The Rest Is History - 75. The East India Company

Episode Date: July 15, 2021

Tom and Dominic are joined by historian William Dalrymple to tell the fascinating and shocking story of the East India Company in the 18th century. How could a gang of “spectacularly corrupt” merchants conquer vast parts of Asia from a small office in London with just 35 employees? And how did the company’s actions pave the way for British government rule in India. A Goalhanger Films & Left Peg Media production Produced by Jack Davenport Exec Producer Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality. It wasn't the British government that seized India at the end of the 18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office five windows wide in London and managed in India by an unstable sociopath.

The East India Company was a model of corporate efficiency. A hundred years into its history, it had only 35 permanent employees in its head office. Nevertheless, that skeleton staff executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history. The military conquest, subjugation and plunder The words of the historian William Dalrymple, talking about the East India Company. Tom Holland, William Dalrymple, I believe, is a man you know well. He is a great hero of mine, a wonderful man and more germainly from the point of view of this podcast, a wonderful historian whose books, The Anarchy, White Moguls, Return of a King, The Last Mogul, anyone interested in Indian or British history, I'm sure will have come across. And if they haven't't then they're very lucky because they've just been issued in a wonderful bumper pack the company quartet um willie is with us

absolutely thrilled to have you i hope he's pleased with your with your plug i'm very pleased well i i promised him a massive plug and i'm i'm more than happy to apply it was conditional it was my appearance is conditional on a massive plug will I'm more than happy to apply. It was conditional. It was conditional. My appearance was conditional on a massive plug. Willie, was that a big enough plug? It was big enough. If you want to carry on plugging, I won't stop. Well, no, I've got an additional plug because... Oh, well, go for it.

You are being recorded here on Zoom because your phone cannot cope with... You've deleted the app because you've got so many photographs on it and the reason you've got so many photographs on it is obviously you're a great photographer and one other plug willie's exhibition of photographs uh the traveler's eye is open at the grosvenor gallery in london at the moment so willie i feel i've paid my dues you have done so hard there must be a butt coming now there's a massive there's a massive part because like like um like can i just go now like the going's good like a british merchant eyeing up the riches of the east i have paid my dues and now i want to

extort from you i want to extort your knowledge of the East India Company, which is the subject of our podcast episode today. As you say, I mean, it is a stunning story. It's so peculiar. A private company basically taking over the richest, most venerable land in the world. I mean, it's absolutely weird when you think about it. You've written about it for 20 years. Do you still find it odd when you contemplate it? I find it even odder, actually, at the end of 20 years than I did at the beginning, because like all historians of the East India Company, you still have that Victorian shadow lurking somewhere in your mind that sees this as something done by the British and it has this nationalist feeling to this story because so much of what has been written up until the

modern times sees it as a national story, the story of the British conquest of India. And the fact that it was a bunch of merchants and a bunch of very corrupt merchants who were who were recognized at the time as quite spectacularly corrupt and badly mannered and uh uh sort of uh an embarrassment to the nation uh and it's extraordinary rather encouraging to see how much the newspapers of the time excoriate the return nabobs uh up and down the land local local newspapers whether in shropshire or yorkshire or cornwall uh or east anglia and i've had great fun getting them all out and and reading them all unite in horror uh at these sort of and and partly it's a snobbery partly it's very much the same set of english prejudices that were directed against merchant bankers and hedge fund managers

um of the sort who would crash their porsches into expensive city restaurants English prejudices that were directed against merchant bankers and hedge fund managers of the sort who would crash their Porsches into expensive city restaurants. And there's a feeling that these guys have got ill-gotten wealth, that they haven't worked for it, that they haven't been educated, they don't know how to behave. And there's all that set of prejudices. But there's also, perhaps surprisingly, some real indignation at what they were doing to India. And it's not just at the top end. It's not just Horace Walpole sitting in Twickenham, harrumphing into his diary.

You get it up and down the land. Protests against particularly Clive and the Bengal famine and plays are put on in the Haymarket where Clive is satirised as Lord Vulture. So it was something that was known at the time, but somehow in the 19th century it became a national story. And then in India it became an anti-colonial nationalism, obviously, that the East India Company was just seen as an arm of the evil British Empire. And in Indian historiography too it's talked of as the British. But it isn't any more than, you know,

Facebook is the Americans or Google is the Americans. It has American staff. It also has other people working for it. And to me, the kind of things that came through last, really, and I only realised as I was finishing the book, I think, was the extent to which not only was it coming out of one office with this initially skeleton staff, 35 people, a little bit before Classy,

but it was just, it was an extraordinary shadow operation. Even in India, there were only 250 white people well into the 18th century in the administrative hub and the fighting of which there was a great deal was done by Indians. So you know of the East India Company army just in 1799 just as as Britain is rearming to meet Napoleon, is 200,000, which is exactly double the size of the British army, which is 100,000 men. And those are not white soldiers, you know, imported from the shires. Those are Indians trained up as mercenaries. And where's the money coming from to pay them? It's borrowed from Indian bankers. So it's the most extraordinary con operation in history

that Indians were persuaded to finance and die for the sake of a British company and British shareholders. And also what's lovely about it is that, you know, in this rising din of the debate on empire and colonialism, the, you know. There are various claims made by the likes of Nigel Biggar and so on for what the empire did and bringing civilization and the generosity of the empire builders and all that line of argument. The great thing about the East India Company is none of that washes at all because the company is very clearly there only to make a profit.

