Empire: World History - 190. Rags to Riches: The Scots in India

Episode Date: September 30, 2024

In the wake of Culloden, much of Scotland was on its knees. Crippled by defeat and the subsequent backlash of the British government, along with famine and poverty, they were in dire need of new horizons. The nascent British Empire would provide it. The Scottish Highlanders had developed a fearsome reputation during their struggles against the English, and would prove just as indomitable fighting for Britain in India. Yet, in more ways than militarily, India was to become a treasure trove of opportunity, enrichment and conquest for the Scots. From their domination of the East India Trading Company, to some of the men credited with cementing imperial rule in India, and the Highlander Regiments who took on the ferocious Tipu Sultan in the South, Scots involvement in all spheres of the British Empire in India was momentous. It also made them very rich… how controversial, then, is Scotland’s Indian involvement? In today’s episode, William and Anita are joined by historian Andrew MacKillop to discuss the colourful history of Scots and India. To fill out the survey: survey.empirepoduk.com To buy William's book: https://coles-books.co.uk/the-golden-road-by-william-dalrymple-signed-edition Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn 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. No man of any other nation can serve and survive in an Indian province where the chief is a Scot and there is a Scott to be found. Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnan. And me, William Durumple. And well, the way he said his name, you can guess. We're still in our Scottish series.

He goes all blue-woad on us, doesn't he? Look, I'm going to start with a little story. Settle down at the back. This is the story. Are we sitting comfortably? Okay, we'll begin. This is the story of a young lanky Scotsman who leaves his shores to go to India. A young man full of hope.

full of wonder, full of questions, he arrives in this foreign place, and immediately misses home, but sees bits of home in India and decides to make a list, a list that will be comforting for a while. It's you, in it? It's me. You were lanky ones. This is a true story. I was lanky once.

Long, long ago. Yeah, you were quite the lanker. It's true. Okay, so what did Lanky William do? So I wrote this list of all the Scots who, in my view, at that point in my life, had done wonderful things for India. I've actually found it on my computer. It used to be in word perfect, amazingly, somehow transformed itself into word. Yeah, so anyway, at the top of the list was a good Scots-border's boy, Alan Octavian Hume, who founded the Congress

Party, believing that a non-revolutionary vehicle for home rule would avoid unnecessary violence. Nearer at home, I wrote on this list, was John Skinner of Montrose, a cousin of the more famous Skinner of Skinner's Horse, who founded both the Bombay Chamber of Commerce and the Bombay steam company, and who along with Dadaboy Pestanji, were the two main promoters of the Bank of Bombay. And we should say, Skinner's Horse, for those who don't know, was an elite cavalry unit that was much active during the, what some call the mutiny and some call the First War of Independence.

So that's Skinner's. We'll hear more about James Skinner, I think towards the second half of the series. But then I wrote down on this list, Lord Dalhousie, who Alitra and I, both regard as a complete demon and wrote against in our Coennaud. But anyway, me in 1984, I wrote the father of the Indian railways. Also, there were Scots engineering firms who built up some of the first engines, Sharp Stewart and Co. of Glasgow and our Bothnot and Co. of Calcutta. And another of Dalhousie scheme was the Telegraph, which was supervised by William O'Shaughnessy of Edinburgh University. So the fact that he's on your list makes me think this list is a little bit

shaky. Do go on. Do you go on. The stream or then we'll get the real story, or the other side of the story, certainly. Two Scots, Robert and Charles Alexander Bruce, who in 1833 discovered the tea plant in Assam, and who later successfully transplanted Chinese variety into the Assam Hills. So beginning the process by which Chai became India's national drink. And then two doctors, Surgeon Major Ronald Ross, who first discovered the way that malaria was invade by mosquitoes, part of the long tradition of Scots Medicine India that began with my final person on the list, but it's a much longer list, but I'll stop here. And it was the Scottish surgeon, William Hamilton, who cured Orangzeb's great-grandson Farroxir of what was delicately called

a malignant distemper, which in plain English I think was a bad case of V&D. It's an STD, isn't it? It's a very nasty SDD. And the Scotsman, William Hamilton, curing Farroxia of this, gave the East Indy Company their entry and was rewarded free trade in Bengal, Bihar and ERISA. So that was my fond imaginings at the age of 18. So 18-year-old Lanky Del Rimpal wrapped this list around him like a comfort blanket. Let's just find out how frayed that blanket might have been. We have a very, very special guest. Historian Andrew McKillop is with us today to discuss exactly, well, how worthy that list was.

But actually, in more depth, how Scots built, expanded their own. as a means of restoring the fortunes in the wake of Collodden. So we spoke a lot about how Collodden was sort of a nadir in the Scottish history. And how do you come back from that? Welcome to the programme, first of all. Thank you very much for being with this. Oh, thank you very much for having me, and he turned, William. I began to sit very uncomfortably as I listened to that list.

I saw you as squirman. Also, may I point out at some point, William is going to go so super Scots in his accent. None of us will know it's him anymore. Those of us who listen regularly to the podcast, he will talk like a different man. Andrew is from the Hebrides. Is it Harris? Ayla Harris, yep.

