How British East India Company Governed India? Part-2

British East India Company Governed India

Such was the Indian government for a long course of years, during which it carried on, simultaneously with its commerce, extensive wars, and subdued and annexed to its dominion some of the finest and most fertile provinces in Asia. These conquered territories, by a strange and indefensible policy, were long considered as a portion of the stock in trade of a commercial company, and were committed, with all their population and revenues, to the administration of a host of needy adventurers, who year after year left the shores of England, to return, after a short career of plunder, "laden with odium and riches," to enjoy the envied fruites of their oppression with very little disturbance from the governing classes of this country. At length, however, the notorious corruption of the Indian government, and the tyranny of its agents, aroused public attention, and towards the close of the last century the impeachment of Warren Hastings proved that the nation had been thoroughly awakened to a sense of its duties and responsibilities. Remedial measures were then first seriously thought of and discussed in parliament. The first great and comprehensive measure which resulted from this improved state of public feeling was the celebrated East India Bill of Mr. Fox. In 1783,that great statesman, burning with indignation at the unparalleled mass of iniquity which the investigations of a committee of the House of Commons had just brought to light, introduced, in a speech worth of the subject and of himself, his plan for regulating the commercial concerns of the Company at home, and for the better government of their territories abroad. He proposed to supersede the two courts of proprietors and directors by vesting the whole of the territories, revenues, and commerce of India in seven commissioners, to be chosen by parliament, and they were to have the power of appointing and dismissing all persons in the service of the Company; nine assistant commissioners, being proprietors of India stock, were to be named by the legislature to assist in the details of commerce, and to be under the authority of the superior board. The soundness of the principle upon which Mr. Fox proceeded in bringing Indian affairs so directly under the control of parliament may well be questioned. The bill was vehemently opposed by the government of the day, and not receiving a very effectual support out of doors, was defeated in the House of Lords by a considerable majority, composed chiefly of peers who were personally subservient to the reigning monarch, to whom the great India Reform Bill was in the highest degree distasteful.But public opinion was too powerful, even in those days, to be entirely disregarded, and Mr. Pitt having pledged hiself to remedial measures, and having really at heart, we believe, the interest and happiness of India, brought forward, in the following year, his bill for the better administration of India affairs, and established the existing Board of Control. We conceive this measure, however objectionable Mr. Fox's may have been, to have been and unstatesmanlike effort to evade, rather than grapple with, the real difficulties of the question. The East India Company had been proved to be utterly cor-rupt and incorrigible; it had lost its capital over and over again. As a commercial body it was bankrupt, and on every principle of justice all political power should have been then taken from it, and its affairs "wound up." But Mr. Pitt, unprepared for the task of governing India from Downing-street, and bewildered by conflicting schemes and interests, found himself compelled to recommit the government of Hindostan to a company which had often managed with the grossest ignorance and ill-success even its own legitimate business. He continued the government of India in the Court of Directors, but he restrained their political action by a number of, as he thought, salutary regulations, and by a permanent Board of Control, composed chiefly of ministers high in the service of the Crown. The East India Company had, until then, been one of the most corrupt and destructive tyrannies that probably ever existed in the world. He allowed, however, to use Burke's figure, "the wolf to continue the guardian of the flock, but inserted a curious sort of muzzle by which the protection wolf should not be able to open his jaws above and inch or two at the utmost." The scheme of reconciling a direction nominally independent with an office substantially controlling was a machinery that could not of course work smoothly if both should affect activity and independence. One must of necessity become subordinate, and the Board of Control soon became supreme, and the direction sank into a merely subservient council; and into immediate connexion with the Crown.In 1793 the British territories in India, together with the exclusive trade, were continued to the "Company" for twenty years. In 1814 the charter was again renewed for another twenty years; the trade was, however, opened under certain restrictions, but the monopoly of the China trade and all the territorial revenues of India were continued until 1834. It was in this year that the East India Company, as a commercial body, may be said to have become, in fact, extinct, and from thenceforth it can only be said of it, "stat magni nominus umbra." Its privileges were entirely abolished, but the government of India was continued in the Court of Directors—a practical anomaly of the most extraordinary kind, there being really no company to direct. The only reason that could be assigned for this arrangement was the difficulty of framing an entirely new government for India, and the supposed necessity of putting up with a temporary makeshift until greater attention could be bestowed on Indian affairs, or public opinion should demand a total change in the system. The capital of the defunct company was guaranteed a fixed rate of interest by the government, and a provision was made for paying it off at a stated period. It became, in short, virtually a government stock. The proprietors of this stock have therefore no more special interest in the affairs of India than in those of Canada or New Zealand, although the farce of a Court of Proprietors is still kept up, which is the ridicule of the well-informed, but the source of many absurd and mischievous delusions.

