Empire: World History - 1. The East India Company

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

Welcome to Empire, a brand new history podcast hosted by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand. The first series looks at the British in India: The East India Company, The Raj, Gandhi, Independence and Partition. In the opening episode, William and Anita discuss the rise of The East India Company, exploring how a small corporation founded in Tudor England - with only a handful of employees - came to rule India. LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire Twitter: @EmpirePodUk goalhangerpodcasts.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to a brand new podcast called Empire with me Anita Arnden. And me, William Durumple. Now, in a funny way, we are both products of Empire. I mean, you could say very simplistically, I'm the Indian in Britain, I mean of Indian origin, born in Essex, but, you know, nevertheless, you know what I mean? And I'm the Brit that's lived most of my adult life in India.

And why are we doing this? Why are we actually doing this? Well, I think it's a very interesting moment to think about empire. It's particularly an interesting moment to think about the British Empire and the British Empire in India, because this is something which I suddenly feel got sort of tucked in an attic in 1947. The British moved on. They joined the European community. they liked to feel that they'd left their imperial past behind them. They turned into a different sort of nation, but they certainly forgot about the most important thing the Brits ever did in world history. And certainly my generation going to school would learn about the Roman Empire.

We'd learn about all sorts of empires. But we wouldn't learn about the British Empire. Well, I mean, you know, I've been to school, dare I say it, a bit more recently than you. But not a sniff of it. And it's really strange because, you know, we do the Second World War. we do the commemorations of the First World War. This is something that was as recent or more recent and was an enormous chapter in Britain's history.

But is it because empire's a dirty word these days, is that why? Well, I think empire is a very controversial word, and that's in a sense another reason for doing the podcast, because for some people, particularly, I think, a generation of Indians and other, if you might call them children of empire, whose parents came here in the post-war period, they're beginning to ask, why are we here?

What's happened? And we've had people like Satnam Sangera writing Empire Land. Indians like Shashi Theroux writing major bestsellers are called Inglorious Empire. And people are looking at this stuff again. This is a period where what was, I think, looked at very romantically, through rose-tinted spectacles, through merchant ivory films and so on, is coming up for critical evaluation. and there's a lot of pushback to that too.

I mean, it's fascinating because, you know, for a while, this was a vacuum that was only inhabited by films. So, you know, in the 70s you had the glorification of empire and things like Zulu. You could not imagine Zulu being made today. And in the 80s, as you say, it was all crinolin and prettiness and sundaunas and Maharajas. Lovely ladies under parasols

passing over the lawns of the Bangal Club or playing croquet on similar lawns with smiling Maharajas and elephants swishing their tails and lovely cut 1930s soon. The idea that empire was actually there, like all empires obviously are, for the benefit of the coloniser, to send money and raw materials back to the home country. It never came into the whole merchandise image, which was all puffing steam trains under glorious night skies with the Taj Mahal's profile rising out of the steam and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. Well, I mean, so in effect, what we're trying to do in this podcast is we're sort of setting fire to the celluloid and trying to bring you the facts of what happened.

through a number of podcasts of different periods. We are going to be talking a lot about, you know, the Raj and India, because that is our expertise, Willie and I myself. But eventually we hope to cover all manner of empires. I'm very keen quite quickly to bring in stuff about slavery, about Africa, about scramble for Africa, but also older empires, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Roman empires, Byzantine Empire, all this sort of stuff. Because it seems to me that it covers a great sway of world history.

And explains a lot of politics today. I mean, that's the thing that I find really fascinating, that we don't know it more because it does. Look, we're going to start, though, with Britain and India. We're going to start with the formation of the East India Company in the 16th century. All the way through the Raj, eventually we're going to take you to independence and the partition of India, which happened 75 years ago this month, by the way. August 2022 is the 75th anniversary. And, Willie, the East India Company, I know, has been one of the great themes of your career, hasn't it?

I've actually been working on the East India Company for 20 years. And I started in 1999, and then this book was, the anarchy, was published 2019. And what's been fascinating for me is see how this subject, which was right at the edge 20 years ago, has moved into the center of things now for two reasons. One is colonialism has moved to the center of things. Suddenly the British have woken up to the fact that they had an empire. The lot of the world is not happy about this. that it isn't a wonderful Commonwealth of nations willingly following the lead of our queen and our people,

but people were conquered, looted, asset stripped, shipped across nations against their wills, that many terrible things happen. And the weird thing that the British simply don't know about this, it's not in our history critters. We're not taught in the school. The second thing that's happened, of course, is that in the same period, the last 20 years,

we've suddenly been confronted by these massive corporations who now dominate our lives. Companies like Tesla, Google, Facebook, ExxonMobil, other massive corporations that operate in all the countries of the world. Amazon can cut around the tax laws and other laws of individual nation states and play one state off against each other. And suddenly we're in a situation as we were with the East India Company 200 years ago, where a corporation is calling the shots and the nation states are on the back foot. Now, as you said, in the story of the East India Company, ultimately, the state wins. And in 1858, the East India Company is nationalized and the British state takes over India. And you get the Raj.

But what is funny is that while the Raj has dominated British perceptions of their empire in India, it only actually lasts 90 years. It's a flash in the pan. Flash in the pan of Indian history. It's also even a flash in the pan in the history of British imperialism. Right. It lasts from 1858 until 1947. And this year we're celebrating the 75th anniversary of Indian independence.

So it's almost as long now since independence. We are in front of it as we were behind it. Yeah, absolutely right. It's 75 years now. In 15 years, it'll be 90 years and it'll be the same amount of time as Raj. But what is forgotten almost, and this was why for the last 20 years I've been working on this, is that like the bit of the iceberg you can't see beneath the water, there proceeds to the beginning of the Raj in 1858,

no less than 250 years when India is ruled from Britain, but not by the British government. So this, I mean, this whole landscape is so broad, and as you say, 250 years broad. But I would like us, if you don't mind, William, to start in Wales. Obviously. Obviously, in Wales.