We last were in the Hebrides in the previous episodes with Body Prince Charlie Landing and Eriske. Not so far. No, no, indeed, not so far. And he passed through Harris briefly on his sort of X around the West Highlands as he avoided the government troops left, right and centre. Harris was also owned by a series of Scottish landowners

in Eastern their company service, which is how I came to it. Yeah, so I mean, you're exactly the right person with the right history to talk to about this. Can we start with a quote from Sir Walter Scott? He called India the corn chest for Scotland. What did he mean by that, first of all? I find it very surprised that I'm actually going to do something I very rarely thought I would do, which is agree with something Walter Scott said.

It's actually a highly accurate statement on the fact that by moving its people out to what then and now is one of the major parts of the world's economy, essentially a quite a relatively marginal, poor, wet, cold Scotland was essentially tapping into the world economy and, well, crudely put, big in asset stripping South Asia of large parts of its surplus capital and its produce. So in that sense, the corn chest for Scotland, what he means is if you send people out, you will get corn, meaning money back. And it's the people for money nexus, which Scotland does very well, and for which India is probably the key part of the world

where they're doing it most effectively and efficient. Andrew, you and I have been on stage trying to persuade audiences in Glasgow and North Berwick about the perfidy of their ancestors. Could you just give us a picture for those who are not from here and don't know this? How, in a sense,

the Scots have romanticised their imperial past and made the English the villains, well, they see themselves as the victims and the heroes. And how far you think that's not an accurate picture? I'm just wondering how long the podcast Scott. I mean, in some senses, I think a useful way to start is, I mean, it's noticeable how Williams list is quite chronologically specific. It sort of starts with really the end of the era of the company and is really more about the Raj when sort of British popular culture says

the Raj is taking over responsible government, you know, implementing all the sort of modern changes you see. So that feeds into Scottish society's perception of itself as, you know, great engineers, great educators, builders of railways, steam lines, etc. And medicine, of course. So there's this sort of happy coincidence where by the nature of the colonial regime has activities which resonate with Scotland's sense of itself as an educated, educating nation, etc. What tends to get missed out is, A, that was still a very colonial process, and B, it misses the very long backstory where the contact isn't sort of from the area you were talking about, William on your list, sort of the 1830s onwards, it goes way, way back much further into the age

of, you know, the English East Indy Company, which put it mildly, you know, is predatory colonialism on an extraordinarily scale and it's a very different type of empire. And they're just, if anything, just as common in that phase as they are in the later phases. Our last episode of empire was about the bloody aftermath of Colodden. And I said it was and Nadia because you saw clan chieftains being stripped of all their powers. You saw lands confiscated. You saw executions and slaughter. And clansmen being sold into slavery and dead should labour. Indeed. So from that point, how soon does the realisation that, you know, actually we need to do something, we won't be able to do it here, so we need to find our corn chest? When does that suddenly start dawning?

How long after Collodon? It's instantaneous. We used to think that. that after the British state breaks up clan power by stripping them off their military and political powers, that it would take till the seven years war for the redeployment of Highland, Gallic troops and large amounts of displaced Scots into British military service. And remind people about what was the seven years war? So the seven years war is the French Indian War. It kind of breaks out in 1753. And it's in some ways the First World War. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, it's the era when the company under Clive was really

beginning to build up military power outside of its original base of the South. But actually, there's now clear, demonstrable evidence that the British state actually takes defeated, imprisoned, former Jacobites and batches them into companies and sends them out with Anson's. That's actually been shown, you've got lists of prisoners sent out to India. I'd never seen that. How fantastic. Would they be given an ultimatum that, look, Macy's, either you go and you fight for us and you do some good for us,

or you've seen what happens to your other Jackabike brothers. Yeah. There's a great letter from the war offices, basically tell them that we'll not inquire into their past histories, but they're going to have to join these companies. And they round up prisoners from Dumbarton Castle, Sterling and Carlisle. What they're basically saying is you can go in front of the assizes and take your chances with the hangman,

or probably removal to North America, or you get free service into these companies. So defeated Scots are actually in India by the end. of 1747. I didn't know that had been proven. Who's done this work, Andrew? This is fantastic. That was myself. It has to be... That was yourself. They're very modest to... To your bugle. Yeah, it's you. Gosh. It was a circuitous way of getting around to seeing I. I mean, because it is extraordinary. It's the stick because I knew about the carrot. I knew, you know, the big government put in financial incentives to say, look, you know, if you join our enterprise

overseas, you can be enriched. You can get some of that power and dignity back. But I didn't realize there was actually, you know, it's this or the noose. Do we know how many? I mean, roughly how many people then were offered that choice? It doesn't sound a lot, but William will know that in a sense the British, either through company or crown forces, doesn't actually have a lot of manpower in India at this 1740, 1750s. They send out six companies of 100 men. It's a full regiment in effect. And to the Carnatic? Exactly, William. They're committed to the Carnatic. We were going to talk about this later, but since we're on the subject now, we might as well just cover this bit now, you have a weird rematch of Kalluddin, don't you, in the Karnatic Wars,

where you've got Stringer Lawrence, who was on the government side at the Battle of Kalloden, and facing him on the front side now in southern India. The Karnatic, we didn't explain, is the east coast of India facing towards the Bay of Bengal. And tell people more about who's fighting who in the Karnatic War? It's basically the French East India Company, the company de Zand, which is incidentally found by an exiled scot, John Law of Lorriston, I'm speaking from Edinburgh today and John Law is a native of this city, but he goes and finds the French East India Company. And so you have the troops of the French East Indy Company led by two, among others, as Dupley, who's the famous general, there's two of Law's sons fighting in the Carnatic War on the

