Empire: World History - 2. Company Rule in India

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

Emerging victorious from the Battles of Plassey and Buxar, The East India Company cements its grip on power in India. Join Anita and William as they discuss the nature, horrors, and key figures of 'Company Rule' in India at its height in the early 19th Century. 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.mparpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnan. And me, William Del Rompel. You're leap in faster now. It's good. It's almost as if you now know your name.

It's great. I'm learning a lot of the series. Now, listen, listen here. So we've been talking about the East India Company. If you are listening to this in sequence, and there's no reason why you have to, but if you are, we were last talking about the inexorable rise of one Robert Clive.

Clive of India to some, Clive the villain, boo hiss to others. So when we last left Clive, he is there receiving the Dewani for India. So this is the right to govern. and so things look pretty racy. So Clive has the gift throughout his life of astonishing timing. He's always in the right place at the right time.

And he has an amazing ability to outflank his opponents of every sort. Initially, it's the various Indian, sorry, initially it's the French he comes into contact with. And he defeats DuPlet, who's his great rival, the French head of the company Desaunt. That's in his youth. then he outflanks Sirajadha, appearing out of the blue

and retaking Calcutta with armaments that Sirajadah didn't realise that the East India Company had and in fact they didn't normally have because this flotilla has arrived by chance. Yes, the Lost Navy. The Lost Navy, which just turned up. And he has developed this way

of basically terrifying his opponents. He attacks in a very different way to the way most people in 18th century warfare operate. 80 century warfare, particularly in India, is often a sort of chess game with maneuvers and both sides trying to bribe each other's generals and money passing back or forwards. It's also very much regarded as a sort of game of gentlemen and there are rules of war. Clive's got no time for this. Clive attacks at night from the back in the early morning through fog during thunderstorms. And he loves doing sort of daring operations that, you know, in a sense, pre-abble sort of the sort of S-A-S and modern sort of spetsnats do.

He comes behind enemy lines. And he's punchy. He's the same punchy guy that he was in his youth, breaking windows and saying, pay me protection and that won't be broken anymore. I mean, there's one extraordinary moment where just after the Sarajadallah has lost Calcutta to Clive, and Siraj's army's gathered there.

And it's about, you know, again, 40 times the size of Clive's little force. So what does Clive do? He waits for an early, foggy morning, and he gets all his troops into canoes, and he rows them up the hoogley, and they arrive in the dark of about 4 a.m. when the mist is at its thickest. And with relatively small numbers, with a couple of thousand troops, he walks into the mogul camp

where there are, I can't remember the exact figure, but let's say 40, 50,000, maybe 100,000 troops. And he just starts shooting wildly in all directions. And of course, you know, scares them completely. And very nearly kills Saraj Dalla. A natural factor shot goes through Siraj Dalla's tent by chance. And it's those sort of tactics that he's very good at. But he's also very good at operating like that against his enemies in Britain. And once he goes back, he's always coming back to and forward.

He's an India as a young man fighting the kinetic wars. He goes back for the first time as an MP, doesn't have quite enough money. And so comes out for the second time and magically pulls off Plassy and this huge sum of money from the Jagat sets, which he banks. He then goes back. And at that point, he starts using his guerrilla tactics, not against. Indian rulers, but against his fellow directors of the East India Company. And he builds up his own faction in the East India Company. And he's just very, he always wins.

He's like sort of Lord Voldemort or something. He's this figure who has this extraordinary ability to outflank, terrify and surprise his rivals. So, I mean, I think we haven't really done justice to the fact that the East India Company, which has so much power and so much wealth, largely due to Clive at this time, is really a tiny operation. I mean, what are we talking about here? This is the extraordinary thing, and this is the thing that most surprised me when I was researching it. For the first 100 years, there are only 35 employees in the head office. It's tiny. It's smaller than, you know, an estate agent today. And in India, at the time

of the Battle of Placie, when the company is, you know, seizing the most valuable real estate in the world, there are only 250 white men in India. It's, it's, it's, uh, that, that, that, the, That's for the civil servants. I mean, there are others who are coming in and out on a military basis. But in terms of administrators, civil servants, form fillers, just 250. Okay, so this now, from the Indian side, begs the question, what the hell were they doing? I mean, why is it just a small number of foreigners are able to come into a country where they are vastly outnumbered, where there is enormous wealth and means?