They don't pretend to be about anything else. I mean, no one joins Goldman Sachs to feed the starving of Africa. And the East India Company was the Goldman Sachs of its day. You joined it to make a fortune. Most people didn't. Most people died young. But if they lived until their 30s

and came home, the chances are they could come home and build a gorgeous paladian mansion, which is now in the hands of the National Trust. So, Willie, let's backtrack a bit let's let's give a bit of context i've given i've given a bit of a fast forward there but no no no don't worry um so we've got lots of questions from listeners so tim wright asks a question which should probably start with he says when it was set up did the east inclead company have a clear vision a company ethos and did it change over time or maybe we

can deal with the change over time later on. But talk to us about, so when is it set up, and who are they, and what do they want? So the East India Company, when it's set up, is really a completely different beast in every single way from the heyday of the East India Company from Plassey onwards, 1765. When the company is set up the first meetings take place in 1599 which is the year that Shakespeare is writing Hamlet and they happen in this you know just a mile away from the Globe Theatre in a now lost building called Moorgate Hall in Moorgate Fields. When that happens Britain has no empire. There are the first colonies being set up very shakily in Virginia. You have

the first Protestant colonies arriving and being knocked back in Ireland and the rich boys on the block are the Spanish and the Portuguese, who are successfully plundering Incas and Aztecs and shipping gold from Colombia and all the rest of it. And the British at this point are very much on the rim of Europe, ephemeral. They've just cut themselves off from the most powerful force in Europe, not the EC, but the papacy in the 16th century.

And they're on their own. And what do they do? They turn with sort of piratical enthusiasm to what is politely called privateering. And they're licensed to go out and raid Portuguese and Spanish shipping. And this is what happens. So this is the spirit of Drake and Raleigh.

Absolutely. And the actual first ship, which is renamed the Red Dragon to make it sound like a nice pub near you in Chalk Valley, Tom, was originally called the Scourge of Malice. And it was a pirate ship. It's literally, you know, Jolly Rogers, all that. And a lot of the sailors were clearly clearly they actually described themselves in the initial meeting of the East India Company, which we've got full notes and a list of everyone that turned up in their profession.

And they described themselves as privateers. They were pirates. They were, you know, the the the Tom Hollander figure, as opposed to the tom holland uh in uh in pirates of the caribbean and so the merchants who are doing it they're kind of pooling resources because this is a very risky venture is that right so it's a hugely risky venture uh it had absolutely no prospect of uh of initial success uh and uh the earlier voyage that sir james lester, the original sea captain who led the first voyage, had sunk and all his crew had been eaten by cannibals. I mean, you couldn't have put your money on a less likely venture. And Willie, just one thing. Also, the East Indies is not India at this point, is it? it's kind of indonesia they're not they're not the great trade of the east india company in the peak period uh that we're talking about the the the trades that generated uh the

money that financed all this initially came from the textile trade with india but at the beginning neither textiles nor india were in the picture they were looking to trade in spices and in what we today would call indonesia um particularly this island of run where all the nutmeg came from which charles milton has written so wonderfully about in nathaniel's nutmeg so they're not aiming india they're not aiming at the indian uh textile trade they're aiming something completely different in a different part of the world and and as their pirates on the initial voyage, they see, even before they get there, a Portuguese ship coming the opposite direction.

So they go into sort of auto-plunder mode, and they just literally, they jump on the ship, they transfer all the clothes, and that's it. And then they sail back. They fill that hole, and they sail home, and sell it for a million pounds. A job well done. It's a huge profit.

And so that then sets up the, that's the kind of family. The next few voyages. Right. Yeah, but again They're not these guys are you know again not you know The best on the block at this and to their great irritation The Dutch who've been a little bit ahead of them and done a couple of voyages which actually sparked this off because it's the Dutch sailors coming to London and trying to buy London boats for this that get that rankles with

the kind of Shakespearean pride of Elizabethan well I think that's fair enough uh yeah that's fair enough absolutely so you can't have our ship so instead they so while the Dutch are still sitting waiting in their hotel uh the English merchants say have a little meeting and say we'll do our own and tell them to piss off I mean that's literally the authentic spirit of the city of london flourishing even though so but so willie you mentioned the dutch so so basically the dutch and the portuguese have already muscled in on this spice trade and and spanish yeah but but spanish are the other hemisphere but very much sailing around the same the mention of the dutch that they are kind of the proto-capitalists and the english they essentially are blazing a path that the english kind of the proto capitalists and the English they essentially

are blazing a path that the English and then the British in due course will follow well yes and no because there's two important things so the the Dutch come up with the idea of um of a stock exchange which is later imported to to Britain and they come up with a lot of financial instruments which are brought over at the time of William of Orange. But the thing which the English seem to have come up with is the idea of the joint stock company. Oh, so that's ours. That's our invention.

That's ours. It's the Muscovy Company which the East India Company is 1599, but the Muscovy Company from memory is something like 1520. It's a good 60 years. So that's furs and stuff from Russia, presumably. Yeah, and that's furs and sable from the Volga and all this sort of thing. And then even that gets kind of diverted eastwards because due to various wars, a lot of the Muscovy merchants come back through Persia.