French side. So you've got two exiled Scots leading the French East India Company army. Who would describe themselves as Jacobites? I mean, would they self-identified, to use the terminology of the day, as Jacobites on the French side? That's a good question. They would probably see themselves as subjects of his most Christian majesty, meaning in a way they're kind of becoming French. They're not quite so content to see themselves as sort of disaffected exiles. The second generation were born in France, weren't they?

So they'd never been to Scotland. But also British East India Company's armies are led by somebody called Stringer Lawrence who'd fought on the government. side at Calodon and facing him is Lally. Tell us about Lally. Was he an Irish Jacobite who'd been one of the wild geese? What are they? Much like far better known variant, the Scottish Jacobism, there's also Jacobism in Ireland, namely the attempt to restore the stewards. That, unlike the persistent sort of revolts you get in Scotland or risings you get in Scotland, the Irish Jacobism is smashed really in the 1690s fairly definitively. And as part of the settlement of that war between

William of Orange and the Irish Jacobites. They are interestingly allowed to exile themselves to France and about 12,000 Irish troops are allowed to head off into Honourable French service. In other words, they can join the French army, etc. And Lally, whose family are from Galway, are part of that displaced Catholic Jacobite tradition. He's serving as a senior French officer for the Compinier des Ande, but his family route is directly connected into defeat of the same movement which string or lot as does in Scotland. Oh, my gosh, so, I mean, it is almost a sort of action replay of, you know, Collodon taking place, you know, over the waters and in India.

Just as some of our listeners, it may have seemed odd on a series of empire that we did the Battle of Collodon, but you cannot understand the Scots and Empire unless you look first at what happens at Collodon and the way that the Jacobites then go out and have the rematch in India. So you have the Carnotic Wars. Does that open the door then to a flood of Scots who then see that the future is India and the future is here and now. How much is the volume or the traffic that then comes over from Scotland to India? William himself has written very eloquently on this. It's not as if there are Scots, your William Hamilton, for example, sort of floating around

the English company in very small numbers. But yeah, the arrival of those former Jacobite prisoners marks the first big sort of structural influx of Scots. So that's why you're quite right to raise Palloden. But what's happening in the Carnatic is, in a sense, The war between the companies des Andorriottal and the English East India Company is kind of, as really was written so brilliantly about, it's happening through proxies. So you've got the companies, respective companies, backing contenders for what are majorly important regional kingdoms. Karnataka, Tangor, various of these southeastern Indian states in what is now really Tamil Nadu, this was the state of Tamil Nadu. And as that happens, the companies are changing themselves. So they're moving from being commercial, largely trade-orientated.

Increasingly, they're raising taxes to support a military machine, and they're needing much, much more manpower. So you move from needing merchants to needing military officers. And there's also a sense, isn't there, Andrew, that in the period of the Carnatic Wars, which is the 1740s, both before and after Cologne, that you've got the company making at that decade, possibly more money by being a mercenary lending force. They lend out their troops, whether the Indian-trained sepoys or these Scots, press-ganged Scots out of the prisons in Stirling and so on, two rival rulers.

So, for example, you have a disputed inheritance of the Nizam of Hyderabad, and the French company and the English company back different claimants. And so you have the idea being that if you manage to seize control of the Nizam of Hyderabad and run his army, a whole chunk of Central India is yours for the taking. Well, absolutely. If you're the muscle, then you'll get the cash as a result. And what ultimately happens after these numerous battles and three major Carnatic wars is that British dominance prevails, the French are pushed right into a corner. French East India companies, that's front ponder cherry, isn't it? That's sort of the place that they inhabit. So you've now got Scots who have fought, they've got Niz Arms, noabs, etc., in their pockets. And they are in a position then to make the corn that was predicted.

and a lot of it. Can we start talking about some people in particular? I suppose it's great to have Stringer-Lorence in, if we need to demonstrate that what's going on here doesn't just involve Scots. He's a Londoner, actually. But what he represents is a really important process by which professional British officers, such as Stringer-Lor-Lorins, you know, who fights at Collodon on the government side are beginning to go well. After 1748, the British Army downsizes, etc. Just as the company is beginning to trade military expertise as a key commodity in these Indian Civil War. So you start to get a drift and then a rush of these professionally trained military officers

out into a new employer. They're basically saying, here's my CV, I need employment. It used to be that these were merchants, but now you're getting military types and tax-raising types, so you're getting more bureaucrats more. And in that context, someone like Stringer-Lorence is taking the professional ethos of the British Army and sort of layering it into the... the nascent CPI armies that are being developed by the company. And Robert Clive is his protege, isn't he?

