How did the East India Company establish itself in India?

I'm Shruti Kapila.

I'm professor of history and politics at the University of

Cambridge.

Today, we are going to talk about the rise of the British in India.

This is, of course, known as a jewel in the crown.

It is the most important aspect of the British empire,

but it is also a story which is long in the making.

It doesn't quite appear suddenly, nor does it go suddenly.

So in the first instance, the most important date is

seventeen o seven.

This is to say that before the British came and established

their empire in India,

there was a very massive empire in India,

which was run by the Mughals.

The Mughals were the great emperors.

So if you were came from outer space in the seventeenth

century, and you looked at the planet,

you would think the planet was under what was called Pax

Islamica or the rule of Islamic empires, whether it was the

Ottomans in Eurasia.

But for India, the big story was the Mughals.

This was the great Mughal emperor empire,

which was a Muslim empire,

but it was also

an empire which had united the southern polity of India

with its northern one after a massive gap in time.

In seventeen o seven, the greatest Mughal emperor,

Aurangzeb, died.

He was an old man, and it's his succession which leads to

a huge new era in the long eighteenth century in India for

a struggle of imperial supremacy.

It would it would be the struggle of supremacy through

which the British will establish the empire most sure

footedly in seventeen fifty seven for a good hundred years.

The principal vehicle of this imperial spread was actually

a body which was called the East India Company.

This is this at one level was a joint stock company, what we

would call today a multinational,

but it was also a bit more complicated than that.

It it had a royal

license for a monopoly for monopoly trading in different

parts of of the world.

And prior to the death of Aurangzeb, the the the East

India Company had been trying to set up shop in India,

trying to trade with with with with Indian merchants

for what were really high end luxury items like ivory,

silk, but, of course, spices above all.

And it's this clamour initially that Lee comes allows for the

British tradesmen to come into India and set up and set up

their enclaves around

the coastal shores of India.

But by seventeen fifty seven, the big story is that from

becoming commercial enterprise,

they become

they become they gain the ability to raise taxes from

India.

And this is really the first pivot of how it becomes an

imperial polity.

So the Easterner Company is not just a a company.

It is also has a private army.

At the end of the eighteenth century,

it is the largest standing army in the world.

So this is where, as it were, a confluence of military power,

commercial power,

combined with the exercise of political control,

that will lead to the rise of the British in India.

But to begin with, this story is going in different directions.

It's really with the loss of the the central power or the

central authority of the Mughal emperor,

whose capital was based in Delhi,

that really a succession war takes place for the for the for

the control of India.

And there is one major event that takes place in seventeen thirty nine.

As I said, the world was Islamic.

The Iranian part of the world was under the

Safavids, also a Muslim empire.

And that also falls, and a major warlord comes from that

area via Afghanistan and raids the capital city of

Delhi.

It is this that hollows out the the kind of political

control of any residual authority that the Mughals may

have possessed and allows for the East India Company,

which is at this point primarily based in the southern

shores, to start moving upwards north, first in eastern India,

and then onto the Gangetic plain, into the heartlands,

and into Delhi very, very, very firmly.

And here, this to to kind of not to complicate the picture too much,

but the competition is not simply between the Mughals and

and and the British.

The competition is also between the French and the Dutch,

who are also beginning to set up and compete with,

compete with, with each other,

but above all with other Indian sub empires which are

emerging at this point.

Principally, amongst them are the Marathas from western India and the

Sikhs from northern India.

So in a way, India becomes the great site of massive global

conflict, in the in the eighteenth century.

And one of the things that I would like to, you know,

point out is that it this eighteenth century story has

always primarily been told as a story of decline and decay in

India. And this is it has seemed to be a dark century.

But good historical revisionist, accounts in the

last twenty, thirty years, have, you know,

shown effectively that what is attracting

Europeans to India is not the fact that this is this is a

chaotic era of of darkness,

but quite the opposite.

This is a commercially robust, rich society,

which with which offers a huge amount of profit for these new

newly trading, trading bodies.

So it is the combination of military power, commercial

prowess, which allows them, the East India Company,

to start through both coercion, persuasion,

and outright warfare, and through that,

they maneuver upwards in India.

And what is what is at the heart of it?

How how do we explain what is what is going on?

Indian society in the eighteenth century is an

upwardly mobile, robust society.

It is a society much like elsewhere in the world where

intermediate groups are rising.

What we might you know, what for the British,

this was the bourgeoisie or the middle classes.

In India, it is the merchant cap it is merchant capital which is on the rise.

It is Indian bankers who, you know,

through trade and specialized networks,

have gained commercial prowess both internally,

but in through also expansion outwards into the Indian Ocean zone.

It is it is this aspect that would lead to a kind

of commerce in warfare that emerges.

So, which is to say that Indian,

smaller Indian emperors or smaller Indian kingdoms

were to to service, to service the warfare that is

taking place is increasingly in debt to moneylenders,

to local moneylenders

and merchant classes.

And it is really this coalition, the changing

coalition between merchants, the Indian merchant capital,

the British commercial interest, and the lack of

Indian political elites to maintain armies,

which creates an opportunity for the British to come in,

which is to say the East India Company becomes the largest

standing army in the world precisely because it is

recruiting Indian sepoys or Indian soldiers because it has

the ability to pay.

It has the ability.

And so these are not national armies like we may understand them today,

but they are armies they are armies which are bound

not by loyalty to to a nation, but to the paymaster.

And as a result,

the East India Company begins a kind of massive recruitment,

is able to recruit as it moves along.

And really, it's this process,

this kind of uneven process between commerce

and warfare, and as it were,

the the interests of land, as it were.

You know, how, you know,

how is it that if you're a commercial body,

you start colonizing Indian land?

Where what is what happens there?

And here, this is about, as I said, the

competing empires, the the

Mughals, the the Marathas, the Sikhs,

and quite apart from other big kingdoms,

opposed, as it were, the loss of moral authority,

this internecine warfare

produces a market in in military recruitment on the one side.

And secondly, if you're unable to pay for the military,

you start leasing off land, I.

E.

The East India Company started ability

it started gaining the ability to extract rent from the land.

And this leads to, as it were, the erosion, the definite

erosion of political rights for India.

And here, the crucial turning point is in Bengal, under,

in in seventeen fifty seven when the the British gain what

is called the Diwani or the right, to extract land revenue.

And if you go to the houses of parliament in in, in in London,

you will see a very important

mural which depicts the story of a king,

of a of a the local king handing over a treaty or the

right to the East India Company officer to be able to to,

to collect land tax.

And this, in a way, makes the British Empire

in India a territorial political entity.