You know, we're not talking about military dullards here. why is it so easy for them to come in and take what they take? So that question is very easy to answer oddly enough, because in a sense, the British had already tried their hand. In the 1680s, there's this character called Joshua Child who tries on knocking the moguls around at the height of mogul power during the early reign of Orangzeb. And what happens at that point,

before the Brits have got the military edge, before the military revolution, when the Brits are still fighting with sort of Cromwellian Pikes and very, very basic. seek muskets, is that the company is knocked out in 30 seconds flat. Bombay is surrounded, all the factors are put in chains, and across the country, the East India Company factors, as they're called, are thrown into prison. And they have to beg on bended knee and promise to behave themselves and the

Rang's let's them out. But what's the difference between the 1680s and the 1750s is two things. On the mogul side, the empire shattered, so split up into individual. towns almost or at best, you know, small regional entities who are discoordinated. They're not acting under a single high command. But also a military revolution has taken place and there are new techniques of warfare that the Europeans, both English and the French, are deploying that the Indians don't yet have. So, I mean, you said this as well in the last episode, just the sheer firepower is much better.

It's better. Why are the Europeans so good at guns? So it's, there's two things. I mean, first of all, there's just been a military revolution, so there's a whole lot of new technology that Indians don't have. But also, what the Europeans realize is it's not rocket science to deploy this, and you don't need to be some sort of highly educated boffin from Enlightenment to operate a burnet. And very quickly, they train up the local Indians.

And they get the best local soldiers in the military marketplace by paying top dollar. So if you're a sepooy for the East India company, you get paid about triple what Tipu will pay you for the same job in an right. rival army further down the peninsula. So in a time when there is anarchy, when the mogul state has collapsed, when other regional powers are all vying for control, the country is still very rich. It's a time of great prosperity in terms of production of cloth and the raw materials that India is producing and the amazing industry of its weavers is still going strong. But there are all these predatory armies backwards and forwards fighting with each other.

and really quite small armies going at each other. Well, and what the company realizes is that it can buy an army for itself and that to do that, it can borrow money from the local bankers. Now, the big question is why would the local bankers lend money to foreigners? They've got a different religion. They look different. They speak a different language. They're clearly predatory.

Why would you do that? The answer is, I think, very simply, that the bankers and the company are both city boys. They both understand interest rates, paying on time contracts. Although on one hand you have these sort of, you know, John Bull, Englishman eating beef. And on the other hand, you have Marwari-Janes picking at Tali's. They understand commercial contracts. Their appetites are the same. Their appetites are the same and they both want to make money and they both realize that they very literally can do business.

So what the company does, and this is the extraordinary trick, is with very few Brits around, They borrow money from Indian bankers and buy Indian mercenaries. And the battles are fought not with white troops against brown troops. It's two armies of brown troops. Very different to the Bollywood depictions of these battles. But also what's interesting when they are basically hiring guns, guns for hire. So if you're transplanting an army of sepoys to fight the Sikhs, you're immediately creating enmity between two parts of the country.

The North will think, who are these people who with brown skin who are coming? and there's a hatred that develops. It's the start of fishes, which then can be exploited later on. Well, I think, I mean, I'm the first person to criticize the country, but I don't think in the sense those fishes need much creation. I think, you know, the Marathas, for example, have been raiding Bengal and raping Bengali women. And to this day, Bengalis put their children to sleep warning

about what the bungis will do, what the Marathas armies can do to you. And the periods of Indian history, when India has been politically united, are very brief compared to the very strong moments of regional unity when, say, the Marathas form a single unit or the Tamils form the Chola Empire or the Kashmiris under Lalitia,

when these people have their regional power bases. We now look back from a time when, you know, 75 years of very clear unity, in India and we think of it as both a geographical, cultural and a political unit. But for a lot of Indian history, India has been united culturally in that there is a common, particularly a common Hindu culture which runs across the region, geographically by virtue of the shape of the peninsula girded by the Himalayas. But politically, there's only brief moments like under the Moris of Ashoka, 250 BC, again

under the Guptas in the early centuries AD, again under the moguls. But most of the time, it's not like that. Okay. Well, they're united in unhappiness under the East India Company, because the East India Company at its height, now starts milking the place dry, doesn't it? And actually, in a way, the rapacious attitude of the East India Company while it's at its height, that's the height of its powers, is what leads to its own downfall in many ways. Talk about that. So what you have is a lot of kids coming out. You can't join the East India Company after the age of 16. So these are kind of adolescents.

It wouldn't, you know, in most parts, America wouldn't be allowed to drink at a bar. And yet they are often, you know, given entire districts to milk. And a lot of them die. There's huge death rates for these writers, as they're called, coming out. The lowest grade of an East India Company officialdom is called a writer, which basically means someone's scribbling in a ledger. Yeah. In Calcata, they're still the writers building. They're still the writers building.