Robert Clive, who's previously an accountant, is trained up as a ruthless soldier by Lawrence. At the same ruthlessness that we saw the English army have after Collodon is taught into Clive, who then uses it the same tactics in India. People who haven't listened to our entire India series, why haven't you? Where have you been? But Robert Clive is not William's favourite man, is he? I mean, just a quick summary of what Robert Clive means to you.

Robert Clive is an extraordinary character, whatever you think of him. And he's the kind of Lord Voldemort figure in my book, The Anarchy. He always wins. He wins on the battlefield against first the French in the Carnatic Wars, then against Saraj Dahlah in Bengal. He then comes home and defeats all his enemies in the company and sees his control of the directorship. Particularly someone called Sullivan is sort of vanquished in the boardroom by his clive.

And finally, in the final sense, phase of his life, he enters Parliament and survives successive inquiries into his corruption. And his big moment comes when he stands in the middle of Parliament. And he's asked by the opposition why when he took Bengal, he just put jewels into his pockets and took a 10% cut for his own personal bank account. And his reply, which is rather, it sort of goes down a bit like a sort of Boris Johnson joke in Parliament today, where all the MPs forget any issues of morality and just laugh at his jokes. He replies, my lords, the treasuries of Mashidabad were thrown open before me. The bankers were grovelling at my feet. My lords, I am astonished at my own moderation, he says.

And they all laugh around and nothing happens. It's Boris Johnson's Christmas parties all over again. Well, I'm very aware that we so far have done a Scots in Empire episode without talking about Scots. We've talked about two Englishmen. So can we talk about the Tipu Sultan factor? in this, because then we do have Scots coming to the fore. So, Andrew, would you agree that it's the next phase of the East India Company conflicts in India, where we really see the Scots at the forefront?

And that is Tipu Sultan of Mysore. He's the very military son of Haider Ali, and the father and the son have seized the old Hindu state of Mysore, re-jigged it, taken it over and turned it into an amazing military machine aimed at the East India Company. Because you've got men like Hector Monroe, Sir David Baird from East Lothian, and the ill-fated William Bailey from Loch Ness. These are the people who are fighting Tipu. Tell us about that conflict. I think you're absolutely right. It's the wars against what you would argue is one of the big regional rising powers.

They very effectively run the state of Mysore. And in those wars, which were the 1760s, again in the 1780s and finally in the 1790s, that sees two things happen. One, the number of Scottish officers that are beginning to populate the presidency army of Madras, which is now increasing from a sort of an original about 1 in 8 to about 1 in 5 to 1 in 4. In other words, the officer code is becoming very Scottish. To put that into context, Scotland's weight of population in terms of Britain and Ireland is about 12. There's almost twice as many Scots inside per head at the military elite style.

But then increasingly, the wars against Tupu force the British state to commit more of its own regular regiments. And what you see is a string of regiments raised in Scotland, the sort of 89th Highland Regiment First, the 73rd, 74th, 75th, 76. These are all Highland regiments. And these officers are largely Scottish. And that makes the Scottish military elite very heavily Scottish. totally disproportionately so, in fact.

And again, with the story of William Bailey's troops who land in Madras, in the middle of the war against Tupu, and a march down to fight the ill-fated battle of Poliloh, these again are Highlanders who are trying to prove themselves loyal to the government after the failure of Golodon. These regiments are, including the one that Bailey leads to disaster, that Polyla are sort of, they're named Highland, but they also have large amounts of sort of new,

Scotland's new urban poor, that are a mishmash of people who are still trying to regain their lands, they're trying to fight for forgiveness as it were. But you've also just got economically poor people who are sort of being committed into regiments. And you're right, when they go to Polilur, they basically get wiped out. So they get wiped out, but a lot of them get taken prisoner as well by Tupu Sultan. And a lot of them end up converting to Islam. Is that, again, because these are survivors and they're going to do whatever they need to do to survive? Or is this, You know, a real pledge of allegiance because, you know, we didn't really want to fight you anyway.

We were just fighting you because we had to. I don't think we've got any examples of officers converting to Islam. Well, you have James Dharimple who's captured at Polly Law. And I don't know whether he converted to Islam, but he married a Begham from Muchley Patnam, the daughter of Nawab of Mazuli Patam, as it's called at the time. And she is a great granddaughter of Nur Jahan's sister. So it's right to the mogul line.

That's impressive. That's social climbing answer. Yeah, it really is social climbing. Dripals did well. They always do, William. Some soldiers do. The conditions are such that if you convert to the faith, you're not allowed to hold fellow Muslims in conditions that they're. So it was a way out of it. Most of those soldiers, however, when the peace comes,

they're then basically persona non grata. They kind of have to stay in Mysorian service or they join French regiments. I mean, it's rough for them, isn't it? They're offered these sort of choices that, you know, either do this or you'll die, join the regiment or you die and either convert or you'll die. Andrew, some of the records of that grim imprisonment are from Scots officers and men describing their captivity. Could you tell us about them?

