An undue thirst after gain : foundations of the Anglo-Indian empire, 1659-1760

Abstract

This essay is intended as a contribution to the debate on "imperialism". More particularly it is an exploration into the nature of the relationship between England and India between l658 .and 1760. It examines the commercial interpenetration by a European group of an aspect of Asian life, and concludes that there was an increasing infringement of traditional sovereignties in the South-Asian subcontinent. This infringement was the consequence of conditions in the subcontinent -which were threatening English commerce. The commercial relationships were such that protection and expansion were reflections of the logic of the relationship, and not merely the extension of European conflicts into the Asian arena. The fundamental proposition, one which highlights and reveals the tensions involved, is that English private traders as, genus and species, established the conditions within which the Company was forced t o interfere in Indian politics. The Company was embroiled to the extent where its own cost-structure began to suffer and where its own strength relative to that of local Indian polities - the "Country governments" - was such that political dominance was both desirable and possible. This development in attitudes and abilities was compounded by the breakdown of central authority in India, which shifted greater amounts of autonomy to the local and provincial governments. To put the proposition another way, the English company's loss (or lack) of effective control over its servants, and the Indian polities' loss (or lack) of control within India are to be highlighted through an examination of the tensions among traders and merchants: tensions within each group functioning as a group, in their cross-fertilisation of commerce in the subcontinent, and in their relationships with their traditional authorities. Of central importance is the developmen t of power on the periphery. The changing attitudes of Company servants and freemen in India towards trade were in sharp contradistinction to the central, or Company's, attitudes. That is, the "national" attitudes of the East India Company being subjected to the tensions created by the private aspirations of Englishmen in India form a dialectic, which culminated at the end of the period in the territorial aggrandisement more familiar to some commentators on the nature of "imperialism", and which in turn influence the modern Indian state and our perceptions of that state. In the essay I develop five major themes: the mechanisms of the private trades, the relationships between the Company and Englishmen in India, the relationships between Englishmen in India, the relationships between Englishmen and Indian merchants, and the relationships between Englishmen and Indian polities. In approaching the questions in this way I attempt to explore and analyse the tensions between private and corporate interests, in order to understand more clearly the processes which developed the intimate identification Englishmen had with India by 1760.