1. The East India Company
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Hello and welcome to a brand new podcast called Empire with me Anita Arnand and me William Durrumpal. Now in a funny way we are both products of Empire. I mean you could say very simplistically I'm the Indian in Britain. I mean of Indian origin born in Essex but you know nevertheless you know what I mean. And I'm the Brit that's lived most of my adult life in India.

And why are we doing this? Why are we actually doing this? Well, I think it's a very interesting moment to think about empire. It's particularly an interesting moment to think about the British Empire and the British Empire in India because this is something which I certainly feel got sort of tucked in an attic in 1947. The British moved on. They joined the European community. They liked to feel that they'd left their imperial past behind them. They turned into a different sort of nation, but they certainly forgot about

about the most important thing the Brits ever did in world history. And certainly my generation going to school would learn about the Roman Empire. We'd learn about all sorts of empires, but we wouldn't learn about the British Empire. Well, I mean, you know, I've been to school, dare I say it, a bit more recently than you, but not a sniff of it. And it's really strange because, you know, we do the Second World War. We do the commemorations of the First World War. This is something that was...

as recent or more recent, and was an enormous chapter in Britain's history. But is it because empire is a dirty word these days? Is that why? Well, I think empire is a very controversial word. And that's, in a sense, another reason for doing the podcast. Because for some people, particularly, I think, a generation of Indians and other, if you might call them children of empire, whose parents came here in the post-war period,

they're beginning to ask, why are we here? What's happened? And we've had people like Satnam Sanghera writing Empire Land. We've had Indians like Shashi Tharoor writing major bestsellers called Inglourious Empire. And people are looking at this stuff again. This is a period where...

What was, I think, looked at very romantically through rose-tinted spectacles, through Merchant Ivory films and so on, is coming up for critical evaluation. And there's a lot of pushback to that too. I mean, it's fascinating because, you know, for a while, this was a vacuum that was only inhabited by...

films. So, you know, in the 70s, you had the glorification of empire and things like Zulu. You could not imagine Zulu being made today. And in the 80s, as you say, it was all crinoline and prettiness and sundowners and maharajas. Lovely ladies under parasols passing over the lawns of the Bangalore Club or playing croquet on similar lawns with smiling maharajas and elephants swishing their tails and lovely cut 1930s suits. The idea that empire was actually there, like all empires are

obviously are, for the benefit of the coloniser to send money and raw materials back to the home country. It never came into the whole Merchant Ivory image, which was all puffing steam trains under glorious night skies with the Taj Mahal's profile rising out of the steam and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. Well, I mean, so in effect, what we're trying to do in this podcast is we're

sort of setting fire to the celluloid and trying to bring you the facts of what happened through a number of podcasts of different periods. We are going to be talking a lot about, you know, the Raj and India, because that is our expertise, Willie and I, myself. But eventually, we hope to cover all manner of empires. I'm very keen, quite quickly, to bring in stuff about slavery, about Africa, about the scramble for Africa, but also older empires, the Assyrians, the Persians.

the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, all this sort of stuff, because it seems to me that it covers a great swathe of world history. And explains a lot of politics today. I mean, that's the thing that I find really fascinating, that we don't know it more because it does. Look, we're going to start, though, with Britain and India. We're going to start with the formation of the East India Company in the 16th century.

All the way through the Raj, eventually we're going to take you to independence and the partition of India, which happened 75 years ago this month, by the way. August 2022 is the 75th anniversary. And Willie, the East India Company, I know, has been one of the great themes of your career, hasn't it? I've actually been working on the East India Company for 20 years. And I started in 1999, and then this book, The Anarchy, was published in 2019.

