The East India Company

Anarchy, a (Raj-inspired) morality tale, or just history?

Sir John Lyman, Lord Mayor of London in 1616 (he lived 1544-1632)

Many years ago I was sitting in a university library reading the remarkable account in the 1862 edition of the  Calendar of State Papers for 1513-1616[1] of how my ancestor Sir John Lyman ventured some of his capital into the what was to become the East India Company. He was one of the founding members of this company, formed on 31 December 1600 as  a ‘Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies'. Its original membership consisted of George, Earl of Cumberland, and 215 knights, aldermen and merchants of London. One of Sir John’s relatives (a nephew perhaps - John was unmarried - he was the first bachelor Lord Mayor of London since 1491) was recorded in the State Papers in the period 1617-21 as the master of the Company's ship the Royal James. His wife was one  Joan Lyman: he died in 1621 or soon after, at sea. He is recorded at a meeting on the high seas between two of the Company's fleets, one consisting of 12 ships and another of nine, on 26 January 1620. They resolved at the time to sail for Acheen and thence to Japan to repair the ships and then to travel to the coast of China. On 16 March 1620 a further consultation was held on board the Royal James concerning a plan to send a ship, the Bee, back to England. His wages were discussed by the Company Board on 26 October 1621 after the Royal James had returned to Woolwich. Joan Lyman is recorded in petitions to the Company in 1621 for 'her husband's goods' and again on 23 January 1622 for her husband's wages. In the same year it was decided to make up his wages with pepper.

Fascinating stuff. It explains why I’ve long had an interest in the EIC.

John Keay, with whom I shared an editor at one time (Carol O’Brien), published his account of the East India Company in 1991, delving deep into its voluminous archives to paint a picture of an organisation that, while growing as a business in a manner unconstrained by modern trading law, also accidently built the foundation of modern India by becoming its de facto ruler. I wholeheartedly recommend his book. It’s a story fundamentally of commercial creativity, in which the organisation created the sinews of trade between the sub-continent and Britain, and subsequently translated this model around the world. This early form of capitalism, unconstrained by anything other than state laws, rewarded its shareholders with dividends on the profits made by trade in cloth, spices, jewels and so on. Its enemies weren’t competitors, but hostile states (Holland and France in particular), including the rulers of princely states across India who wouldn’t bend their will to the Company’s.

When he wrote The Honourable Company: A History of England’s East India Company Keay observed that the EIC hadn’t attracted many scholars in the post-imperial world, noting that it had been damned by the British Government following the 1857 Mutiny and the taking over of the ‘India account’ directly by the British Government, thus to become the Raj in 1858. The story propagated then was that the EIC was not much more than a vicious band of mercantile pirates who represented the very worst of the British character. Social snobbery was a critical part of this characterisation: those ‘in trade’ have always been looked down upon by the aristocracy in Britain, for whom land provided the root of their wealth and self-worth. The story the Raj perpetrated of a rapacious commercial empire being replaced by one of civic order, commercial law and social equity was something of a myth created by the administrators in London, and later in the Indian government, to provide a type of moral framework for imperialism (‘EIC bad; Raj good’). So its fascinating to see William Dalrymple essentially adopting the same premise in his well-written and engaging Anarchy. He is a masterful story-teller and, along with his previous books, I really enjoyed his telling of the EIC story.

However, I think Dalrymple falls into the cunning trap laid for us by the propagandists of the Raj. In his effort to portray the men of the EIC as masters of rapine Dalrymple presents their voracity as unique, almost as if this was a British mercantile trait. He adopts, perhaps unknowingly, the Raj’s moralistic assessment of its predecessor, painting its origins and motives in unprincipled terms. What we have is a brutish, profit-driven monster motivated not by good but by profit, all of which bettered Britain and beggared India. In this analysis, the equally vicious, self-centred and fabulously wealthy Indian princes and their families get a free pass (surprisingly, he passes without comment on the sources of their wealth). Indeed, in some cases, the EIC’s enemies are suddenly given a posthumous virtue they would have only been given in real life by the obsequious court-toadies that were paid to do so. History, however, like life itself, is not a zero-sum game. In order to present the barbarity of one side does not require the posthumous sainthood of the other. This habit of narrative historians through the ages (think of the hagiographies of the medieval period, for instance) distorts history, and makes it something of which we wish, rather than of what it was. John Keay observes that history’s treatment of the EIC after its imperial traducement is important to understand, so as to rescue it from the propaganda of the Raj. Freeing the EIC from this straitjacket would allow it to stand ‘forth as a robust association of adventurers engaged in hazarding all in a series of preposterous gambles. Some paid off; many did not but are no less memorable for it. Bizarre locations, exotic produce, and recalcitrant personalities combine to induce a sense of romance which, however repugnant to the scholar, is in no way contrived.’ Exactly. Applying a mantle of morality to the equation – as did the Raj to its EIC predecessor – distorts the true picture of what we are observing. What is this ‘true picture’? Keay suggests that it ‘was thanks to the incorrigible pioneering of the Company’s servants that the British Empire acquired its peculiarly diffuse character. But for the Company there would have been not only no British Empire but also no global British Empire.’