Where else? If you don't mind. That's not the... the animal you're talking about. Not the mammal, no. I'm talking about a place in Wales, Powis Castle. So this is a fascinating place, Powis Castle. Just tell us why this is a really good place to start this story.

So Pursk Castle from the outside looks about as English as anywhere could possibly. Although it's actually just over the border from England within Wales. It has Tudorbox hedges. It has wonderful sort of Renaissance doorway and marble. it has these lovely Elizabethan windows and it has on the top crenellations and it'd be hard to think of anything more British than this sort of fantastic structure

It looks like every boy's idea of a fort Exactly, it's a perfect sort of castle that children build in sand on the beach But within the long gallery at Powys you enter a completely different world Because you walk under a painting Into a gallery, a Kazana, a treasury of what can only be described as Indian lute.

And lute, of course, is an Indian word. Lutna, the plunder, is a word that enters the Indian language at this period to describe exactly the sort of objects which are filling this castle. And what you have is talwas, swords, shields, Indian gowns, little ivory chessmen, miniatures.

And one or two quite in big objects of imperial plunder of a real international importance. Sir Rajah Dowler's palanquin left on the battlefield of Placie. Now, Placie was the battle which is always said to begin the British conquest of India. It's the first moment that the Brits score a major victory over an Indian power and take over a great chunk of territory by force. At the other end of the gallery, you go through a little archway and you end up in Tupus Sultan's hunting tent. Why is that there?

Because another member of the family bought this tent after the Tepu Sultan was conquered by the East India Company in 1799, his palace burnt, looted, and the actual loot is here in powers. In actual fact, if you take the whole thing together, there is more Mughal loot, more Mughal artworks and objects in a private house in the Welsh countryside than exists in the National Museum in Delhi, or the National Museum in Pakistan, or the Great Lahore Museum, or the National Museum of Bangladesh, or the museums in the... in Afghanistan and Iran. And what's it doing here in a private house

and although it's looked after by the National Trust, the objects in the museum is still the property of the family in powers, what's it doing there? Okay, stop teasing us. You're asking the question. What is it doing there and who is the family? So I said that when you enter this gallery, you walk under a picture. And that picture is the crucial key to the whole story.

and it has a very unhelpful caption beneath it. It says, the Shah Alam conveying the gift of the Duwani to Lord Clive. Now, in Britain and in England, there are very few people

that would understand what that means. The gift of the Duwari. It sounds like a nice Diwali present or sort of Christmas or a birthday. And the picture shows a big court scene

with lots of nobles on the right are the Indians, the Mughals. On the left are the Brits. and the gentleman of the East Indy Company. In particular, there are two men at the front surrounding the Mughal Emperor who's dressed in cloth of gold. So cloth of gold, and you've got all of his retinue behind him, also very finely dressed,

looking incredibly serious and grave, although it's notable that the man who is the most richly dressed of the moor has his head bowed. Almost it looks like in supplication. The British side, their heads are up. So they're sort of the bewigged gentlemen in their crimson coats and their gold brocade. And they are very much looking up, straight-backed, ramrodded. And the Indian, who is clearly in this picture, even if you didn't know the caption, is a potentate.

His head is bowed. And, well, it might be bad because the potentate, who is Shah Alam, who is the Mughal emperor, whose ancestors ruled over not just all of India, but Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. He has just been humbled in battle, defeated by the armies of the East India Company at the Battle of Bucksa in 1765. And he has just been forced to hand over. And you can see in the picture, he's handing over a document to a man in a red coat. That coat is Robert Clive. Clive of India.

Sometimes called Clive of India, who to this day stands outside the foreign office and behind Downing Street. By the way, really irritates Indian diplomats. I had no idea where we know a few. Do you remember? They have told us how disgusted they were to have to walk past Clive of India to get to their office. This is the picture is the reason that people are disgusted because Clive of India was not even the servant of the British government. And this is the crucial point. He was the servant of a company, a corporation. Just like Elon Musk actually works for Tesla himself, his own company, not for Mr Biden. He's not observant of the American state.

He has his own company. Now, this is exactly the situation of Robert Clive. Robert Clive is not appointed by the government. He's appointed by the East Indy Company, by the directors. And what he's doing in this picture is he's taking control after the battle of the three richest provinces of the Mughal Empire. Now, we should say immediately that, A, the picture is not very good. It's by a guy called Benjamin West, who is not a great painter, the dome in the background, which is this sort of looming palace

actually looks, as one of the critics said when it was hung in the Royal Academy, more like the dome of St. Paul's than anything you'd like to find in India. And we learn, in fact, that Benjamin West had never been to India. And everything about this picture is actually a deception because not only had Benjamin West never been to India, but this scene never really took place,

at least in the way that it's shown here, actually took place. The important document was transferred and signed in the private tent of Clive after the battle. He had basically put a gun against the defeated emperor's head and made him sign. And according to one mogul historian who was there, he said the entire ceremony took place quicker that it would normally take to sell a jackass at a market.

Hashtag fake news, as well as with that dome, hashtag fake views. I mean, this is a scandal upon scandal. So it is. And so it's a completely deceptive. And then, you know, to add insult to injury, the caption, as we said, is conveying the gift of the duwani to Lord Clive. Now, what's the divani, first of all? We have to say, what is the duani?

