The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

by William Dalrymple

Tipu was already one of the most feared and admired military commanders in India: able and brave, methodical and hard-working, he was above all innovative, determined to acquire the arsenal of European skills and knowledge, and to find ways to use them against his enemies.

Tipu began to import industrial technology through French engineers and experimented with harnessing water power to drive his machinery. He sent envoys to southern China to bring back silkworm eggs and established sericulture in Mysore, something that still enriches the region today.

More remarkably still, he created what amounted to a state trading company with its own ships and factories. Regulations issued to Tipu’s ‘commercial department’ survive, providing details of a state trade in valuable commodities such as sandalwood, silk, spices, coconut, rice, sulphur, and elephants imported into and exported from Srirangapatnam.

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ambassadors to Ottoman Istanbul

Keeping in mind his father’s advice to win the love of his subjects, Tipu went out of his way to woo and protect the Hindus of his own dominions. From the beginning of his reign he had loaded the temples of his realm with presents, honours and land. Few of his chancery records survive, but from the temple archives of the region we know, for example, that in 1784 he gave a land grant to one Venkatachala Sastri and a group of Brahmins, begging them ‘to pray for the length of his life and prosperity’.

But it was the great temple of Sringeri that always received his most generous patronage, as a stash of correspondence discovered within the temple in the 1950s bears witness.

Sending a large sum of cash and a consignment of grain ‘for the consecration of the goddess Sarada’, and to ‘feed one thousand Brahmins’, Tipu asked the Swami ‘please to pray for the increase of our prosperity and the destruction of our enemies’.

This was not just a matter of statecraft. Tipu, despite being a devout Muslim and viewing himself as a champion of Islam, thoroughly embraced the syncretic culture of his time and believed strongly in the power of Hindu gods.

The British consistently portrayed Tipu as a savage and fanatical barbarian, but he was in truth a connoisseur and an intellectual, with a library containing some 2,000 volumes in several languages, mainly on law, theology and the secular sciences, as well as amassing a large collection of modern scientific instruments including thermometers and barometers.

Tipu did, however, have some severe flaws which left him vulnerable to his enemies. For Tipu was prone, even by the standards of the time, to use unnecessary violence against his adversaries and those he defeated, creating many embittered enemies where conciliation would have been equally possible and much wiser.

Allied to this often counter-productive aggression and megalomania was a fatal lack of diplomatic skills. When Cornwallis reached Calcutta in September 1786, Tipu was already at war with both the Maratha Peshwa and the Nizam of Hyderabad, both of whom had been allies of his father. Unlike Haidar, who joined the Triple Alliance coalition against the British, Tipu’s aggressive attacks on his neighbours so alarmed both Marathas and Hyderabadis that, when courted by Cornwallis, they agreed to form a new Triple Alliance. This time the alliance would be with the Company, and it was aimed against Tipu’s Mysore.

Then, in December 1789, Tipu opened a new front. He had already conquered northern Malabar as far as Cochin; now he decided to bring to obedience the Raja of Travancore to its south.

So when, at daybreak on 29 December 1789, Tipu brought up his heavy artillery and blew a wide gap in the Travancore defences, sending in his crack Tiger Sepoys to massacre the unsuspecting Raja’s troops, he suddenly found himself at war not only with the Marathas, the Hyderabadis and the people of Travancore – but also, yet again, with his oldest and bitterest enemy, the East India Company.

The Third Anglo-Mysore War began, as had the previous two, with Tipu marching with unprecedented speed and violence into the Carnatic.

But Cornwallis had no intention of allowing Tipu to run rings around him. He was also determined to redeem his military reputation, tarnished by his surrender to George Washington at Yorktown a decade earlier.

In early February 1791, the portly figure of Marquess Cornwallis could be seen mounting his charger and trotting out of Madras at the head of an army of 19,000 sepoys.

After two months of resting, feasting and military parades with their Maratha and Hyderabadi allies, Cornwallis sent his men off to begin besieging Tipu’s mountain fortresses that guarded the remaining passes through the ghats. They started with those commanding the Nandi Hills, overlooking Bangalore, and the fearsome fort of Savandurga, perched on a near-vertical peak and believed to be one of the most impregnable fortresses in the Deccan.

Tipu had a larger army than this – more than 50,000 sepoys and cavalry troopers – but he was too careful a general to risk open battle against such a formidable force. Instead he stayed within the magnificent fortifications of Srirangapatnam which had been designed for him by French engineers on the latest scientific principles, following Sébastian de Vauban’s research into artillery-resistant fortification designs, as adapted by the Marquis de Montalembert in his book La Fortification Perpendiculaire.