The writers come out at age 16 and a lot of them are dead within a couple of years. Two monsoons are said to be the average lifespan of European. But once they've got that sort of immunity against Indian diseases and against the things in the Indian water, if they survive that time, they realize that if they play their cards right and bribe the right people and get into the right positions, they can make a massive fortune by the age of about 30. get home, buy a rotten borough, buy a nice big house at the country, or build a palladian mansion, and have the life that they dream of. So these people are very much trying to make a fortune and enough money to buy a country mansion or a political seat

and get out before they cop it, before they either killed in warfare, in terms of if they're soldiers or killed by cholera or whatever else, dysentery, if they're a civilian. And, you know, a lot of them don't make it. like three quarters of them don't come home. And you've got to put that. So it's a huge gamble. It's like a massive lottery.

And if you're very lucky, you could be one of the few big winners like Clive, who come home and buys not one, but ten enormous houses. And Samora and Ireland too. But most of them end up in Park Street Cemetery. And their bodies rot like the carcasses of sheep, according to one early sea captain who comes in and just sees the number of new graves in the graveyards of Calcutta. But for those who stay the course, there is money to be made.

And the models are really, I mean, it's miserable for the Indians, but it's a neat one because it costs the British next to nothing. At this point, just after Placian Buxer, this is the time of maximum rapaciousness. Now, this is a wonderful time if you're a young 20-year-old out to make a fortune and you're a Brit based in Calcutta. It's the worst possible time to be a Bengali weaver. at this time for example that we have stories of the Brits corolling weavers into effectively sort of weaving concentration camps but they're not even allowed home and telling them they have to produce so much per day or per week and this leads to the story of some cutting their thumbs off so a lot has been made in we should we should explain this a bit more it's a really important because in India this has an enormous currency that we had an we had you know they say that we had we had we had we had we had we had we had we should explain this a bit more important story it's a bit more important story it's a bit of We had an industry. We had the best weavers in the world. They did the finest cloth in the world.

All that is true. And then they came and as an act of vengeance, if we didn't do what they said, they chopped off our thumbs. And killed an industry and killed an art form. So that second bit is a slight confusion. So this is based on one story, not from a particularly reliable source

because he was an enemy of Clive who was writing a book to bring Clive down. But it sounds kind of right. He says that in some cases, these weavers were being so badly oppressed and made to produce huge amounts of clothes. that they cut their own thumbs off so they couldn't weave and the company had no option about to release them.

Now, later on, at a completely different period of history in the mid-19th century after the Industrial Revolution, when the entire economy of empire has changed and you now have centres of industrialized textile production in the north of England, trying to export textiles to India, in other words, the reverse of the original trade. At that point, this story gets confused and the story is that the way that the reason that the Indian textile industry declined. Yeah. Was that the wicked Brits cut the...

They cut their thumbs off, they couldn't do it anyway. That's interesting. So I mean, neither story, I mean, the second story about the Brits cutting the weavers' thumbs off is definitely wrong. That some weavers could have cut their own thumbs off. Well, just tells you the dire state of their lives at that time, if they would do that to get out of it.

But what is unequivocally the case is that the East India Company moves in after the Battle of Bucca and has the field to itself. And it does what a modern asset stripping bank would do, taking over a subject company. They see the things they want, the stuff they don't like, they get rid of,

the stuff they do want, they put in a ship and send it back to England. That's mainly money. I mean, I've heard you use this analogy before. We've got to ask about it, because you have said it, it is, the East India company doing this. It's like Jeff Bezos,

invading a country in many respects. In the sense that you have a massive corporation whose drive is to make maximum profits that has no other purpose. And the one quite refreshing thing about the East Indie company is that you don't get any of the hypocrisy of the later Raj which sort of pretends to be there to civilise the natives and build railways and so on,

but is actually there, of course, because empire enriches the mother country. The company has none of this. The company just is clearly a company. It's there to make money. It doesn't pretend to be about anything other than being a money-making machine. And so while it's far more rapacious, I think, and far more brutally open about its aspirations to asset strip India.

It's a bit more honest. It's frank about it. And weirdly, though, also it finds willing collaborators. So Calcutta initially is a tax-free port. And so the Morari's moved there, not because they particularly like the company of the British, but because they didn't have to pay taxes. and that they can make enormous amounts of money lending cash to these dinti company at high interest that they know will be repaid.

So many great fortunes are made by some bankers, while if you're a Bengali weaver out in a village with your loom, things are getting very, very tough. So then, I mean, life is hard enough for a Bengali weaver, but then you get a slight change in direction from the British in that they want a new crop to be grown. And it's not food, is it? It's over. Exactly.

