British In India

21 Pages 5127 Words

es, and the English traders who set foot on the subcontinent a little later actually sought to avoid conquest. Directors back in London kept telling them that conquest would only cut into profits. "All war is so contrary to our interest," they reminded field employees in 1681, "that we cannot too often inculcate to you our strictest aversion thereunto."

But India was still part of the fading Mogul empire, which a century earlier had brought Muslim administrators and conquerors. Just to protect its ability to do business in a land already riddled with fierce animosities, the company found itself forced to defend trading posts with hired soldiers. Before long, the posts became cities (Calcutta, Bombay, Madras) and their soldier garrisons, small private armies. As assets and responsibilities mounted, the merchants, who had come out as supplicants bearing gifts to local princes for an inside track on trade, gradually became soldiers, and then became local rulers themselves.

By the time the company was disbanded in 1858, hardly more than a thousand British officers controlled India, an area the size of Europe in which 200 million people--about a quarter of them Muslim, but a majority Hindu--spoke more than 200 different languages. By then, the company had carried home such Indian terms as "bungalow," "verandah," "punch," "dungarees" and "pyjamas." They had also imported back to Britain many pukka (first class) habits such as smoking cigars, playing polo and taking showers. Most of all, they had laid the foundations for, and forced the British government to get involved in, what was about to become the most ambitious, and the most anguished, empire in modern history.

The East India Company was originally conceived in September 1599, when a group of London merchants resolved to raise 30,000 for sending ships to the East to collect silks, spices and jewels "upon a purely merchantile bottom." On the last day of the 16th century, Queen E...