So the duani is basically the right to run the duan, which is the treasury or the administration. And what it means is that this private company, the East India company, is being given the right to run the finances of three Indian provinces. Now, those provinces, Bengal, Bihar, and ERISA were in the 18th century, quite simply, the richest place on earth. The looms of those three provinces, of which there were about one million, were churning out a great deal of the revenue, which meant that Mughal India was creating very nearly a quarter of the world's GDP, while Britain is just creating 1.8%. This is because India had the great textile. industry of its day. You know, what would move in the 19th century, partly because of the events

kicked off at this moment by the gift of the Duany, as it's called. Britain eventually gets control of India and the Indian industries eventually shut down and we get the great industries of all the textile manufacturing moves to Lancashire and the north of England in the 19th century. Yeah, Manchester gets called Cottonopolis. The alternate name for, yeah. That's right. And but this is the moment before that episode, this is the moment when an English company first gets its hands on this incredibly rich territory. And it's done it in two stages.

First have been, and we'll deal all with this over the course of the next hour of this podcast. But the first stage is the battle of Plessy, the second stage is the battle of Bucksa. And this signing of this document takes place immediately after the second battle. Okay. When the East India Company has now basically subdued all opposition in North India. I think that's, can we circle back to that? Because I still want to know, and this is a question that Indians ask all the time, how is it that in numbers we outnumbered, in strength of arms, we were more powerful together,

and yet a group of adventurers managed to subdue and control a country as vast as India? So can we go right, right, right, right back to the first, birth whales, the cradle whales, of what would become the East India Company. And this really fascinating man who I just love historian, William, called, if we are going to be called what we do, customer smith. Can we start with him? Sure. So the East Indy Company is a company, a corporation. And like any company, it starts up as a startup, effectively. And the guy who has the idea, the founder of this company, is a man called customer or auditor smyth. So called because he was an auditor, other words, an accountant, who ended up running the customs and ran the customs of London.

So he's a kind of Richard Branson of his day or the Vijay Malia of his day. He's an entrepreneur, has made a lot of money. His dad was a big entrepreneur before him. He's inherited some money, but he's hugely enlarged that. And so when the news comes in the late 1590s during, now this is the year that Elizabeth, I suppose, is about 80 years old, an old woman now. everyone's slightly wondering what's going to happen when she dies. This is also the incidentally that Shakespeare is writing both Hamlet and Julius Caesar, which I saw last night in the Globe.

And if you had walked from the globe in 5099 over Southern Bridge into what was then Morgate Fields, not a grottie tube station in those days, but fields, as the name suggests. And in the middle is a gorgeous black and white Tudor building called the Family Sanders Hall. The customer Smithe hires that for the day. And he calls all the rich investors, the people who you think can invest in his venture. And he says, the Dutch have just gone to the East Indies. By the East Indies, he means what we now call Indonesia, not India initially. Right. And the early days of the company's aimed not at all at India, interestingly, but at Indonesia and even beyond the spice islands on the edge of Papua New Guinea.

And he has the idea that if the Dutch can get there and buy spices, cutting out all the middlemen, cutting out the Arabs, cutting out the Venetians, cutting out the North Europeans, so can the English. And so he appeals to their Tudor patriotism. And he calls in a lot of people that we today were called pirates.

Privateers. Privateers, right? The privateers are people who have been licensed by the state to loot the treasure ships, moving gold, silver, and other precious objects from, South America to Spain and Portugal.

Again, I mean, you're so familiar with this, but to somebody who is not, that is an astonishing thing that the state is giving full power to robbers, ostensibly, to go and rob. Well, it's actually quite a familiar situation because in the immediate run-up to this, England just cut itself off from the continent.

In this case, not the, of course, the European community, which hasn't been founded yet, but the Reformation has cut it off from the whole of state. Southern Europe and countries like Spain and Portugal regard England as a dangerous enemy state. And there's an awful lot of rivalry. This is just after the Spanish Armada. This is Philip II is just dead. And there's an awful lot of dislike of Catholic Spain and the popish continent, as they see it.

But even the Protestants are not necessarily very friendly towards the English. And the Dutch, who are Protestant, who have just broken free from Spain, have made this pioneering visit to the spice islands and made a fortune. And the reason that the Dutch, again, the reason the Dutch are so very important is because they've discovered that route through the Cape of Good Hope, which makes their traffic and their trade so very lucrative. Well, that route had been open for a while. It had been found, first of all, by Vasco da Gama, 50 years earlier, and the whole Portuguese

empire had come and gone. And the Dutch by better sailing boats, better cannon and deeper pockets. and deeper pockets, frankly, overcome the Portuguese Empire and get to areas at the very edge of the Portuguese influence where the spices grow. And what sets off the whole thing is a visit of Dutch shippers to London

to try and buy up some London shipping in order that they can make more voyages. And customer smith says, hang on, guys. We can't have the Dutch. You cannot take our British ships. Come over here and take our ships. Cut over here and buy our ships.

We can do this ourselves. So this meeting is called, the same year that Julius Caesar and Hamlet first performed in the globe, this meeting is called in this black and white judah hall. And we, bizarrely, we have all the documents. Everything for the East Indy Company is kept right from this first meeting. Okay. And one of the most tantalizing documents that is in this is the type of people who sort of sign in and sign up for this. I mean, privateers, as you say. But, you know, what we would call M&S shareholders, you know, people from every walk of life.

Correct. And so the document, which is in the British Library, which I have a picture of in my book, The Anarchy, shows the first people signing up are the grandees, the mayor of London, who puts in 300 quid. Somebody else puts in 1,000. But on sort of page 20 of this document, you have the people, as you say, the ordinary... Oh, vintners, people who sell wine. Lather workers. Saddle makers.

Saddle makers. And they're putting in 10 quid, 5 quid. And what has happened is that Elizabeth in England has invented this new mechanism for doing business. Stock shares, shareholding. Shareholders. Yeah. This is an idea which is invented at this period. Before that, you had guilds.

