The painting shows a scene from August , when the young Mughal emperor Shah Alam, exiled from Delhi and defeated by East India Company troops, was forced into what we would now call an act of involuntary privatisation.
The collecting of Mughal taxes was henceforth subcontracted to a powerful multinational corporation — whose revenue-collecting operations were protected by its own private army. It was at this moment that the East India Company EIC ceased to be a conventional corporation, trading and silks and spices, and became something much more unusual.
Within a few years, company clerks backed by the military force of 20, locally recruited Indian soldiers had become the effective rulers of Bengal. An international corporation was transforming itself into an aggressive colonial power. Using its rapidly growing security force — its army had grown to , men by — it swiftly subdued and seized an entire subcontinent. Astonishingly, this took less than half a century. We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality.
It was not 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 — Clive. In many ways the EIC was a model of corporate efficiency: 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 of vast tracts of southern Asia. It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history. Yet if history shows anything, it is that in the intimate dance between the power of the state and that of the corporation, while the latter can be regulated, it will use all the resources in its power to resist.
When it suited, the EIC made much of its legal separation from the government. But the MPs who voted to uphold this legal distinction were not exactly neutral: nearly a quarter of them held company stock, which would have plummeted in value had the Crown taken over. For the same reason, the need to protect the company from foreign competition became a major aim of British foreign policy. The transaction depicted in the painting was to have catastrophic consequences.
As with all such corporations, then as now, the EIC was answerable only to its shareholders. Before long the province, already devastated by war, was struck down by the famine of , then further ruined by high taxation. Company tax collectors were guilty of what today would be described as human rights violations. No great sophistication was required.
A portion of the proceeds was later spent rebuilding Powis. The painting at Powis that shows the granting of the Diwani is suitably deceptive: the painter, Benjamin West, had never been to India. In reality, there had been no grand public ceremony. Later, the British dignified the document by calling it the Treaty of Allahabad, though Clive had dictated the terms and a terrified Shah Alam had simply waved them through.
By the time the original painting was shown at the Royal Academy in , however, no Englishman who had witnessed the scene was alive to point this out. Clive, hounded by envious parliamentary colleagues and widely reviled for corruption, committed suicide in by slitting his own throat with a paperknife some months before the canvas was completed. He was buried in secret, on a frosty November night, in an unmarked vault in the Shropshire village of Morton Say.
No contemporary corporation could duplicate its brutality, but many have attempted to match its success at bending state power to their own ends. The people of Allahabad have also chosen to forget this episode in their history.
One of the guards proudly showed me the headlines in the local edition of the Times of India, announcing that Allahabad had been among the subjects discussed in the White House by Modi and President Obama. The sentries were optimistic.
A t the height of the Victorian period there was a strong sense of embarrassment about the shady mercantile way the British had founded the Raj. The Victorians thought the real stuff of history was the politics of the nation state.
This, not the economics of corrupt corporations, they believed was the fundamental unit of analysis and the major driver of change in human affairs. Moreover, they liked to think of the empire as a mission civilisatrice : a benign national transfer of knowledge, railways and the arts of civilisation from west to east, and there was a calculated and deliberate amnesia about the corporate looting that opened British rule in India. A second picture, this one commissioned to hang in the House of Commons, shows how the official memory of this process was spun and subtly reworked.
I came across it by chance late this summer, while waiting there to see an MP. The painting was part of a series of murals entitled the Building of Britain. It features what the hanging committee at the time regarded as the highlights and turning points of British history: King Alfred defeating the Danes in , the parliamentary union of England and Scotland in , and so on.
The image in this series which deals with India does not, however, show the handing over of the Diwani but an earlier scene, where again a Mughal prince is sitting on a raised dais, under a canopy.
Again, we are in a court setting, with bowing attendants on all sides and trumpets blowing, and again an Englishman is standing in front of the Mughal. But this time the balance of power is very different. Sir Thomas Roe, the ambassador sent by James I to the Mughal court, is shown appearing before the Emperor Jahangir in — at a time when the Mughal empire was still at its richest and most powerful.
The Indus Plain is the world's most fertile plain. It is located in Pakistan Subcontinent. Culture India was a mixture of Hinduism and Islam, having Muslim rulers who had ruled for hundreds of years. Naive people The Indian people had always been too innocent and were used to people ruling over them. The Europeans saw this as an upportunity.
Rulers As mentioned above, the Indian rulers promoted art to its fullest. Due to that, anyone was welcome in India with open arms. The Europeans saw this as an opportunity of present friendship and future backstabbing. English traders first arrived in India to acquire cotton, spices, and a base for further trade beyond India. The need to stabilize their trading partners over the next years kept growing.
European trade with India was extremely lucrative, and the British first arrived in the East India Company to set up a Factory -- this then being a warehouse where goods for shipment to England would be stored to await a trading vessel. There was a strong demand for cotton, indigo, saltpetre, and salt.
The Indian factory was also a staging point for trade in spices and for silk, tea, and ceramics from China. India was not then very stable and the East India Company soon found itself raising troops to guard its facilities and to protect its trading partners inland from Bombay -- especially as the trade grew in wealth and importance. India also turned into an arena for European rivalries, especially as the Mughal Empire weakened in the middle of the 18th Century. In the Carnatic Wars of the s and '50s, the East Indian Company and their allies were in a struggle with their French counterparts -- and their local allies.
The war ended in a British victory, but it also left their erstwhile allies looking to Britain for protection, and with the British in charge of Bengal and the former French Allies. After EIC merchants were massacred at Amboyna in present day Indonesia in , the company increasingly turned their attention to India.
From these coastal toeholds, they orchestrated the profitable trade in spices, textiles and luxury goods on which their commercial success was predicated, dealing with Indian artisans and producers primarily through Indian middlemen. The company grew in both size and influence across the 17th and 18th centuries. Listen: William Dalrymple explains how a single London corporation took over the Mughal empire and became a major imperial power on this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast.
They grappled to maintain their trading privileges in the face of declining central Mughal authority and the emergence of dynamic individual successor states. European competitors also began to have an increased presence on the subcontinent, with France emerging as a major national and imperial rival during the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War.
As well as maintaining a large standing army consisting primarily of sepoys Indian mercenary soldiers trained in European military techniques , the EIC was able to call on British naval power and crown troops garrisoned in India. After military victories at the battles of Plassey and Buxar , the EIC was granted the diwani of Bengal — control over the administration of the region and the right to collect tax revenue.
At the same time, the company expanded its influence over local rulers in the south, until by the s the balance of power had fundamentally changed. Expansion continued and rivals such as the Maratha people in western India and Tipu Sultan of Mysore were defeated. Individual nabobs as EIC employers were derisively dubbed amassed massive personal fortunes, often at the expense of their Indian subjects.
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