And what's been fascinating for me is seeing how this subject, which was right at the edge 20 years ago, has moved into the centre of things now for two reasons. One is colonialism has moved to the centre of things. Suddenly the British have woken up to the fact that they had an empire. The Lord of the World is not happy about this, that it isn't a wonderful Commonwealth of Nations willingly following the lead of our Queen and our people, but people were conquered by...

looted, assets stripped, shipped across nations against their wills, that many terrible things happened. And the weird thing that the British simply don't know about this, it's not in our history curriculums. We're not taught it in school. The second thing that's happened, of course, is that in the same period, the last 20 years, we've suddenly been confronted by these massive corporations who now dominate our lives. Companies like Tesla, Google, Facebook, ExxonMobil, other massive corporations that operate in all the countries of the world. Amazon can...

cut around the tax laws and other laws of individual nation states and play one state off against each other. And suddenly we're in a situation as we were with the East India Company 200 years ago, where a corporation is calling the shots and the nation states are on the back foot. Now, as you said, in the story of the East India Company, ultimately,

the state wins. And in 1858, the East India Company is nationalized and the British state takes over India and you get the Raj. But what is funny is that while the Raj has dominated British perceptions of their empire in India,

It only actually lasts 90 years. It's a flash in the pan. Flash in the pan of Indian history. Also even a flash in the pan in the history of British imperialism. Right. It lasts from 1858 until 1947. And this year we're celebrating the 75th anniversary of Indian independence. So it's almost as long now.

since independence. We are in front of it as we were behind it. Yeah, absolutely right. It's 75 years now. In 15 years, it'll be 90 years and it'll be the same amount of time as Raj. But what is forgotten almost, and this was why for the last 20 years I've been working on this, is that like the bit of the iceberg you can't see beneath the water, there precedes the beginning of the Raj in 1858, no less than 250 years later.

when India is ruled from Britain, but not by the British government. So this, I mean, this whole landscape is so broad, and as you say, 250 years broad. But I would like us, if you don't mind, William, to start in Wales.

Obviously. Obviously in Wales. Where else? If you don't mind. That's not the animal you're talking about. Not the mammal, no. I'm talking about a place in Wales, Powys Castle. So...

This is a fascinating place, Powys Castle. Just tell us why this is a really good place to start the story. So Powys Castle from the outside looks about as English as anywhere could possibly go, though it's actually just over the border from England within Wales. It has Tudor box hedges. It has wonderful sort of Renaissance doorway in marble. It has these lovely Elizabethan windows and it has on the top crenellations.

And it'd be hard to think of anything more British than this sort of fantastic structure. It looks like every boy's idea of a fort. Exactly. It's a perfect sort of castle that children build in sand on the beach.

But within the long gallery at Powys, you enter a completely different world because you walk under a painting into a gallery, a kazana, a treasury of what can only be described as Indian loot. And loot, of course, is an Indian word. Lutna, to plunder, is a word that enters the English language at this period to describe exactly the sort of objects which are filling this castle. And what you have is talwas,

swords shields yeah indian gowns little ivory chessmen miniatures and one or two quite in big objects of imperial plunder of a real you know international importance there's

Sir Rajad Daula's palanquin left on the battlefield of Plassey. Now, Plassey was the battle which is always said to begin the British conquest of India. It's the first moment that the Brits score a major victory over an Indian power and take over a great chunk of territory by force.

At the other end of the gallery, you go through a little archway and you end up in Tipu Sultan's hunting tent. Why is that there? Because another member of the family bought this tent after Tipu Sultan was conquered by the East India Company in 1799. His palace burnt, looted, and the actual loot is here in Powys. In actual fact, if you take the whole thing together, there is more Mughal loot.

more Mughal artworks and objects in a private house in the Welsh countryside than exists in the National Museum in Delhi.

or the National Museum in Pakistan, or the Great Lahore Museum, or the National Museum of Bangladesh, or the museums in Afghanistan and Iran. And what's it doing here in a private house? And although it's looked after by the National Trust, the objects in the museum are still the property of the family in Powys.

What's it doing there? Okay, stop teasing us. You're asking the question. What is it doing there and who is the family? So I said that when you enter this gallery, you walk under a picture and that picture is the crucial key to the whole story.

And it has a very unhelpful caption beneath it. It says, Shah Alam conveying the gift of the Diwali to Lord Clive. Now, in Britain and in England, there are very few people that would understand what that means, the gift of the Diwali. It sounds like a nice Diwali present or Christmas or a birthday. And the picture shows that.