Now, guilds were a bit like this in that, you know, all the woolmakers of Suffolk get together, they pool their resources, and they go off and cut a deal with the tapestry makers in Holland, for example, or Belgium. But to be a member of a guild, you had to be a wool worker and have something to do with the wool industry. And that gave you access to a beautiful hall in a town like Lavon or Burford or one of these lovely wool churches in England. And what's new about the joint stock company, which is an idea of first invented in Elizabethan England in 1580 with the founding of the Muscovy Company. The Muscovy Company was aimed at trade with Moscow and Russia. It sold furs and this sort of stuff and goods from the forests of the step, frankly. When they found that, they have this new model and they say, you know, it's not just merchants that can join. Anyone that wants to put in some money can invest it and they will get a share a percentage depending on how much they put in.

So if they're a huge investor, they get a huge share of the profits. If they're a small investor, they'll get a tiny share. But this idea changes everything, because suddenly you have the growth of companies. And these companies, if they're popular, can raise vast sums of money. And if they fail, they fail. And so what happens, interestingly, is that the Elizabethan state outsources a lot of its colonial activity to merchant companies, not to the state itself. Well, I mean, it cuts overheads. It sort of makes sense.

If you're an extrecker and you've got other things on your mind, like wars, you know, or. threatening borders. This is the last thing that you want to administer. Administration is expensive. So from this time, you get the Muscovy Company, you get the Royal Africa Company, which is a slaving company. You get the Hudson Bay Company, which still exists, which deals with all the furs coming in from the Northern United States or Northern America, now in Canada. You get the Rhode Island Company, which controls Rhode Island. So you get the Virginia company controlling. So you get all these different areas which are actually run by merchant corporations and investors. And so the East India Company is part of this,

but it's not the first. Can I just ask, I mean, Customs-Smith? What was he like? I mean, you said he was like Branson. And sometimes these things rise and fall, particularly these days, corporations, on the charisma of the person leading it. What was he like? Do we know what he was like? Well, we have a picture of him, which shows this sort of, you know, very Elizabethan guy with a a tall like a stovepipe hat, a goate beard. He's a, he's a well-to-do, new rich, one-generation old fortune. And he's exactly the sort of man who is rising up at this period, full of entrepreneurial energy, quite ruthless.

So, Nouveau-Rish. I mean, we're talking Nouveau-Rish. I mean, think of all those characters in Shakespeare plays from this period who end up being cast away on islands in like the Temple. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So he's a London businessman. He's connected with the privateers. And he gathers these guys into this meeting and says, invest in my company, we'll get some spices.

And they do that. So he says, come and invest in my company. And they do. And they do. And as I said, we have this document which shows the large summer money, which is raised through this public meeting. And we even have a description of the meeting. The young Richard Hacklett, who will go on to write wonderful travellers accounts and compile the accounts of other travellers, is high.

to be the kind of notary keeping the records and writing the history. They're aware that they're doing something very historic. So they employ a best-selling non-fiction writer to be their own biographer right from the beginning. And there's a great awareness that this is an important moment. But it's not a guarantee that this is going to work. No, I mean, and in fact, you know, there are very good reasons for wondering whether this is a good way to spend your money. first of all, the man they hire to sail the first voyage is a man called Sir James Lancaster. And he's just come back from a disastrous voyage in the same area.

He's employed because he's the only man that's actually sailed there. But he didn't sail back because he sank his ship and all his crew got eaten by cannibals. Okay, this is not a successful first choice. And yet, you know, he's the only guy that does this. So his first thing, you know, in the weeks after the meeting, they've got their cash, they gather it from their shareholders. We even have notes saying, you know, X and Y hasn't paid up yet, and they start getting kind of legal notices because they promise such and such money and they haven't delivered it. But they go out and they go to Depford to look for a ship. And the first ship they find is a creakial hulk called the Mayflower.

The Mayflower. The Mayflower. The Mayflower. Which they reject because they think it's not seaworthy. And obviously that has its own history going in a different direction. Right. Nobody tells the pilgrims. One presumes.

But instead they buy a pirate ship. And I'm not making this hub. It's called the scourge of malice. It sounds like Johnny Depp's flagship from pirates. I mean, it does seem a little obvious for privateers or pirates to be on the sky. But they don't keep the name because the name is not a good name for a serious company, is it? Exactly. So being good, again at PR, again looking at posterity,

they change the name immediately from the scourge of malice to the Red Dragon, as if it's a nice sort of country pub in the Welsh countryside next to Powers Castle. Right. And as you say, you know, there's no guarantee this will work. And initially it doesn't. They set sail and they get be calmed in the channel by a freak, freak heat wave. And there's no breeze. So they just sit in the channel and people have picnics on the tap.

And are they laughing at them? Are they literally pointing in laughing? They actually pointing them. Ha ha ha. You thought you were going to can't even get past the car park. That's very funny. But the breeze picks up eventually and off they sail. And to their own surprise, they round the cape of good hope.

they actually apparently perform a Shakespeare play on the ship. That's marvelous. Which is wonderful. What are the Dutch doing is they going through their sea lanes? I mean, do they know, do they allow it? Or is it just they're lucky? Because Lancaster is just lucky this time. Well, I didn't think they have to ask permission from anyone.

And this is armed commerce from the very beginning. The charter that they ring out of the Elizabethan court allows them to wage war explicitly. They'll fight their way through if they have to. And they employ people, you know, with cannon. and they employ archers and they employ all sorts to protect them. So they realise that, as all commerce is at this point, that it's a risk and they've got to take precautions. And they get eventually to the East Indies,

by which we would say Java, Indonesia. And just as they're about to land, they see a Portuguese caraville coming in the opposite direction. And as there are literally a bunch of ex-pirates, they just land on the Portuguese ship and transfer its contents to their own hold and sail home again. Okay, so this is... So not only does this require no effort, but also no money.

So they come back with the, you know, the kaching in their pockets, but also laden with goods. Laidant with goods. They take an entire cargo of nutmeg and spices, and they sell it for one million pounds. Let's take a break here, and we'll be back after this break with what happens to the pirates. when they come back with their million pounds.

