Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire

New Cambridge History of India #2.1

by C.A. Bayly

This volume provides a synthesis of some of the most important themes to emerge from the recent proliferation of specialized scholarship on the period of India's transition to colonialism and seeks to reassess the role of Indians in the politics and economics of early colonialism. It discusses new views of the "decline of the Mughals" and the role of the Indian capitalists in the expansion of the English East India Company's trade and urban settlements. It considers the reasons for the inability of indigenous states to withstand the British, but also highlights the relative failure of the Company to transform India into a quiescent and profitable colony. Finally it deals with changes in India's ecology, social organization, and ideologies in the early nineteenth century, and the nature of Indian resistance to colonialism, including the Rebellion of 1857.

Genres: History, India, Nonfiction, Politics, British Literature, Academic

246 pages, Paperback

First published April 29, 1988

About the author

Christopher Alan Bayly was a British historian specializing in British Imperial, Indian, and global history. A graduate of the University of Oxford, he was the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge. He was knighted in 2007 for achievements as a historian.

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book covers the historiography of how Indian developed in the British Empire up through the Mutiny in 1857. The rise of British dominance in the Punjab as well as the surrounding countryside is broken up by category and analyzed through the relevant literature at the time. This book does a wonderful job of assessing where the debate on empire was at the end of the 1980's and while it is important to update for current literature it is still a very thorough and useful account. It looks at how the rise of a farming class gave way to the caste system that was a development of the British Raj. This is mostly an account of the pre European and early days of the East India Company that developed into the British Empire following the Mutiny. Overall this is a very useful book on how the British Empire came into formation and the effect that Indian society had on forming the crown jewel of the empire.

[Bernard English · Rating 3 out of 5]

I suppose any reader who is not a specialist in Indian history will be reading this book wondering how Britain benefited India or more likely how much did Britain hamper Indian industrialization and modernization.  Bayly hints at the answer but it's not the subject per se of the book. First off, "[A]round the 1700's India was a  major source of artisan production but around the 1800s it became mostly a raw materials exporter, a situation which is only now slowly reversing again." Even if the Brits hurt Indian development, didn't the Moghuls as well? After all the British empire was built on top of the fading Mughal empire.  Yes, but "the range of the Company state, its monopoly of physical force, and its capacity to command resources from a peasantry now increasingly disarmed set it apart even in its early days from all the regimes which had preceded it." In fact, the colonialists were able to prevent Indian states from entering into bilateral relations with each other. They even claimed that a kingdom without an heir would escheat to the colonial state. Other manifestations of British power were monopolies.

"The company  secured control of monopolies of valuable produce such as saltpetre, salt indigo and betel nut." Bayly writes that in general "Indian merchants were excluded from free trade in many valuable commodities by British monopolies, especially after 1763."  There was some tax relief:  In 1784 by an Act of Parliament the the British excise tax on tea was reduced from 129 per cent to 12.5 pre cent." But one wonders how much damage had already been done by a 129 per cent tax! Now for all the exclusion, there were some special minorities that benefited financially from British colonial policies which explains why a small European island nation could control such an expansive land mass. A few examples would do: "The Moplahs (Muslims of the  Malabar Coast) were agents in the pepper trade for the British; they alone had contacts with growers in the interior." Another example: "The powerful and influential Hindu and Parsi merchant communities had increasingly sought  the protection of the British merchant marine and the safety of British shipping in their voyages to east Asian ports." Divide and conquer seemed to have worked.

