The conquest of India made the Industrial Revolution in England possible by providing the necessary capital and markets, without which a predominantly agricultural Eng- land could not have become the industrial 'workshop of the world" and the richest and most powerful nation on earth. Mere inventions or the introduction of new and ex- pensive implements or processes are not sufficient to trans- form the economy of a country simply because it 'involves a large outlay; it is not worthwhile for any man, however energetic, to make the attempt unless he has a considerable command of capital, and has access to large markets.
The inventions made before 1757 did not seem to have come into use; but the inventions made after that date made a tremendous impact on the economic life of England. Why? Because the conquest of India provided the "considerable command of capital" and "access to large markets'
What followed the British conquest of Bengal (an act of treachery, falsehood, forgery and above all a "tremendous piracy" proving in part what William Blake said that 'the whore and gambler, by the state licensed, built that (England) nation's fate'") in 1757-the starting date of the British empire in India-is described by two historians. "A gold-lust unequalled since the hysteria that took hold of the Spaniards of Cortes and Pizarro's age filled the English mind. Bengal in particular was not to know peace again until it had been bled white.
Horace Walpole said 'such a scene of tyranny and plunder has been opened up as makes one shudder .We are Spaniards in our lust for gold, and Dutch in our deli- cacy of obtaining it.
Lord Macaulay, about whom an American, Brooks Adams, said, 'upon the plundering of India there can be no better authority" than him, tells us what happened after the battle of Plassey "The shower of wealth now fell copi- ously on the Company and its servants. A sum of eight hundred thousand sterling, in coined silver, was sent down the river from Moorshedabad to Fort William (later Calcutta). The fleet which conveyed this treasure consisted of more than a hundred boats, .As to Clive, there was no limit to his acquisition but his own moderation. The treasury of Bengal was thrown open to him . Clive walked between heaps of gold and silver, crowned with rubies and diamonds and was at liberty to help himself. He accepted between two and three hundred thousand pounds.
According to the list laid down before British Parlia- ment in 1772, the company and its employees received £6,000,000* from the natives of India as "gifts" in just ten years, from 1757 to 1766. Clive and other servants of the company came back to England laden with colossal wealth acquired 'corruptly, covertly, scandalously." The loot of Clive 'enabled him to vie with the first grandees of Eng- land. . Besides a great mass of ready money, he had his Indian estate, valued by himself at twenty-seven thousand
a year.
The readers must keep in mind throughout that the value of money at that time st have beer quite high. It cannot be figured out with certainty, but according to an English writer, John Strachey, who compare the purchas ng power to pound in the 1750's with 1950's multiplier of at least 10 is appropriate,
Now the 1970's it is certainly larger than ten. This means that this and other figures should be multiplied by at least te to get some idea of the great loot. Ameri- can reader should multiply it further by the exchange ratio of the dollar with the English pound.
A few examples of many are cited here to show how even the servants of the company pillaged the Indians in their private capacity. Macaulay took home £25,000 as his personal fortune after remaining in the service of the company for only three and a half years. Barwell, another employee of the company, took home £80,000 after six years of service in spite of the fact that he was an invetc. rate gambler, who lost £40,000 in one sitting. Pigot, the Governor of Madras, received £1,200,000 in bribes in 19 years from the Nawab of Carnatic; and even the more modest Wynch pocketed £200,000. Even the Christian priests were not behind anyone in the search for loot, including the Archbishop of York, who was grateful to the Governor- General, Warren Hastings, for allowing his son, Markham --Resident at Banaras, to make £30,000 a year in bribes, The true ambitions of the Christian servitors may best be appreciated from what one of them wrote "I am extremely anxious to go as Chaplain on the East India fleet. The stipend is small, only £40, but there are many advantages. The last brought home £3,000. No wonder that "direc- tors and directors' relatives, peers, even the Royal family. saw no reason why they should not push a young friend or dependant into a service which within an incredibly brief period would bring him back enormously enriched. Such looting by the British was a typical feature at the end of almost every battle won by them in India. Readers can therefore imagine how much money, or the equivalent thereof, was taken out of India by England just on this count alone.