And that, again, sort of extends Elizabethan IA eastwards and then at what point Willie do they do they start to what so India is not in the picture at this point really not at all so at what point does India specifically enter the picture so it's rather like imagine uh a startup today and uh it's its initial offering uh is to do one thing in one place let's say do a podcast uh for historians for example that's a very good very good well chosen example and let's say just for the sake of argument the podcast is a complete failure no one listens this is a very badly chosen example then they decided instead to do videos on science fiction uh and that's rather what happens to these companies they they move from doing they they tried to get the

spices from indonesia but the dutch are just richer they got bigger ships they got better finance uh they've got much better finance that's ultimately the thing and they and various wars the famous and all this sort of thing goes on in the 1630s 40s and 50s and eventually the the the the english basically bail and there's already been a few exploratory voyages that have reached surat the mughal port on the coast of Gujarat, and also to Thata, which was the often forgotten Mughal port at the base of the Indus, and that's what they begin to focus. So they kind of relaunch in the 1640s, no longer about Indonesia, no longer about spices, it's now about textiles and India. And then there's one final change is that they basically migrate the bulk of their energy from the west coast of India where the Mughals were largely exporting and looking

westwards right round to the Hukli and they found Calcutta. And Calcutta, bizarrely, because it's damp, boggy, disease-ridden, and thoroughly unpromising in every human way, nonetheless proves to be the big money spinner, because that's where the best textiles are being produced. And by about 1700, India, astonishingly, is producing 40% of the world's GDP, at a time when the British are at about 6%, English, sorry, it's not Britain, it's England specifically, it's on about 6%. So Willie. And as the there's this huge imbalance of power in that the

the moguls are the richest, it's a unified state with a million men under arms, very tightly and rigidly organised, very, very unpleasant punishments for those who break the rules. And the Elizabethans come in initially as sort of stumbling economic migrants pleading to do business in this very, very rich country country and so often we think of what just final that we think we think of the moguls as these sort of a feat guys dropping mangas into their mouths and playing with white pigeons and and and generally cavorting with dancing girls but all that is built on a very strong manufacturing base which is not part of the usual movie picture of the moguls there's a massive uh proto-industrial machine going in, particularly in Bengal,

where there's one million weavers making the greatest textiles in the world. And those textiles are from a whole variety of different sorts. There are very fancy transparent silks and really gorgeous embroideries that you see up in a lot of National Trust houses as bedspreads and hangings. But the real sort of bread and butter embroideries that you see up in a lot of national trust houses as bedspreads and hangings but the real uh sort of uh bread and butter of the trade is the cheapest best quality cotton in the world that's produced in large in large blocks called called peace uh peace goods and these are just you know shoved straight onto east india company uh boats the problem is there's a lot of competition

but the good thing is none of the competition is really coming from india uh the indians do a bit of local trade across the bay of bengal and so on a little bit across to uh to the gulf but the large-scale export trade always remains in european hands from the beginning of this whole manufacturing boom willie a question i have always had um and you were the person to answer it. The English, as you say, are, I mean, basically, they're the kind of barbarians who great imperial courts have always attracted. India has always been this incredibly rich civilization. Barbarians, usually from the, you know, from the steppes coming down through Khyber Pass or whatever, you know, they've endlessly invaded. So the Vikings coming to the Baragian Guard in Constantinople and all that. So the English in that sense are just, you know, they're barbarians coming to the court of a great king.

But as you say, the Mughal Empire is also a great economic power and it produces everything that it needs so what are the english using to buy these textiles well this is exactly the the issue because uh despite a lot of very optimistic attempts to sell the bengalis tweed for example just what you need a three-piece suit and then they then they have a second round they try selling the tweeters horse blankets and even that doesn't go down very well um so at the end of the day the answer is nothing they don't want anything from england they're quite happy to have the occasional sort of uh elizabethan coach or something given as a present or trumpets for them they rather like

sort of Purcell style trumpet voluntaries and and all that and a guy called Robert Truly defects is what I think the first defector from the East India Company who goes over to service as a trumpeter but in terms of proper economic trade it isn't an exchange of goods because there is frankly nothing so how they buy this stuff just with a silver coin or which which incidentally is quite different from from the situation in roman times when the romans came to uh to india there were all sorts of things that the indians wanted for the romans like olive oil and wine and a whole range of goods that they could actually trade in but that's not the case in the 18th century with these companies. So what they do is they just bring gold.

And gold flows from Europe into India, gold and silver. Neither of which, funnily enough, India has a great deal of, in terms of mines and natural resources, India has jewels, has all sorts of good things, but it doesn't have a great deal of gold. Right. Nor does it have a great deal of silver. So the Mughals are very happy to do this.

But the English Parliament is not at all happy about this because very soon it becomes clear that the the country is literally draining uh its reserves of gold and silver for fancy luxuries which is exactly the complaint that plinny had in the first century when he says all the roman ladies wanting silks and jewels is draining the Roman treasury. This happens far more in Jacobean England. OK, so this is pre-Adam Smith. So it's kind of mercantilist approach that you're either a winner or a loser. But I guess... Well, Adam Smith is very much around and looking at and writing about the company, which he abhors.

