Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff
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And since all the European companies were competing with one another for the same markets, their representatives constantly jockeyed for position with local rulers, plying them with gifts, promises, favors, and bribes. This was the experience of Britain’s first ambassador to India, Sir Thomas Roe, who traveled to the court of the emperor Jehangir in 1615. When Roe raised the subject of trade and tax concessions for Britain with the emperor,
He asked me what Presents we would bring him. I answered…that many Curiosities were to bee found in our Countrey of rare price and estimation…He asked what kind of curiosities those were I mentioned, whether I meant Jewels and rich stones. I answered, No: that we did not thinke them fit Presents to send backe, which were brought first from these parts, whereof he was chiefe Lord…but that we sought to finde such things for his Majestie, as were rare here, and unseene, as excellent artifices in painting, carving, cutting, enamelling, figures in Brasse, Copper, or Stone, rich embroyderies, stuffes of Gold and Silver. He said it was very well: but that hee desired an English horse.
Unprepared for the emperor’s wishes, Roe instead found himself outmaneuvered by the Portuguese, who gave Jehangir “Jewels, Ballests and Pearles with much disgrace to our English commoditie.”7 In 1618, however—a full three years after he first sought an audience—Roe’s persistence was rewarded by an agreement with the emperor “for our reception and continuation in his domynyons.”8
For the next century and more, the East India Company evolved into one of the most profitable, stable, and progressive corporate bodies in Britain. It was still very much a business: its charter, unlike those of the companies settling North America, did not invite it to establish colonies, nor, before the 1740s, had it begun to build a substantial army of Indian sepoys.9 By 1750, the East India Company’s factories stretched from Basra on the Persian Gulf to Bencoolen in Sumatra. The Company establishment in India centered on three coastal settlements, later the “presidency” towns, or regional capitals, of British India. On the west, or Malabar, coast was Bombay, which England received from Portugal in 1661 as part of the dowry of Charles II’s bride, Catherine of Braganza. By that time, Madras on the east, or Coromandel, coast was a flourishing settlement of about forty thousand, with a fort and (from 1680) the first Anglican church in India, poised on a rise above the crashing breakers of the bay. Calcutta, later the most important of the three towns, was also the newest, founded in 1690 by the Company factor Job Charnock at a swampy site eighty miles up the Hooghly from the Bay of Bengal. Charnock had chosen the spot, it was said, “for the sake of a large shaddy tree,” a choice that confounded most, for “he could not have chosen a more unhealthful Place on all the River.”10 Mosquitoes buzzed insistently, miasmatic vapors thickened in the air, and the nullahs, slow, fetid canals, lay across the settlement like breeding grounds for disease. So many of those who went to eighteenth-century Calcutta died there that “it is become a saying that they live like Englishmen and die like rotten sheep.”11
Against disease little could be done, but against armed opponents, there were more concrete forms of protection. Right from the start, the search for profit in the East was laced with violence. European traders defended themselves and their factories with gates, guards, and guns. In part, inspired by prudence as well as paranoia, they did it to protect themselves from the locals. In Egypt, for instance, incidental attacks on Europeans were so common—or at least so feared—that Europeans were advised (if not required) to wear Eastern dress. Throughout the cities of the Levant, Europeans (like Jews, Greeks, and Eastern Christians) lived in gated districts, known as Frankish quarters, at least partly for their own security. Reading the records of early French and British traders in Egypt, one turns up a steady stream of complaints about harrassment and avanias—“outrages”—incidents in which Ottoman officials levied extortionate duties or demanded bribes. In 1767, Ottoman authorities even seized the chief French dragoman (interpreter) on the Alexandria waterfront and imprisoned him on the charge that he was a renegade subject of the Sultan. After nearly a year of merciless captivity, chained up in the bowels of an Ottoman slave galley, the doomed dragoman died, “broken by suffering and worry,” in the slave prison of Constantinople.12
But the chief goal of European defenses was to protect themselves from one another. Nowadays, “trade wars” are costly but generally bloodless. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were not. Violent altercations, particularly with the Portuguese and the Dutch, pepper the early history of the East India Company.13 An especially vivid incident of intra-European rivalry overseas occurred in Java in 1623, when the East India Company factory at Amboina was attacked by Dutch VOC soldiers and ten Englishmen were tortured and killed. Promptly dubbed a “massacre,” and the subject of intense public outrage in Britain, the Amboina episode had the effect of turning English traders away from the spice islands—where Dutch power was now paramount—and concentrating them on the Indian subcontinent. By the mid-eighteenth century, Portugal and the Netherlands no longer posed a major military threat to the British in India. But a new and far more dangerous rival appeared on the subcontinent instead: France.
Alliances and conflicts between European powers cast a long shadow over the global expansion of European trade. In the late nineteenth century, at the height of the scramble for Africa, the German chancellor Bismarck memorably remarked that his map of Africa lay in Europe. A hundred years earlier, his maps of Asia and the Middle East would have been there instead. Wars in Europe triggered conflicts between factions of Europeans abroad, and overseas incidents between groups of Europeans could touch off conflicts on the Continent. At the same time, Europeans were enlisted and manipulated by local rulers. On the coasts of West Africa, for example, European slave traders involved themselves in struggles between regional powers, not least because African prisoners of war constituted a major source of slaves.14 In North America, the famous tale of Captain John Smith’s “rescue” from execution by the “Indian princess” Pocahontas was in fact probably a ritual ceremony staged by her father, the powerful chief of the Powhatan Indians, to co-opt the strange white newcomers as subordinate tributaries.15
The result was a complex map of loyalties, on which national, ethnic, and even religious groupings overlapped in curious ways. Who was friend and who was foe, and how could anyone tell the difference? Even the national labels of “French” or “British” were flexible categories at best, particularly when it came to accommodating Catholics and Protestants (respectively) of other nationalities. The East India Company army, like the British Crown army, relied heavily on continental European volunteers—at times drawing as much as half its strength from non-British nationals. The French East India Company was also a hybrid creation, chaired by a Scot and manned (like the French army) by a range of Europeans, including Scottish Jacobites and Irish Catholic “wild geese” who had flown across the Channel in search of opportunities denied them in Protestant Britain. The boundaries between ally and opponent were not, and could not be, defined exclusively in ethnic or racial terms. After all, as The Death of General Wolfe suggested, the native North American was a truer friend to Britain than the Frenchman.
Perhaps nowhere in the mid-eighteenth century did European and indigenous rivalries cross with greater consequence than in India. Much had changed since the days of Sir Thomas Roe, when the Mughal emperor commanded three-quarters of the subcontinent, bound together by a brilliant, effective system of revenue collection and military organization. Now the Mughal Empire was racked by invasions and civil war. In 1739 the Persian warlord Nadir Shah sacked Delhi, carrying the emperor’s celebrated Peacock Throne away with him as a trophy. The emperor was also steadily losing control over his vassals.