The main problem with the orthodox account of modern world politics is that it describes only one of these patterns of international order: the one that was dedicated to the pursuit of peaceful coexistence between equal and mutually independent sovereigns, which developed within the Westphalian system and the European society of states....Orthodox theorists have paid far too little attention to the other pattern of international order, which evolved during roughly the same period of time, but beyond rather than within Europe; not through relations between Europeans, but through relations between Europeans and non-Europeans. Instead of being based on a states-system, this pattern of order was based on colonial and imperial systems, and its characteristic practice was not the reciprocal recognition of sovereign independence between states, but rather the division of sovereignty across territorial borders and the enforcement of individuals' rights to their persons and property.Footnote 1
The American Revolution and the “revolution” in Bengal posed new political questions for domestic British politics and inaugurated a new era for the British empire.Footnote 2 As the British committed themselves to the administration of a vast population of non-Europeans in the Indian province of Bengal, and estimations of financial windfalls were presented to stockholders and politicians, the center of the British Empire came slowly to shift toward the East. The evolution of a system of indirect rule in India as it related to larger political questions being posed in Britain, partly because of its protracted and diverse nature, has not received the same attention.Footnote 3 Attention to Indian states, in the scholarship on eighteenth century South Asia, has closely followed the expanding colonial frontier, focusing on those states that most engaged British military attention: Bengal, Mysore, and the Marathas. And yet, the eighteenth century should also command our attention as a crucial moment of transition from an earlier Indian Ocean world trading system, in which European powers inserted themselves as one sovereign authority among many, to that of being supreme political authorities of territories that they did not govern directly.Footnote 4 India's native states, or “country powers,” as the British referred to them in the eighteenth century, underwrote the expansion of the East India Company in the East. The tribute paid by these states became an important financial resource at the company's disposal, as it attempted to balance its books in the late eighteenth century.Footnote 5 Additionally, the troops maintained to protect these states were significant in Britain's late eighteenth century military calculations.Footnote 6 These states, in other words, were absolutely central to the forging of the British imperial order, and generative of the very practices that came to characterize colonial expansion and governance.
In 1765, the East India Company secured diwani (the right to collect taxes) in Bengal. At the same time, Robert Clive (subsequently, First Baron Clive) also obtained from the Mughal emperor rights to tax lands in the south—the Northern Circars—that came under the authority of the Nizam of Hyderabad. However, the history of these two regions and the men who ruled them played out in completely different ways. In the south, the Company in its relations with the Nizam utilized a new form of colonial power—the protectorate (although it was by no means called that at the time)—which was adapted and survived through independence until 1948.Footnote 7 The model of indirect rule forged in eighteenth century India departed from practices of the first British Empire in the West, which had focused on the subordination of internal and external populations (i.e., slave and native) in order to secure the freedoms and economy of settler societies.Footnote 8 In south India, the Northern Circars were ceded to the British not simply as a matter of the rights of conquest, or by right of Mughal decree, but also in exchange for the maintenance of troops to protect the Nizam. The logic of this relationship evolved in the late eighteenth century, ensuring by the early nineteenth century the creation (despite objections and debate among the British themselves) of a system of politics adhered to by the British as a matter of policy, especially after 1857, known subsequently as “indirect rule.” Indirect rule was as consequential for the history of the Second British Empire as those practices pioneered in Bengal and was utilized, in modified form, by a range of European powers in the creation of indirectly ruled territories in Africa, after the Scramble, and in the Middle East, after World War I.Footnote 9
In addition, therefore, to asking when and how the British were able to conquer different parts of the Indian subcontinent, we might also ask: When and why did the British decide not to conquer certain states? How did they deal with those states that never became a part of their directly ruled empire? The first section of this article explains how the Company came to establish a dual sovereignty in Bengal. As they established their territorial empire in India, the British braided together notions of sovereignty that then existed in Europe with those that existed in South Asia. This section explores how the British used the different legal instruments at their disposal, and the tensions created between a charter granted by the British crown that privileged the purpose of trade and diwani granted by the Mughal emperor for the expanded purposes of governance. The second section moves to south India and explores the forms of political authority that existed in the subcontinent in this period, and how the British inserted themselves in political and economic relationships at even the local level. The third section focuses on how these Indian states were remade from the outside in, through an evolution in treaty-making that one can see most clearly in their dealings with the Hyderabad state. Here, the British returned to using the legal instrument (grants received from the Mughal emperor) that had become the basis of their administration in Bengal. The final section of this article considers the novelty of these arrangements, and the way that a systematized treaty system with lesser states came to be considered an alterative to colonialism by territorial expansion. Through these political and legal instruments, the British brought about a new division of sovereignty on the subcontinent.
Viewing British relations with Indian states from the south will allow us, therefore, to think anew the contingent political possibilities available to the British Empire in this period, and the different ways that eighteenth century “revolutions” affected the interstate relations of this period. In tracing the history of Nizam–British relations in the mid-eighteenth century, these sections taken together seek to make three interconnected arguments. (1) The evolution of indirect rule in India was not simply determined on the periphery. Indirect rule was shaped by metropolitan political preoccupations. (2) The new interstate relations of this period reshaped the nature of the polities that existed in eighteenth-century south India. (3) Therefore, the system of indirect rule should not be understood as an absence of colonialism, or a delayed colonialism, but rather a novel system of interstate politics, involving the parceling of sovereign rights, which was essential to the forging of a new global order.