A big court scene with lots of nobles. On the right are the Indians, the Mughals. On the left are the Brits and the gentlemen of the East India Company. In particular, there are two men at the front,

surrounding the Mughal emperor who's dressed in cloth of gold. Cloth of gold and you've got all of his retinue behind him also very finely dressed looking incredibly serious and grave. Although it's notable that the man who is the most richly dressed of them all has his head bowed. Almost it looks like in supplication. The British side, their heads are up. So they're sort of the bewigged gentlemen in their crimson coats and their gold brocade.

And they are very much looking up, straight-backed, ramrodded. And the Indian, who is clearly in this picture, even if you didn't know the caption, is a potentate. His head is bowed. And, well, it might be bad because the potentate, who is Shah Alam, who is the Mughal emperor, whose ancestors ruled over not just all of India, but Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan.

He has just been humbled in battle, defeated by the armies of the East India Company at the Battle of Buxa in 1765. And he has just been forced to hand over, and you can see in the picture, he's handing over a document to a man in a red coat. That coat is Robert Clive's.

Clive of India. Sometimes called Clive of India, who to this day stands outside the Foreign Office and behind Downing Street. By the way, really irritates Indian diplomats. I had no idea, but we know a few. Do you remember? They have told us how disgusted they were to have to walk past Clive of India to get to their office. This picture is the reason that people are disgusted because Clive of India was not even the servant of the British government. And this is the crucial point. He was the servant of a government.

company, a corporation, just like Elon Musk actually works for Tesla himself, his own company, not for Mr. Biden. He's not a servant of the American state. He has his own company. Now, this is exactly the situation of Robert Clive. Robert Clive is not appointed by the government. He's appointed by the East India Company, by the directors. And what he's doing in this picture is he's taking control after the battle.

of the three richest provinces of the Mughal Empire. Now, we should say immediately that A, the picture's not very good. It's by a guy called Benjamin West, who was not a great painter. The dome in the background, which is this sort of looming palace,

actually looks, as one of the critics said when it was hung in the Royal Academy, more like the Dome of St. Paul's than anything you'd like to find in India. And we learn, in fact, that Benjamin West had never been to India. And everything about this picture is actually a deception because not only had Benjamin West never been to India, but this scene never really took place, at least in the way that it's shown here, actually took place. The important document was transferred there.

and signed in the private tent of Clive after the battle. He had basically put a gun against the defeated emperor's head and made him sign. And according to one Mughal historian who was there,

He said the entire ceremony took place quicker than it would normally take to sell a jackass at a market. Hashtag fake news, as well as with that dome hashtag fake views. I mean, this is a scandal upon scandal. So it is. And so it's a completely deceptive. And then and then, you know, to to add insult to injury, the caption, as we said, is conveying the gift of.

of the Diwani to Lord Clive. Now, what's the Diwani, first of all? We have to say, what is the Diwani? So the Diwani is basically the right to run the Diwan, which is the treasury or the administration. And what it means is that this private company, the East India Company, is being given the right to run the finances of three Indian provinces. Now, those provinces, Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa,

We're in the 18th century, quite simply, the richest place on earth. The looms of those three provinces, of which there were about one million, were churning out a great deal of the revenue, which meant that Mughal India was creating very nearly a quarter of the world's GDP, while Britain is just creating 1.8%.

This is because India had the great textile industry of its day. You know, what would move in the 19th century, partly because of the events kicked off at this moment by the gift of the Duwani is its

Britain eventually gets control of India and the Indian industries are eventually shut down and we get the great industries of... All the textile manufacturing moves to Lancashire and the north of England in the 19th century. Manchester gets called Cottonopolis. Cottonopolis. The alternate name for it, yeah. That's right. But this is the moment...

Before that episode, this is the moment when an English company first gets its hands on this incredibly rich territory. And it's done it in two stages. First, and we'll deal with this over the course of the next episode.

hour of this podcast, but the first stage is the Battle of Plassey, the second stage is the Battle of Buxa, and this signing of this document takes place immediately after the second battle, when the East India Company has now basically subdued all opposition in North India. Can we circle back to that? Because I still want to know, and this is a question that Indians ask all the time,

How is it that in numbers we outnumbered, in strength of arms we were more powerful together, and yet...

a group of adventurers managed to subdue and control a country as vast as India. So can we go right, right, right, right back to the first birth whales, the cradle whales of what would become the East India Company and this really fascinating man who I just love, historian William, called, if we are going to be called what we do, Customer Smythe. Can we start with him? Sure.

