The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

by William Dalrymple

As they approached the first serious obstacle, the Fort of Budge Budge, whose heavy guns commanded a bend in the river, they disembarked the sepoys, who had a tough march of sixteen hours, wading sometimes breast-high through water, at other times stumbling through jungle or marshy paddy.

as the sun rose, the full scale of the devastation became apparent: Government House, St Anne’s church and the grand mansions lining the river were all burned-out shells, rising jagged from the loot-littered riverfront like blackened, shattered teeth from a diseased gum. The wharves were derelict; inside the mansions, the gorgeous Georgian furniture, family paintings and even harpsichords had been burned as firewood where they stood in the middle of what had once been drawing rooms.

On 3 January, Clive declared war on Siraj ud-Daula in the name of the Company; Watson did the same in the name of the Crown. It was the first time that the EIC had ever formally declared war on an Indian prince: ‘The chess board of time presented a new game,’ noted Ghulam Husain Salim’s account, Riyazu-s-salatin.

Clive and Watson set off in the Kent to attack Siraj ud-Daula’s principal port, Hughli Bandar, to exact a violent revenge for the destruction of Calcutta. On arrival, they raked the ghats of Hughli with grapeshot, then landed the grenadiers at four o’clock in the evening, seizing the area around the fort. At 2 a.m., under a full moon, they scaled the fortifications with siege ladders. Once inside, they made ‘themselves masters of the place, in less than an hour, with little or no loss, effecting a prodigious slaughter’ of the sleeping garrison.

Acting with his usual decisiveness, Clive ‘went immediately on board Admiral Watson’s ship, and represented to him the necessity of attacking the Nabob without delay; and desired the assistance of four or five hundred sailors, to carry the ammunition and draw the artillery; which he [Watson] assented to. The sailors were landed about one o’clock in the morning. About two, the troops were under arms, and about four they marched to the attack of the Nabob’s camp.’

By 11 a.m., Clive’s force had returned dispirited to the city, having lost nearly 150 men, including both Clive’s aide-de-camp and his secretary, both of whom were killed by his side:

What they had no idea of was the terror they inspired in Siraj ud-Daula, who only narrowly escaped with his life. Around 1,500 of his Murshidabad infantry were not so lucky, nor were 600 cavalry and four elephants.

Quite unknown to Clive at the time, his night attack was in fact a decisive turning point. Terrified by the unexpected nature of the assault, Siraj struck camp and retreated ten miles that morning. The following day he sent an ambassador with proposals for peace.

on 9 February he signed the Treaty of Alinagar, which granted almost all the Company’s main demands, restoring all the existing English privileges and freeing all English goods of taxes, as well as allowing the Company to keep their fortifications and establish a mint. His only insistence was that Drake be removed – ‘Tell Roger Drake’ not to ‘disturb our affairs’ – something the Company was more than happy to grant.

Watson was unequivocal about what he now needed to do: attack the French, wherever they were to be found. And in the case of Bengal, that meant starting by attacking the French colony of Chandernagar, twenty miles upstream.

Early on the morning of 23 March, Clive stormed and took the principal French battery commanding the river. From that point on, Admiral Watson took over and it was to sea power, not Clive’s land forces, that most casualties fell. The French, who had only 700 men to defend their fort, fought bravely in their burning, disintegrating buildings, with no possibility of relief.

The capture of Chandernagar was a body blow to the entire French presence in India. As Jean Law noted, ‘with the fall of Chandernagar, the gate to the entire country was thrown open to the English, a gate that opened onto the road of glory and riches.

As April drew to a close, Clive and Watson began to pack up and prepare their troops to leave Bengal for the Coromandel, nervous at how long they had left Madras undefended and open to a French attack. There the whole Bengal campaign would have ended, but for the hatred and disgust now felt for Siraj ud-Daula by his own court, and especially Bengal’s all-powerful dynasty of bankers, the Jagat Seths.

A second scheme had revolved around supporting Siraj’s cousin, Shaukat Jung of Purnea, ‘a subahdar to the taste of Jagat Seth and the chief Moors and Rajas’, but the latter had proved even less dependable than Siraj.56 He went into battle against his psychotic cousin in such a cloud of opium that he was ‘incapable of holding up his head’ or to do more ‘than listen to the songs of his women … so alighted from his elephant … and was totally out of his senses when a musquet-ball, lodging into his forehead, made him return his soul to its maker’.