Dual Sovereignty
The expansion of the British Empire in eighteenth century India involved a complex legal and political negotiation with Indian states. This negotiation had as much to do with the management of different states' conflicting ambitions in South Asia as it did with the evolution of politics in Britain itself. In securing rights to Indian territory through the Mughal emperor, Clive inaugurated his “dual system,” which acknowledged the Company's powers in India as emanating dually from its charters with the British and Mughal crowns. As Nicholas Dirks has pointed out, this arrangement was perhaps the first experiment with British indirect rule, and applied equally in the south and to the early administration of Bengal.Footnote 10 Shortly after the acquisition of diwani in Bengal, Harry Verelst, as he departed from his post as governor of the Council in Calcutta, issued a warning to the remaining members of the Council that clarified some of the advantages to be drawn from this dual system of government. “But there is a rock, and a dangerous one, which requires the greatest circumspection to avoid….we have reached that supreme line, which, to pass, would be an open avowal of sovereignty. It should be remembered, that we cannot be more, without being greater than found policy allows; the interests of our employers at home, no less than our national connections abroad, forbid it…. [Destroying the Nizamut (the native government of Bengal)] may become the source of perplexities and jealousies, if not the deprivation of the Company's privileges.”Footnote 11 Robert Travers has revealed how Company officials were well aware of the advantages and protection that this “dual system” offered them, both from the jealousies of foreign rivals, such as the French, and from oversight in Britain itself. “A legal opinion from 1757 suggested a distinction between territories conquered by British arms, which would be subject to both the dominion and dominium (sovereignty and property) of the Crown, and territories leased or granted from Indian rulers, which would remain the property of the Company. Thus by claiming to hold much of Bengal as diwan by grant from the Mughal emperor, the Company sought to define its territorial revenues as its own property.”Footnote 12
In the same year (1765), that the British faced opposition in their American colonies to the introduction of the Stamp Act, the Company secured the right to revenues in Bengal in the name of the Mughal emperor, rather than through an act of Parliament. John G. A. Pocock has argued that British fears of domestic strife, and civil war, had produced a fierce commitment to the unified sovereignty of king-in-Parliament that made American demands to override the decisions of Britain's Parliament a fundamental political challenge to widely held beliefs about the origins and rightful operation of British sovereignty.Footnote 13 The recognition of native sovereignties in India, and the preference for the maintenance of their territorial integrity, was not only a matter of expedience in the periphery (i.e., not only because those territories were not particularly fertile, or they were useful as buffers with other antagonistic states, an ancient practice of imperial politics). Expedience itself should perhaps be rethought. What appeared expedient in any particular period and context would have as much to do with facts as with how those facts were assessed. In the middle and late eighteenth century, preserving these states served to obviate the political and legal problems that would arise from an empire that made claims to territory through conquest and the questions of sovereignty—as they related to colonial governance—that would concomitantly become a political problem for domestic British politics.
In the same letter, Verelst noted the political and economic contradictions created by the East India Company in Bengal.
The consequences are but too evidently exemplified in the decline of commerce and cultivation, the diminution of specie, and the general distresses of the poor….Experience must convince the most prejudiced, that to hold vast possessions, and yet to act on the level of mere merchants, making immediate gain our first principle; to receive an immense revenue, without possessing an adequate protective power over the people who pay it; … are paradoxes not to be reconciled, highly injurious to our national character, dangerous to the best defended establishment, and absolutely bordering on inhumanity.Footnote 14
In linking Bengal's poverty to the actions of the Company, Verelst was only stating beforehand some of what his critics (such as William Bolts) would subsequently say publicly and much more dramatically shortly after.Footnote 15 One can see in Verelst's letter an acknowledgement not only of the economic difficulties faced by Bengal's peasantry by virtue of the Company's policies (some comment in the midst of the massive famine of 1769–70 was perhaps unavoidable), but also the suggestion that the future of the Company might lie in making it less a commercial venture and more a political one.
After 1772, when the Court of Directors in London sent orders that the East India Company should directly “stand forth as diwan” in Bengal, discussion of native forms of authority and rule did not disappear. Again and again, British administrators (such as Warren Hastings, Philip Francis, and Thomas Munro) in the Company's directly ruled territories referred in debate to precolonial political forms, the ancient constitution, or the original rights and practices of India's inhabitants.Footnote 16 Often, revolutionary policies that would drastically alter the political and economic landscape of India were justified in a language of pre-existing forms, and not coincidentally, given how the Company had come to establish itself in India. For example, Burton Stein has pointed out (that in the territories surrounding Madras) “Munro's ryotwar [a system of assessing taxes with individual cultivators] purportedly based upon historical praxis and thus presumably free of innovations and disruptions was a powerful force for extended monetization and individuation of wealth through society!”Footnote 17 Kathleen Davis has described even (member of the Bengal Council's) Francis's revolutionary plans for a system of private property in Bengal as being based on a description of “Indian property relations as feudal, likening the relationship between Mughal prince and zamindars to that of a ‘liege lord and his vassals,’ and depicting zamindars as feudal landlords,” relegating Bengal to an ambivalent temporality where it had “to be, and not be, medieval at once.”Footnote 18 Both Stein and Davis draw our attention to how projects of British reform in both Bengal and Madras were often framed in a language that made reference to past practice, especially as it had to do with the economy, property rights, and revenue systems.
Ultimately, however, as Sudipta Sen has argued, there were important lacunae in British attempts to understand precolonial political practice. “In British India, where Persian had long been recognized as the official language of correspondence with the Mughals and other native regimes, terms close or analogous to ‘sovereignty’ in contemporary Persian or Hindustani usage such as mulkgiri or iqtidar were never seriously considered as substantively equivalent concepts in contemporary debates on the legal validity of East India Company's territorial acquisitions.”Footnote 19 This lack of engagement with Indian political concepts was contemporary with the Company's decisive intervention in the interstate politics of India. We must, therefore, take recourse to a variety of sources, and the many legal arrangements that the British entered into, in order to understand the shift in the balance of power in the late eighteenth century and the profound political transformation, both direct and indirect, that accompanied East India Company rule.