And it's a very interesting point that Adam Smith, who's often held up by the right as the last word in economics, thinks the company's monopoly is one of the most shocking abuses of economic power out there. And he is one of the great opponents of the company and wants it to lose its monopoly. So then, Willie, what happens? So at this point, clearly the Moughals have got this fantastic state,

manufacturing base, huge army. You know, the scales seem loaded in India's favour, as it were. Correct. So what happens to change that? And am I right in thinking it's something to do with the Persians? Correct. It's a complete wild card, and no one sees it coming. Well the first thing that happens is internal. The Mughals for six generations are led by remarkable

warriors and strategists and they expand slowly south. But the final one, Aurangzeb, the final one of the great movies, over-expands dramatically and spends far too much money on war. And when he dies, the whole thing begins to clap. The Marathas, who are the great warriors of the west coast of India, in the hills above Bombay, they burst out of their hills. And they're Hindu, right? They are very Hindu and very consciously under their leader Shivaji opposed to Islamic rule. That isn't just a modern interpolation. You get from the generation after Shivaji some extraordinarily sort of modern sounding denunciations of Islamic rule.

And it's very consciously Hindu identity. I'd always assumed it was a modern political spin put on them, but in fact Sanjay Subramaniam has dug up a lot of stuff that sounds very much like RSS propaganda dating from one generation only after Shivaji's death. So very consciously Hindu, very much going back to Indian antiquity, designing kingship ceremonies which have the large Vedic, Brahminical sacrifices and this sort of stuff. And very consciously a nativist uprising against Islamic rule from the north. And so those guys in the West Coast, you've got the Jats between Delhi and Agra, you've got the Sikhs beginning to rise up in the Punjab. So the whole thing is shaking,

but basically still holding over most of India, particularly holding onto Bengal where the money is. It's the tax revenues of Bengal that pays for about two thirdsthirds of Mughal expenses. So even if the whole of the rest of India goes and they hold on to Bengal, they've still got the money to keep the civil service and the army going. Then, out of nowhere, there's what we today would call a military coup in Persia. And the Safavids, who are very much the kind of Persian equivalents of the Mughals,

the guys who built Isfahan, Shah Abbas in Persia, building these gorgeous mosques that still stand to this day in Isfahan. That dynasty is snuffed out by an extraordinary, rather grim character called Nadir Shah. And Nadir Shah is from very humble origins, self-made man, his dad made fur hats on the border of iran and afghanistan literally and he gets into the army and he is also a great military technology buff he designs a sort of the cavalry equivalent of a light tank gun a gazelle that's enormous and that's propped up on a horse's neck by a sort of tripod that fires armor-piercing slugs that can pierce any Mughal armor. And in 1738 he comes out of Persia with no intention of ruling India. It's

very clear from the beginning that what he wants is Mughal cash. Why? In order to fight his two real enemies who are the Turks and Russians. And so he goes on this looting raid, first into Afghanistan, which is a Mughal hell. We often forget that the Mughal empire stretches right up to Kabul. Kabul is a summer capital. And then meeting no resistance, he just carries on. Then he takes Peshawar, then Lahore and finally arrives at the Battle of Karnal. He defeats 1.5 million Mughal troops in a brilliant bit of strategy at the Battle of Karnal, then captures the Mughal emperor person by simply inviting him to dinner and arresting him and marches into Delhi with him. Six weeks later, he leaves with the entire Mughal treasury, the Peacock

throne, the Koh-i-Noor, the Dari-i-Noor, everything that the Mughals have plundered and collected and mined and traded for over six generations, he lifts into 6,000 wagons and takes it straight up to Afghanistan and Herat. And like, I mean, this is, you know, you could imagine the Mughal Empire like an enormous Baroque mirror that's just thrown out of a third-story window,

and it lands on the ground and it smashes into a million tiny glittering fragments. And those tiny glittering fragments are every town in India. So Jodhpur declares its independence, Jaipur, Udaipur, all those gorgeous castles in Rajasthan are built at this time because no one's having to send their taxes to Delhi anymore. Tanjore, Hyderabad. Suddenly, where you had one enormous megastate with a million men under arms, you suddenly have a fragment, a fragmentary scattering of tiny city states. And the two forces that emerge at this point to hoover that up are the two East Indy companies, the rival English and French. Perfect. Tom, I think we should take a break right now.

And then we'll come back and we'll have the East Indy companies rise to... Because we've got the Battle of Classy and all that coming. The Battle of Classy and Clive and Warren Hastings. All that fun and games. All that's coming, so we're going to have to speed up. We're going to take a break in order to replenish our energy and then we'll come back very very quickly and move through all this okay back in a sec i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz

gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com That's therestisentertainment.com Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We're talking the East India Company with Willie Dalrymple. And we are facing, to coin a word, anarchy in India.

The Mughal Empire is in a process of implosion. And the East India Company, a company of merchants, are basically parked on the flank of this expiring behemoth. They're in Bengal, which really is kind of really, I mean, it's the richest area in India, is it? Richest area in the world, probably. This is one of only two moments of world history that India is producing more than China.

It happened once in distant antiquity, and then it happens again in the mid-18th century. Okay, and so it's very important that uh the taxes are collected and so there's this magnificent description of this guy called saeed raza khan who i think you mentioned um who who would sometimes place airing officials and people who did not pay their taxes into a pit containing waste in such a state of putrefaction as to be full of worms he also used to oblige them to wear leather long drawers filled with live cats and he would force them to drink buffalo's milk mixed with salt so if the inland revenue were listening anyone from the inland revenue is listening in on

this the idea of making tax defaulters wear leather long drawers filled with live cats is a is a brilliant one i recently saw your cat on Instagram, Tom, where he looked a very quiescent fellow who was extremely patient with his master opening boxes of Yorkshire cookies. No, that was even. That was the female one. But the male cat,

I mean, we did a podcast yesterday and he interrupted us, actually. I know the clip Willie is talking about. It's the biscuit tea. The biscuit tea, exactly. Well, I mean, that's very East India Company, isn't it? That's that's what it's all about. So, Willie, essentially, there is this apparatus of exploitation that the moguls have been running. To what to what extent is it fair to say that basically the East Indian Company just take it over?