Only now that Clive had demonstrated his military capacity in taking back Calcutta, then seizing Chandernagar, did the plotters decide to reach out to the Company as a third option, hoping to harness the EIC’s military forces for their own ends.

Miiiiiistaaaaaake

The bankers and merchants of Bengal who sustained Siraj ud-Daula’s regime had finally turned against him and united with the disaffected parts of his own military; now they sought to bring in the mercenary troops of the East India Company to help depose him.

a group of Indian financiers plotting with an international trading corporation to use its own private security force to overthrow a regime they saw threatening the income they earned from trade.

the EIC men on the ground were ignoring their strict instructions from London, which were only to repulse French attacks and avoid potentially ruinous wars with their Mughal hosts.

In all, Clive estimated that the Nawab had gathered 35,000 infantry, 15,000 cavalry and fifty-three pieces of heavy artillery which was superintended by a team of French experts. With its back to the bends of the Hughli, there was by 8 a.m. no exit for Clive’s troops. Whether Mir Jafar lived up to his promises or not, there was now no realistic option but to fight.

Then, towards noon, the skies began to darken, thunder boomed and a torrential monsoon storm broke over the battlefield, soaking the men and turning the ground instantly into a muddy swamp. The Company troops made sure to keep their powder and fuses dry under tarpaulins; but the Mughals did not.

A huge contingent of Mughal cavalry on the left then began to move away down to the banks of the Hughli and left the fighting. This, it turned out, was Mir Jafar, withdrawing just as he had promised.

Clive was not planning any treachery: ever the pragmatist, his need to install and use Mir Jafar as his puppet overruled the anger he had felt over the past week.

Mir Jafar was handed by Clive onto the masnad, the throne platform, and saluted by him as Governor. He then stated publicly, and possibly sincerely, that the Company would not interfere with his government, but ‘attend solely to commerce’.

As it turned out, the Jagat Seth’s goodwill was immediately necessary. There was only about Rs1.5 crore in the treasury – much less than expected, and if Clive and the Company were to be paid their full commission it would have to be through a loan brokered by the great bankers. Clive’s personal share of the prize money was valued at £234,000, as well as a jagir, a landed estate worth an annual payment of £27,000.

Like two gangsters after a heist, Mir Jafar and Clive watched each other uneasily, while the Jagat Seth searched for money:

The same day that the remains of Siraj ud-Daula were paraded through the streets, 7 July, exactly 200 days since the task force had set off up the Hughli to Fulta, Clive finally got his hands on his money. It was one of the largest corporate windfalls in history – in modern terms around £232 million, of which £22 million was reserved for Clive.

In all, perhaps £2.5 million was given to the Company by the Murshidabad Nawabs in the eight years between 1757 and 1765 as ‘political gifts’.

The changes he had effected were permanent and profound. This was the moment a commercial corporation first acquired real and tangible political power.90 It was at Plassey that the Company had triumphantly asserted itself as a strong military force within the Mughal Empire.

From this point, the nature of British trade changed: £6 million** had been sent out in the first half of the century, but very little silver bullion was sent out after 1757. Bengal, the sink into which foreign bullion disappeared before 1757, became, after Plassey, the treasure trove from which vast amounts of wealth were drained without any prospect of return.

The Company was now no longer simply one of a number of European trading companies competing for Indian markets and products. Rather, it found that it had become a kingmaker and an autonomous power in its own right.

They now suspected that if they grew their army sufficiently they could probably seize any part of the country they took a fancy to, and rule it either directly or through a pliant puppet. Moreover, many Indians were beginning to understand this, too, meaning that the Company would become the focus for the attentions of all the dethroned, dispossessed and dissatisfied rulers, leading to a kaleidoscope of perpetually reforming and dissolving alliances that occurred from this point and which offered the region little prospect of peace or stability.

Three months later, in September, Clive had to return to Murshidabad to try and sort out a growing chaos there. Exactions by the Company, gathering arrears of pay of Mir Jafar’s troops, military paralysis in the face of rebellions and punitive expeditions using Company sepoys created a growing vortex of violence and unrest.