So the East India Company is a company, a corporation. And like any company, it starts up as a startup, effectively. And the guy who has the idea, the founder of this company, is a man called Customer or Auditor Smythe.

So cool because he was an auditor, in other words, an accountant, who ended up running the customs and ran the customs of London. So he's a kind of Richard Branson of his day or the Vijay Malia of his day. He's an entrepreneur, he's made a lot of money. His dad was a big entrepreneur before him. He's inherited some money, but he's hugely enlarged that.

And so when the news comes in the late 1590s, during, now this is the year that Elizabeth, I suppose, is about 80 years old, an old woman now, everyone's slightly wondering what's going to happen when she dies. This is also the year, incidentally, that Shakespeare's writing both Hamlet and Julius Caesar, which I saw last night in The Globe. And if you had walked from The Globe in 1599 over Southwark Bridge,

into what was then Moorgate Fields, not a grotty tube station in those days, but fields, as the name suggests. And in the middle is a gorgeous black and white Tudor building called the Founders Hall. The customer smith hires that for the day.

And he calls all the rich investors, the people who he thinks can invest in his venture. And he says, the Dutch have just gone to the East Indies. By the East Indies, he means what we now call Indonesia, not India initially. And the early days of the company's aim, not at all at India, interestingly, but at Indonesia and even beyond the Spice Islands on the edge of Papua New Guinea.

And he has the idea that if the Dutch can get there and buy spices, cutting out all the middlemen, cutting out the Arabs, cutting out the Venetians, cutting out the North Europeans, so can the English. And so he appeals to their Tudor patriotism. And he calls in a lot of people that we today would call pirates. Privateers. They're called privateers in those days, right? The privateers are people who have been licensed by the state to loot the treasure ships and

moving gold, silver and other precious objects from South America to put Spain and Portugal. Again, I mean, you're so familiar with this, but to somebody who is not, that is an astonishing thing that the state is giving full power to robbers, ostensibly, to go and rob. Well, it's actually quite a familiar situation because in the immediate run up to this,

England just cut itself off from the continent. And in this case, not the, of course, the European community, which hasn't been founded yet, but the Reformation has cut it off from the whole of Southern Europe. And countries like Spain and Portugal regard England as a dangerous enemy state. And there's an awful lot of rivalry. This is just after the Spanish Armada. This is Philip II is just dead.

And there's an awful lot of dislike of Catholic Spain and the Popish continent, as they say. But even the Protestants are not necessarily very friendly towards the English and the Dutch, who are Protestant...

who have just broken free from Spain, have made this pioneering visit to the Spice Islands and made a fortune. And the reason that the Dutch, again, the reason the Dutch are so very important is because they've discovered that route through the Cape of Good Hope, which makes their traffic and their trade so very lucrative. Well, that route had been open for a while. It had been found, first of all, by Vasco da Gama 50 years earlier, and the whole Portuguese empire had come and gone.

And the Dutch buy better sailing boats, better cannon and deeper pockets, frankly, overcome the Portuguese empire and get to areas at the very edge of the Portuguese influence where the spices grow. And what sets off the whole thing is a visit of Dutch shippers.

to London to try and buy up some London shipping in order that they can make more voyages. And customer smite says, hang on, guys. You're not taking our ships. You're not taking our British ships. Come over here and take our ships. Yeah, come over here and buy our ships. We can do this ourselves. So this meeting is called the same year that Julius Caesar and Hamlet first performed in the Globe. This meeting is called in this black and white Tudor Hall.

And we, bizarrely, we have all the documents. Everything from the East India Company is kept right from this first meeting. Okay, and one of the most tantalizing documents that is in this is the type of people who sort of sign in and sign up for this. I mean, privateers, as you say, but, you know, what we would call M&S shareholders, you know, people from every walk of life. Correct. And so the document, which is in the British Library, which I have a picture of in my book, The Anarchy, shows the first...