You're listening to Empire with me, Anita Arnden. And me, William Dalrymple. You always leave this very pregnant pause, as if you've forgotten what your name is. It is William Dalryl. I can... Who me? Who me?

The World's Authority on the East India Company. Yes, you. And we left this story with John Lancaster, who does not have the most... Sir James Lancaster. John to his friends. No, it's not. Sir James Lancaster,

who has not the most distinct. English record at sea who has lost a flotilla and many of his crew have been eaten on a previous voyage. But this time lucks out royally or bigly, as I may say in America, because instead of having to spend the hard invested cash of all the shareholders in this nascent East India company has bumped into a Portuguese ship, said, I will have that, takes everything and goes home. Yep. That is literally it. And that's very much the spirit of the time. After the Brits have fallen out with everybody in Europe again, they have to take what they can get. And so there begins a very tricky 30 years when they are competing against the Dutch.

Now, the Dutch were the first in. The Dutch, a new nation, have fantastic financial instruments. They are brilliant finances, which is the Tudors are not yet. They're beginners at this. and because the Dutch have got deeper pockets and because they've got better ships and better sea captains than Sir James Lancaster by 1630, 30 years in,

the Brits basically lost the competition. The real success story in the spice trade is now the Dutch. And there's a series of disasters, the Amboina massacre being won when the whole lot of Brits are captured and tortured by the Dutch. And eventually a treaty is signed.

And as a sop, as a sort of consolation, prize to the English, they are given a muddy island in the Hudson River, the other side of the road, called Manhattan. Oh, I've heard of it. So that, of course, turns out to be a rather good investment in the long term. But in the short term, this is rather a humiliation. And rather like a startup, which has gone awry. And, you know, investors haven't quite got their return, but they're not giving up yet because, you know, they can see there's still potential. the business model is basically re-rigged in around 1630, 1640. And what they decide to do is basically forget the spice trade, leave that to the Dutch.

And I think already there are signs that the great days of the spice trade have passed, that the prices of spices are going. So the English are not completely heartbroken to have. No, they're can. They know that's not a thing to fight over it. And what they realise is that the new trade, the really, exciting trade is textiles. So when we're talking about textiles coming, you know, from Bengal and you say, you know, this was the majority of textiles were coming from Bengal at this time.

What kind of textiles are we talking about? So initially, the big mogul port is Surat, which is in Gujarat, and Gujarat is the centre of the cotton trade. By which, and that cotton to us is very ordinary, I'm wearing a simple cotton white shirt at the moment and it's, you know, it's unremarkable and cheap. But at the time, it was considered luxury product because it's, and it's, you know, it's It's very soft on the skin. You wear it well, darling. Thank you so much. All right.

And this was an ancient export of India. It was something at the time of the Romans, Gujarati cotton was as valuable as silk. Gosh. And, you know, as with spices, you know, you go to waitrose or Sainsbury's or Tesco's or Liddle and buy by pepper now without thinking about it. And it's not a luxury product because the sheer quantity, the supply is meant. that the price has sunk right down.

The same is slightly true of cotton. That what was a luxury is now something which is unremarkable. What were people wearing before cotton? Well, the Brits are wearing wool, which obviously is not suitable for the tropics. And so they buy the cotton from Gujarra, and then they begin to get involved in all the incredibly more exotic and exciting textiles being produced in Bengal. Muslin, which is incredibly fine, often see-through.

silks, wonderful embroideries, things called kalamkarees, which are painted, and you hang them on your Tudor four-poster bed. And this is a very, very good moment to be in the textile trade. And it's also, I don't think this was particularly planned, because there's no question that the East Indy company just lost battles against the Dutch. But by moving from the spice trade to the textile trade, and moving from a focus on Indonesia to India, both these decisions are very canny in the long run.

I mean, it means you have the whole field to yourself. You have the whole field to yourself. Well, not quite the whole field, because there are still a few Portuguese enclaves like Goa. And the East Indic Company has a few dustoffs with the Portuguese. Right. But nonetheless, they're in early. And the important point is that the moguls who now run India, they've come down from what was Uzbekistan, they've taken over the north and the middle of India.

and by 1640 Shah Jahan who builds the Taj Mahal is on the throne and the Mughal empire is incredibly rich and incredibly willing to do trade but as these guys are Central Asian nomads they're not interested particularly in the sea and there's no I mean there's a small there's a few ships but there's no navy as such that the moguls control can I can I just I'm just draw at your attention everyone's attention to you know you just said you know actually the the muggles were so rich that it does not matter. The British is kind of a blip.

There is, I mean, a later picture, which is really informative. This is Jahangir as the millennial Sultan, preferring the company of Sufis. It's by Bichir, the painter. Bichda. And it is, it's a remarkable thing. So you've got Jahangir, sort of with a great golden disc behind him, looking resplendent and important. And he's... Patti's fluting above him.

And he's handing over, one would presume, a religious text to a Sufi scholar, I guess. But in the left-hand corner is a teeny tiny James I first. James First is looking remarkably pissed off. The fact that Jahangir prefers the Sufi to him. And he's got this sort of sour expression on his face. And he's really not very amused. But also not important. So this is the scale of what India regarded Britain as at the time.

And the person below him is the painter, Bichita. Bichita. His own self-portrait. And an artist in the mogul court, while the moguls were obsessed with art, the status of artists was very low. So it's slightly like putting a picture of, I don't know, President Macron next to a dustbin man. Right. I mean, he's not a, you know, he's not, he's been given the least honourable position. I mean, is it designed to be a pictorial insult or is it, is it just, this is just how they saw?

That's just how they saw it. And what has happened is that there's a picture of James I'm first sitting there because it's been given by one of the ambassadors and it's an exciting object and the mogul artist just copied it and shoved it above his own picture in the corner. I assume it's a remarkable picture. That's also in your book.