Clive and his colleagues had intended to do little more than re-establish British trade on a favourable footing and to ensure the accession of a more friendly Nawab. But what they had in fact done was fatally and permanently to undermine the authority of the Nawabs, bringing chaos to what had been up to that point the most peaceful and profitable part of the old Mughal Empire.

the directors consistently abhorred ambitious plans of conquest, which they feared would get out of control and overwhelm them with debt. For this reason the great schemes of conquest of the EIC in India very rarely originated in Leadenhall Street. Instead, what conquering, looting and plundering took place was almost always initiated by senior Company individuals on the spot, who were effectively outside metropolitan control, and influenced by a variety of motives ranging from greed, naked acquisitiveness and the urge to get rich quick, to a desire for national reputation and a wish to outflank the French and frustrate their Indian ambitions.

If anyone had changed it was in reality the smugly victorious and now supremely wealthy Clive. Indeed, such was Clive’s swaggering self-confidence at this period that he began to show signs of regretting sharing power with the Mughals at all.

Even more than the distrust and contempt, what emerges from the letters of the period is the sense of mutual incomprehension between these two very different worlds which had now been brought into such close proximity. Mir Jafar, for example, clearly imagined the Company to be an individual.

The incomprehension was mutual. In London, the directors were still dimly digesting the news of the overthrow and murder of Siraj ud-Daula, leading one anxious but inattentive Company director to ask another, was it true that the recently assassinated Sir Roger Daulat was a baronet?

Not since Cortés had Europe seen an adventurer return with so much treasure from distant conquests.

‘The cost of living rose immediately with the coming of this Croesus,’ wrote Horace Walpole, the waspish Whig, in his diary. ‘He was all over estates and diamonds … and if a beggar asks charity, he says, “Friend I have no small brilliants with me.”’

the Salisbury Journal was reporting that even Lady Clive’s pet ferret had a diamond necklace worth over £2,500.

Just before Clive left, Mir Jafar had been able to pay only three of his army’s thirteen months’ arrears of pay. As a result the unpaid troops were openly mutinous and some were starving:

It had taken only three years since Plassey to impoverish what had recently been probably the wealthiest town in India.

It was now clear to everyone that Mir Jafar was simply not capable of ruling Bengal: an almost uneducated Arab soldier, he had no political skills and little conception how to run a state or administer its finances.

The Mughal nobility and officers of the army came to be increasingly resentful of the massive tribute that Mir Jafar had so thoughtlessly agreed to pay for Company support in overthrowing Siraj ud-Daula, and which was now daily depriving them of the payments and salaries that sustained the engine of state.

To avoid further embarrassments, the bankers announced they were heading off with their families on an extended pilgrimage to the temple of their deity, Parasnath, in the mountains of Jharkhand. When the Nawab ordered his troops to block their way, the Seths called his bluff and forced their way through.

Miran’s first concern was systematically to wipe out what remained of the house of Aliverdi Khan to prevent any counter-coup. He had already sent his henchmen to drown the entire harem of Aliverdi Khan and Siraj ud-Daula. Next came the turn of five of Siraj ud-Daula’s closest relatives.

‘that unfortunate innocent youth was forced between two of those wooden frames called takhtahs [planks], where they conserve shawls and other precious goods; and the ropes having been strained hard at one and the same time, he had been squeezed to death, and it was from that kind of rack that that guiltless soul took its flight to regions of unalterable innocence and eternal repose’.

Miran’s paranoia grew in proportion to the chaos: the list of potential victims he kept scribbled in a special pocket book soon extended past 300.

But the Company, far from helping Mir Jafar, was actively engaged in undermining the economy which sustained him, so helping wring the neck of the Bengali goose which had been laying such astonishing golden eggs.

By 1762, at least thirty-three of these private businesses had set themselves up in more than 400 new British trading posts around the province. Here they defied the power of local officials, refusing to pay the few taxes, tolls or customs duties they were still required to pay, as well as encroaching upon land to which they were not entitled. In this manner they ate away at the economy of Bengal like an invasion of termites steadily gnawing at the inside of an apparently sturdy wooden structure.