They realise that. So the first thing that happens after Bucksor, really, is that they realize that they no longer need to send money out from England. Since 1600, the Brits have been arriving in ships full of gold from home, and they use the gold to buy products of India. After the Battle of Buckser, they no longer have to ship a single penny from England. Because what they do instead is they just tax, land tax, the locals. And so with the profits from the land tax, after they paid all their costs, they use that money now to buy the cotton, to buy the silk, to buy the saltpeter, the other stuff they're after. And it's a win-win situation for the company.

They're not spending any money, but they're getting land tax plus. They're selling the goods that they all sell. And then they have a third brainwave, which, again, as far as the coffers of the company is concerned, is a wonderful thing. And again, as far as India is concerned, is awful. They realize they can grow vast quantities of opium,

particularly on the more marginal land. And it's initially around the, you know, the fertile land is, still use for food crops, but it's on the rough soils on the edge where the poppy is like growing. And such as the profit, that they then begin to sort of move the opium into previously, into land previously used for food crops. So are we talking about the same areas now that poppy cultivation takes place sort of in the rocky areas of Afghanistan and around the edges of Pakistan? So the poppy is very happy on a kind of rubbly hillside. You don't need the same sort of rich, well-irrigated land that you'd need, say, for ice.

But as the profits grow on the opium trade, and this begins in the 1770s and reaches a peak in the 1790s, 1800s, more and more land is given over to poppy and less and less to food. If you're using ground that grows food to grow opium, what happens to the people who need the food? Join us after the break and find out. The monsoon of 1768. brought only the lightest of rains to northeast India. Then the following summer, 1769, no rain fell at all. Instead, the intense heat continued unabated.

The rivers dwindled, the tanks dried up, and the pukhors, the fish ponds at the center of every Bengali village, turned first to sticky mud, then to dry earth, then to rain. The price of rice rose steadily, week by week, until it had multiplied five times. By October, as drought began to turn to famine, great dearth and scarcity were reported around Mashitabad. By November, the farmers were stated to be totally incapacitated

to cultivate the valuable crops of cotton and marberries. James Grant, who was stationed up country near Raj Mahal, reported a growing deprivation in his district. In the country, the highway and fields were strewn. In towns, the streets and passages, choked with the dying and the dead, he wrote. Multitudes flocked to Mashitabad. 7,000 were daily fed for several months.

The same practice was followed in other places, but the good effects was hardly discernible amidst the general devastation. It was impossible to stir abroad without breathing the offensive air, without hearing the frantic cries, and seeing numbers of different ages and sexes in every stage of suffering and death. At length, a gloomy calm succeeded. It's an indication, but only an indication of the human suffering that goes on. So it gets much worse after that.

A lot of these people who upcountry in Mashitabad then come down to Calcutta in starving multitudes. And by the height of the famine in 1771, there are estimated to be between 3 and 5 million deaths in Bengal. I mean, just hold that number for one moment, 3 to 5 million dead. Now, India's not a stranger to famines. There have been famines, but there are failed monsoons, which, cause catastrophic events, even before the British have turned up. But there is a difference, isn't that? Because when those famines take place, whoever the local potentate is, they will do some kind of famine relief, won't they? Well, that was interesting. You see, in that reading,

Mashidabad was still had a princely family, and they were giving out food. But in Calcutta, where you have total rule of the company, not one soup kitchen is put up. The company does not see itself as responsible for the people of Bengal. It's there merely to make profit. And they're very cold-hearted and clear-headed about this. They just want to gather taxes. So the first year, even as these bodies are piling up, as flies are circling, as dogs and vultures

are picking at human bodies in the streets of every town of Bengal, even as that's happening, these soldiers being sent out with barenets into the villages to gather tax forcibly. And so they're taking money from starving families as if it was a perfectly normal year. Again, this is not what the India practice. The Indian practice is always that you waive taxes in a year of famine. News is getting back to London because I mean, I've seen this stuff in Hansard recorded that, you know, in parliamentary debates, there's evidence from Brits who are in India who are justifying their behaviour,

who are saying, you know, okay, so the planes are filled. I'm paraphrasing with the bleached white bones of Bengali weavers, but it's better that they should suffer than my family suffer. I mean, it's really quite brutal. So it's interesting because this is the first time that you really get whistleblowers. Remember that the East India Company controls all access to India from Britain. So there's no sort of Robert Fisk or Christina Lamb landing up on a plane and reporting the horrors. No BBC reports every night telling about the suffering multitudes.