People signing up are the grandees, the mayor of London who puts in 300 quid. Somebody else puts in 1,000. But on page 20 of this document, you have the people, as you say, the ordinary. Oh, vintners, people who sell wine. Vintners, leather workers. Saddle makers. Saddle makers. And they're putting in 10 quid, 5 quid. And what has happened is that Elizabethan England has invented this new mechanism for doing business. Stock shares, shareholders. Shareholders. Yeah.

This is an idea which is invented at this period. Before that, you had guilds. Now, guilds were a bit like this in that all the wool makers of Suffolk get together, they pool their resources and they go off and cut a deal with the tapestry makers in Holland, for example, or Belgium.

But to be a member of a guild, you had to be a wool worker and have something to do with the wool industry. And that gave you access to a beautiful hall in a town like Lavenham or Burford or one of these lovely wool churches in England. And what's new about the Joint Stock Company, which is an idea first invented in Elizabethan England in 1580 with the founding of the Muscovy Company,

The Muscovy company was aimed at trade with Moscow and Russia. It sold furs and this sort of stuff and goods from the forests of the of the step frankly When they found that they had this new model and it and they say, you know It's not just merchants that can join anyone that wants to put in some money can invest it and they will get a share of

a percentage depending on how much they put in. So if they're a huge investor, they get a huge share of the profits. If they're a small investor, they'll get a tiny share. But this idea changes everything because suddenly you have the growth of companies. And these companies, if they're popular, can raise vast sums of money. And if they fail, they fail. And so what happens, interestingly, is that the Elizabethan state outsources a lot of its colonial activity

to merchant companies, not to the state itself. Well, I mean, it cuts overheads. It sort of makes sense. If you're an exchequer and you've got other things on your mind, like wars, you know, or threatening borders, this is the last thing that you want to administer. Administration is expensive. So from this time, you get the Muscovy Company, you get the Royal Africa Company, which is a slaving company. You get the Hudson Bay Company, which still exists, which deals with all the furs coming in from the northern United States or northern America, now in Canada.

You get the Rhode Island company, which controls Rhode Island. So you get the Virginia company controlling. So you get all these different areas which are actually run by merchant corporations and investors.

And so the East India Company is part of this, but it's not the first. Can I just ask, I mean, Kustur Smythe, what was he like? I mean, you said he was like Branson. And sometimes these things rise and fall, particularly these days, corporations, on the charisma of the person leading it.

What was he like? Do we know what he was like? Well, we have a picture of him, which shows this sort of, you know, very Elizabethan guy with a tall, like a stovepipe hat, a goatee beard. He's a well-to-do, new rich, one generation old fortune. And he's exactly the sort of man who is rising up at this period, full of entrepreneurial energy. Wow.

quite ruthless. So nouveau riche. I mean, we're talking nouveau riche. Think of all those characters in Shakespeare plays from this period who end up, you know, being cast away on islands in like the Tempest. Oh, interesting. Yeah. He's a London businessman. He's connected with the privateers and he gathers these guys into this meeting and says, invest in my company, we'll get some spices. And they do that. So,

So he says, come and invest in my company. And they do. And they do. And as I said, we have this document which shows the large sum of money which is raised through this public meeting. And we even have a description of the meeting. The young Richard Hacklett, who will go on to write wonderful travellers' accounts and compile the accounts of other travellers, is hired to be the kind of notary keeping the records and writing the history. They're aware that they're doing something very historic.

So they employ a bestselling nonfiction writer to be their own biographer right from the beginning. And there's a great awareness that this is an important moment. But it's not a guarantee that this is going to work. No, I mean, and in fact, you know, there are two very good reasons for wondering whether this is a good way to spend your money.

First of all, the man they hire to sail the first voyage is a man called Sir James Lancaster. And he's just come back from a disastrous voyage in the same area. He's employed because he's the only man that's actually sailed there. But he didn't sail back because he sank his ship and all his crew got eaten by cannibals. Okay, this is not...

What a successful first choice. And yet, you know, he's the only guy that does this. So his first thing, you know, in the weeks after the meeting, they've got their cash, they gather it from their shareholders. We even have notes saying, you know, X and Y hasn't paid up yet. And they start getting kind of legal notices because they promised such and such money and they haven't delivered it.