Macaulay describes the condition of Bengal after a few years of English rule "Every ship from Bengal had for some time brought alarming tidings. The internal mis- government of the province had reached such a point that it could go no further.The misgovernment of the English carried to a point such as seems hardly incompatible with the very existence of society. The Roman proconsul, who, in a year or two, squeezed out of a province the means of rearing marble palaces and baths on the shores of Cam- pania, of drinking from amber, or feasting on singing birds, or exhibiting armies of gladiators and flocks of camelopards, the Spanish viceroy, who, leaving behind him the curses of Mexico or Lima, entered Madrid with a long train of gilded coaches, and sumpter-horses trapped and shod with silver, were now outdone . The servants of the Company obtain- ed, not for their employers, but for themselves a monopoly of almost the whole internal trade. They forced the natives to buy dear and to sell cheap. They insulted with impunity the tribunals, the police and the fiscal authorities of the country. .Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumu- lated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the cxtremity of wretchedness .The Eng- lish Government, oppressive as the most oppressive form of Barbarian despotism, was strong with all the strength of civilization.
Brooks Adams, the brother of a famous American President, whose celebrated book, "The Law of Civilization and Decay,' 'is entitled to rank among the permanent classics of American thought" and 'is to be included among the outstanding documents of intellectual history in the United States, and, in a way, the Western World" says that "the savings of millions of human beings for centuries, the English seized and took to London, as the Romans had taken the spoils of Greece and Pontus to Italy. What the value of the treasure was, no man can estimate but it must have been many millions of pounds-a vast sum in propor- tion to the stock of the precious metals then owned by Europeans.
Adams tells us how only the capital supplied by India could make the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions in England possible "Therefore, the influx of Indian treasure, by adding consi- derably to the nation's cash capital, not only increased its stock of energy, but added much to its flexibility and the rapidity of its movement.
"Very soon after Plassey, the Bengal plunder began to arrive in London, and the effect appears to have been instantaneous, for all authorities agree that the 'industrial revolution' began with the year 1760. .Plassey was fought in 1757, and probably nothing has ever equalled the rapi- dity of the change that followed. In 1760, the flying shuttle appeared, and coal began to replace wood in smelt- ing. In 1764, Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, in 1776 Crompton contrived the mule; in 1785 Cartwright patented the power loom and in 1768 Watt matured the steam engine, the most perfect of all vents of centralizing energy. But though these machines served as outlets for the accelerating movements of the time, they did not cause the acceleration. In themselves inventions are passive, many of the most important having lain dormant for centuries, waiting for a sufficient store of force to have accumulated to set them working. That store must always take the shape of money, and money not hoarded but in motion
"Before the influx of the Indian treasure, and the expansion of credit which followed, no force sufficient for this purpose existed; and had Watt lived fifty years earlier, he and his inventions must have perished together .
"Agriculture, as well as industry, felt the impulsion of the new force. Arthur Young remarked in 1770, that 'within ten years there had been more experiments, more discoveries, and more general good sense displayed in the walk of agriculture than in an hundred preceding ones' and the reason why such a movement should have occurred seems obvious. After 1760, a complex system of credit sprang up, based on a metallic treasure, and those who could borrow had the means at their disposal of importing breeds of cattle, and of improving tillage, as well as of organizing factories like Soho and nothing better reveals the magnitude of the social revolution wrought by Plassey, than the manner in which the wastes were enclosed after the middle of the century. .Possibly since the world began, no investment has ever yielded the profit reaped from the Indian plunder, because for nearly fifty years Great Britain. stod without a competitor.
Not only Bengal but also Madras in South India was under the company's rule where "during the last fifty years of the eighteenth century, the Company's servants were in every way baser, as well as more venal than in Bengal. During a stretch of nearly half a century the administra- tion of the Carnatic was mischieveous and corrupt to an even worse degree than that of Bengal in its worst period.'
No need of going into details except to state that such administration affected the economy of Madras very ad- versely.
William Digby, C.I.E., and sometime member of the British Parliament, wrote in 1901 in his voluminous work: "England's industrial supremacy owes its origin to the vast hoards of Bengal and the Karnatick being made available for her use . The connection between the beginning of the drain of Indian wealth to England and the swift uprising of British industries was not casual; it was causal. . Thus England's unbounded prosperity owes its origin to her con- nection with India whilst it has, largely, been maintained- disguisedly from the same source, from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present time.
The East India Company was allowed to ship goods to and from India free of duty by the Mughuls. That was the only privilege given to them and they were not to inter- fere at all with internal trade. But no sooner did the British become the masters of Bengal, than the company and its employees' took advantage of their political power, and indulged in the internal trade free of any custom duty to which the native merchants were liable. This meant that the British merchants could now under-sell the Indian mer- chants in the markets of India. The internal trade was not merely the encroachment on the Indian traders it was sheer robbery. Not only that, they established their monopoly in almost all the products of the country, including such neces- sary commodities like cloth, betelnut, tabacco, and salt. This monopoly meant that the native producers and manu- facturers had to sell their products at the lowest possible price fixed by the company; and the British company could sellto the consumers at the maximum possible price, making huge profits for the company.