Revenue Grants and State Sovereignty in Hyderabad
Despite the fact that the British secured rights to collect revenue from Bengal and the Northern Circars simultaneously, the Northern Circars do not figure prominently in accounts of eighteenth century colonial expansion. This is not without reason. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Company delayed collecting revenue in the Northern Circars, had immense difficulties and intermittent success when it did, and ultimately even witnessed a proposal by Governor Hastings to return the territories to the Nizam of Hyderabad. Peter J. Marshall has described the variance between Company policy in Bengal and in the south as resting on differences in the nature of the native states encountered in these two regions. “A brief explanation would be that in Bengal the British inherited a centralized indigenous state structure through which they could impose their direct authority with relative ease. They had neither the need nor the inclination to preserve Bengal's Indian rulers….In the south, there was no comparable state structure and so the Company had no real alternative to working through the Nawab of the Carnatic who was endeavouring to extend his authority over largely unincorporated local powers.”Footnote 20 Whatever the initial differences in policy between the two regions, the Nawabs of the Carnatic also ultimately met the same fate—being set aside entirely—as the Nawabs of Bengal, only significantly later. The Northern Circars also ultimately became part of the directly ruled territorial empire of the British in India, although here what will be emphasized is the role of the Northern Circars in the evolution of alternative forms of empire in the eighteenth century. Attending to the history of the Northern Circars allows us to pose larger questions about the reasons for a variance in British policy in the subcontinent, about the nature of the Indian states that the British encountered, and also about how the British inserted themselves into these political relationships, interacting with local actors seeking revenue grants from the Company and its servants. Ultimately, this description of state-making in south India will allow us to understand the novelty of treaties signed with the Nizam subsequently, and the ways that they inaugurated a new state form.
Left, map of India in 1765. Right, map of India in 1805. Source: Imperial Gazetteer of India, vol. 26, Atlas. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909). http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:India1765and1805b.jpg Wikipedia User:Fowler&fowler.
Clive's interest in the Northern Circars had been ignited by his participation in the Carnatic wars and prior French claims to that same land.Footnote 21 The Mughal emperor's firman (royal order/decree) made explicit reference to the French and to the English company's ability, indeed right, to expel them from these territories. This firman rendered French possession illegitimate by proclaiming that the English company had expelled them “in consequence of its [the Nizam's grant of the lands to the French] not being confirmed by us, either by Firmaun or otherwise,” and proceeded to award these same territories to the British “by way of enam or free gift.”Footnote 22 The Northern Circars (in much the same way as Bengal) were thus granted to the English company free and clear, or so it would seem. The path of English policy in these southern districts was far from straightforward, however, and into the 1790s, “Company officials had yet to determine how revenue was assessed on the land and how it was collected by the tax contractors to whom this was entrusted.”Footnote 23 The Company's rights to the Northern Circars were also necessarily complicated, as witnessed in the Mughal emperor's firman, by the Nizam of Hyderabad's claims to the same territories, a story we will return to shortly.
Company records repeatedly stressed difficulty penetrating the revenue systems of the Northern Circars. Initially, President Palk of the Madras Council wrote to London explaining that the Company should delay taking possession of these southern territories. “Untill all is settled & likely to continue quiet in Bengal it may not be safe to avail ourselves of the grants received for the Northern Circars unless Nizam Ally can be brought to confirm them…if we do not take possession of these Circars till another year, it can make no great difference…”Footnote 24 Clearly then, securing the Company's possessions in the north would take precedence, as would guaranteeing the Nizam's consent to the acquisition. It also seems that Clive had a plan “from his Arrival in India, of repossessing Cuttack, or that part of Oriza, belonging formerly to Bengal, situated between Ganjam and Ballasone, in order to make the Junction of the two Presidencies compleat.”Footnote 25 This initial delay could also have devolved from Clive's ambition to make policy matters in both regions a united consideration. And although the documents of this period refer to the Company's possessions in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa (reflecting Clive's desires), the latter territory was not conquered by the British from the Marathas until the early nineteenth century.
Once negotiations began in 1766 over the Northern Circars, the Company considered putting the Nawab of Arcot/Carnatic in charge of these territories on its behalf, and utilizing his troops to secure the revenue demand. Ultimately, they decided against this policy in order to “give less umbrage to Nizam Ally already jealous of the Nabob's Designs on the Decan, [who] would therefore judge that Existence of his Government depended on opposing the Firmaund which gives us Possession of a Country adjoining almost to Hydrabad, especially, as there is not Fort of any consequence to interrupt our march to that Capital or even to Aurangabad.”Footnote 26 The Northern Circars may have lain on the path from Madras to Bengal, but they also lay on paths to the heart of the Nizam's territories. Company records indicate that the Nawab of Arcot had greater ambitions than supervision of these limited territories. “When the Provinces of Bengal became subject to the Company the Nabob had the vanity to propose that his oldest son Omdut ul Omra should be made Soubadar of Bengal, and that his second son the Ameer ul Omra should succeed to the Musnud of the Carnatic, while he himself aspired to the Soubadarry of the Decan.”Footnote 27 Not only, then, were the Northern Circars subject to the Nizam of Hyderabad, and therefore also the largely symbolic claims of the Mughal emperor, but the Nawab of Arcot also was imagining a larger political realignment on the subcontinent, giving him and his family rights to lands through the intervention of a third party.Footnote 28
Initial negotiations with the Nizam about these districts had been conducted through Husain Ali Khan, who had been put in charge of them by the Nizam. Madras was not sanguine, however, about his abilities. “Hussain Alli Cawn appointed by Nizam Alli Cawn had the Management of all, but neither he nor his Master being much regarded in any of them he could collect but a very small part of the Revenues, & that only by means of such a force as devoured the whole….”Footnote 29 In fact, it was difficult for the British to even estimate revenue values for these territories. Fantasies of financial windfalls depended upon calculations of French revenue collections, estimated in one instance as 39 lacks (3,900,000).Footnote 30 Testifying before the House of Commons in 1766–67, Henry Vanisttart is reported to have claimed that the French had farmed them at 29 lacks (2,900,000) but after deductions, they had only yielded 1,800,000, or the equivalent of ₤225,000.Footnote 31 Husain Ali Khan himself claimed to have never sent the Nizam more than 50,000 from these same territories.Footnote 32 Therefore, how should we understand these large discrepancies, competing political ambitions over the same territories, and the difficulties that the British faced in extracting revenue in the south? What kind of state did the British encounter in the Northern Circars?
Although he had been deputed to the Deccan as a Mughal governor, the founder of the Hyderabad state, Nizam-ul Mulk, had departed in significant ways from Mughal administrative ideals. “Thus, for example…complex processes of bargaining rather than cadastral surveys (although one was taken in 1726–27) tended to determine revenue payments by zamindars; many lower-level revenue offices were allowed to become hereditary; and revenue farming (ijaradari) was tolerated, albeit reluctantly.”Footnote 33 The complex process of negotiation with a diverse group of local authorities that Munis Faruqui describes is confirmed in one contemporaneous account of the (first) Nizam's army.