But they go out and they go to Deptford to look for a ship. And the first ship they find is a creaky old hulk called the Mayflower. The Mayflower. The Mayflower. The Mayflower. The Mayflower. Which they reject because they think it's not seaworthy. And obviously that has its own history going in a different direction. Right. Nobody tells the pilgrims this. Nobody tells the pilgrims. One presumes. But...

Instead, they buy a pirate ship. And I'm not making this up. It's called the Scourge of Malice. It sounds like Johnny Depp's flagship from Pirates of the Caribbean. I mean, it does seem a little obvious for privateers. No.

Pirates to be on this. But they don't keep the name because the name is not a good name for a serious company, is it? Exactly. So being good again at PR, again, looking at posterity, they changed the name immediately from the Scourge of Malice to the Red Dragon as if it's a nice sort of country pub in the Welsh countryside next to Powers Castle. Right. And as you say, you know, there's no guarantee this will work. And initially it doesn't. They set sail and they get becalmed in the channel by a freak, freak heat wave. And there's no, well,

there's no breeze so they just sit in the channel and people have picnics on the top of the white cliffs and are they laughing at them are they literally pointing and laughing they're literally pointing and laughing haha you thought you were going to can't even get past the car park that's very funny but the breeze picks up eventually and off they sail

And to their own surprise, they ran the Cape of Good Hope. They actually apparently perform a Shakespeare play on the ship. That's marvellous. Which is wonderful. What are the Dutch doing? Are they going through their sea lanes? I mean, do they know? Do they allow it? Or is it just they're lucky because Lancaster's just lucky this time? Well, I mean, I don't think they have to ask permission from anyone. And this is armed...

Armed commerce from the very beginning, the charter that they wring out of the Elizabethan court allows them to wage war explicitly. They'll fight their way through if they have to. And they employ people with cannon and they employ archers and they employ all sorts to protect them. So they realise that, you know, as all commerce is at this point, that it's a risk and they've got to take precautions.

And they get eventually to the East Indies, by which we would say Java, Indonesia. And just as they're about to land, they see a Portuguese caravel coming in the opposite direction. And as there are literally a bunch of ex-pirates,

They just land on the Portuguese ship and transfer its contents to their own hold and sail home again. Okay, so not only does this require no effort, but also no money. So they come back with the ka-ching in their pockets, but also laden with goods. Laden with goods. They take an entire cargo of nutmeg and spices and they sell it for one million pounds. Laden.

Let's take a break here and we'll be back after this break with what happens to the pirates when they come back with their million pounds. You're listening to Empire with me, Anita Arnand.

and me William Dalrymple you always leave this very pregnant pause as if you've forgotten what your name is it is William Dalrymple I can who me who me the world's authority on the East India Company yes you and we left this story with John Lancaster who does not have the

Sir James Lancaster. John to his friends. No, he's not. Sir James Lancaster, who has not the most distinguished record at sea, who has lost a flotilla and many of his crew have been eaten on a previous voyage. But this time luck's out

royally or bigly, as some may say in America, because instead of having to spend the hard invested cash of all the shareholders in this nascent East India company has bumped into a Portuguese ship and said, I will have that. Takes everything and goes home. Yep, yep. That is literally it. And that's very much the spirit of the time. After the Brits have fallen out with everybody in Europe again, they had to take what they can get.

And so that begins a very tricky 30 years when they are competing against the Dutch. Now, the Dutch were the first in. The Dutch, a new nation, have fantastic financial instruments. They are brilliant financiers, which the Tudors are not yet. They're beginners at this. And because the Dutch have got deeper pockets and because they've got better ships and better sea captains than Sir James Lancaster,

By 1630, 30 years in, the Brits basically lost the competition. The real success story in the spice trade is now the Dutch. And there's a series of disasters, the Amboina Massacre being won when the whole lot of Brits are captured and tortured by the Dutch. And eventually a treaty is signed. And

As a sop, as a sort of consolation prize to the English, they are given a muddy island in the Hudson River, the other side of the road, called Manhattan. Oh, I've heard of it. So that, of course, turns out to be a rather good investment in the long term. But in the short term, this is rather a humiliation.