This policy was not limited to politics or economics proper--it infused colonial social policy so any benefits from being exposed to 'progressive' British thought was limited. "Outside the fort enclaves exclusive racial zones and European dominance in city government were quite slow to develop. However between 1770 and 1800 the easy symbiosis between Europeans and Indians began to decline under the pressures of world war and commercial rivalry. Multi-racial corporate cities in which Indians were justices, members of civic bodies and in which a variety of Mughal offices retained honour gave way to colonial cities in which an exclusively European executive dominated both Indian and European commercial communities." Again, "traditional India was not a rigid society. It was British rule which made it so, codifying many localised and pragmatic customs into a unified and Brahminised 'Hindoo Law' and classing people into immutable castes through the operations of the courts and ethnographical surveys." It was not fated that India would develop hardened castes. Earlier during the Mughal empire anti-hierarchical tendencies could easily be identified. In Bengal there was the teaching of Chaitanya who disparaged caste and ritual, stressing the need for individual absorption in god." In Nepal and Rajasthan, there were the Ramanandis, followers of Rama (Vishnu). " They rejected caste distinctions. . . ." The Swami Narayan, the founder of Satya Naryanis of Gujarat "dismissed caste as irrelevant to the soul's status before God." The Chamars of Central India (of particularly low social status) were "no longer weighed down by a sense of inferiority . . . the Satnami holds together and resists all attempts from other castes to reassert their traditional domination over them." Caste was not an "immutable given " of Indian society.  In fact, marriage outside caste was not unknown in 18th century India. There was much migration in the eighteenth century, which one imagines would break down social barriers, though later the British viewed migrants with fear as potential rebels and tried to control migrations. In Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, there was a "splitting up of Europeans from Indian residential areas. On the west coast there were small and exclusive communities of expatriates, particularly Scots and Anglo-Irish." And Maratha women, rather than giving in to Victorian values, "displayed their independence by riding their own mounts in camps and the Maratha countryside still boasted weak caste distinctions. . . ."

But didn't Britain at least 'invest' in India? Yes, but apparently only on the coffee and tea estates did the British show real entrepreneurial spirit and make improvements over past methods. And what of the wealth that was created in India? "First, there were large unreciprocated transfers of bullion and bills from India to Britain which were known as the Home Charges" which was referred to by Indian nationalists as the 'drain on wealth.' Then again, "much of this private wealth appears to have been exported in the form of silver to Macao and Canton through the agency of private British captains and Portuguese commercial houses." Or as Bayly puts it elsewhere "investment in internal trade and production remained as it had been in the eighteenth-century--a way of laundering profits and returning them to England."

The obvious conclusion seems to be that any benefit to India was either incidental or due to India's own business environment as the British were there first and foremost as imperialists and exploiters. The author does not put it so harshly, it's just my impression. Despite the fact that the book is relatively short, I still thought it was an overwhelming amount of information simply because it didn't seem so well organized. AND no, I wouldn't know how to organize it better. Maybe that's just the nature of India's rich history.

[Jennifer]

Too dense for me to finish. Also, I felt like concepts were repeated several times (i.e. "the British inserted themselves into the already established practice of revenue farming to gain a stronghold in India") without explaining how exactly those concepts worked. I made it about halfway and I'm still not sure what revenue farming is, but I know it was important.

[John Harvard · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is largely a series of essays that have been pulled together on a variety of different topics relating to the title of the book. The author has not taken the trouble to weave a narrative or to explore the broader societal factors that may have impacted the actions of Indian society during those years beyond a simple narration of the facts. As a result, the book is a dry read that leaves one challenged to slog through it, despite it having barely 200 pages. The title of the book is very interesting and the author could have developed a more interesting narrative by researching personal anecdotes from that era to support the statements made in the book. All in all, a dense, dry book.

[Milpool · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bayly tries to recuperate British India’s pre-Rebellion history from Whiggish teleology by analyzing how the disintegration of Mughal hegemony and the rise of Indian capitalists coincided with imperial power. The East India Company's dominance in this instance is recast from a salient historical determinant of empire to one factor amongst many in the historical trajectory of the subcontinent between ca. 1600 and 1857. Its sweep is a bit too sprawling for such a short volume, however, so the survey feels unfocused.

[Julie Bozza · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thorough consideration of the political, economic and cultural forces at work in the pre-colonial and early colonial era.

[Dr. GURMINDER]

C.A. Bayly

[Tyler Amick · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s a pretty dry read if I’m being honest

[Sagarika · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oxford has taken me to places I wouldn’t go to with a gun to my head (reading a history book in 5 hours fora lecture the next day)

[Chelsea · Rating 3 out of 5]

A really excellent book in terms of the information presented, but the presentation is incredibly frustrating for the reader. This is a dense, dry book, despite the interesting material it contains.

[Evan Stein · Rating 1 out of 5]

An example of exactly how history books SHOULDNT be written