Yeah, so I mean, when you're basically locked in either Haider Ali or Tupu's sultans, dirgens, you don't have a lot to do. So a lot of these kind of burnt time by keeping narratives of their imprisonment and precisely because so many of these officers are Scots, We've got, you know, like John Walker of Boland's great narrative, there's the Leslie narrative, which kind of explain, they're really interesting insights into how Scots see themselves, but also how they kind of understand or think they understand South Asian society. And what do they say? Because we won't have read these. It's fascinating the way they pick up in this idea that there's a sort of authentic India.

And people like Tipu and his father are sort of, you know, Islamic intruders. they're sort of conquerors. And what do they say about every accusation as a confession? You know, they're kind of projecting sort of narratives of recent conquest onto, of course, an Islamic society that's been in India for many centuries in this part. So they're trying to sort of other the Mysorian state and its Islamic leadership by saying, you know,

we're really here to help the poor Hindus. Is it, dare I say, an Operation Freedom kind of situation? I hate to say it, but yeah, kind of is getting close to that. But, you know, in other words, they're envisaging India. the way it works for the East India Company. But they also note that they draw very noticeable comparisons. They see hilltop towns and forts and they think of, they say, oh, it's just like Edinburgh. They think of the military elites in Mysore. These are really good, proud warriors, but like ourselves. You know, so there is odd cosmopolitan equivalencies being drawn as well.

And, you know, they note with great, almost perverse pride that Tipu and Hyder Ali note that They say we recognise in the British, but we know that you guys are Scots and you're somehow a different bunch. You're the real warriors. There's an odd mixture of othering and attempts to compare against each other. Yeah. Othering and mirroring at the same time is quite the trick. Look, we'll take a break now. Join us after the break. We've talked about Polilur. We've talked about the Highland Regiments being defeated by Tipu Sultan. Join us after the break where the Scottish Highland Regiments prove to be victorious and the impact that has on India. Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about the Scots being roundly defeated at the Battle of Polilur by Tipu Sultan and his regiments. But that's not the end of their story and it can't be the end of their story because otherwise they wouldn't have the foothold that they then go on to have in India. So let us talk about something I know, William, you have written extensively about. Andrew knows everything about. And that's the lead up to Seringa Putnam, which is the great defeat of Tipu Sultan, which leads to, you know, things like Tipu's Tiger being in the V&A museum today. So just both of you, hold our hands and take us through this great success that the Scots go on to have. We should explain the name. Sri Rangaputnam is the old Hindu name, which the British anglicises Seringa Patam. And it becomes one of those names that you see on lists of British victory in sort of Q gardens and various obelisks around the country.

So David Baird is from East Lothian. He's captured at Pollylaw, badly wounded. And when there is a peace treaty between the company and Tipu, he is allowed out with him in captivity. I have to say is James Durumple, this guy who marries a Muslim wife, and he's, I think, Baird's ADC, and they're imprisoned together. A famous quote from Baird's mother when she hears that the survivors of Polly Lou have been led away shackled together. And her comment is, I pity the lads that shackled to Ur-Davy. That's great. Scott's mother's quote. Anyway, so it is Sir David Baird who leads the attack on Sri Rangaputnam in

79. Andrew, tell us about what happens then. Yeah, so Thuringapatnam is such an important, symbolic and geostrategic victory for Britain because my soar, I mean, a lot of Indian states put up really sophisticated opposition to the East India Company, but MISO has done it incredibly effectively, as we've just heard. And it's very noticeable that the minute that the British make peace in 1783 at the end of the American War of Independence, they can have gun for Mysore, because they know that if they take it out, they're taking out one of the most advanced, sophisticated tax-raising military states. They're also worried, aren't they, because there's French military in Sri Rangiputton, that Tipu's army have been trained up with a bunch, not just of

Frenchmen, but French Republicans with a treacle. In other words, that's exactly why Mysore. they go, that's a state that's making serious world connections to our old enemies. And that's why they just, Cornwallis is ruthlessly looking for any reason to partition it. So there's a war in the 1790s, which Mysore manages to sort of lose but contain British victory. But then the final war, which happens at the end of the 1790s, really sees a huge military effort on the part of the British. It's almost like an inverse testimony to how much they think of Mysore that they put together a huge army. it's got 10 European regiments, that's a very big field force, four of which are Scottish. So 40% of that force from a country which is 12% of Great Britain.