And rather like a startup, which has gone awry and, you know, the investors haven't quite got their return, but they're not giving up yet because, you know, they can see there's still potential. The business model is basically rejigged in around 1630, 1640. And what they decide to do is basically forget the spice trade, leave that to the Dutch.

And I think already there are signs that the great days of the spice trade have passed, that the prices of spices are going. So the English are not completely heartbroken to have their canny. No, they're canny. They know that's not a thing to fight over. And what they realize is that the new trade, the really exciting trade, is textiles. So when we're talking about textiles coming from Bengal and you say, you know, the

This was the majority of textiles were coming from Bengal at this time. What kind of textiles are we talking about? So initially, the big Mughal port is Surat, which is in Gujarat, and Gujarat is the centre of the cotton trade.

And cotton to us is very ordinary. I'm wearing a simple cotton white shirt at the moment and it's unremarkable and cheap. But at the time it was considered a luxury product because it's very soft on the skin. You wear it well, darling. Thank you so much. All right. And this was an ancient export of India. It was something at the time of the Romans, Gujarati cotton was...

as valuable as silk. Gosh. And, you know, as with spices, you know, you go to Waitrose or Sainsbury's or Tesco's or Lidl and buy pepper now without thinking about it. And it's not a luxury product because the sheer quantity, the supply has meant that the price has sunk right down. Right. The same is slightly true of cotton. What was a luxury is now something which is unremarkable. What were people wearing before cotton?

Well, the Brits are wearing wool, which obviously is not suitable for the tropics. And so they buy the cotton from Gujarat, and then they begin to get involved in all the incredibly more exotic and exciting textiles being produced in Bengal.

muslin, which is incredibly fine, often see-through, silks, wonderful embroideries, things called kalamkaris, which are painted and you hang them on your Tudor four-poster bed. And this is a very, very good moment to be in the textile trade. And it's also, I don't think this was particularly planned because, you know, there's no question that the East India Company just lost battles against the Dutch. But by moving from the spice trade to the textile trade,

I'm moving from a focus on Indonesia to India.

Both these decisions are very canny in the long run. It means you have the whole field to yourself. You have the whole field to yourself. Well, not quite the whole field because there are still a few Portuguese enclaves like Goa and the East India Company has a few dust-offs with the Portuguese. But nonetheless, they're in early. And the important point is that the moguls who now run India, they've come down from what was Uzbekistan, they've taken over the north and the middle of India and

And by 1640, Shah Jahan, who builds the Taj Mahal, is on the throne. And the Mughal Empire is incredibly rich and incredibly willing to do trade. But as these guys are Central Asian nomads, they're not interested particularly in the sea. And there's no...

I mean, there's a small, there's a few ships, but there's no navy as such that the Mughals control. Can I just draw your attention, everyone's attention to, you know, you just said, you know, actually the Mughals were so rich that

that it does not matter. The British are kind of a blip. There is, I mean, a later picture which is really informative. This is Jahangir as the millennial sultan preferring the company of Sufis. It's by Bichir, the painter. Bichir. Bichir. And it is

It's a remarkable thing. So you've got Jahangir with a great golden disc behind him looking resplendent and important. And he's handing over, one would presume, a religious text to a Sufi scholar, I guess.

But in the left-hand corner is a teeny tiny James I. James I is looking remarkably pissed off at the fact that Jahangir prefers the Sufi to him. And he's got this sort of sour expression on his face. And he's really not very amused. But also not important. I mean, this is the scale of what India regarded Britain as at the time. And the person below him is the painter Bichita. Yeah.

his own self portrait and, and an artist in the mogul court, while the moguls were obsessed with art, the status of artists was very low. So it's like, like putting a picture of, I don't know, um, president Macron next to a dustbin man. Right. Uh, I mean, he's, uh, this is not a, you know, he's not, he's been given the least honorable. I mean, is it, is it designed to be a pictorial insult or is it, is it, is it just, this is just how they saw it. Uh,

And what has happened is that there's a picture of James I sitting there because it's been given by one of the ambassadors and it's an exciting object and the mogul artist has copied it and shoved it above his own picture in the corner. I assume it's a remarkable picture. That's also in your book. But that again is very telling because the Brits are from this... I mean, the Emperor Akbar talks about...