It's not as neat a comparison as one might like, because the Mughals, whether you take the right wing Indian view that they've been living in India since the 1200s, that they're as Indian as the Norman French are by the 18th century England, that they are fully integrated into India and this is their home. They rule for the long term and they invest in simple things that you need to do if you're an Indian ruler, in things grain stores so that you know everyone knows that monsoons fail once every few years and you need a stock of grain to feed your people they invest in in all sorts of long-term uh uh uh economic um investment which which a country needs what's notable about the beginning of East India Company rule is that not only do they, as you suggest, use the mogul tax system and draw wealth from that, which they do do extremely efficiently, they have no sense of being responsible for these people.

There is no sense in which they are doing uh doing anything more than ruling them and they don't think it's their job so when for example we have this terrific famine which breaks out uh it's not that it's it's a worse famine than india's ever seen before it's just that no one has bothered making any grain stores or uh in company territory providing soup kitchens or uh right more than amazon would provide kitchens now it's it's yeah so in in in in luck now the same famine takes place but they uh the nawab gets everybody to uh to build an imam vara the which is still there this enormous white elephant of a building but you know people get basic pay they. They can buy themselves some food and they don't die. This is a Keynesian program. Exactly that.

Right. Exactly. But the company doesn't do that. And it just lets a million people die. So you can draw a real distinction. They're both. It's quite true. Our exploitative systems, the mogul rule taxes very heavily.

And in terms of straight tax probably taxed tiny bit more heavily even than the East India Company but the difference is that the they do very mogul see themselves as rulers and see themselves as having responsibilities as well as the perks of of ruling a very rich territory the company simply doesn't and everyone is young they're in their 20s they want to get back to England and and start a parliamentary career and it is any way they can just make a quick buck they tend to well that raises a good question willie that we've got from stefan jensen he says who who are these people so you said they're young they're in their 20s he says are they basically the equivalent of people working on apprenticeship elite apprenticeship schemes for

sort of strategic consultancies and investment banks today when they leave oxbridge or or are they are they people from the bottom who are working their way up or what are they exactly so in terms of class uh the perennial english question um they're mid they're middle upper rank but they're not the top um simply because so many people die in the east india. I mean, the simple fact is if you join the East India Company at the age of 16, which was the oldest you could join it. The oldest? They were literally the oldest.

They were taking kids of 15 and shipping them out. And then they spend a year or two in the writer's building learning accountancy and languages, and then off they go. And then they die. And most of them, if they can, are out by 30 or 35. And what's the death rate? Two-thirds. Goodness.

Two-thirds die. Two-thirds die and one-third die the first year. Okay. So it's a massive carnage. And you go to those cemeteries in Calcutta, Park Street Cemetery, and there's these lines and lines of Georgian obelisks. And a lot of them die one or two years. A lot of them are children, some of them get married out there and their children just die.

As one English or Scottish sailor Alexander Hamilton puts it, they die like rotting sheep in Bengal. So if you were a top-top, if you were the Duke of Devonshire's son, you wouldn't join the East Indic Company. However, if you were from the background, my family, which we're from, which was provincial Scottish gentry whose income never quite matched their social aspirations. You pile in. This is absolutely where you send your younger brothers and younger sons in the hope that one of them will live long enough to make some money.

And in the case of my wife's family, the Fraser six go out one comes back so willie this this attritional rate it means as you've said you said at the beginning of the episode um basically that there are very few british people out there and so and so when we look at clive who i guess is the the archetype of the self-made man who scams and tricks and strong arms his way to a position of incredible wealth. He wins the Battle of Plassey. He essentially conquers Bengal. He's doing that in association with a lot of Indian backers, right? I mean, it's not a kind of British takeover. It's an Anglo-Indian coup, essentially. So the crucial point about Plassey is that it's not just he's doing it in association with a lot of Indian backers. He is paid to do it by an Indian banker.

He hadn't thought of fighting Plassey. The story, in a nutshell, is that the Seven Year Wars is about to break out and the East India Company get given a dossier, a dodgy dossier, an intelligence dossier that turns out to be completely wrong. And some captain has seen a whole load of French ships loading cannon at Port Lorient and heading off and tells the East India Company it's heading to Bengal. In fact, it's heading to Canada. And that's where the Seven Year War in the end breaks out with a lot of sort of, you know, last of the Mohican stuff of war canoes crossing Lake Huron and all that sort of stuff, and scalping in top Washington state and all that sort of thing. But because of this, the East India Company goes to the Admiralty and says we've got a report saying that there's a huge French fleet going to attack Bengal and so they send out Robert Clive who has

already been out to India once before, made a name for himself as a rubbish accountant but an incredibly talented untrained soldier. He's this sort of weird extraordinary suicidal man who twice has failed to shoot himself through depression, but who then finds his métier in soldiering against the French. So he's the most lethal accountant in history, in a way. He's the most lethal accountant. I mean, there are many lethal accountants in the annals, but he's definitely the number one badass accountant.