But that again is very, that again is very telling. Because the Brits are from this, you know, I mean, the Emperor Akbar talks about the northerners as being like animals. I mean, these people are regarded as semi-savage. The Brits? The Brits and all the other North Europeans. Okay, so, right. Okay, so we've got the British, apart from the old skirmish around with the Portuguese.

The English. I beg your pardon. The English, but just the Portuguese, sort of snipping away at their heels. But otherwise, they've pretty much got a clear run. So from the 1630s on, the Brits have a very good chance of taking the Indian textile market and exporting it around the globe. And they do this very successfully. So that by the early 18s, You have de-industrialisation as far as Mexico because there's so much cheap Indian cotton of a high quality and very low cost being exported by the Brits to the new world.

Are they exporting stuff that's already being made or are they causing more stuff to be made? They are buying piece cotton as it's called, which is otherwise bolts, rolls of raw material. They're not in most cases. Commissioning anything. commissioning sort of nice clothes, no, it's the raw material. And they're shipping it not just to Britain, but all over the world. And, you know, when you go to, for example, lovely Renaissance palaces in Italy on your summer holidays, you often see on the walls, mogul Kalam Kari's, which are presumably got there via the East India Company.

A beautiful decorative items. Okay, so this is lovely. I mean, you know, England gets its cotton and the weavers get their money and they all lived happily ever after. Well, for a long time they do. And both the moguls and the East India Company prosper, spectacular at this period. And everything goes quite well until Orangzeb, who is this mogul emperor who messes everything up. He takes too much of the deck and he over expands too fast to the south. And also he irritates all the Hindus by reimposing the jizziah. Attacks are non-believers. If you worship your own god and it's not an Islamic god, you pay a tax. Basically since the time of Akbar, the Mughal Empire had been a very successful collaborative deal between the Rajput armies who are Hindu, who are defeated in battle, but then rather than being punished or being looted, they are brought into the mogul fold and become the spearhead of Mughal armies. So for quite a lot of the next century, you find Hindu-Mogul armies attacking minor Muslim seltans halfway down India in the decade. So Ahmad Naga, Bijapur, Golconda. All these little sultanates are attacked by Hindu armies working for the moguls.

So it's the opposite in the sense of what you'd expect. Which is why today, for example, one goes to Rajasthan, if you go to the town of Bikina, there's a wonderful library, where you find the best decany manuscripts, which have been looted at this period for the middle of India. I come back to us. Orang Zep is messing things up. Orang Zep is messing things up. And when he dies in 1707, the empire begins to fall. And this, again, was something we talked about in an earlier podcast. The Jats, the Sikhs and the Maratas are rising up.

Any of them could have taken the moguls out. But in the end, it's this odd character from out of town, Nadeeshire of Persia. Comes in, comes to Delhi, loots everything. It takes the coal. Cairns of the Conell. And among 8,000 wagons of other stuff. And once he's taken all the finance from the imperial treasury, the Mughal Empire disintegrates. Where previously you'd had a single unitary state, beautifully administered.

by local governors in every corner of the empire over what's now four different countries, suddenly every town is semi-independent. Jobpo, Jaipo, Udaypur, Tanjol, Hyderabad. You can't pay the soldiers, you can't pay the administrations, no one's going to work for you. The whole thing falls apart. And in that churning, if you like,

in that extraordinary transformation of India from a massive empire to tiny self-governing states jostling up against each other, two European corporations make merry. One is the East India Company, based in Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. But there's a rival French company called the Company Desaunt, which is based in Pondicherry and Chandonaga. And they have shadow factories opposite the English ones in almost every place.

What's the relationship? I mean, competition is one thing, but did it get violent between the two? So it's very hostile. And the whole of the 18th century, there's a global conflict between France and England, which manifests itself in, first of all, the Austrian succession of eventually the seven years war. And these are global conflicts. The British fight, the French, in Lake Huron and in the northern United States, in Canada, that last of the Mexican stuff with Daniel de Lewis leaping over waterfalls and all that sort of stuff in the Caribbean.

as far away as the Philippines, but also, you know, the Jacobite rebellion, arming the Irish, all this sort of stuff is going on. In the middle of all this, the English and the French are fighting it out. And Robert Clive, as a young man, does a whole series of skirmishes called the Carnatic Wars. Wait, wait, wait. Before you go into the Carnatic Wars, let us, first of all, just explain who Robert Clive actually was. Because, you know, in my mind and in my schooling, we only heard Clive of India, as if he was some noble who had sort of beamed down into the history book. But he was quite different, wasn't he? Sure. So Robert Clive is exactly the sort of guy who joins the East Indy Company at this period. He is from a sort of poshish background. He's the local

squire's son, social aspirations, but not much money. And a lot of these people are being signed up by the East Indy Company because it's not a bad way of making a living at this period. And if you are the sort of minor gentry that has high social aspirations but simply doesn't have the money to support it anymore, to put one of your kids out to the East India Company is a good option. It's like one son sometimes goes into the priesthood if you don't know what to do with it. But okay, so Robert. But this is more like, I suppose, putting one son into Goldman Sachs. Okay, but he is by nature a delinquent. He is indeed a delinquent.

And there is a whole lot of letters from his uncle which survive, which have him being the village village bully. He has protection rackets against village shopkeepers in Shropshire. He breaks the windows of shopkeepers who don't pay up. He even floods somebody's shop just out of spite. So he's this sort of unruly adolescent who is sent off by his uncle eventually to India, where he's signed up as an accountant. And of course, being an unruly delinquity, he hates it. And twice he tries to shoot himself and twice for various reasons he fails.

But he regards this as sort of almost as a sort of divine mandate that he's clearly been spared for great things. And so when war breaks out between France and England, he signs up to become a soldier. And this tells that, unlike a can't see, to be something that he's very... Right up his street. Right up his street. And he's not a professional soldier.