And it's really interesting when you read the Edinburgh newspapers that are following the advance of the British Army towards my source capital city of the Baton, they're kind of going, oh, when they take this place, we are going to get a huge bonanza. They're already talking that the Edinburgh newspapers are packed full of the list. of all the Scottish officers, and they're basically saying, this country is going to make a killing, both literally and financially. And the prize money alone from just the treasury, not the looting of the city, was 1.2 million. Now imagine that therefore the tens of thousands of pounds that is going in prize money to all those Scottish officers and men. It's a huge injection of Indian

capital to Scottish families. They're very involved in the fall of Serangiput. Now, they join the final assault, but they are the ones, are they scaling the walls and breaking the siege? David Baird is in charge of the army and there's this famous description of him offering his troops a dram of whiskey before they make the final charge over the river. And then there is this famous scene which has its representation in the Scottish National Gallery to this day. Tell us about that. Yes, you're right. The Beard leads the British assault on the capital, which is very well defended and they put up huge resistance. The British take a lot of. of casualties. It's a mixture of European and CPI forces that break in. And a very young Wellington

is there and he is not happy at the way that Beard allows this army, this to rampage through this city. So, you know, if someone like Wellington is becoming a bleeding heart liberal, you have to really wonder what the scenes were like. So what happens is Tipu dies as probably as he lived, he died fighting and his body is found inside his palace complex. It's not clear if when the painting is done, William, that, you know, that's an actual representation. It's probably an idealisation. But certainly it is known that British officers and men and Sipoy found Tipu Sultan. He was, because he was such a bogey man, due to with reasonable respect, but then subsequently this iconic painting is dawn of bared coming down to view the body of Tipu Sultan.

And there's a really interesting angle on it because it's in a dark dungeon and torchlight, the light that's lighting up the scene, which is often seen as a metaphor for bringing either Christian or British civilization here is held by a kilted Highland soldier, who of course had been the barbarians back at Colloden so there's a real reversal in the way that the Highland Soldier

is being portrayed from sort of barbaric savage to Enlightenment as it were. And this picture by Sir David Wilkie is now one of the biggest, I mean physically one of the biggest paintings in the National Gallery of Scotland. It's enormous.

I saw it just last year actually and was utterly overwhelmed by the size of it. Commissioned by Beard's widow, noticeably. So it's also a woman making sure that the family's reputation is to be understood in a certain way. And this year in Sotheby's, was it Obonum's Tipusselton, soared with the inscription of the company to Sir David Baird came up for auction

and was bought inevitably by an Indian businessman, taking it back to India for something extraordinary, more than the million. Wow. Yeah, I'm looking at it now. And absolutely, as you say, the light falling off. on the kilted, youthful face of hope. I mean, it is just heaving with symbolism. It's got a lot of symbolism in it.

Yeah, it really does, Anita. You're right. This is 1799. Half a century later, at the Great Uprising, what the British still call the Indian Mutiny, it is again Highland Regiments who are associated in the British national narrative with the liberation of Lucknow

and the reconquest of Karnpur, the Kornpour, massacre site, which again in national myth was the site where the women and children of Britain were violated and killed. Tell us about the role of the Highland troops, because we have a memory of it in the record as this great heroic act. We've got statues still up in Glasgow to the general who commanded it, but it's famous in India as the site of some of the worst colonial atrocities of all time. Tell us about that. Empires always end up producing cleavages between cultures, but I think the way 1857, the Great Indian Rising First War of Independence,

is understood in both society, kind of exemplifies just how one society can develop this idea of a sort of heroic military resistance motif, which interesting is not the South Asian one, that's the Scottish one, which is their defenders of battled Britishness, of women and children. And proportionally, Scottish regiments aren't actually numerically particularly important within the British counter-offensives of 1857-58. There's very large numbers of Sikhs, Nepalese and local troops, but they do form a bit of the speartip of the British army's presence. So again, there's this high-profile public image

that puts the British assault with a lot of kilted Highland Regiments sort of portrayed to the front. And there's these legends that the sepoys think of the kilted Highlanders as the ghosts of the women come back. Oh, really? Yeah, there's rumours flying around about what they represent. Now, whether that's true or not, but it's all adds to the mythos of these regiments. They've got all these different characteristics to them. But what did the spearhead actually do? What's the reality behind the mythology? What were they doing? Killing very large numbers of people. But from the minute the British begin to advance back up through what would become out of Pradesh, these regiments are undertaking what we might euphemistically describe as counterinsurgency actions.

The time of year is such that if you burn a lot of crops, you're basically going to induce mass starvation. It's fairly clear that they're under strict orders not to kill women and children and innocent civilians, but how the British read what an innocent civilian is. It's not very clear. Very large numbers of South Asian men in civilian clothing will be killed. And Colin Campbell, who's the general in charge of what's called the liberation of Kohn-Poe, but in other words, the taking of the city of Kampo, inflictings terrible, tortures and punishments on the sepoise he captures. He enters the Bibigar where the women and children are supposed to have been raped or killed. It's elucidated in full in Victorian times,

but the suggestion is that the women have been violated. The men are made to lick up the blood of the women, is that right? And then sown in pig skins? You're absolutely right. A Scottish general orders what was known as the strange law, which was precisely to directly attack people's sense of caste by making them undertake those actions, or sewing Indian Muslim. into pigskins. It was a deliberate attempt to say, we're not only going to kill you, we're going to erase your religion eternally. Kill your soul as well. But that was not James Campbell. That was James Neal, but who is a Scot and is just one of

the divisional commanders. So you're absolutely right that it was a Scot that ordered that strange law. Your speciality is talking about the economics of this whole relationship. Before we get to the economics and the money, I just always I struggle with this, because these are people from Scotland and a history where they know oppression. They know what it is like to be colonised, if you like, and they haven't liked it, and they've fought hard to maintain an identity. And that identity is still intact because they're in Highland regiments when they go over. How do they reconcile the fact that they are doing precisely what was done to them to another people? The key way they probably look at it is, first of all, the question is, is Scotland colonised, is now a very live language.