And he has this sort of suicidal tendency. He attacks at night in monsoon thunderstorms from the rear. And everything he does could so easily go wrong. And yet he has this amazing sense of how far he can push things, how to size up in Poland. When he's attacking, so he comes out to india finds there's no french fleet and you know it's an embarrassing situation but luckily the news comes that calcutta has fallen to the uh nawab suraj and dallas so he sails his his navy fleet of marines up to uh up

to the hoogly and he takes calcutta back and he's about to go home and willie this is this is the black hole of calcutta incident this is is after the black hole of Calcutta. So Siraj has captured Calcutta from the British, bunged them in the black hole, or have they, you know, much debated, and then he retreats. Definitely, definitely there was a black hole. The question is how many died,

and estimates vary widely, whether it's 100 or whether it's just 60 or something, or 40. But however many died, and we'll never actually know the figure, Clive, by chance, because of this dodgy dossier, is on hand with a fleet. And rather than attacking the French, he turns it on Siraj, takes Calcutta, and is about to go home.

Job done. And at that point, and this is a crucial point that's often obfuscated in both English and Indian accounts of the battle, the jugger set, who is the big banker, who's invented a way of getting tax revenue from Bengal to Delhi without marching it out physically. In the old days, you'd take the tax revenue, put it on a line of 100 bullet carts and march it through UP to Delhi. But because Delhi and UP has now given way to anarchy, it's very difficult to get

the money through in a physical form. So the jagat set says, no problem, just deliver it to my office in Murshidabad, and you can draw it by credit in Delhi, and I will take 15%. Thank you very much. And because of the anarchy and because of the difficulty of getting finance there physically, the Mughal emperors do this,

and 15% of the Bengal tax revenues go to this one banking. And so, Willie... They turn into... Just finish the story. So they turn into the Rothschilds of India, and it's those guys who write to Clive and say, don't go back to Madras quite yet. Finish the job, march up to Mashidabad,

two days days march from Calcutta and kill Siraj Udawla. And I will pay you personally, Robert McClive, one million pounds and I will pay the East India Company a further one million pounds. And Clive says, thank you very much. He doesn't ask anyone. He doesn't write to Madras. It's a totally different mission to the one he'd been sent on, but he goes and does it. And once he's in there and Siraj is dead he marches into the machida bad treasury and literally fills first his pockets and then 60 barges with gold which are then punted downstream to fort william when he's asked later uh by the

parliamentary inquiry uh why he just felt he could do this he said my lords i was astonished my own moderation so what's fascinating about this story is that there's a there seems to be a kind of anglo-indian synergy so you've got clive basically behaving like you know like nadir shah i mean he's basically doing exactly the same correct um but you also you have you know, we know that capitalism is developing in England and Britain, and the East India Company is kind of riding that wave. But clearly, you also have capitalism emerging in India, you've got these kind of proto Bitcoin kind of developing in India so so what's other is it British capitalism that's interviews that's um influencing the way that Indian merchants operate or is it Indian merchants that are influencing how the British operate or are they kind of fusing to create this hybrid Anglo-Indian form of of capitalism so so what you've got is is two groups of bankers speaking the same language

to each other and although one lot are vegetarian Hindus Hindus and Jains originally from Jodhpur state, the Mawaris, who are this the Mawaris are the kind of uber bankers of India, even today, they own something like 25 percent of Indian capital. There's only a handful of them and a lot of the big houses, a lot of the big business houses in india to this day are more worried um and so the the jagat sets want business as usual and they're making a fortune lending money to people like the east india company the dutch east india company and the portuguese and the danes and the french and siraj down the raid in calcutta is not just a threat to the east india

company it's a threat to the juggernauts so say, we've got to get rid of this complete psychopath, Siraj Adana, who clearly, incidentally, British propaganda against Siraj Adana is not just British propaganda against Siraj Adana, he was clearly a complete psycho. And the Mughal accounts and French accounts and everyone's accounts make this clear. So Jagat Seth paid for the East India Company to use its military force on Indians for the first time. And from that point, not just the Jagat Seths, but other Indian bankers continue to pour their finances to the East India Company. Why?

Because the East India Company are businessmen. They understand the conception of interest and repaying on time and the uh gradations of uh of incremental uh uh interest that you must pay if you're late and so on while if you're lending state to a maratha warlord and you ask for your money back he's quite likely to hang you up by your heels and and and and beat you to death and so there's a very clear mutual understanding of mutual interests going on between indian bankers and the company and they are you know they're the same sort of people talking the same sort of language and they all make a huge profit together willie i want to ask a question because you're talking about the seven years war and how this happens in the context of the seven years

war and that raises an excellent question which michael priest sent in on twitter he says if the east india company didn't exist or if it had been slower to grasp these opportunities, would another European competitor, let's say the French or the Dutch, particularly the French, I guess, since we're in the late 18th century, would not they have moved in and done precisely the same thing? The answer is quite possibly. The Dutch are kind of out of the picture by the time of Classy. They're still around in Indonesia, but that is certainly no longer the great

days of the VOC. And as a military force, they don't really exist. But the French very much are around and they are less efficient business operation than the English East India Company because they're controlled by the court in Versailles. And the court in Versailles doesn't really understand business. But the East India Company is just run by a bunch of merchants who do understand finance and profit. And therefore

it responds to economic need much more readily than the French East India Company which is always a political operation. And is it also that Clive can act quickly in a way that maybe a frenchman would be more frightened because the court or something not the case because you get these i mean get these early on i mean clive's first victories in the 1740s a decade before classy are against these very quick-witted um frenchmen one of whom is the son of lord Deloriston, who sets up the whole French East

Indy Company in the first place, and who creates the whole French banking network. And one of the most interesting figures, a Scotsman originally, who fled Scotland after a duel over a point of honour, and becomes the big French banker. There's a fantastic James Buchan biography last year. His son is the adversary of Clive in the 1740s, the Carnatic Wars, and the French operate very efficiently there. So yes, there is a strong possibility that had Clive not existed and had the Lord of the Loristons had the run of the game, that you'd now have French as the spoken language of India and maybe rather better food in the Bengal clubs than the Brown Windsor soup, which is still served.

