Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff
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on the European continent and increasingly overseas. But this was the fiercest, most expensive, and most expansive war that Britain and France had waged to date. They clashed everywhere, from Montreal to Martinique, from the mouth of the Gambia in West Africa to the sudden rock outcroppings of South India. And almost everywhere, Britain won. The scale of British victory surprised even the victors. The prime minister William Pitt the Elder, who trumpeted patriotism as his watchword, dubbed 1759 his annus mirabilis: in that year alone, Wolfe secured British dominance in Canada; the French navy was demolished and Britain won access to the Mediterranean; and at Minden, in Hanover, British forces helped score that most precious of feats, a decisive land victory over France. Less than a year later, Sir Eyre Coote continued to rout France in India with his victory at Wandewash, in the south. The Americas, the Continent, and India: it seemed as if the whole world was falling into British hands, and at France’s expense.
But victory had its price. After peace was signed in the Treaty of Paris in 1763, Britain faced an empire that was larger, costlier, and more far flung than ever before. Manpower had to be found to defend it, manpower for which Britain regularly turned to its margins and colonies—Scotland, Ireland, America, and increasingly India. Money had to be found to pay for it, money that Britain also looked to its colonies to provide. The notorious Stamp Act, passed in 1765, imposed a tax on printed material in the thirteen colonies. In 1767 followed the Townshend Duties on various British imports in America, including tea, which had fast become a staple of imperial trade and of the Anglo-American palate. Britain could justify these duties in part as a way of asking the colonists to contribute to the costs of their own defense. To some colonists, however, the taxes seemed to be little better than the despotic measures of the Oriental tyrants in the empires of the East. If the Seven Years War won Britain a greater empire than ever, it also touched off the financial and political crises that would cause the thirteen colonies to break away not twenty years later.
The Seven Years War had a profound effect on Britain’s imperial geography, winning Britain important footholds around the world but also fatally weakening its ability to rule the thirteen colonies. These changes in where Britain had its empire were accompanied by changes in the kind of empire it now possessed. Historians used to treat the American Revolution as a dividing line between two distinct eras of British imperial history: a “first” British empire that was Atlantic, colonial, and mercantile; and a “second” empire, based in Asia and characterized by conquest and direct rule. The opposition of these two misleads. For what the Seven Years War heralded was the emergence of a British Empire that could be both Atlantic and Asian, commercial and conquering. It marked the beginning of a modern British Empire that was global and land-based, one that needed enormous resources—human, economic, and cultural—to keep it going.4
The Seven Years War also had tremendous significance for the French empire—but not, as conventional wisdom would have it, simply by ringing its death knell. (Almost no historians write about the overseas French empire between 1763 and the invasion of Algeria in 1830.)5 Indeed, though France lost the war, it pursued its ongoing struggle with Britain with renewed vigor. The ink was hardly dry on the peace treaty before Louis XV’s shrewd chief minister, the Duc de Choiseul, began to prepare for the guerre de revanche. France reformed and modernized its army, and substantially increased the size of its navy—a navy that performed against Britain to devastating effect at Yorktown in 1781, precipitating Britain’s surrender in the American Revolution. It built up its continental alliances, and its Caribbean commerce flourished. Finally, France turned its imperial eyes keenly toward the East. Choiseul and his successors actively researched the possibility of invading Egypt—the stepping-stone to India—and sent Admiral Bougainville scouting for new colonies in the Pacific, thus provoking Britain. Because French history is so often divided up by political régimes (the Ancien Régime, Napoleon’s First Empire, the Restoration, and so on), continuities across periods often get neglected.6 But if one looks at French imperial policy, a more unified picture emerges. Notably, some of Choiseul’s undertakings would find echo under Napoleon a generation later. French imperialism did not die after the Seven Years War; it just changed its tune.
Rather than put an end to Anglo-French imperial rivalry, then, or tip the scales definitively in Britain’s favor, the Seven Years War opened a new chapter in the history of both the British and French empires. It signified a turn toward territorial gain and, with it, direct rule over manifestly foreign subjects. It also, critically, marked a swing to the East as a site of imperial desire. From this point on, the history of British and French imperial rivalry would unfold there, and in India in particular. Over the course of the next century, British power dramatically expanded in India and steadily reached beyond it, to Egypt, China, Afghanistan. France dedicatedly worked to thwart British expansion in India and to build its own influence in the Middle East and North Africa, where by 1900 it would be the dominant European power. In short, the Seven Years War fueled an Anglo-French competition for Eastern empire that would burn on and explode, in India and Egypt, more than thirty years later.
So what did the British Empire look like viewed from the mango groves of Plassey, instead of from the Plains of Abraham? In many ways, rather different. Unlike Quebec, Plassey was not fought for the open conquest of territory, nor was it fought explicitly against the French. It was chiefly fought not by Crown troops but instead by the private army of the East India Company and its native Indian troops, or sepoys, in defense of commercial interests. And to stand in contrast to the youthfully gallant (if also neurotically self-absorbed) Wolfe of Quebec, Plassey cast into the public eye an altogether more complicated and more equivocal hero: Robert Clive, who, while hailed by some in Britain as the “heaven-born general,” would also find himself, and the empire he represented, the target of public attack. The history of British imperial collecting in the East began with the battle of Plassey and with Robert Clive. For it was there that Britain began to collect its empire in India and began the process of its own imperial refashioning, from a mercantile, Atlantic-based, colonial power to a global territorial ruler and an imperial nation-state. It was also at Plassey that Robert Clive became British India’s first major imperial collector, acquiring a vast personal fortune that he would use to transform himself into the greatest—and most reviled—potentate of Britain’s emerging empire in the East.
The British presence in India actually had its formal beginning one hundred fifty years before the age of Clive, Plassey, and the Seven Years War. It dated back to the last day of the sixteenth century, when Queen Elizabeth I, by then a frail old woman with thick face paint and frizzed curls, granted a royal charter to the “Company of Merchants of London, Trading to the East Indies.” It was among the final acts of her reign, and one of the most significant. The charter granted the East India Company, as it was known, the right to operate a monopoly of English trade with India and the spice islands of the East. In form, the East India Company was a joint-stock company, made up of investors who bought shares in trading ventures. There were many such companies, pursuing Britain’s commerce with every corner of the globe: the Levant Company, the Muscovy Company, the Royal African Company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, and the South Sea Company—whose “bubble” burst in 1720, bringing the fortunes of thousands down with it. France and the Netherlands also conducted overseas trade through monopolistic companies of this kind. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) was founded in 1602; the French East India Company, which had been established by Colbert in 1664, was revamped and consolidated as the Compagnie des Indes, both East and West, by the brilliant Scottish financier John Law in 1719.
These were companies; their goal was profit. But securing profits in distant, unfamiliar, and potentially hostile domains required more than business acumen and willing investors. It called for diplomats and strong defenses. Winning a charter back home to trade was only the first step. Actually carrying on that trade meant winning partners and permissions overseas. In the Mughal and Ottoman empires, Europeans needed