But this horror is so terrible that many whistleblowers anonymously write letters to the spectator or the gentleman's magazine or Blackwoods or whatever the magazine is. giving horrific reports of what's going on. So this is the first time the British public is aware that the East India Company, rather than just bringing delicious things to the ports of London, is doing so in a terrible way. But also there are those who very clearly know what's going on,

and that includes the East India Company shareholders. And at the annual general meeting in 1772, they are told that the company, despite the famine, has still managed to gather the full whack of taxation. So reports may be filtering back, but this does not deter the behaviour because the East India Company is doing what the East India Company does. But what is astonishing? It's the short-sightedness. You can waggle your bayonet as much as you like at somebody, but if they're starving to death and they die, they're not going to weave for you. Exactly. You're not going

to get your cloth, are you? So in 7072, like any company today, the East India Company has its annual general meeting and all the shareholders gather in a hall in London. And they are presented with what they are told is the great news that despite the famine, the East India Company has got its taxes in full. Now, what that means on the ground is that people are hanging from gibbits, starving people who refuse to give up their last rupees, have been either bernetid or hung. And this reign of terror has allowed the East India Company to gather full taxes in 1772.

And the response to the shareholders is to vote for an increase of their dividend from 10 to 12.5%. So that's the kind of attitudes. They know what's going on. They know there's a famine. But the news is presented to them certainly in such a way that they think this is good news

and they vote themselves an extra big dividend. But this is only possible if you, I mean, if you don't care about or you have othered so much these natives that they are less than human. So it doesn't matter if they die because it doesn't, you know, we matter more, you know. Yes, but it's also interesting

how very quickly after this, and after these news of starving multitudes of mountains of dead bodies, of vultures and so on, spreads around the country, there is a huge amount of pushback from the British public. And the East India Company gets a reputation of being this sort of murderous, brutal organisation.

This has major repercussions, not just in England, but around the world. In London, for example, you get a play put on at the Haymarket where Clive is satirised as Lord Vulture. and people jeer him in the streets. But more important for Britain, this news reaches America. And since the passing of the T Act, which is one of the government's measures

to help relieve the East India Company of its financial problems following the famine, because as we'll hear in a second, the famine ultimately breaks the company. The Americans read all these reports in the Gentleman magazine in The Spectator and are terrified that the East Indian Company is going to be let loose on them,

just as the tea is now being sold by the East India Company, what's to stop them moving in and doing to us what they've done to the Bengalis. So the Boston Tea Party is East India Company tea, which has just arrived and is bobbing off the shores of Boston Harbour in the middle of this famine. So we don't want your tea, we don't want your type of government here, get out, get out.

And it's a lost bit of history because American historians aren't particularly interested in India. And it's only now, I've talked to a lot of 18th century, American stories. They're finding all this stuff in the early Patrick and the tide in many ways turns against the British when the Bostonians and so on and the people in Massachusetts are reading these horror reports from Bengal. Am I wrong in saying actually there's another link between Eastern India Company in America? Is there not a very similar flag that exists?

I mean I saw this for the first time in one of your books and it just blew my mind actually. Can I describe it first? It looks like the stars and stripes without the stars on it. And where the stars should be in the corner, there is a union flag. And then you've still got, I mean, fewer red stripes going across. I can't recall how many. But it's the same basic design. It is the same as the Betsy Ross. Yeah. So what is that all about? What is that flag? So the, I mean, no one has sort of proven the link, but anyone looking at the two flags can clearly see an influence. I suppose if you're coming up for, you know, there's a limited number of designs available for a flag. And the, and the

Americans borrow the idea for the East India Company colours. That's the biggest irony, isn't it? It's what starts the revolution in America is the East India Company, and then they sort of adopt the flag. It's very, very odd. Okay, so let's get back to India now. So the famine has started to change people's attitudes, but it has also started to hit the balance sheet.

Correct. At the East India Company, hit it hard. And the first year, you know, enough people have got enough savings that the East India Company, at the point of a bed, it can extract the full tax, even if it involves hanging hundreds of people. But the next year, there's nothing left. There's no new crops. Everyone's last piggy bank is broken into.

People have started selling their children. People have started selling their farming implements. People have started eating each other. There's reports of cannibalism from the north of Bengal. And at that point, the East India Company realizes the effect of its actions and it's effectively starved the goose that lays the golden eggs. to death and the goose is now dead. And by 1773, there is real anxiety. And letters now coming from Carcutta saying there's no money. We're not going to be able to buy anything. You have to

bail us out because we're making vast losses. And when these letters start arriving in London, there is a run on the banks. And the first bank to go down is in Scotland, the Air Bank, AYR as opposed to AIR. And in the next two months, 32 banks claps across Europe. It's like the financial crisis of 2008. It's worse. Much worse.