Well, I remember going to Pondicherry and having a croissant. So a little glimpse there of what might have been. But Willie, just to broaden that question out. So the British basically annex Bengal. And then the next kind of major focus for military engagement by this point the company realized that they can recruit armies is that they come up against tippu sultan in mysore in the south of india who's a great enthusiast for rockets dominic we were talking about congreve rockets congreve rockets tippu sultan who basically

um for for the hindus say in southern india who were afflicted by the kind of anarchy, by rival warlords, whatever. What's the difference between the British and Tipu Sultan? They're both monotheists. Does it make any difference to them who the ruler is? So this is, in a sense, one of the great questions that Indians have asked for 50 years and you get completely different answers depending on which end of the political spectrum you are. For a leftist, Nauruvian, Tipu is a son of the soil whose ancestors have been in India for you know possibly 700 years or 600 years by this

stage and who is as Indian as anyone else. However, if you ask a historian like Swapandas Gupta on the Hindu right, you'll say, no, they are outsiders. They look to Mecca. Or V.S. Naipaul's attitude to Indian Muslims. They're not fully Indian. They're somehow different. And this is the big debate in India today. Are Indian Muslims part of India or are they not? And the Nauruvians say yes they are. The BJP and the RSS say they're not. The founder of the RSS compares them to the Semitic minority in Europe, the Jews, and we must do, says Goelka, and we our nation have defined the original RSS policy document, if you like, we must do to our minority

what the Germans did to theirs at Kristallnacht. But Willie, in terms of the 18th century, late 18th century, beginnings of the 19th century, the mass of Indians who are Hindu, when they look at Muslims, Muslim sultans or British Christian company officers, do they feel, no, we can't have the British because they are completely foreign? Or does it not really make any difference who their rulers is, as long as the rulers are providing a measure of stability, a measure of security? And is that why the East England Company is able to establish its rule ultimately is that enough indians are willing to accept it as as basically the kind of the guarantee the guarantor of security no matter how rapacious they may be because basically you know indian peasantry are used to being

that's the kind of standard for centuries and centuries so if i'm asking my my opinion um my opinion is that there is a huge difference for an indian between being ruled by uh the east india company and tippu sultan um yes both are different religion to the hindus but tippu sultan's culturally become part of India. If you go around Karnataka today, although he has a reputation for having destroyed temples of his enemies outside his kingdoms, all the temples around Mysore have what they call Pajcha Lingams, which were given by Tipu Sultan to the great temples across Mysore and Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. So I don't think it's the same.

But the second part of your question, is it true that people back the company for stability? Unquestionably, yes. And that's particularly the merchant class. The jagat sets are not alone. There is a whole swathe of business India that consistently lends to the company in preference to lending to Tipu or the Marathas, even though the Marathas are the same religion. And the Marathas, for example, burst through Bengal in the 1740s and do a lot of looting and plundering of what

they regard as Mughal territory, even though the majority of the people there are Hindu. And this is one of the big things that leads to the growth of Calcutta, because Calcutta, which had been a small merchant colony, grows enormously in the 1740s because it has what is still called the Maratha Ditch. It's now a ring road, but it was the ditch dug by the company to protect Calcutta against the Marathas. And the Marathas never attacked Calcutta. So that's also the point at which a lot of the Mawari bankers moved from Rajasthan to Bengal. And on top of this, the company establishes in Calcutta a system a bit like Dubai today, where basically rich people can go tax-free if they invest their wealth in the colony. And so you get this huge hemorrhage of bankers from North India moving to Calcutta to avoid taxes and to be protected by British guns.

So although it's a very, in a sense that explains the difficult thing for us, which we find so hard to understand, how so many Indians could act against what we presume to be Indian national interests by becoming a sepoy or lending money to this this rapacious greedy aggressive foreign company uh people people went to it because it protected them and because uh they could make money out of it even though the it might mean the destruction of various dynasties

and the looting of of the unlucky if you were a rich merchant you could make your money by joining hands with the company lending the money and uh and retire with with huge fortunes which which the the british assist the merchant classes in stripping from the mogul aristocracy and giving to the new the new rising banking and and merchant classes okay willie we're running out of time a bit so um tell me what what go i don't believe believe that Ben McIntyre said to you that you wouldn't get a word in Hedgeways. I mean, that's definitely it. And if he did, you've proved him comprehensively wrong, I will say.

Shrinking pilot. So what goes wrong, right? What goes wrong? The East India Company is there. It's making tons of money. It's got collaborators. You know, life goes on in India. If you're an East India Company man, all seems rosy.