Late on 5 February 1792, the three armies arrived in front of the formidable walls of Srirangapatnam island for the second time. Without waiting for Tipu to make the first move, and without telling his allies of his plans, Cornwallis launched an immediate attack, taking advantage of the moonless night.

Once Tipu had abandoned the encampment, and the fords were left unguarded, Cornwallis unleashed a second column towards the fortress at the eastern end of the island.

The following day, Tipu made a series of ineffectual counter-attacks, but, as the hopelessness of his position became apparent, more and more of his troops deserted and he was forced to send a message to Cornwallis, through some captured Company officers, suggesting peace negotiations.

The treaty was finally signed, and the two young princes – Abdul Khaliq, who was eight, and Muizuddin, aged five – handed over to Cornwallis on 18 March 1792.

In many ways 1792 was the major turning point for the East India Company in India: before this, the Company was often on the defensive and always insecure. After this year, the Company appeared increasingly dominant.

The reforms Cornwallis initiated on his return to Calcutta further consolidated this position. In America, Britain had lost its colonies not to Native Americans, but to the descendants of European settlers. Cornwallis was determined to make sure that a settled colonial class never emerged in India to undermine British rule as it had done, to his own humiliation, in America. By this period one in three British men in India were cohabiting with Indian women, and there were believed to be more than 11,000 Anglo-Indians in the three Presidency towns.61 Now Cornwallis brought in a whole raft of unembarrassedly racist legislation aimed at excluding the children of British men who had Indian wives, or bibis, from employment by the Company.

It was under Cornwallis, too, that many Indians – the last survivors of the old Murshidabad Mughal administrative service – were removed from senior positions in government, on the entirely spurious grounds that centuries of tyranny had bred ‘corruption’ in them.

Major William Palmer,

Cornwallis then set about making a series of land and taxation reforms guaranteeing a steady flow of revenue, particularly in time of war, as well as reinforcing the Company’s control of the land it had conquered.

These reforms quickly produced a revolution in landholding in Company Bengal: many large old estates were split up, with former servants flocking to sale rooms to buy up their ex-masters’ holdings. In the ensuing decades, draconian tax assessments led to nearly 50 per cent of estates changing hands.

Many old Mughal landowning families were ruined and forced to sell, a highly unequal agrarian society was produced and the peasant farmers found their lives harder than ever. But from the point of view of the Company, Cornwallis’s reforms were a huge success. Income from land revenues was both stabilised and enormously increased; taxes now arrived punctually and in full. Moreover, those who had bought land from the old zamindars were in many ways throwing in their lot with the new Company order. In this way, a new class of largely Hindu pro-British Bengali bankers and traders began to emerge as moneyed landowners to whom the Company could devolve local responsibility.

So even as the old Mughal aristocracy was losing high office, a new Hindu service gentry came to replace them at the top of the s...

They participated in the new cash crop trades to Calcutta – Dwarkanath Tagore, for example, making a fortune at this time in indigo – while continuing to lend the Company money, often for as much as 10–12 per cent interest. It was loans from this class which helped finance colonial armies and bought the muskets, cannon, horses, elephants, bullocks and paid the military salaries which allowed Company armies to wage and win their wars against other Indian states. The Company’s ever-growing Indian empire could not have been achieved without the political and economic support of regional power groups and local communities. The edifice of the East India Company was sustained by the delicate balance that the Company was able to maintain with merchants and mercenaries, its allied nawabs and rajas, and above all, its tame bankers.

In the end it was this access to unlimited reserves of credit, partly through stable flows of land revenues, and partly through the collaboration of Indian moneylenders and financiers, that in this period finally gave the Company its edge over their Indian rivals. It was no longer superior European military technology, nor powers of administration that made the difference. It was the ability to mobilise and transfer massive financial resources that enabled the Company to put the largest and best-trained army in the eastern world into the field.

The biggest firms of the period – the houses of Lala Kashmiri Mal, Ramchand-Gopalchand Shahu and Gopaldas-Manohardas – many of them based in Patna and Benares, handled the largest military remittances, taking charge of drawing bills of exchange in Bombay or Surat or Mysore, as well as making large cash loans, all of which made possible the regular payment, maintenance, arming and provisioning of the Company’s troops.

The Company in turn duly rewarded these invaluable services in 1782 when they announced that the house of Gopaldas would henceforth be the government’s banker in the place of the Jagat Seths. Support from the Company then enabled the house to br...