And it's not just Lehman Brothers and Northern Rock. It's 32 banks go down. But I guess from what we know of what happens in the next few years, the East India company is judged to be too big to fail. Well, it's very interesting how it all breaks out. And it's again a measure of how the company operates. So the company, once you retire in Bengal, you put in a chit into the headquarters in Calcutta. And the idea is you then sail home and you can withdraw your winnings in London.

In 1772, just as all these letters are arriving saying there's going to be, there's no money this year, we're completely out, a whole load of Brits who've had enough and want to flee Calcutta because it's now a charnel house, full of dead and dying people. an exceptionally large number come home on the fleet and put in their demands for one million pounds each. They're making so much money. And one after another, these IOUs turn up in Ledenhall Street and there's no money to pay them. And the banks don't have it.

They don't have it. So the first thing they do is they go to the newly established Bank of England. And the Bank of England doesn't have it. And we're talking really new. I mean, these are contemporaneous events. The Bank of England is really freshly minted to forgive the pound. It is, isn't it? It hasn't got the cash.

It just hasn't got the reserves, at this time. So there's only one thing for them to do is they have to go to Parliament. And what effectively happens after lots of back and forth and parliamentary debates and various bills are proposed and shot down is that finally in 1773, something called the Regulating Act goes out. And that's a bit like the moment that Gordon Brown took over that West. You basically have the state buying a 50% share of the East India Company. and this is important for two reasons.

One is that for the first time the state has got some control over the East India Company. But the second point is that it's the first time that you actually have the state becoming involved in British imperialism in India.

Up to this point, the only involvement to be in odd national emergencies like when Britain's about to go to war with France, when the Navy might send a fleet of Marines, as happens just before Placie.

But it's basically all this time from 1600 through to 1773, a self-governing libertarian dream or nightmare if you're part of the occupied Bengal. And these guys have had the run of the thing. But in 1723, Parliament says, enough. You know, this is a shocking way to run anything. You can't have a private company, a bunch of merchants running our greatest colony now

without any supervision. So a whole new structure is put in place whereby Parliament sends out a bunch of guys to try and sort out what's going on. But this, of course, is the moment that the state begins the takeover of the East India Company. It's the seeds of the Raj. It's the seeds of the Raj. It was all perfectly fine to have the East India Company do this if the revenues are coming into England and it's great and fine.

But now they have to step in. So just to contextualise this a little bit, who is the Prime Minister, who's on the throne? And what else is going on in Europe at the time? So, 773, Georgia Third is on the throne. And he's in an out of hospital, in and out of sanity. And Pitt is Prime Minister. And Pitt is very interesting because he, in Parliament, he's saying these terrible East India Company men are stripping Bengal bear.

But in actual fact, his own family fortune had come from his father who worked in the East India Company in Madras and had famously sold an enormous diamond, the Pitt Diamond, which was the source of the family fortune. And both Pitt the younger and Pitt the older managed to finance their. entire political career with basically Indian diamond money. There is such a beautiful symmetry. I mean, not beautiful, but it is a symmetry. So we've got Mad King George. We have got Clive on the Downs. And we have a new name that comes up at this time, which is very, very important.

And I know this is a name that you defend very much, Warren Hastings, who does have a really rough ride of it, doesn't he, a British public opinion. In my view, and this is not the universal. view, Parliament, when it impeaches Warren Hastings, in a sense, goes to the wrong guy. The guy they should have gone for was Clive. Clive was the rotter. Clive is the ruthless. Well, you kind of spoiler alerted that because we know there's something bad down the track. But who is Warren Hastings and what is he like? So Warren Hastings is very different to the kind of plump, pompous, militaristic,

brutish clive. Clive, you know, never notes a single nice view in India. in his letters. He's not at all interested in Indian architecture or Indian culture. He just sees it basically as a money box waiting to be prized open. And he's very clear about that. You know, you're dealing with a man who, from all one, because he has absolutely no visual sense, no sense of culture, no sense of civilization or philosophy. He doesn't care. He's a money man and a soldier. Warren Hastings couldn't be more different for that. Warren Hastings is an East seat, a linguist. He's been in India since he was 16. Speaks Hindi.