Clive and a few other top employees of the company, including a Christian Chaplain, created their own monopoly in which select part- nership' was responsible for many henious crimes.
. In doing this, every sort of oppressive methods were applied. Not only were these methods cruel, their results on the Indians were ghastly. Many business people were completely ruined" all con- sumers had to pay much more for their necessities, millions of people were dying, and the revenue of the puppet Nawab was seriously depleted. William Bolts, a contemporary, 'wrote in 1772: "There is in Bengal no freedom in trade .
All branches of the interior Indian commerce, are, without exception, entirely monopolies of the most cruel and ruinous natures and so totally corrupted, from every species of abuse, as to be in the last stage towards annihilation. Civil justice is eradicated, and millions are thereby left entirely at the mercy of a few men, who divide the spoils of the public among themselves; while, under such despotism, supported by military violence, the whole interior country, is no better than in a state of nature. In this situation, while the poor industrious natives are oppressed beyond conception, popu- lation is decreasing, the manufactories and revenues decaying.'
In a letter dated December 24, 1765, sent to the em- ployees of the company in India, the directors said: "Your deliberations on the inland trade have laid open to us a scene of most cruel oppression; the poor of the country, who used always to deal in salt, betelnut, and tabacco, are now deprived of their daily bread by the trade of the Euro- peans.
In an other letter, the directors lamented the 'corrup- tion and rapacity of our servants, and the universal depra- vity of manners throughout the settlement" and added," we think the vast fortunes acquired in the inland trade have been obtained by a scene of the most tyrannic and oppres- sive conduct that ever was known in any age or country.'
Lord Macaulay wrote "A war of Bengalees against Englishmen was like a war of sheep against wolves, or men against demons. . The business of a servant of the Com- pany was simply to wring out of the natives a hundred or two hundred thousand pounds as speedily as possible.
Burke who gave 'studious attention' to Indian affairs for a number of years' compares these "demons' and 'wolves' with "Orangoutang" or the 'tiger' when he said in 1783 "Animated with the avarice of age and all the impetuosity of youth, they (British) roll in one after another, wave after wave; and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, Were we to be driven out of India this day, nothing would remain to tell that it had' been possessed, during this inglorious period of our domi- nion, by anything better than the Orangoutang or the tiger.
William Bolts wrote: "To effect this (monopolizing of the whole interior trade of Bengal) inconceivable oppres- sions and hardships have been practised towards the poor manufacturers and workmen of the Country, who are, in fact, monopolized by the Company as so many slaves, Various and innumerable are the methods of oppressing the poor weavers, which are duly practised by the Com- pany's agents and gomastas in the country; such as by fines, imprisonments, floggings, forcing bonds from them and by which the number of weavers in the country has been greatly decreased. The natural consequences whereof have been, the scarcity, dearness, and debasement of the manufac- tures as well as a great diminution of the revenues .
Bolts tells us that these severities and 'every kind of oppression' were practised on the natives by the British frequently 'in the most ignominious manner" violating the 'most sacred laws of society" to force the natives to work only for the company. One such oppression was 'cutting off their thumbs to prevent their being forced to wind silk along with kidnappings, flogging, etc.
Not only did these "demons' greatly harm the internal trade, they also damaged a flourishing foreign trade by deterring all foreign merchants from coming to Bengal. As a result 'the whole of that advantageous trade is now turned into other channels, and probably lost to those coun- tries forever'.
Agriculture also was not spared by them. In the words of Bolts "The ryots, who are generally both land- holders and manufacturers, by the oppressions of Gomastahs in harassing them for goods, are frequently rendered incap- able of improving their lands, and even of paying their rents; for which, on the other hand, they are again chastised by the officers of the revenue, and not infrequently have by those harpies been necessitated to sell their children in order to pay their rents, or otherwise obliged to fly the country.
The following are a few comments by the top British officers of India, who themselves were responsible in creat- ing the conditions described by them. In a letter written to the directors of the company, Clive describes the condition and loot of Bengal.
"I shall only say that such a scene of anarchy, confusion, bribery, corruption, and extortion was never seen or heard of, in any country but Bengal; nor such and so many fortunes acquired in so unjust and rapacious a manner.
The British Governor-General of India, Warren Hast- ings, in his letter to the Council Board, dated Lucknow April 2, 1784 wrote "From the confines of Buxar to Benares I was followed and fatigued by the clamours of the discontened inhabitants .I am sorry to add, that from Buxar to the opposite boundary, I have seen nothing but traces of complete devastation in every village.