Aside from Keay’s book the most helpful book on the EIC is by an Indian economic historian, Professor Tirthankar Roy. His masterful The East India Company: The World's Most Powerful Corporation (2012) was published in India and can only be purchased in the UK in paperback. But it is worth acquiring. As an economist, Roy is interested in measuring and calculating, and comes to some interesting conclusions. His approach is resolutely factual, not presenting the men of the EIC or those Indians with whom they traded – mainly the ‘walking jewellers shops’, which is how he recalls one American calling the local princes – in moral terms, but as people who held and exercised commercial, legal and political power. A more recent (2019) book of his – How British Rule Changed India’s Economy: The Paradox of the Raj – is excellent (though be warned: it’s expensive) in challenging some very deeply held prejudices about how the EIC operated. A key feature of Roy’s analysis is to point out that the EIC didn’t trade with ‘ordinary’ Indians,  but only with those who held wealth and power, and in creating their empire they built factories that employed ordinary Indians and in the long term generated wealth for India. He makes quick work of the ‘drain theory’ of colonial exploitation, arguing that it relies on an entirely false premise that Indians as a whole enjoyed India’s wealth at this time, when in fact it resided in the pockets and treasure chests of a tiny handful of extremely wealthy autocrats. In exchanging one set of rulers for another, a process that took a considerable amount of time (the EIC first established legal power or statehood in part of India in 1770), the poor remained outside of the economic equation: the trade in wealth, power and prestige was one that took place in the higher and rarefied echelons of economic power. In this relationship wealth travelled from one (Indian) pocket to another (the EIC).

The question in this context, if we want to look for a moment at the empire through a moral lens, is to ask: ‘Who or what was more beneficial to ordinary Indians: the EIC or their original rulers?’ Roy is explicit in this context: Indian princes spent their vast wealth, much of gained via taxation off the backs of the people – on themselves. Hence the huge palaces, jewels and fabulous luxury which astounded the workaday merchant adventurers from Britain when they first encountered India. They did not arrive to find a uniquely equitable society, but one that was even far less equitable than that which they came from. The princes didn’t spend their money on schools, hospitals, roads, poverty relief or advantageous infrastructure, but (in the main) on their own power, status and vainglory. This is not to suggest that the EIC and its officers (like Clive) set out to do anything other than to relieve the princes of their wealth and to enrich themselves. Of course they did: that’s why they were there. But as Roy describes, in creating a commercial infrastructure in India the EIC brought with it first, contractual law, and then civil law, on which the former was based. With both came statehood, and with a British-inspired statehood came the structures of civic governance that in due course the Raj inherited and which provides the basic legal and political infrastructure to the world’s largest democracy today.

None of this expiates any of the guilt of those responsible for colonial oppression or imperial violence whenever it occurred, but it does explain that the coercion employed by the EIC was not unique to that organisation in the context of the period. Indeed, I think that ‘anarchy’ is an exaggeration, a useful piece of hyperbole dreamt up by a publisher to sell a book. It also suggests that the EIC were substantially net benefactors to India than those from whom they extracted wealth and power. This doesn’t excuse empire: I am not an apologist for such. But it does explain it, rather better than Dalrymple does, and it offers more balance than he does in understanding this long period of Indian history. For all his excellence as a narrative historian, Dalrymple has merely given us a repeat of the the Raj’s ‘bad guy’ version of the EIC, an argument long ago appropriated by nationalists in India keen to create a story that explained why the empire needed to end.

John Keay, keen to disassociate the EIC from the calumnies heaped upon it by the Raj, did not fall into this trap. If you ask me to recommend a book on the EIC, therefore, either Keay or Roy are the choices I’d make.

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[1] Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, East Indies 1513-1616 (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1862)