Speaks not only Hindi but Bengali and Persian perfectly and takes great interest in Sanskrit which he learns but never quite perfects. And he is the man who sponsors the first translation of the Bhagavad Gita into English, for example. And he writes in his letters, I love India a little more than my own country. That said, he's working for the most rapacious

multinational in the world. And while he reforms it, and while he's responsible, for example, for building granaries, the first time. So when you go to Patner, there's that famous Gola, which is one of the great monuments of the city that's built by Warren Hastings to store grain to make sure there's not another famine. So I'm not for a minute saying he's an angel. He is a man of the 18th century making a fortune in India like everyone else. But he is... But he is... He's a good guy. Compared to

Clive, he is a scholar, a professor. And he's personally very ascetic. So when he is put on trial by Parliament, the famous impeachment of Warren Hastings in 1784, which is one of the great events of George in England when Gibbon, Sheridan, all the great names of the period, line up to have a punch, to punch Warren Hastings. They're expecting some fat, flamboyant Nouveau-Riche monster. And instead, the man that turns up at the bar is this thin, ascetic figure dressed in black with white stockings and grey hair. And he looks more like a Puritan peacher about to give a sermon than the kind of paunchy plunderer that they've been expecting.

I feel we're sort of leaprogging. Was there perhaps an impeachment? Okay. So Warren Hastings is the man in charge. He is, by comparison, a better guy than Clive, but he's still running the East India Company. At what point do the wheels fall off for Warren Hastings? I mean, clearly we know they do because you've said impeachment three times,

but what happens to cause that? So he is put in charge after the regulating act. So we've had the famine, we've had the death. And Warren Hastings, who is an East India company man, is put in charge as governor of Bengal. And he immediately does all sorts of really excellent things. He builds granaries. He makes sure there's not going to be another famine.

He is concerned to sort out the legal system, which is a complete mess and is completely inadequate. And then a whole bunch of regulators arrive. The Regulating Act has as its central pole the fact that some regulators, appointed by the government, will go out and watch out what's happening. And things get off to a bad start when Hastings doesn't go to meet them at the port and then receives them for lunch in what is considered to be undress, in other words, almost in his sort of, you know, in his slippers. And both things cause enormous offence. Well, it's just an ego slide. Is that really as simple as that?

These are important. Well, they're human beings, you know, upon whom his. three turns you forget sometimes but yeah but these guys also have have already you know in a sense made up their minds interestingly they are set against warren hastings before they set off by none other than clive and clive doesn't like warren hastings he thinks he's soft he thinks he's he's far too sort of pro-indian he's he's not strong enough for the job so philip francis who's a particularly nasty piece of work comes out determined that he's going to basically sack hastings and take the job for himself. And he's this ambitious, I mean, his letters are full of sort of malice and sland.

He's probably the author of a famous set of letters called the Junius Letters, which were the, I don't know what the modern equivalent would be Guido Forks or one of those sort of political blogs that sort of break scandal in Parliament or something. And he has a real talent for malice. And he tries to bring down Warren Hastings. And the two are locked in political combat. and deadlocking the action on the ground of the company, even as the company's military enemies like Tupu Sultan are busy defeating the company troops. The same night that the British received their first major defeat at the Battle of Polly Law in 1784, Warren Hastings and Philip Francis actually meet in Calcutta to fight a duel.

Wow. And this is one of the great sort of comic moments of Indian history, because both Hastings and Francis are men of the pen. They're not fine, so I was just thinking. And they both turn up. And it turns out that neither have the slightest idea had a load of pistol. Hastings has, in fact, fired a pistol at once.

He'd been involved in the attack on Calcutta under Clive in 1757. But Philip Francis had never picked up a pistol in his life and has arrived without the primer which you need to fire a musket. So he has to borrow primer and I think a ball from Warren Hastings. From Warren Hastings, the man he wants to shoot. That's just priceless. And so first of all, Francis is offered the first shot by the gentleman Hastings. And he lines up, aims, pulls the trigger and it doesn't go off.

And this happens two or three times. And eventually, Hastings has to show him how to do it. This is how you shoot me. He takes the shot and misses by a long way. The shot goes wild over his head. And then Hastings, so I said, has had a little military training in his youth and has some idea how to operate a gun, takes a shot at Francis and he hits him. But he doesn't kill him. And so Francis is carried off.

And there is this brief reconciliation it appears when Hastings goes and says, I'm very sorry. I hope this will be the end of... Can we still be friends? Can we still be friends? And for a moment it looks as if Francis actually might sort of bury the hatchet. But of course, no, he goes back to England. And he stirs up the whole country. He joins Parliament and he works on all these other characters and tells them that the entire evils of the East India Company are responsible,

are the responsibility of Warren Hastings. Is there in any way a bit of string pulling going on in the background from Clive? Because they do, in effect, get the wrong man, don't they? They absolutely do. And Clive has definitely set. the regulators against Hastings and they go out with these ideas that they're going to sort out a crook.