What goes wrong in the mid-19th century? So two things go wrong. First of all, something goes wrong in the late 18th century. You get such comprehensive asset stripping of bengal after plastic and baxter classy is 1756 baxter in 1765 these two great company victories leaving no effective opposition in north india to the company and at that point these guys just literally uh just just you know they strip everything that isn't that can. They start locking weavers up in sort of weaving concentration camps so that allegedly, according to one source,

they start cutting their own thumbs off so that they're useless, can't weave and can escape this sort of slavery. And when the 1770 famine breaks out and between one and six million people die according to whose accounts you take probably around two million uh the company actually goes bankrupt this company that had seemed too big to fail which means sending vast sums of money home millions are exported during the famine by individual company men who've made profits profiteering. And in 1772, between 1770 and 1772, the company goes properly bankrupt. They first go to the Bank of England, which is just set up, and doesn't have enough money to save it.

So what happens is that Parliament meets, and you get the same thing as Gordon Brown did for NatWest after the 2008 bank collapses, it basically turns the East India Company from the ultimate libertarian, free market, economic buccaneer into a sort of public-private partnership. So by 1774, in the Regulating Act, the company is half owned by the British state.

And that's the beginning of state involvement in the company, which increases towards the 19th century so that by the 1830s the company's not really functioning as a merchant organization at all it's become like a governing corporation rather like the BBC uh the idea of the BBC conquering the media. Running a piratical. It is the last of the corporations. Forcing people to make terrible Radio 4 comedy shows. Literally, the same charter of corporation which is given to the company is still held by the BBC. It's exactly the same mechanism of state.

Amazing thought. to the company it is still held by the BBC it's exactly the same mechanism of state okay anyway the so the so the gradually into the 19th century the company becomes less and less about trade and more and more about government and then uh the apple cart is overturned due to the increasing evangelical proselytization uh of of company generals during the great evangelical boom of the 1820s and 1830s. And the Clapham sect and all these happy, clappy evangelicals come out to India and start reading the Bible to see boys on parade who are all good Brahmin vegetarians who do not want to be told about eating the body of Christ. And for this very brief period, and it is a very short period of about 20 years, the company suddenly embraces evangelical Christianity, largely through somebody called Charles Grant, who's a leading evangelical, becomes the director of the company. And this

leads to the massive anti-colonial uprising that we in this country still call the Indian Mutiny, and which in India is known as the First War of Independence. Whatever you call it. Both of which are inaccurate, basically. Yeah, I mean, I call it, in The Last Mogul, which deals with this, I call it the Great Uprising, because it is a mutiny, but it's also joined by large swathes of population in certain places like that now and then tribal groups and all sorts of people jump aboard and in 1857 there breaks

out the largest anti-colonial revolt to take place anywhere in the world at any point and hundreds of thousands of people die and it's complete bloody mess a lot of the British population in India slaughtered at the beginning a lot of the british population in india slaughtered at the beginning a lot of the indian population of north india slaughtered in the retribution which follows and parliament meets in 1858 and says enough's enough lots of people have been saying you know this is a ridiculous way to run your best colony to hand it over to a bunch of merchants sitting in the city of london clearly it's a people been saying this right very loudly in parliament quick interjection quick interjection at the beginning you said the british didn't take

india the east india company did so it wasn't a british thing but there you just said this is a ridiculous way to run our best colony so have attitudes changed then and people now think the reality has changed because the company which was this libertarian free market thing for 200 years, in its last 50 years does become increasingly a government agency. And the governor general is appointed by Parliament. So Lord Wellesley, for example, hates the company and regards it as a bunch of cheesemakers. Never trust a cheesemaker, like Alex James.

Never trust a cheesemaker. And so Wellesley is a fascinating figure because he's a young, ambitious parliamentarian, the elder brother of the Duke of Wellington, and he comes out determined to use the army of the East India Company, a corporation, for the British state needs. So he uses it to attack French interests in India, even though the director said,

no, no no no no we don't want this we just want a peaceful trade we want to make a profit and wellesley overrules them and bankrupts the company spends a vast quantity of cash borrows massively and also incidentally builds massive buildings like the governor general's house a palace modeled on kettleston it's such an odd story it's it's such an odd story It's such an odd story It's such an odd story So I think I mean I think we've

And then it's nationalised 1858 It's nationalised And it becomes the Raj But the kind of weird thing Is that the Raj Which is so famous You know

And has occupied Sunday night dramas In Britain And we all know about Kipling and the But the Raj Only lasts 90 years Yeah

It doesn't even make a century. It started 1858, it's abolished 1947. And we've forgotten that the much longer period is the 250 years when India is run by a private corporation out of one office in London. Well, Willie, thank you so much. I don't think anyone listening to this will have any excuse for not appreciating the astonishing way in which British rule came to India. I mean, it is an amazing story and you tell it brilliantly.

Your four books, The Anarchy, White Moguls, Return of the King, The Last Mogul, The Company Quartet, out now. Do buy them if you haven't read them. Thanks so much. We will be back next week can't remember what with but something historical something probably historical it's a it's a fair hunch i think we want dames we want dames and english oh we've had that we've done that we've done that you're clearly not listening you're clearly not listening to our own catch up with the backlog willy there's a football tournament going on those All those gags had already been...

We're old gags. You always had it so readily on your Twitter feed that night, Tom. I'm very disappointed. It's all gone into the podcast. Nothing goes to waste here. Willie, thanks so much. And we will see you all soon. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.