As Rajat Kanta Ray put it, ‘With regard to the indigenous systems of commercial credit, the Company was better placed than the Indian powers by virtue of its reputation as an international capitalist corporation with a developed sense of the importance of paying its debts. It was known, moreover, to have the biggest revenue surplus available in the country to offer as collateral for large contract loans obtained from sahukaras [moneylenders].’68 The Company was perceived as the natural ally of Indian traders and financiers; the British, wrote Hari Charan Das, did not ‘interfere with the wealth of any rich men, bankers and merchants, and other people who reside in their cities, but on the contrary they are kind to those who are wealthy.’69

As the Jagat Seths had discovered forty years earlier, the East India Company spoke a language Indian financiers understood, and offered a higher degree of security to Indian capital than its rivals.70 In the end, it all came down to money. By the end of the century, Bengal was annually yielding a steady revenue surplus of Rs25 million at a time when Scindia struggled to net Rs1.2 million* from his territories in Malwa.

Ultimately it was the East India Company, not the Marathas or the Sultans of Mysore, that the financiers across India decided to back.73 Moreover, for all the rapacity of the Company, it was an increasingly easy decision for them to make.

Meanwhile, the great Maratha Confederacy, the power which controlled the most land and fielded the largest and most formidable armies, was slowly beginning to unravel. On 1 June 1793, at the Battle of Lakheri, after many years of open rivalry and increasingly strained relations, Tukoji Holkar was comprehensively defeated by Mahadji Scindia. When the result of the battle was reported to the blind Shah Alam in Delhi, he chuckled and commented, ‘the power of the Marathas will soon be destroyed’.

It was no longer difficult to predict the future. By the 1790s the Comte de Modave, for one, had no doubt what lay in store for India. ‘I am convinced that the English will establish themselves in the Mughal empire only precariously and with much uncertainty,’ he wrote, ‘and they will no doubt, eventually, in due course of time, lose it.’

This pattern of behaviour, from which they have not deviated for several years, has allowed them to seize control of many areas beyond the limits of Bengal, so much so that they will soon be masters of the Ganges from Allahabad to the Ocean. They play the game of advancing without ever being seen to make any step forward … In brief, they assiduously practise that old maxim followed by the Romans in their politics, that is, in the words of Tacitus, everywhere to keep in place [local hereditary] rulers, in order to use them as instruments to reduce the people to slavery.

The Company, he believed, now looked unassailable. But he was overlooking one thing. There was in fact one force which could still stop the Company in its tracks. Modave’s own homeland, now in the grip of revolution and led by a heavily accented Corsican colonel named Napoleon Bonaparte, had just declared war against Britain on 1 February 1793.

On 17 May 1798, two days before Napoleon’s fleet slipped out of Toulon and sailed swiftly across the Mediterranean towards Alexandria, a single tall-masted ship, this time a sleek East Indiaman, was tacking into the River Hooghly after seven months at sea. On board was a man who would change the history of India as much as Napoleon would change that of France; indeed, though his name is largely forgotten today, in the next seven years he would conquer more territory in India, and more quickly, than Napoleon conquered in Europe.

The passenger was the new Governor General, Richard, Marquess Wellesley;2 ‘Arthur’ was his younger brother, who had also recently been posted to India, and who would, in time, eclipse Richard and be ennobled as the Duke of Wellington. Between them, the two would transform both India and Europe.

Where Wellesley differed quite markedly from his predecessors as Governor General was in his attitude to the Company he was expected to serve. For just as Calcutta was now quite different from the small, battered town familiar to Clive, so the Company was a very different beast from that which Clive had served. In India it might be immeasurably more powerful, with an army now roughly twenty times the size of that commanded by Clive; but in London, Parliament had been steadily chiselling away at its powers and independence, first with Lord North’s Regulating Act of 1773 and then with Pitt’s India Act of 1784.

Wellesley was, unrepentantly, a government man, and unlike his predecessors made no secret of his ‘utter contempt’ for the opinions of ‘the most loathsome den of the India House’.3 Though he would win the directors a vast empire, he came within a whisker of bankrupting their Company to do so, and it was clear from the beginning that he had set his sights on far more ambitious goals than maintaining the profit margins of the Company he was supposed to serve, but whose mercantile spirit he actually abhorred.

Unknown to the Company’s directors, Wellesley had come out east with two very clear goals in his mind. He was determined to secure India for British rule and was equally determined to oust the French from their last footholds on the subcontinent.

Henry D...

At a time of national crisis, when Britain was at war not only with France but also with Holland and Spain; when its last ally – Austria – had just laid down her arms; when a naval mutiny had broken out in the Channel Fleet; and when Napoleon was drawing up plans for seaborne invasions of both Ireland, then on the verge of rebellion, and the English south coast, this was not something the British government was prepared to tolerate.4

Major William Kirkpatrick