He is followed by 10,000 mounted men under various commanders, as also forty officers of state, and 20,000 cavalry. The sons of ‘Abd-un Nabi Khan, the Nawab of Cuddapah are with the army…Their horse numbers 3,000. There are also Poligars in the camp….The army of these numbers 5,000 or 6,000 horse and 100,000 foot. The number of the Pindaris in the army is beyond calculation. The distinguished Mahrattas who have accompanied the Nizam's troops are Raja Chandrasen and Raja Nimbalisiyudosi. They have a force of 20,000 horse. With this array, they proceeded to Tirupati, to worship the god of that place….It is also reported that after a stay of fifteen or twenty days at Arcot, he will leave his son Nasir Jung there, and move with the whole of his forces to Trichinopoly. The object of this expedition, it is stated, is to transfer the possession of Trichinopoly to the Mysorians.Footnote 34
The state of Hyderabad had established itself in the Deccan through alliances forged in the field with a multilingual and layered elite. The eighteenth century Nizams moved through their territories, “as though the sea was rising and flooding the land,” to display their military power and demonstrate their authority and alliances.Footnote 35 This particular description of the Nizam's retinue disguises the diverse set of circumstances that might have brought any particular group to court. Some were clearly there to show support for the Nizam, even as their own titles and lands were recognized by the state; others, more recalcitrant participants perhaps, were there so that the Nizam could keep an eye on them and the arms at their command (hostages of a sort); and yet others, such as the Marathas, representatives of another state, were there to keep an eye on the Nizam and be sure that he met their tax demands.Footnote 36
This elite, in turn, provided the state with both revenue and a considerable army. This mode of state making had clear precedents in the Deccan, and we can perhaps understand the Hyderabad state's forging of a political order at variance with Mughal ideals as the result of these regional precedents.Footnote 37 States in south India not only incorporated local elites in order to build their armies and courts, but also granted tax-free land to other, even more local actors: religious establishments, village servants, accountants, and headmen.Footnote 38 Clearly, in the Northern Circars, some of these chiefs were especially resistant to the authority of the Mughals and the first Nizam, as had been the case with Subbana Rao, the Valama Reddy chief of Gundugolanu.Footnote 39 Even into the nineteenth century, in the neighboring district of Guntur, the Company continued to face resistance to its authority from village leaders: zamindars, dubashes, as well as from British officers.Footnote 40 This was a diverse set of political actors, with shifting political alliances, operating in varied locales from villages, towns, and hills, to the tents of the Nizam's camps.Footnote 41
There were new actors in these regions as well. Fifteen years after the Company had acquired the Northern Circars, the president of the Council at Fort St. George was reporting to London that “the Zemindars are so loaded with debts to the Company, and to Individuals, that he observes with great concern the little prospect there is of any great increase of Revenue from the Lands, or of the speedy payment of what remains due from them.”Footnote 42 The importance of financiers, many of them Company servants, in the economy of the Northern Circars, posed specific political problems, and as with their political policy in India, more generally raised allegations of corruption. The directors in London demanded that its officials in Madras “strictly enquire, whether, in order to obtain their Leases or Agreements, any present or gratuity hath been given or made, directly or indirectly, by any Renter, Rajah, Zemindar, or other person or persons, to any person whatever in the service of the Company, and more especially to any Member or Members of our Council at Fort St. George.”Footnote 43 The problem was that the private financial dealings of Company men were sullying the Company's claims to neutral governance.
Charges of corruption were shared by British governments at home and in India. In England as in India, these charges of corruption accompanied the expanding revenue capacities of the state. In England, we may note that these charges, leveled by Tories and Whigs in the eighteenth century, were radicalized in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars to become the basis of new demands for electoral reform in the nineteenth century.Footnote 44 In India, charges of corruption also involved the territorial expansion of the state. The Regulating Act of 1773 was formulated to address these allegations and reform Indian administration. “The bill sought to put in place a wide range of checks on the corruption of the Company servants, raising the salaries of key Company servants, while both prohibiting presents and placing some new restrictions on private trade. Significantly, an important provision for dealing with the excesses of Company merchants in southern India was dropped because of a deal with a group of powerful parliamentarians who represented the ‘Arcot interest.’”Footnote 45 Therefore, what was seen at the local level in the Northern Circars, with revenue contracts, echoed allegations made elsewhere in India, especially in relation to the Nawab of Arcot, whose debts to the Company and its officials gained some notoriety in Britain.
Clearly, these private British financiers were stepping into a vacuum created by indigenous “portfolio capitalists”—those large-scale entrepreneurs involved simultaneously in economics and politics—who, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Christopher A. Bayly tell us, were in decline in this region in precisely this period.Footnote 46 It would not be surprising therefore, if the local elites of the Northern Circars hoped, through their financial dealings, to gain some political leverage within the British administration at Madras.Footnote 47 However, the “corrupt” players of South India may have been different from their counterparts in England. My suggestion is that whereas the “old corruption” of England aimed to re-entrench the political and economic privilege of the landed gentry, the corruption of company officials and local elites in south India may have been a sign of, and alibi for, the expansion of the colonial state. As Bhavani Raman has demonstrated, charges of corruption levied against the Indian clerks and accountants who staffed the Company's growing bureaucracy fueled a revolution in the relationship among writing, learning, and the state in the Madras presidency, entrenching and enlarging early colonial state practices.Footnote 48 Charges of corruption in India may, therefore, have largely been a sign of the functioning of financial and political actors on the margins of the oversight of the Company state, some of whom were being newly incorporated into its expanding bureaucratic apparatus. It was some of these (British) financial interests, recently returned to England, who eliminated a proposal put forward during discussion of the Regulating Act to prohibit trade between Company servants and foreign merchants in south India.Footnote 49 So whereas the bill had never really been formulated to address the most radical critique of the East India Company's monopolies leveled by figures such as William Bolts and Alexander Dow, it was the “Arcot interests” in Parliament who opposed further restrictions on trade in the East.Footnote 50 It was ironically, representatives of Indian corruption who lobbied in Parliament for freer forms of trade in south India.
