in the New Cambridge History of India of 1987, I wrote of the early Company regime that ‘[a]t the highest level the functioning of government no longer depended, as it had done under the Nawabs, on a consensus of powerful Indian interests, but it was still accessible to Indian influence. The Company could not do without the services of the merchants and bankers, of the great zamindars, and even for a few years of the Muslim grandees’.Footnote 42
‘Negotiation’ seems to be a convenient shorthand for describing the processes by which Indians could try to influence the new order. They did not of course have access to formal channels of negotiation, established in the Atlantic empire, through remonstrances and petitions of the colonial assemblies, the appointment of agents in London and enlisting the support of like-minded MPs or interest groups in Britain.Footnote 43 Nevertheless, they could make their views known to their rulers in Calcutta and even in London, where largely self-appointed agents claimed to act for Indian rulers and sometimes obtained seats in parliament. The British in India were supposed by their Indian critics to lack both the taste and the skill for providing opportunities for the face-to-face encounters between aggrieved subjects and the ruling power that were deemed to be one of the hallmarks of good Mughal governance. Leading Company servants did, however, hold Durbars or levees for Indian notables in their houses. They received petitions, which could be entered on the Company's records and might be sent to London, where they could embarrass British Company servants in Bengal. Indians could seek redress in the Supreme Court, which, they quickly came to appreciate, could be antagonistic to the Company's regime, by suits against individual Europeans. Leading Indians were well aware that the Company's governing bodies in India and even in London were riven by faction and that there were great advantages to be gained from forming alliances with those factions that were in the ascendancy, with correspondingly great dangers in miscalculations which left one on the side of a defeated European faction. Threats of public allegations of abuses were formidable weapons if skilfully deployed. An implied promise of silence was a valuable inducement for favours. Alliances were of course unequal ones, characteristic of patrons and clients, but in return for the power and influence of his patron, the client had his knowledge and skills to offer as well as his wealth and access to credit. The relationship of banian, or business agent, to his British ‘master’ was, for instance, on the surface one of abject abasement. The reality was often very different. The most conspicuous examples of banians who succeeded in manipulating the British for their own purposes were those who acted as the personal agents of prominent Company servants. Travers mentions two of them, Krishna Kanta Nandy and Gokalchandra Ghosal, who amassed huge fortunes and great holdings of revenue rights, which became the basis of huge landed estates in the nineteenth century. A recent article of great interest by Jon E. Wilson on the Rangpur peasant rising or dhing of 1783 suggests that even poor cultivators saw their relations with their rulers in terms of negotiation. Open resistance was aimed not at overthrowing the regime but at restoring negotiations with it. Wilson argues that the rebels only resorted to violence when their ‘offer to negotiate was rebuffed or when officers met them in bad faith’.Footnote 44
That British and Indians should have been mutually dependent on one another in the early years of a new regime seems hardly to be surprising. The historian has no need to express moral approval or disapproval about these connections. Both sides were pursuing their own interests. Good inter-racial feeling, often assumed, rightly or wrongly, to have been characteristic of the eighteenth century in contrast to later periods, did not enter into the matter. Indians had no inhibitions about working through Hastings, who personally liked some of them and generally respected their culture, but could be a dangerous and ruthless enemy to those who crossed him, or through Francis, who seems to have disliked contact with Indians and to have despised their culture. The point has already been made that serving the British was not necessarily incompatible with loyalty to ideals of good governance in the Mughal tradition.Footnote 45 Somewhat puzzlingly, however, in recent historiography the nature of interchanges between Indians and British seems to have become an ideologically charged issue. Dr. Peabody, for instance, assures his readers that his account of Indian participation ‘in the colonial encounter’ in Rajasthan is not ‘meant to offer an apology for European colonialism’,Footnote 46 although it is not at all easy to see why anyone should suppose that it was. Travers also seems to feel it necessary to tread delicately. He hopes that those who emphasise ‘“Indian agency” and social continuities’ and those who stress ‘the cultural dislocations wrought by colonial discourse’ will, like the farmers and the cowmen in Oklahoma, be friends and see that there is ‘scope for intellectual cross-fertilization’. Quickly suppressing an unworthy exclamation of ‘some hope!’, this very marginal dirt farmer is happy to add his ‘Amen’ to such proper sentiments. Travers concludes that ‘the paradigms of “negotiated empire” and the imperial rule of force can be fruitfully held together as inseparable dimensions of colonial state formation’ (pp. 12 and 14). No one can of course doubt the reality of ‘the imperial rule of force’. Nevertheless, study of the role of Indians in early British state building in Bengal through what can loosely be called a process of negotiation is probably the most interesting development in the field in recent years. What Travers contributes to our understanding of this process is one of the major contributions made by this admirable book. It should go without saying he is not thereby offering an apologia for colonialism.