but all the processes that involved the suppression of Jacobism. It involved lots of Scots actively suppressing Jacobism. William talked about Collodon. One in five red quotes at Collodon was a Scot. Scotland, as a weight of its population, is overrepresented in the British Army at Collodon. So in other words, you have a Scotland, which is kind of in a sense divided between those different aspects, between does it want to be Protestant, unionist, does it want to be Stuart and maybe aligned with France?

Those divisions become moot when you move into the empire. So it becomes a way essentially of easing off Scotland's own internal divisions, of essentially displacing the tensions and the fissures of Scottish society out and just applying them elsewhere or making them irrelevant. Scotland is also very conscious of its status as an ancient kingdom, but it's now in bed, as it were, economically, with one of the richest societies in the world, in European terms at least. And it hates that idea that it's poor and poverty-stricken versus being in bed

with relatively rich England. So there's a ruthless drive, frankly, to capital accumulate. And it happens all over Scottish society and agriculture. But one of the best ways and most cost-effective ways is to get into the empire and especially get into India. And you said, I mean, you know, the newspapers, even before Seringa Putnam was breached, we're saying the money is coming. The money is coming. Let's talk about the money. Let's talk about the money. So what was the benefit to Scotland from all of this? The benefit from Scotland is, almost certainly even in the great age of tobacco and transatlantic slavery, India is probably contributing as much to those already well-known colonial links. I think a couple of examples

would probably suffice to give you an idea of the sheer scale of the money. If you take someone like the Kenzies of Seaforth, they own hundreds of thousands of acres in the north of Scotland, one of the great big landlords of the north of Scotland. And they have a rental, which in Scottish terms is colossal. In 1780s, it's about 6,300 pound. That is vast by Scottish terms. Three Seaforth serve as divisional commanders in India, and in five years they bank in Bombay, 38,700 pounds. In other words, India is giving them income that is 10 times their annual rental in Scotland. And remember, the McKenzie's are the richest type of Scott you can get, but India's wealth, warfs that of Scotland and they just want that action. And wherever you go in Scotland, you see

in the big houses a cup from Ood taken in 1857. There was a whole exhibition, wasn't there, in Edinburgh 10 years ago, of all the Scottish loot from Sri Runggabatnam, the tiger and the thistle that was called. Scottish society is, because it's so heavily overrepresented, is probably per capita, one of the place where the greatest amount of loot comes back. The money just from a sort of sample of about something in the order of 500 people in a sort of 40-year period, they bring back five and a half million pounds. Now, that might not sound much in today's terms, but I think the best way to put it is, well, the combined bank stock of the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Bank of Scotland, i.e. the two national banks, comes to 1.6 million. So basically, India is giving

Scotland five times its entire banking infrastructure at the national level. That's almost certainly bigger than the impact is in England. I mean, some of these numbers are eye-watering, the amount of wealth that's pouring in. Does it percolate down in Scotland to all stratas of society? Yes, I mean, it's largely going to the landed aristocracy and the merchant elites. But you do find that the money and the loot starts to percolate into the lower reaches of society. If you look at wills, for example, of Scots dying in India, there's a noticeable pattern where the sort of junior officers, NCOs, actually consistently,

their money not to fathers and brothers, but often to their mothers and sisters. So there's a sort of gendered element by which Scottish womanhood are benefiting from this. And it does percolate down. There are examples of ordinary soldiers leaving wealth to their family in parishes, which means that these families move right up the chain. And these are ordinary soldiers. So these come from the lower parts of Scottish society. But leaving the money to the women, sisters and wives, this isn't sort of protein feminism. It's because it's expected that the blokes will go out to India and they may not live very long. Is that the supposition there? That's correct. You're not leaning it to brothers because the assumption is those brothers should be

undertaking other activities either in India or in other parts of Britain or the empire by which they support themselves. You're not supporting the male part of the family. Your job is to support the women of the family. And that's a discernible pattern that's very noticeable. Andrew, tell me about the geographical spread. I mean, in a sense, London's got its own money and maybe empire doesn't play quite such a major role there. But when you're looking further northwards into Northumberland and Cumbria and Scotland, how big a difference does India make there to the regional wealth? I think that's a great question, William,

because I think the argument that Britain didn't become wealthy from empire might have some basis, in fact, if you're down in the sort of home counties or London, which are rich societies, and you've up into someone like Cumbria, or into large parts of Scotland, And that wealth is materially important to the capital accumulation of those regions. The empire looks very different in those parts of Britain or England and Scotland. Can I ask you this? I mean, we've talked about sort of cups from Mysore and people's houses and grandhouses getting even grander.