Client States, Military Campaigns, and Indirect Rule in Hyderabad
“The French,” Vasant K. Bawa argues, “contributed indirectly to the success of the British empire in India by introducing a system of indirect control of the native state through an armed force, for whose maintenance some territory was assigned. This pattern was later adopted by Lord Wellesley and extended to different parts of India.”Footnote 51 Indeed, Wellesley's introduction of the subsidiary alliance system, by which India's native states by treaty relinquished their rights to negotiate with foreign powers independently of the British, has been understood as the consolidation and systematization of the ad hoc policies and ambitions of the British over the preceding half century. Viewed from the south, these policies were clearly driven in some measure by efforts to counteract French influence on the subcontinent. However, moving too quickly from Dupleix and Bussy's ambitions on the Coromandal coast to the systematization of indirect rule hazards eliding the specific nature of interstate politics as they developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This process was far from seamless or inevitable, and was characterized by both significant reversals of policy and differing opinion.
The French had intervened in succession disputes in the south, and ultimately extracted the rights to revenue in places such as the Northern Circars. Whatever their imperial ambitions, they had largely operated through client states. Initially, what the British also had in the Carnatic, and (hoped to have in) Bengal, were client states, territories that were ruled by leaders who owed their rise and ability to retain power to the Company.Footnote 52 In the Carnatic, this policy was especially effective because of the Nawabs' financial dependence on the Company. What the British created in Hyderabad with the Nizam was different, and evolved swiftly. The idea of making Hyderabad into another client state did exist, as will be discussed, but it was set aside as the British tried to consolidate an alliance that would recognize the sovereignty of the Nizam, while also obligating him to recognize their own alliances, therefore hemming in his ability to conduct an independent foreign policy. The result in this case was to transform the state from the outside in through an evolving process of treaty making.
In 1759, even before the Mughal emperor's grant of diwani to Clive, Colonel Forde entered into an agreement with the Nizam (Salabat Jung) for territory on the Coromandal coast, the port town of Masulipatam, and surrounding districts.Footnote 53 Whereas major Asian powers, such as the Mughal and Chinese emperors, were reluctant to enter into treaties with European trading companies (rather than directly with their sovereigns), other states had contracted agreements with them throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Forde had been deputed to the Northern Circars by Clive, who feared that the French would move north to assist the Nawab of Bengal. The Madras government sent M. John Andrews to accompany him. Together, they entered into an agreement with Ananda Raju (Raja of Chicacole/Vizianagaram) that would have put the British in possession of much larger expanses of territory on the coast.
This classic expression of territorial aggrandizement pursued by “men-on-the-spot” was not, however, applauded by their superiors. “The Council at Fort William deplore his [Andrews] tendency to acquire more territories in the name of the Company which according to them was against the Company's interest because it entails the maintenance of a large force, the revenues of the country will not be sufficient to defray the maintenance of a large force and that it is inconsistent with the general plan of assisting the gentleman on the Coast in driving away the French entirely out of India.”Footnote 54 Clearly then, as late as 1759, the Company's directors were most concerned with French rivalry, and intended to continue their policy of exercising Company authority within coastal enclaves, not a rapid territorial expansion. Under Laurence Sulivan's leadership of the Board of Directors in London, between 1758 and 1763, the Company refused the diwani of Bengal three times.Footnote 55 Under Clive, this policy changed, as he pressed the issue through the Mughal emperor's firman.Footnote 56
Unlike Bengal, the Mughal firman granting the Company territory in the south was not accompanied by a military defeat of the Nizam. Hence, the Madras Council, as neighbor to the Nizam, found itself negotiating the terms in Hyderabad on behalf of the Company. In 1766, they concluded a treaty by which the Company received the circars as “a free gift thereof on them and their heirs, for ever and ever, [and] do hereby promise and engage to have a body of their troops to settle the affairs of His Highness' government in everything that is right and proper, whenever required.”Footnote 57 The promise of troops to assist the Nizam was in fact a continuation of the practices of the French, whose troops had become instrumental in succession disputes in both Hyderabad and the Carnatic. The 1766 treaty brought the Nawab of the Carnatic, the British, and the Nizam together in “perpetual honour, favor, alliance, and attachment.” Having the Nawab of the Carnatic as a signatory meant that his hereditary claims to Arcot were simultaneously recognized by the Nizam and the British. British military assistance was assured to the Nizam only when their own possessions and those of the Carnatic were secure and at peace. The size of these contingents was to be determined by the Company alone, and the costs were to be born from the revenues that the British would receive from the Northern Circars. The desire to secure troops trained by European powers was not unique to the state of Hyderabad.Footnote 58 Willingness to militarily assist the Nizam was not necessarily shared in London by the Company's directors, and soon all but disappeared as a result of the Nizam and his family's role in the first Anglo-Mysore war in 1767.Footnote 59
Soon after concluding this treaty with the British in 1766, the Nizam had second thoughts. Vacillation ran from a military alliance with the British, to the Nizam's short-lived cooperation with their military rival, Hyder Ali of Mysore, culminating in the Nizam's agreeing to recognize Tipu (Hyder Ali's son) as the Nawab of Arcot, in place of the British client.Footnote 60 Left having to explain this reversal to the Court of Directors in London, the Madras government wrote:
If any judgment could be formed of the Actions of the Soubah [Nizam] on the principles of reason and prudence, it would appear impossible that he should so readily have relinquished our alliance when he had all the assurances both by words and actions of our determined resolution to establish and support his authority, but that prevailing argument Money which Hyder Alli plentifully Distributed among his Ministers soon garnered him a considerable Party at Court, nor was this a point Difficult to be carried, as they naturally concluded their Influence with the Soubah must decrease, in proportion as ours prevailed. It was also to be expected that Bazalet Jung [the Nizam's nephew] would exert his utmost endeavours to prevent a mutual confidence between us and the Soubah; as by that means he had two objects in view. First that while the Soubah entertained any jealousy towards Us, he would not oblige him to give up the Circar of Candavir. Or in case of a rupture, and we should proceed to Extremities he might possibly entertain hopes of obtaining the Soubahship [become the ruler of Hyderabad].Footnote 61
At the time, the government of Madras was not unaware of the complex ways in which Hyderabad's policy was determined. The lines between foreign and domestic concerns were thin ones. Matters of succession, always so important to the maintenance of even the Mughal Empire in its heyday, could, in the context of eighteenth century politics, quickly evolve into matters involving multiple parties and states, as they did with Basalat Jung, or as they had when the question of the Northern Circars was first raised.Footnote 62 Likewise, if, as we noted earlier, the functioning of the Nizam's court, and state, was especially dependent upon the forging of alliances with various elites, it is not surprising that those alliances had to be constantly renegotiated, as seems to have been the case in this instance with the ministers who came to align themselves with the Mysore government.Footnote 63
It was during this war that officials in both Madras and Bengal thought to simply replace the Nizam. Here they returned to the tried method of establishing a client state. The suggestion came to them initially from the Vazir, or Nawab of Lucknow/Oudh, who recommended that “the Governor must write an 'arzi to the resplendent Presence for a sanad for the Deccan, and having obtained it, he may keep it. And when the Nizam has been expelled, the Governor may give the sanad to whom he pleases; when the disturbances begin, His Excellency must show it. By this means the Nizam will be deserted by his followers; and the lords and zamindars of that country, which is very extensive, will be disaffected towards him, and he will find it very difficult to support himself.”Footnote 64 This was an effort to delegitimize an enemy during a time of war by revoking his recognition from the emperor in the north.
