The Honourable Company

Title: The Honourable Company – A History of the English East India Company

Author: John Keay

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1993 (First published 1991)

ISBN: 9780007431557

Pages: 475

The English East India Company arrived in India as a trading concern and set up shop here to control its trade between India and Europe and to China and the Spice Islands. The Mughals kept them under a tight leash. However, the empire tottered after the death of Aurangzeb and a state of anarchy set in. As the provincial governors assumed sovereignty, the British saw their chance when the empire was tearing itself apart. They took sides with the contestants and extracted privileges when their protégés were hauled to the throne. It was then only a matter of time when the Company assumed the onus of ruling large areas of the Indian subcontinent by itself. When the Company eventually overstepped the limits of Indian tolerance with its expansionist and ill-timed social reform policies, the Mutiny of 1857 broke out. The British prevailed in the bloodbath that ensued, but at a great cost in human lives. Piqued at the inept handling of a delicate situation the Crown took over the administration and the company itself was dissolved in 1873. This book tells the story of the East India Company, except for about the last few decades of its life. John Keay is a British historian, journalist, radio presenter and lecturer specializing in popular histories of India, the Far East and China. He is a prolific author with some twenty-five titles to his credit.

The book dispels the myth that the East India Company was formed solely to deal with Indian spices. The Company was established in 1600 as The Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies. In the seventeenth century, the words ‘India’ and ‘Indies’ had no precise geographical connotation. They were used indiscriminately to describe anywhere east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Azores. This is in effect the whole of the world except Europe, Africa and the Asian landmass. Except pepper, all major spices came from the archipelago now known as Indonesia. The Coromandel and Gujarat coasts were linked to Spice Islands for trade. They exchanged Indian cotton pieces for Indonesian spices. The Gujarati merchant marine then sailed annually to the Red Sea ports to sell the spices. It was to exploit these trade links, not to open up India’s internal trade or to gain a political toehold on the subcontinent that the Company first directed its ships to India. They had only British woolen clothes to sell, which did not find any takers in Asia. This necessitated export of bullion from England to pay for spices. This situation was not conducive to two-way commerce and not at all sustainable in the long run. Keay thus ensures the moral necessity of the British to devise some novel ways to stay in business.

The chapters on the development of the Company’s operations in India stresses on the hesitation of the Company’s officials to venture into anything not connected with trade. They were fearful of the cost, risks and delay, making them reluctant warriors. Each journey was separately financed, accounted and dividends paid. Instead of getting a market for English broadcloth which was used in India as horse blankets, India’s cotton caught on in England. In a way, the East India business generated the London money market just as it did the London docks. Money was converted to Spanish silver rials, which was the only designation accepted in India. This caused a huge drain on precious metals in England. By the 1680s, the Company exported 240,000 kilograms of silver and 7,000 kilograms of gold to the Mughals. As trade improved, the economies of the two regions became more intertwined. The manufacturing industries of Gujarat, the Tamil country and Bengal had come to depend on European trade of cotton and silk.

Another revelation of Keay’s work is the details of the hard working environment of the Company on the home front. Its monopoly was deeply resented by rivals who wanted to enter the trade. Some did it covertly, earning the sobriquet ‘interlopers’. The company also lost a substantial portion of its business to the private trade of its own employees. They could influence the crown only if they had had money to loan him or to extend other favours. Its monopoly was ended before a century of its beginning of operations. Another company competed with it for a while, but the two were amalgamated soon enough to create a united company. Around this time, the Mughal economy became dependent on the company’s bullion export. The Mughals did not employ a navy worth its name and the English presence remained the Mughals’ only guarantee of a safe passage to its shipping in the Arabian Sea which was infested with European pirates, some of whom had been in the employ of the European companies.

The book describes the chaotic political climate of Northern India with the weakening of Mughal authority. The company was forced to ensure the defence of its establishments with a private militia. Slowly, this transformed into regular troops. The company’s journey to the position of power in India began with a ‘farman’ (decree) issued by the Mughal Emperor Farrukhsiyar in 1717. This waived the customs dues in favour of an annual lump sum payment of Rs. 3,000. Villages adjacent to the British Presidency settlements were handed over to them. The company was allowed to mint coins out of its bullion imported to India. An extradition treaty was signed to apprehend and hand over criminals escaping to Company territory. The most outrageous concession was that all goods carried under a pass (dastak) issued by the company’s officials could be transported freely in the empire without interference from royal officials or attracting taxes. The British company officials also had to contend with rival European companies whose battles at home spilled over to Indian soil. However, so long as Mughal authority lasted, it acted as an effective brake on the rivalries of the European companies. But once it crumbled, there would be nothing to stop every European quarrel from spreading to the trading settlements and then to the hinterland. Keay also explains why Indian troops appeared to stand no chance in a frontal battle with the Europeans. The ideas of drill, arms and tactics had scarcely progressed in India after Akbar while in Europe they had undergone steady refinement and development in a host of campaigns. Warfare in India was still a sport and in Europe it was a science. The pathetic state of Indian military tactics was seen in 1746 at the Siege of Madras. The Nawab of Carnatic’s soldiers were scattered by the numerically smaller French forces. It seemed that every French gun had the firepower of thirty Indian guns and every French trooper could comfortably account for ten ill-armed Mughal mercenaries.

It was in the eighteenth century that the company began its brutal exploitation of India. The Mughal emperor’s farman enabled them to collect revenues from territories ceded to them. This source of income helped stop the import of gold and silver to cover the heavily unbalanced payments. China stood firm a little longer, but the company found opium to be much in demand if it could be clandestinely transported there. The opium producers in India thus became the unwitting pawns in a cruel trade game. Proceeds from the sale of opium were used to buy tea which took England by storm,but it wasn’t contained in a tea cup. The company fought two actual wars with China for ‘establishing’ its right to sell the narcotic to Chinese people against the wishes of its emperor. The company was also oblivious to the fate of the people living in their territories in India. A famine raged in Bengal in 1770 in which up to a third of the total population perished. The company utilized this unsettling time to enhance the land revenue to ten per cent. Any relief measures were unheard of.

While it is true that the company was indifferent to the well-being of Indians living under their protection, readers are not to be deluded with the thought that the Mughals, their governors and vassals were any better. The author comments on the miserable existence of the Tamil people under the Nawab of Arcot – “The Tamil-speaking Hindus were already in a state of abject subjugation. No ruler, from the Nawab down to the pettiest poligar (feudal chief)seems to have been of Tamil birth. Nor were any of his troops. While the Tamil peasant took cover amongst the palmyras, the armies, including those of the English and French, which trampled his paddy and commandeered his buffalo, were composed of Punjabis, Afghans, Rajputs, Pathans and Marathas. All were outsiders, adventurers, mercenaries who when not fighting one another were employed in exacting tribute in the guise of revenue. Government was simply a euphemism for oppression under the imperial sanction of Mughal authority” (p.292)

The book’s readability is rather mediocre, as the text is peppered with extensive quotes from contemporary sources with strange spellings and arcane constructs. The final chapters of the book lack a clear sense of direction as if the author is at a loss on how to finish the story. Narratives of a large part of far-eastern trade carried out by the company are crammed into a few pages. The book is interesting only in those areas where it deals with India. At all other places, it pours out travels and fighting in search of trade with disconcerting precision. Almost half of the text is devoted to the company officials’ sea voyages in search of material for trade. It is adorned with an excellent and comprehensive bibliography. Typically Indian comparisons are also seen like this one – “the Mughal Empire crumbled like a crushed pappadam”.

The book is recommended only to serious readers of history.

Rating: 3 Star