But for visitors who come to Edinburgh and Glasgow as you walk the streets, what are the buildings, be our tour guide now, Andrew McKellop, and tell us, you know, talk us through some of the landmarks we may know and how they are rooted in this Indian history. That's a really interesting question because in some senses I'm about to contradict myself. One of the things that happens with Indian wealth is wealth asset stripped or made through the colonial economy is it tends to disappear into built infrastructure, landscapes that actually isn't obvious anymore.

That's one of the reasons we've misunderstood it because they're conscious they don't want this to be seen as sort of loot wealth. What they want to do is turn it into respectable buildings. The East India Company wealth actually tends not to go into the city so much, Anita, as go into the countryside and rural improvement, big country houses and landscapes. When you go around the highlands, you see these obelisks and these museums and these charitable institutions, one after the other, with names associated with India. That's where you do see the wealth.

It tends to go into things like new hospitals, infirmaries, schools, churches. In other words, it's not so much going directly into building, you know, large amounts of tenements and streets. It's what it's doing is it's going into key parts of the economy. So see if you go to someone like Elgin. Elgin was exactly what I was thinking of. I went last year and it's there in your face. Tell me, tell me, I've not been to Elgin. What do I see?

What's in my face? It's a small town and yet they have these enormous public buildings. I think that's what you're looking for when you ask that question. It is you'd expect to find it in Edinburgh and Glasgow. But it's actually if you go to someone like Aberdeen or Elgin. I mean, Elgin's two main public buildings, the Anderson Institute, and it's still operating, Dr. Grace Hospital. These are, as William says, they're a magnificent public buildings. They're paid for by surgeons or military commanders who made their money in India.

If you go to the northern infirmary in Bernesse or to its academy, the subscription, this is actually from all over the world, from Caribbean and from India. So actually, to some extent, Glasgow and Edinburgh, we know they're big imperial cities and a lot of the, but that's more from the colonial economy generally. The India money tends to go into land, land at acreage, and exactly as William said, churches, schools, hospitals. Andrew, you've been absolutely fantastic. Andrew and I've done a number of events in Scotland together. And Andrew just picks out wherever we are,

all the local big houses and all the local estates which were built on Indian money. He has this fantastic, psychedipedic knowledge of where the bodies are buried, so to speak. in another occasion, we're going to continue on this theme of Scotson India, another time talking about my white moguls, who are the... The lovers, not the fighters, the title. Exactly. Slightly that.

Because I think one of the features that we haven't talked in this episode is the fact that it was often, when you go to the presidency towns like Bombay, Madras or Calcutta, you get hundreds of oldettonians joining the cricket club and it's all very much like England. But you find that the Scots often choose the postings upcountry. I've got here in front of me a quote from young Alec Fraser from the British residency in 1805, and he said, would you suppose it? We usually sit down 16 or 18 at the residency table, of whom nearly half, sometimes more, are always Scotsmen, about a quarter Irish, the rest English. The Irish did not always maintain their proportion, the Scotch seldom fail. And so you have this impression that the Scots are choosing the more, or be given certainly, the more remote postings. And quite often in that circumstance, whether the only European in a town like Lacknow or Hyderabad, they often intermarry with the locals.

And there's a far higher rate I've found of Scots intermarrying with Indians than the English for whatever reason that is, whether they're less racist or whether they, I don't know, it's interesting to analyze what's going on. But I think we are going to do another series on the White Mughals another time. So we'll come back to this subject. People like David Ok Tlione, who's sitting there in the Delhi residency. surrounded by Indian dancing girls with a eunuch holding a fan above him and all the rest of it. There's a lovely moment in 1805 when you've got Octolone, this character with his own pet eunuch and dancing girls presiding over the British residency. He has William Fraser and his friend Edward Gardner as his underlings. And the commander-in-chief's wife looks at all these guys with their long mogul beards and their Indian wives.

And she writes in her diary, I shall now say a few words about Messrs. Gardner and Furlings. Fraser, who are still of our party, she says. They wore immense whiskers, and neither will eat pork or beef being as much Hindus as Christians, if not more so. They are both of them clever and intelligent, but eccentric. And having come to this country early, they have formed opinions and prejudices that make them almost natives. In our conversations together, I endeavour to insinuate everything I think will have any weight with them. I talk of the religion they were brought up with and of their friends who would be astonished and shocked at their whiskers and beards. All this is generally debated between us, she says, and I hope they will think

of it. So you get this impression of these guys are going completely wacko out there in the upper mogul provinces. Well, look, that for sure will be a mini series of the future. And before we go, we should recommend Andrew's fantastic book called Human Capital, all about, particularly the Scots, but also the Irish and the Welsh, who joined the East India Company and made extravagant fortunes out of India. And he's very good at pinpointing exactly where the bodies are buried. In other words, where the big country houses and the big estates are formed from Indian loot. I highly recommend it. Follow the money as the saying goes. And he really, really does. Andrew Riklip, thank you very much. Till the next time we meet is goodbye from me, Anita Arnan.

And goodbye from me, William Dorempu.