It is noteworthy that this condition of Benares was created by Hastings and others under him only 3 years after the atrocious dethroning of the ruler of Benares. An- other British Governor-General, Lord Cornwallis, said in 1789 after 32 years of British rule. "I may safely assert that one-third of the Company's territory in Hindostan is now a jungle inhabited only by wild beasts.
The natural consequence of all such ghastly policies was the severe famine of 1770-71 'which wasted Bengal in a manner dreadful beyond all example. Yet the reve- nue of the Company was fully collected through 'violent" means, as the official report mildly puts it.
Before the British rule, Europe had almost nothing to export to the East except bullion, as pointed out by Dr. L. C. A. Knowles "The whole difficulty of trading with the East lay in the fact that Europe had so little to send out that the East wanted-a few luxury articles for the courts, lead, copper, quicksilver and tin, coral, gold and ivory, were the only commodities except silver that India would absorb. Therefore it was mainly silver that was taken out.
But after the establishment of British rule, this was not only stopped but reversed. Now the British used a con- siderable portion of the Indian revenue raised from taxing the people, to buy the goods of India and sell these back to the people of India and other countries, including those in Europe, at a considerable profit. Such purchases in India by the Company acquired the name of "investment' The Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1783 throws some light on these investments "A certain portion of the revenues of Bengal has been for many years set apart in the purchase of goods for exportation to England, and this is called the investment. The greatness of this investment has been the standard by which the merit of the Company's principal servants has been too generally estimated; and this main cause of the impoverishment of India has been gene- rally taken as a measure of its wealth and prosperity. . But the payment of a tribute, and not a beneficial commerce to that country, wore this specious and delusive appearance. "When an account is taken of the intercourse (for it is not commerce) which is carried on between Bengal and England the pernicious effects of the system of Investment from revenue will appear in the strongest point of view. In that view, the whole exported produce of the country (so far as the Company is concerned) is not exchanged in the course of barter, but it is taken away without any return or pay- ment what-so-ever.
Some statistics will clarify the position of the so-called 'investment" According to a report made by the company to the parliament in 1773, during the first six years of the Diwanee (civil administration) of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, the net revenue collections amounted to £13,066,761, the total expenses to £9,027,609, and the balance to £4,037, 152. With this money the goods were bought and export- ed to England. That was aside from the enormous money made by the employees of the company. Most of this ex- penditure also went to England in one shape or another as most of the purchases were made in England. In other words, the actual drain from Bengal to England was 'much greater than the above figures show. The correct drain can be gauged from the import and export figures for 1766, 1767, and 1768, compiled by Governor Verelst. According to him the exports from India amounted to £624,375' only; which means India received in return only about 1/10 of what she sent. (This 'monstrous drain' continued year after year as will be explained later). India in the normal course of trade should have compensated by the import of bullion from Britain; but paradoxically enough, instead of importing, India exported not only other goods, but also bullion in large quantities to England before the company as a necessity, started to reimport bullion to India from England. The following observation of Sir John Shore (afterwards Lord Teynmouth) in his minute of 1787 with reference to Bengal gives some idea of the export of bullion from India. "The exports of specie from the coun- try for the last twenty-five years have been great, and parti- cularly during the last ten of that period. .Silver bullion is also remitted by individuals to Europe. The amount cannot be calculated, but must, since the Company's accession to the Dewany, have been very considerable."""
About the heavy loss to India and the extent of the wealth looted from India which caused the Industrial Revolution in England: 'estimates have been made which vary from £500,000,000 to nearly £1,000,000. Probably between Plassey (1757) and Waterloo (1815) the last- mentioned sum was transferred from Indian hoards to English banks.
As explained before, under the influence of mercantal- ism, the export of bullion by the Company to India from England was greatly resented before 1757. The Company was looking for some way by which they could stop export- ing the bullion to India, and at the same time buy the textiles and other products of that country and sell them. to Europe. This was now achieved as the British "have the government and rifles' or as a famous British statesman, Gladstone, put it, 'the law and argument of force, which is the only law and argument which we possess or apply."
Up to 1812, the economic importance of India to Britain was for the British to gain maximum possible loot of capital from India, as the official report of the Company itself in 1812 made clear "The importance of that immense Empire to this country is rather to be estimated by the great annual addition it makes to the wealth and capital of the Kingdom, than by eminent advantage which the manu- facturers of the country can derive from the consumption of the natives of India.