He's not in the British Army, but he takes to it like a duck to water. And he's trained up by various veterans of Culloden, who have now come out to South India. And together, Clive and some of his mates, basically outwit the French company. French company is hobbled because it's very much state-run, guys that can't quite make it at court in Versailles, a slight losers sent out. And unlike the British company, which is a sort of libertarian, thrusting, hungry, ruthless, ambitious young men, you get a lot of sort of dim aristocrats in the French country.

So nobody knows what to do with. And they also haven't got much freedom of movement. Everything has to go through Versailles. They don't get an answer from the king because he's busy with his mistresses. and all that sort of stuff. So the arrival of Clive coincides with the moment that the English East Indy Company clearly gets an upper hand over the French. And Clive makes his first fortune at this point,

comes back to England and goes into Parliament. And almost immediately there's a scandal over the fact that he's bribed everyone. And quite soon, having given some money to his dad and bought some land, he finds his coffers which he thought would be enough to a taron, in fact, they're exhausted within three or four years. So he signs up at exactly the moment when England and France are heading to war again. And this is going to be the conflict that will finally break out in 1756 to 7 that the Americans call the French and Indian wars,

which we in Britain call the Seven Years War. Right. Again, the global conflict between Britain and France in all their different colonies and territories. And rather like the Iraq War a few years ago, everything is set off by a false piece of intelligence. A document is delivered to the East Indie Company saying that we've just seen that the French are loading up an enormous flotilla in their main base, Port L'Oriand. And it's clearly going off to Bengal and just set sail. And there's descriptions of the number of cannon, the number of warships that have gone. The document is not completely wrong in that there was a big potential teller, but they've got the destination wrong.

In fact, it's heading to Canada. And so when the Brits send off a rival fleet, the company goes to the British Navy and says, you know, you've got to protect our interests. We're about to be wiped off the face of Bengal. The Royal Navy produces some ships. Clive is recruited on the company side. And so you have a joint sort of Royal Navy and Marine. and East India Company expedition. But they arrive in Madras to find there's no French.

There's no opposition at all because they've all gone off to Canada. And they've sailed halfway around the world. They've taken six months and there's no one there. What the hell do they do? Might as well fire. Clive, very nearly sort of career almost ended at this point, having pressed to this expedition, is saved by a complete fluke,

just at the same time as he's arriving to the north in Calcutta. A new governor of Bengal is called Saraja Daila. And he is another sort of angry punk. He's young. He's already fallen out with everybody. He's the beloved nephew of a man called Ali Verdi Khan, who'd governed Bengal for years very well. But he has none of Ali Verdi Khan's tact, diplomacy, or sense of state. He's famous for sinking pleasure boats just to have the fun of watching people drown.

He's a serial seducer of women who takes women and walls them up If they if they're He sounds like a total scumbach He's a total scumbach And he attacks Calcutta On the very justified grounds That the Brits have been

Rebuilding the fortifications of Calcutta Without his permission He's the governor They have to ask If they're going to fortify that Planning permission If you will Exactly

It's a planning permission dispute And If he thinks that they must be arming it against him because a lot of bankers have recently arrived to Calcutta and the Brits are resisting them paying any taxes to Saraj Dalla. In fact, of course, they are arming against the French because they've been given this intelligence

and the documents survive in the Indian National Archives. There's an entire Latila on their way. There's a tiller on their way. So when news arrives that Saraj Dala has attacked Calcutta and put many people into a guardhouse where they died of heat and hysteria in something called the black hole of Calcutta in 1756. When news comes that the city has fallen and there's been this apparent abuse of the survivors,

Clive suddenly has a job. He's sent north and he retakes Calcutta. Can we just on the black hole of Calcutta? Because, I mean, that is something that did come up when I was at school. And it was hundreds of people were forced into this inhumane, oxygenless hole in the ground. and left to die, men, women and children. It's a very pitiful story. Is that what happened?

Is that the truth of it? Well, it's a hugely disputed bit of history. That many people died is clear, but the numbers seem to have been hugely exaggerated. What happened was that when the Brits lost Calcutta, a lot of them got very drunk and ran a mock, and the various people were shot guards. So again, Sir Raja Dider's troops quite reasonably, so we can't have this lot just running loose

and taking pot shots out of us. So they lock them in a guardroom. But they lock probably about 60 people in this guardroom. It's a small space, isn't it? And about 30 people come out alive. So my understanding, having looked at the documents and studied this, is that something happened. There was definitely some extremely unfortunate and avoidable deaths.

But it wasn't a sort of dastardly plot to kill them all. The Brits have misbehaved. And this was an attempt to keep unruly prisoners, underlocking key until somewhere better was found for them. I mean, Sir Rajadalit is not somebody we want to stand up for either. I mean, he's quite capable of doing atrocities, but the Black Hole of Calcutta is not one such. Okay, all right. But by the time it's arrived in Madras, this story is already.

It's given a mandate, isn't it? It gives a mandate and a reason and an honourability to what follows. So the idea is that Clive is going to liberate this captured city. He's going to vindicate British honour. and he's going to teach these savages who've killed our poor women and children a lesson. And he's got a big Royal Navy Fittler with some Marines. He's taken on the East India Company's own nascent mercenary army, who are the sepoys, who he's drained up a bit.

And there's not many of them instead, any of the sepoys at this point. There's only a few thousand. And they're really just jumped up security guards, given a few muskets. And he arrives in Bengal, and he recapt. to Skarkata without really much opposition. It's not a very difficult task given the armaments that he has. And he then gets the news that the French have declared war on England and the seven-year war has begun. So he then takes a second town, which is Chandonaga, the French settlement. And that is much more of a conflict. There's a enormous sea battle, in fact, or using naval ships

on the Hoogley River. And a lot of people are killed on both sides. And at this point, having taken not just Calcutta, but the French headquarters at Chandanaga, Clive writes to his dad that he's heading home and that his name is made, and he should be now again set up for life. Set up for life. Yeah. So just as Clive is heading back to Madras and planning to cash in his chips and another nice little victory, a letter arrives that changes everything.