Therefore, the Governor in Bengal wrote “as faithful adherents to His Majesty [the Mughal emperor], as protectors of the people of God, and as defenders of their own possessions which they owe to the Royal farmans, the English have been compelled to draw their swords in support of His Majesty's dominions, in their own protection, and in the cause of humanity.” They asked
that His Majesty may cause a draft sanad to be issued…that in case this enemy of mankind draws upon himself so calamitous a catastrophe as his ejectment from his territories, everything may be found prepared for the immediate nomination of a successor. Being a stranger to the family and connections of the Nizam, the writer is yet undecided whom to recommend to His Majesty for the office, but His Majesty may be assured that in a matter of so much delicacy and importance, the writer will in no way interfere without consulting His Majesty's illustrious approbation.Footnote 65
When news of this scheme eventually reached London, the directors were not impressed. They wrote to record their disapproval of “your application to the King for a blank firmaun for the Soubahdarry of the Decan, to be filled up at your pleasure, or at the pleasure of the President and Council of Madras,” and directed the Bengal government to “return it to the King & acquaint him that we will not suffer our servants to be guilty of such an abuse of the confidence he is pleased to repose in us.”Footnote 66 The idea that the Company would create client states across India seemed at that time insupportable from London, in part, perhaps, because it was British actions on behalf of these “clients,” both in representations to Parliament and in the waging of Indian wars, that was arousing public suspicion of corruption.
In the wake of British success in the first Anglo-Mysore War, a new treaty signed in 1768, 2 years later, recast many of the terms of the earlier arrangement, and embodied the means by which the British hoped to redefine their relationship to this state.Footnote 67 “It was stipulated in the former Treaty made at Hyderabad that the Company and the Soubah [Nizam] would mutually assist each other when required, and their own affairs would permit; but it being apprehended at present that such an agreement may subject both parties to difficulties, and that misunderstandings may arise on that account, it is now agreed only that a mutual peace, confidence, and friendship shall subsist….” The treaty did go on to promise the Nizam that the Company and Nawab of Arcot “will always be ready to send two battalions of sepoys and six pieces of artillery, manned by Europeans, whenever the Soubah shall require them…provided the Soubah pays the expense during the time that the said troops are employed.”Footnote 68 This was a move in the direction of the subsidiary alliance system developed by Wellesley: a refusal to recognize or authorize the rights of this sovereign to deploy British troops in war. It should, perhaps, go without saying that no native leader under the authority of the Nizam would have been able to make any similar claim by right. Additionally, the treaty separated discussion of the Northern Circars from promises of military assistance, treating both issues as independent. Now, the Company promised to pay the Nizam “if they peaceably possess the Circars…and the Soubah [Nizam] gives them no trouble.”Footnote 69
The Company could no longer be understood to be renters in the Nizam's dominions.Footnote 70 Whereas negotiations with the Nizam had begun because the British believed they needed his consent to effectively assume power in these districts, the language of this treaty was cast so as to assert British rights as devolving from the Mughal emperor (who was not mentioned in the first treaty, but prominently in the second) and not the Nizam. Additionally, this new treaty attempted to sever the relationship between Hyderabad and Mysore by having the Nizam declare “and [make] known to all the world, that he regards the said Naique [Hyder Ali] as a rebel and a usurper…because the said Naique has deceived the Nawab Ausuph Jah [Nizam], broken his agreement, and rendered himself unworthy of all further countenance and favours.”Footnote 71 Not only did the British then establish their own authority in the south as separate from that of the Nizam, they also had to pry apart polities within the south, to define the foreign relations of the Nizam's state even as they attempted to influence them.Footnote 72 The treaty was duly accompanied by a sanad (decree), under the Nizam's seal, which declared Hyder Ali to be a “rebel and usurper,” even as it instructed the zamindars of the Carnatic Balagaute (a territory that the British had recently annexed from Mysore) to pay no “attention to his [Hyder Ali's] deputies … [and] to stop all correspondence either with him or them.”Footnote 73 And so a remarkable injunction on correspondence entered the annals of British India.
Treaties and the Imperial States' System
Treaty-making with Hyderabad and the wars fought by Hyder Ali in the south coincided with a parliamentary inquiry of the East India Company's affairs, as well as with a hard-fought election of Company directors that witnessed the return of Laurence Sulivan to the Board in London. During this period, the whole system of treaty-making in South Asia came under scrutiny, creating both skepticism about its usefulness and, on the part of Governor General Hastings, a desire to enlarge and systematize it. It was perhaps because of public scrutiny in Britain that communication from London, even after these considerable changes in Nizam–British relations, continued to express dissatisfaction with the state of political relations in south India. “It is with utmost Concern We find, that the Victory you have gained tends to involve Us still further in this Chaos of Treaties and Engagements.” In fact, treaties themselves fueled allegations of East India corruption in Britain. “We cannot take a view of your Conduct, from the Commencement of your Negotiations for the Sircars, without the strongest disapprobation, and when we see the opulent Fortunes, suddenly acquired by our Servants, who are returned since that period it gives but too much weight to the Public opinion, that this Rage for Negotiations, Treaties and Alliances have private advantage more for its object, than the public Good.”Footnote 74
A year later, they were more generally ruing all of their actions in the south, including their territorial acquisitions and their contracts with revenue collectors.