But by this stage, Clive is dead. And this is... So probably not. Very important what happens. So Clive, in the aftermath of the famine, becomes this hated figure. There is massive press reporting on the horrors of the Bengal famine.

And there are plays put on the haymarket. And Clive becomes a hated figure and people boo him and hiss at him in the streets of London. And eventually he's called before Parliament. And he actually manages to talk his way out, rather like Boris Johnson. He's an incredibly eloquent man.

This Ruth of the Soldier is also a fantastic debater. He gathers the chamber and says, give me my life or my honour and walks out of the chamber. And he narrowly gets let off by Parliament. It's a very close vote. But he is, after that, a mark man. and rather like Boris Johnson being booed outside Westminster Cathedral, Clive gets booed wherever he goes around London.

And eventually he takes his own life. He cuts his archeries with a paper knife and is found in a toilet with blood all over him, collapsed on the ground. And he was always this sort of depressive and twice had tried to commit suicide, but the third time succeeds. So he's not around anymore.

and in his absence, Hastings becomes the hate figure. So everyone expects Hastings to be this sort of mega-corrupt symbol of venality and evil. And he turns up in Parliament. And he's not that at all. He's a grey-haired scholar. But he still goes through that whole impeachment process anyway. But when they see who he really is... They ultimately let him off.

The trial drags on for many years. Yeah. So I don't in any sense want to pretend that Warren Hastings is an angel. He's not. But he's a far more civilised and he's far more an Indophile character. And under him, all sorts of things happen. You get the first translations from Sanskrit. You get William Jones founding the Royal Asiatic Society.

And the English for the first time really realised that India is an extraordinary civilisation. Jones realises that there's a family of languages, which Hindi and Sanskrit are part of, which is the same family as ours, the Indo-European languages. You begin to get British officials in India commissioning artworks from Indian and Mughal painters. So it's still the same extractive and venal organisation.

It always has been. But under Hastings, there's at least some element of civilisation and learning and scholarship. And maybe some accountability. He's got somebody who wants to show the workings. So the East India Company, what happens then after the impeachment process? So the company throughout the deadlock of Warren Hastings and Philip Francis can almost not defend itself because no laws can be passed, no armies can be moved.

And it's only when Hastings goes home to defend himself in Parliament that the East India Company can get its act together. And by this stage, it is, it is. got some very serious new enemies. It's got Tupu Sultan in the south, and it's got the Maratas who started in the decade in the middle of India,

but have now filtered all over an extremely powerful force under a series of rival warlords, particularly Sindia and Holker at this period. And so what you have now, that is between the departure of Warren Hastings in the 1780s, and the peak of company influence

in about 1800. is a series of military campaigns. And the company wins, not because anymore it has this military edge, because Tipu and the Maruttas have both learned the lessons. They've got the new cannon, they've got the new ballistics, they've got the same muskets, very similar banits. They fight in the same way.

They've got a whole load of French and various other Europeans to teach them these new modes of European warfare. So the company's lost that edge. And the reason ultimately that the company prevails is two things. First of all, it's got Bengal, which is the richest province, and can just generate more revenue. And with that money, more soldiers can be bought and trained up and armed. So ultimately, he's got bigger armies than the others. And secondly, they're always supported by the bankers, because the bankers know that they can get their money back without trouble from the East India companies. So they have a constant line of credit. And in emergencies, they can go to the bankers and say, we need a million pounds, and the bankers will give it to them. And that can instantly be transferred into muskets, burnets, cannon. And the battles against these two enemies, Tipu Sultan of Mysore and the various Marata forces,

are very close. And if India had managed, even at that stage of the 1780s, at the time of Warren Hastings, if the Maratas and Tipu had managed to stand together. And there's a moment when a brilliant Marata statesman called Nana Fadnaviz nearly pulls this off. And he realizes that the danger that the company, an existential danger to India that the company represents,

and even at that point had they stood together, they could have defeated the company. But instead, the company is able first to take out Tipu with Marata help. And then it's able to divide the Maratars between each other. So Sindia and Holka fight separately. They never unite and fight together. And so one by one, the enemies go down. and that leaves us in 1799 at this moment when suddenly the East India Company armies have grown to 200,000 troops just at a point when the British Army is only 100,000. And this, I think, is in the sense the climax of company rule.

It has this vast army. It's conquered or has taken control by proxy of every court in India south of the Himalayas. and only Ranjit Singh and the Punjabis are holding out. It's a story in another podcast. I think we'll leave it there and we'll pick up next time on the, well, the bumpy fate of the East India Company from here on in. It looks very rosy, but it doesn't remain so. That's it from me, Anita Arnh.

And me, William Dalrymple.