And the letter is from a man called the Jugget set, the banker to the world. And the Jugget sets are like the Rothschilds of 19th century Europe. They are these incredibly rich, very political bankers. They've invented a very clever system of transferring funds around India at a time of disruption. In the old days, the tax from Bengal, which kept the whole thing going, because this was the rich area of India, would be put onto a wagon, a troop of soldiers would go with it. and it would literally march overland up the Ganges to Delhi. Now with war bands roaming around, that's no longer a possibility. And the Jugger Set's come up with this credit idea that basically you pay the tax into our office in Calcutta

and we will give you a chit and you can withdraw it in our office in Delhi. It's like it feels like such a modern concept. It's a modern concept. It's a credit. It's a credit. And saying, right, send it over, money order. But they, it's exactly that. But they, they take 10 to 15% of the tax load.

And given this is, you know, the main source of money for the Mughal Empire, they make a fortune very, very quickly, become the richest people in Asia. And according to one, mogul source, money flows into the coffers of the jugate sets, like the Ganges flows into the sea. And so these guys reach out to Clive and say, we've seen that you've just defeated Sarajadir and taken back Calcutta. we've got a proposal for you. We think Sir Raja Dalla is a psycho.

He has threatened us. He's forced us to give him loans. He's threatened to circumcise us and make us Muslims. And we're not standing for this. What we propose is that you attack Siraj Dada at his capital in Moshidabat. We will pay off his generals so they don't fight. And for that, service, sir, we will pay you personally,

one million pounds. And we will pay the company another million pounds. What does that mean in those days? What is one, I mean, it sounds like a one million pounds. What does it actually mean in those days? It means that Clive becomes the richest self-made man in Europe overnight. It's a colossal offer. And he has no authority to do this.

He's been sent to fight the French, which he's done. But he takes this and no one is going to say no to this kind of money. It's outrageous sums of money. No one's ever been offered this. And the fact that the company's been offered a million two means that Clive thinks that he can get away with it. So he goes north and for a week there's a terrible silence and he wonders whether he's falling into a trap because there's no letters reaching him. But eventually he brazenes it out and they meet at the battlefield of Palashi, known in English textbooks as Flassie. Palash is actually a type of tree.

A palash tree is this gorgeous orange tree that produces these wonderful bright blossoms in April. But anyway, there's mango groves there. Clive camps at the night in the morning he finds the mogul army has encircled him. And there's a terrible moment when it looks like he's a trap. It's a trap. He's bitten off more than he can true. And then the fire from this army, supported by incidentally a French contingent that are very keen to wipe out the English,

starts. And Clive's army has to hide. They hide on the banks of the river. They hide in the mango groves. And it looks like they're going to have to leg it back to Calcutta at night. at the only possible option. But at the vital moment, a monsoon storm breaks, and there's a terrific damper.

And while the British remember to cover their gunpowder with tarpaulins, the moguls don't. You are joking. Literally, this crucial moment, this one accident, that basic. That basic thing. Could have turned history.

Totally, it does turn history. So when the mogul cavalry think that the same must have happened to the English and the English calendar are out of commission, immediately the monsoon storm ends, the cavalry, the mogul cavalry charge forward. And they're met by a coruscating, enormous volley from the English cannon,

killing all the leaders of the cavalry. And that's it. And that's the end of Plessy. That is the Battle of Plessy. At that point, Mirjaffa, who is the general in the pay of the jacket sets as well, takes his half of the army and marches off the battlefield.

Sir Roger Dowler realizes that he's been portrayed, blees off. he is eventually captured, hacked bits, and his mutilated body is paraded on the back of a donkey through Mashidabad. The next day, Clive walks into Mashitabad with the jug it says, and literally helps himself to everything in the treasury. He stuffs his pockets. And years later, when he's called before Parliament, rather like sort of Boris Johnson, he brazenes it out and says, my lords, there was a prostrate city at my feet. the bankers waited on my pleasure.

My lords, I was astonished at my own moderation. Oh, for heaven's sake. And everyone laughs and he's off the heart. And there's, oh, Clive. But that explains where we started, Paris Castle. Not quite. Not quite. No, no.

Nearly. So what happens then is that Clive gets his million. And eight years later, all the people that he has put into power as puppets again rise up against English because the English have behaved so incredibly badly. and basically killed the goose that was laying the golden egg. In just eight years, they lay waste to Bengal by asset stripping it. And there is another big act of resistance, and not just the Nawab of Bengal this time,

who's now called me a custom, a man actually put in by Clive, but also the Nawab of Avod, which is basically Uttar Pradesh, who's called Shudja Udaullah, and the Mughal emperor himself, Shah Alam, all meet at the battle of Bucking. and they take on the East Indy Company. But again, the company has used the money that it's gathered to enormously increase the size of its sepoys and it's bought an enormous number of sepoys. And there are now 40,000 trained up sepoys trained in the latest European techniques of warfare.

Horse artillery, 18th century ballistics, muskets, bear nets. And it's a hard fought battle, but the East Indy Company's army defeats all three of these armies massed together. And this is the moment when Clive returns to India and makes Sha'Alum sign the Duani. And suddenly you find that the richest provinces of India, three rich provinces, Bengal, Bihar and Arissa are signed over not to the British government, not to the British army, but to a private corporation, the East India Company. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you tell a story. And it's not even the end, is it? It's just the end of the beginning.

This is now the moment that the company moves from being a trading organisation. Suddenly it's an imperial territorial power. And if you want to know more about that, do listen to the next podcast. That's all from me, Anita Arnden. And me, William Darympa.