When we reflect on the vast Length of the Country from the Northern Parts of Chicacole to the Southern Districts of Madura and Tinnuvelly, the Number of Garrisons to be maintained, and the wild Independence of most of the Rajahs and Polygars, from whom nothing can be collected but by a standing Force, we regret our having ever passed the Boundaries of the Carnatic, even for the Possession of the Circars; for we have great Doubts whether the Charges will not always exceed the Collections, and apprehend many ill Consequences from so great a Division of our Forces.Footnote 75
The idea that the Company's territorial empire in India had overextended itself was contemporaneous with that very extension.
Therefore, when, in 1781, at the beginning of the second Anglo-Mysore war, and after significant military defeats, Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of Bengal, proposed returning the Northern Circars to the Nizam of Hyderabad, he was reiterating themes that had been raised by the board of directors over a decade earlier. The place of the Northern Circars in discussions with the Nizam may have been one of the main reasons–although a largely neglected one–why company policy here continued to differ from that of Bengal. The immediate desire was to entice the Nizam to ally with the British during the course of the war. In January of 1782, newsletters from Poona were reporting conversations between the Nizam and Marathas about the possibility of his joining an “anti-English Confederacy.”Footnote 76 But larger questions were also raised. Were the Northern Circars a good investment? Were they profitable? Did the British possess the military force required to defend them? The Committee of Secrecy appointed by Parliament in 1773 had determined that after expenses (military and pēshcash [tribute]) the Company would be left with a clear profit of 43,310, just under the amount estimated by Husain Ali Khan.Footnote 77 The answer returned to Hastings's proposal from MacCartney (newly in charge of the Madras council) was that the Company should retain the Northern Circars. The tide had also definitively turned on the Board of Directors, who agreed with MacCartney. In the Northern Circars, also, the Company would henceforth devote itself to revenue extraction.
Hastings was motivated by a larger vision of the British Empire in India and of regularizing the interactions between the Company and the native states. Therefore, in 1777, he wrote to Alexander Elliot about the “general system” he had hoped to be empowered to establish, “namely, to extend the influence of the British nation to every part of India not too remote from their possessions, without enlarging the circle of their defence or involving them in hazardous or indefinite engagements, and to accept of the allegiance of such of our neighbours as shall sue to be enlisted among the friends and allies of the King of Great Britain.”Footnote 78 His plan to return the Northern Circars to the Nizam was formulated within the context of this larger imperial vision, one that imagined permanent relationships of alliance with India's native states. Hastings hoped to implement this new system of relations first with Oudh/Awadh and Berar (states bordering Bengal), but eventually also incorporating others in to a treaty system “executed in the name of the King of Britain.”Footnote 79 Hastings's plan acknowledged that “an extension of territory beyond certain bounds is dangerous,”Footnote 80 and proposed, rather, the extension of a treaty-making system that would afford the British greater military capacity (by requiring the maintenance of British troops by native states), greater security (in that states would be tied to the British imperial order by permanent relationships of defense), and greater income (in that they would pay subsidies for the maintenance of these troops).Footnote 81 In other words, Hastings hoped to extend the power and the authority of the British Empire in India not through conquest, but by means of establishing permanent relationships between India's natives states and the British crown.
Treaties between European and non-European states in the East Indies had at times, even prior to this period, been unequal. Charles H. Alexandrowicz has argued that these unequal treaties, or the beginnings of the parceling of sovereign rights, emerged from a desire to eliminate rival European commercial competition. “The monopolization of trade found its further expression in the application of the discriminatory clause by which one Company made the contracting Ruler discriminate against other Companies and their nationals. Inter-European discrimination was gradually extended from trade to politics, and at this stage the monopolization of external relations of the Ruler by one or another of the contracting European agencies resulted in inequality of treaty making between them.”Footnote 82 In the case of Hyderabad, this inter-European discrimination had been extended to non-Europeans rulers as well. What was unique about Hastings's vision then, was not the reference to unequal treaties. Rather, it lay in his imagination of a web of such treaties stretching across the subcontinent and being pursued as a possible alternative to territorial expansion. Neilesh Sen has argued that Hastings's desire to create treaty relations directly with the British crown was not incidental, and that Hastings had what “amounted to a coherent and farsighted proposal for a government of reformed structure and more legitimate authority. The [British] monarch, under… [Hastings'] scheme, was to have represented a guarantee of open, regulated government, fettered neither by the pretence of deferring to Mogul power nor by the subordination of the British provinces to the interests of a commercial body.”Footnote 83 In suggesting the Crown as the arbiter of power on the subcontinent, Hastings proposed a plan that he knew would be controversial, and which ultimately, at the time, had little support in London itself.
Many of India's native rulers themselves hoped to establish binding agreements directly with the British crown, but had to wait for Queen Victoria's proclamation in the aftermath of the Rebellion of 1857 to do so.Footnote 84 It was only as the Indian Empire made a permanent transition from the jurisdiction of Company to the British state that the native states were also understood to be permanently tied to the Crown; Queen Victoria's Proclamation itself was understood as a Magna Charta by the princes. By the late nineteenth century, as Laura Benton has demonstrated “these [native] states could be viewed as relating to one another and at times to the imperial power in the same way as nation-states in the international order, with the difference that the imperial government possessed legal hegemony as the dominant political entity. In this sense, imperial administration represented a perfected international order, one without the Austinian problem of the absence of an overarching legal authority.”Footnote 85 With the formalization of the order of princely states post-1857, figures such as Henry Maine could understand imperial sovereignty as functioning through a parceling of sovereign rights, with the British acting as a “paramount” power on the subcontinent. This formal theoretical acknowledgement of the semi- or “quasi-sovereign” status of India's princes and native institutions as indeed efforts to preserve that status, came, as Karuna Mantena has shown, as a response to the wide-ranging rebellions that shook the foundations of the British Empire in the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 86 However, the drive toward this “perfected” international order began much earlier than we have readily acknowledged, and in the context of political debate over the expanding financial, administrative, and military capabilities of the modern state.Footnote 87 The parceling of sovereign rights was not an accidental outcome of the Company's military endeavors, nor was it simply a reflection of the way things had to be. Rather, it was a consequence of British attempts to spread their power, cut their costs, and avoid political controversy; attempts that were a foundational element of the expansion of the British Empire in South Asia.
