Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff
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community of European expatriates and a thriving regional court. He would never be British again. In Lucknow, he earned a small fortune, prominent friends, and recognition in European and Mughal circles alike. He also formed a large manuscript collection that anchored him firmly in both communities. Polier was one of many who discovered in Lucknow the means and chance to collect and cross borders. His friends Claude Martin, Benoît de Boigne, and even the nawab of Awadh himself, Asaf ud-Daula—who ascended the throne vacated by his father, Shuja, in 1775—did the same. Their stories bring a remarkable and little-explored side of imperial culture into view.
By the time Antoine Polier moved to Awadh, British rule in India was taking root. In Bengal, the Company began to develop tools and institutions with which to govern its vast and unfamiliar new territory and subjects. To gather taxes, for instance, it needed data about population, agricultural production, and trade—to say nothing of knowledge of India’s basic geography. In 1765 the first survey of India was undertaken by Major James Rennell; his map “Hindoostan,” published in 1782, offered the European public its first coherent and detailed image of “India” as a geographical unit.4 To defend and control its territory, the Company recruited more and more Indian sepoys, which meant that officers had to learn local languages and how to accommodate the needs and expectations of high-caste Hindu troops (its preferred constituency). Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal from 1773 to 1785, set efforts to “know” India at the center of his governing program. Where Robert Clive tried to live India down, Hastings and his peers made it their mission to lift India up, searching through its past for ways to guide its future. Wanting to rule India according to its “own” traditions, Hastings sponsored projects ranging from the translation of Persian histories and the Sanskrit Bhagavat Gita, to the compilation of Hindu and Muslim legal traditions; from supporting a madrasa (Muslim school) in Calcutta and the first Bengali printing press, to promoting exploratory missions to Tibet. Alongside these Companyfunded Orientalist projects, “amateur” Orientalism flowered in Calcutta’s Asiatic Society of Bengal, founded in 1784.
Meanwhile in Britain, a skeptical public was learning about and fitfully coming to accept this new kind of overseas dominion, so different from the settlement colonies of the Americas. The paranoia over nabobs had subsided. East India Company propagandists worked to foster an image of the Company as a benevolent, fair-minded ruler. The Company did have its critics, and always would. The most eloquent was Edmund Burke, who in 1788 would lead the charge to impeach Warren Hastings for corruption and abuse of power. Owing not least to Burke’s intervention, the Hastings Trial (at least during the first of its seven years) would pose a higher-profile, more sweeping, and vastly more dramatic challenge to Company rule than the 1772-1773 Clive inquiry had done. But while Burke, and Whigs led by Charles James Fox, opposed the abuses of empire on moral grounds, they were mainly attacking Company “despotism”; the fact of British rule in Bengal was widely acknowledged and accepted. In the event, Fox’s radical East India Bill of 1783—which would have brought the Company under full parliamentary control—failed; William Pitt’s more moderate India Act of 1784 established a parliamentary Board of Control, which jointly supervised Indian government with the Company’s Court of Directors. (Hastings, whose sad, distinguished figure in the dock had won him more sympathy than opprobrium, was acquitted by the House of Lords in 1795.)
This, then, was the “British India” that Robert Clive had helped to build: an actual empire of conquest and direct rule administered with a blend of rapacity and paternalism, and an idea of empire gradually being woven into British government and society. Yet there were two significant respects in which late-eighteenth-century India was far from British. The first lay with men like Antoine Polier: the thousands of non-British Europeans who lived and worked under the East India Company banner. Throughout the 1750s and 1760s, the East India Company army—like the British Crown army, and the armies of many other European powers—relied heavily on recruits from across Europe. In 1766, for instance, the year of the Company’s decree on foreign promotions, only three in five white soldiers in the Madras army were actually English or Welsh. Continental European troops composed almost 15 percent of the army—more than the Irish (13 percent) or the Scots (11 percent). At the end of 1800, the ratios were still more pronounced: one in every five soldiers in the Madras army came from the Continent, while only half the army was English or Welsh. And if the Company’s white soldiery was by no means fully British, neither was it uniformly Protestant. Though most of these continental troops hailed from the stalwart Protestant regions of the north—the Netherlands, the northern German states, and Scandinavia—large numbers of French and southern Europeans, combined with the Irish Catholics, made for a substantial Catholic presence.5
Even Calcutta, that most British of Indian cities, was a lot less British than images let on. Popular aquatints produced in the 1780s by the uncle-nephew team Thomas and William Daniell showed a polite and well-tended city, where swift phaetons flew over the streets as sepoys paraded past. But north of the wide avenues and clean white colonnades of the city center twisted the narrow lanes of Calcutta’s Bengali districts, home to anywhere from one hundred thousand to four hundred thousand Bengalis.6 Also outside the frame were the Armenian and “Portuguese” (often a synonym for mixed-race or Indian Catholics) quarters, each with long-established communities. (When Siraj ud-Daula marched on Calcutta in 1756, more Portuguese and Armenian militiamen were on hand to defend the city than regular European troops.)7 And according to a “List of Inhabitants Residing in Calcutta,” drawn up in 1766 for Clive, only 129 out of 231 European men—more than half—were formally British, that is, English, Welsh, or Scottish. Twenty were Irish, another twenty from German states, and the rest from virtually every corner of western Europe. They included discharged veterans, resettled émigrés from French Chandernagore, and a wide range of enterprising souls, such as John Richard, Calcutta’s French pastry chef; John Davour, “Lord Clive’s German musician”; and Laurens Orman, a Swede who lived in Calcutta from 1759 to “keep a Punch house with permission.”8 Probate records offer evidence that communities mixed: Bengalis, Armenians, Portuguese, Britons, and continental Europeans regularly encountered one another at estate sales and auctions.9
The other way in which “British India” was far from British lay in regions such as Awadh, in the areas under at best indirect control, beyond the frontiers of formal Company rule. Fifteen years after Plassey, British Indian towns remained coastal toeholds on the very edges of the Mughal Empire. Company territory consisted chiefly of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay—a triangle of significant possessions, yet together just a tiny fraction of a massive and contested land. The vast majority of the subcontinent remained in the hands of the Mughal nobility and other Indian rulers. The nawabs of Awadh and the nizams of Hyderabad governed the two largest and richest Mughal provinces—just to the west of Bengal and Madras, respectively, and thus just on the border of Company domains. Other important regional rulers included the confederacy of Maratha leaders in the west, and various independent rajas and sultans in the south, notably Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan of Mysore. None of these states would fall into direct British control for decades to come; many never would.
Nor did many Britons want them to. Possessing Bengal certainly encouraged some top figures in the East India Company to acquire more. There were new commercial and strategic interests to protect, new desires to satisfy, new and neighboring territories to bring into line with Company ends. But old imperatives remained. The Mughal emperor still sat on his throne. It was probably beyond the Company’s ability to topple him; it was definitely beyond its strategic and economic interests. The Company was still a company. It needed to turn a profit for its shareholders, as well as abide by its charter and the dictates of Parliament’s Board of Control. Further costly armies, expensive conquests, and showy heroics were undesirable; to many, having to administer Bengal was bad enough.
This meant that