The elaborate parliamentary inquiries of 1852-3 resulted only in a trifling modification of the old system. After an investigation extending over two sessions and the examination of numberless witnesses, the united wisdom of the two Houses of Parliament was able to devise nothing more satisfactory than a trifling modification of the Board of Directors, by admitting the principle of government nomination to the extent of six members of that body, giving it thereby rather more the character of government council, and indicating, by an approach towards a correct system, the direction which future and more important changes would probably take.Thus, by the last legislative arrangement for the government of India, the antiquated and obsolete system was almost entirely retained, a system not only theoretically absurd, but, we are convinced, practically mischievous, and such as no statesman would ever have originated, or could consistently retain one hour beyond the necessities which gave in existence. And one of the most censurable portions of the arrangement thus prolonged for another term of years, was that of retaining the fiction, or even assuming the reality, of an East India Company, by permitting periodical meetings of the proprietors of East India stock, and recognising their corporate action. The Court of Proprietors is even a greater fiction than the direction; nevertheless, a few pompous and insignificant individuals have been permitted to assemble half-yearly to propound their views and discuss the interests of an empire which they affect to take under their especial protection. This is, perhaps, the grossest error that has been committed. It has been the cause of those misconceptions which exist to a very great extent not only in this country but throughout Europe and Asia. Who does not frequently observe in the public prints of this country, as well as of France and Germany, allusions to "the Hon. the East India Company" as a still existing body, possessing territorial rights, and a political and commercial organisation? On the continent of Europe this misapprehension is very general, nor can we feel surprised at the mistake, when even public men of some repute in this country have been observed to labour under similar delusions. It was but the other day that a gentleman,who' had for a considerable period a seat in the legislature, declared at a public meeting that it was unjust to permit the people of India to be ruled by a few commercial gentlemen, whose only object must necessarily be to obtain the highest dividends for their constituents! If a public man, living in the clear atmosphere of English public life, and with access to all the sources of correct information, can labour under such extraordinary misapprehensions, what sort of idea must be formed of the British government in the untutored mind of the Hindoo, or by the fierce and fanatical Mussulman? They never hear of any other power than that of the "Company." They regard it as the source of all authority. From it alone the governor-general receives, as they suppose, his commission, and to it he is responsible, and their highest conception of sovereign power must be a grasping and avaricious mercantile association draining India of its wealth to swell its enormous gains. What sort of allegiance could the people of India justly owe to such a government, and what attachment could a native soldiery entertain for a power supposed to maintain them out of the very spoils of their country? It is certainly not in human, far less in Indian, nature to venerate a power which it conceives as ruling not for the righteous purposes of protection and justice, but for its own selfish and mercenary ends.

THE EAST INDIA COMPANY

THE EAST INDIA COMPANY'S HISTORY!!!

The  East India Company is, or rather was, an anomaly without a parallel in the history of the world. It originated from sub-scriptions, trifling in amount, of a few private individuals. It gradually became a commercial body with gigantic resources, and by the force of unforeseen circumstances assumed the form of a sovereign power, while those by whom its affairs were directed continued, in their individual capacities, to be without power or political influence. — Bentley's Miscellany 43 (1858)

One of the strangest parts of the history of the British Empire involves that commercial venture generally known as the East India Company, though its original name when founded by royal charter on the very last day of 1600 was the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies. As its name suggests, the company was the enterprise of London businessmen who banded together to make money importing spices from South Asia. For centuries the valuable spice trade with the East Indies (as they were long known) relied on land routes across Asia and the Middle East, but by the sixteenth century, the superior navigational technology and skills of the Portuguese for the first time permitted Europeans to cut out intermediaries and hence make themselves far greater profits. The Spanish and Portuguese had a monopoly of the East Indies spice trade until destruction of the Spanish Aramada in 1588, which permitted the British and Dutch to seek their share of this wealthy import business.

The company with the long name first entered the spice trade in the form of an old-fashioned or early capitalist venture, essentially conducting each voyage as a separate business venture with its own subsribers or stock-holders. This approach lasted for a dozen years, and then in 1612 the company switched to temporary joint stocks and finally to permanent joint stocks in 1657. Supposedly a monopoly, the company evenentually faced competition from another group of English investors and merchants, and the two merged in 1708 as the United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica,

The company met with opposition from the Dutch in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and the Portuguese. The Dutch virtually excluded company members from the East Indies after the Amboina Massacre in 1623 (an incident in which English, Japanese, and Portuguese traders were executed by Dutch authorities), but the company's defeat of the Portuguese in India (1612) won them trading concessions from the Mughal Empire. The company settled down to a trade in cotton and silk piece goods, indigo, and saltpetre, with spices from South India. It extended its activities to the Persian Gulf, Southeast Asia, and East Asia.

The company's encounters with foreign competitors eventually required it to assemble its own military and administrative departments, thereby becoming an imperial power in its own right, though the British government began to reign it in by the late eighteenth century. Before Parliament created a government-controlled policy-making body with the Regulating Act of 1773 and the India Act eleven years later, shareholders' meetings made decisions about Britain's de facto colonies in the East. The British government took away the Company's monopoly in 1813, and after 1834 it worked as the government's agency until the 1857 India Mutiny when the Colonial Office took full control. The East India Company went out of existence in 1873.

During its heyday, the East India Company not only established trade through Asia and the Middle East but also effectively became of the ruler of territories vastly larger than the United Kingdrom itself. In addition, it also created, rather than conquered, colonies. Singapore, for example, was an island with very few Malay inhabitants in 1819 when Sir Stamford Raffles purchased it for the Company from their ruler, the Sultan of Johor, and created what eventually became one of the world's greatest trans-shipment ports.

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