Conclusion
Political debate in Britain about the rights of the Company in India was at a high pitch in the aftermath of the “revolution” in Bengal. Contentious elections for the Board of Directors, along with Parliamentary enquiries, and news of wars being fought in India, meant that the Company's policy was always potentially subject to the scrutiny of politicians, stockholders, and a larger public. Spencer Leonard has drawn our attention to radical critiques of the Company, centered on a liberal political economy, which questioned the legitimacy of the Company's territorial conquest, in the period of the 1767 enquiry by Parliament.Footnote 88 As late as 1772, one anonymous pamphleteer published a tract that he claimed to have written 2 years earlier. In it, he accused the East India Company of having “contrived to establish the most complete system known of fraud and violence, by uniting, in the same persons the several functions of Merchant, Soldier, Financier and Judge; depriving, by that union, all those functions of their mutual checks…. It is to be hoped that the time is not far off, when those functions, so improperly combined, will be again separated: when his Majesty will resume, from those Merchants, the sword, which, by our happy Constitution, cannot be placed, with energy or safety, in any hand but his own.”Footnote 89 It was in this context that the British first had to manage, not only criticisms of their administration in Bengal, but also their relations with other Indian states. Preserving these states avoided some of the political questions that arose as the result of outright acquisition, about the rights of the Company to govern vast populations, and about the organization and principles of that governance, along with its relationship to commerce. Although the company had long assumed the functions of a state in the east, in the mid-eighteenth century it was being asked to explain its right to tax Indian subjects, or to wage offensive wars for purposes that seemed to have little to do with supporting and protecting Britain's trade.Footnote 90 Into the late 1780s, this questioning continued, most famously with Edmund Burke's denunciation of Warren Hastings actions as governor-general.
However, treaty-making too was fraught with difficulties. The forging of alliances with Indian powers was accompanied by charges of corruption, and with expressions of dismay from different British players trying to sort out their priorities in India. Leaving a native ruler on his throne, however, did not mean that the state would continue its native practices. The waging of war on both internal and external frontiers was characteristic of the state system as it then existed in south India, and stabilizing these internal and external boundaries was a task to which the British would apply themselves over the course of the next century, beginning in these early years with the signing of treaties and the issuing of sanads. In this evolving system of interstate relations, the British would fundamentally alter the ways that sovereignty was made and performed on the subcontinent. From the movement of sovereigns and their military camps through the countryside and communication with and shifting alliances between a range of elites, these states had relied upon a variety of actors and relationships to sustain and project their authority. This reliance made them no less effective, as can be seen by the ability of the Nizam to establish his authority over a wide expanse of territory in the eighteenth century Deccan. This mode of authority, expressive of a certain tolerance indeed reliance upon multiple parties across a range of territories, was ultimately displaced by an order that attempted to divide sovereign rights in novel ways. This new division began with the military powers of the native states. Now, native rulers would agree to house troops, even pay for them, but could not command them unilaterally. As these treaties were ultimately (despite Hastings' desire) signed with the Company, the only recourse these native states had in seeking redress was to personally address the British crown and Parliament, as leader after leader, beginning with Arcot, Awadh, and the Mughal emperor himself tried to establish some relationship to those two bodies.Footnote 91 Ultimately then, well before 1857, the fate of these states was tied to British politics.
Lauren Benton is right to remind us that “While an iconic association with empire is the pink shading of British imperial possessions in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century maps, that image, and others like it, obscures the many variations of imperial territories. Empires did not cover space evenly but composed a fabric that was full of holes, stitched together out of pieces, a tangle of strings. Even in the most paradigmatic cases, an empire's spaces were politically fragmented; legally differentiated; and encased in irregular, porous, and sometimes undefined borders.”Footnote 92 However, even this patchwork had its decisive moments; in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, imperial administrators set about trying to create a system of alliances with lesser states, states that vested many of their sovereign rights in the hands of European companies. It is to be hoped that this article has demonstrated that this moment of transition not only affected the way that these states conducted their foreign policy, but that it also, in separating them from elites in neighboring territories, affected the ways that their sovereignty and political authority were renewed internally.
It was in the wake of these events that theories of natural law came to be reassessed in Europe. In the nineteenth century, John Austin could argue that international law was not in fact positive law, as there was no sovereign to impose it.Footnote 93 This influential legal theory emerged in the early nineteenth century, after the British had cemented their authority as sovereign over a system of states in India. It was perhaps in response to Austin that international jurists began to be more sparing in their attribution of sovereignty to non-European states, and, therefore, also to restrict the applicability of the law of nations. “The question of the geographic scope of the law of nations was central for theorists of international law throughout the second half of the nineteenth century in a way that it had not been to the thinkers they recognized as the founders of their field—Grotius, Pufendorf, Wolff, or Vattel, for instance.”Footnote 94 Jennifer Pitts further argues that “While international jurists, whatever their disagreements over the most satisfactory grounds for the exclusion, agreed that international law could apply to only very few non-European states, we find dissent from this position in the broader public debate and efforts to establish European states' extensive legal obligations abroad.”Footnote 95 In its most exclusionary form, this notion of international law presented the colonial encounter “not [as] a confrontation between two sovereign states, but rather between a sovereign European state and a non-European society that was deemed by jurists to be lacking in sovereignty—or else, at best only partially sovereign.”Footnote 96 Understanding the equal antiquity of indirect rule and territorial acquisition in South Asia as imperial practices might, therefore, also contribute to a better understanding of the evolution of international legal thought, and the particular problems that it has sought to resolve.