the northerners as being like animals. I mean, these people are regarded as semi-savage. The Brits. The Brits and all the other North Europeans. Okay, so right. Okay, so we've got the British apart from the old skirmish around with the Portuguese. The English. Because we're pre-union. The English, but just the Portuguese sort of snipping away at their heels. But otherwise, they've pretty much got a clear run. So from the 1630s on, the Brits

have a very good chance of taking the Indian textile market and exporting it around the globe. And they do this very successfully. So that by the early 18th century, you have de-industrialization as far as Mexico.

because there's so much cheap Indian cotton of a high quality and very low cost being exported by the Brits to the new world. Are they exporting stuff that's already being made or are they causing more stuff to be made? They are buying piece cotton, as it's called, which is otherwise bolts, rolls of raw material. They're not, in most cases, commissioning sort of nice clothes. No, it's the raw material.

And they're shipping it not just to Britain, but all over the world. And, you know, when you go to, for example, lovely Renaissance palaces in Italy on your summer holidays, you often see on the walls, mogul kalam curries, which are presumably got there by the East India Company. Beautiful decorative items.

Okay, so this is lovely. I mean, you know, England gets its cotton and the weavers get their money and they all lived happily ever after. Well, for a long time they do. And both the moguls and the East India Company prosper spectacularly at this period. And everything goes quite well until Aurangzeb, who is this mogul emperor who messes everything up. He takes too much of the Deccan. He overexpands too fast to the south.

And also he irritates all the Hindus by reimposing the jizya. Attacks for non-believers. If you worship your own god and it's not an Islamic god, you pay a tax. And basically since the time of Akbar, the Mughal Empire had been a very successful collaborative deal between the Rajput armies, who are Hindu, who are defeated in battle, but then rather than being punished or being looted, they are brought into the Mughal fold and become the spearhead of Mughal armies.

So for quite a lot of the next century, you find Hindu-Mughal armies attacking minor Muslim sultans halfway down India in the Deccan. So Ahmednagar, Bijapur, Golconda, all these little sultanates are attacked by Hindu armies working for the Mughals. So it's the opposite in the sense of what you'd expect.

Which is why today, for example, when one goes to Rajasthan, if you go to the town of Bikaner, there's a wonderful library where you find the best Deccanese manuscripts, which have been looted at this period from the middle of India. I come back to it. Aurangzeb is messing things up. Aurangzeb is messing things up. And when he dies in 1707, the empire begins to fall. And this, again, was something we talked about in an earlier podcast. The Jats, the Sikhs and the Marathas are rising up.

Any of them could have taken the moguls out. But in the end, it's this odd character from out of town, Nadeshar of Persia, comes in, comes to Delhi, loots everything, takes the Kona and among 8,000 wagons of other stuff.

Once he's taken all the finance from the imperial treasury, the Mughal Empire disintegrates, where previously you'd had a single unitary state beautifully administered by local governors in every corner of the empire over what's now four different countries.

Suddenly, every town is semi-independent. Jodhpur, Jaipur, Udaipur, Tanjore, Hyderabad. You can't pay the soldiers. You can't pay the administrations. No one's going to work for you. The whole thing falls apart. And in that churning, if you like, in that extraordinary transformation of India from a massive empire to tiny self-governing states justling up against each other, two European corporations make merry.

One is the East India Company, based in Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. But there's a rival French company called the Compagnie des Indes, which is based in Pondicherry and Chandanagar. And they have shadow factories opposite the English ones in almost every place. What's the relationship? I mean, competition is one thing, but did it get violent between the two? So it's very hostile. In the whole of the 18th century, there's a...

global conflict between France and England which manifests itself in first of all the Austrian succession then eventually the Seven Years' War and and these are global conflicts the British fight the French in in Lake Huron and in the northern United States in Canada remember that last of the Mohican stuff with Daniel Day Lewis leaping over waterfalls and all that sort of stuff in the Caribbean and

as far away as the Philippines, but also, you know, the Jacobite rebellion, arming the Irish, all this sort of stuff is going on.

In the middle of all this, the English and the French are fighting it out. And Robert Clive, as a young man, does a whole series of skirmishes called the Carnatic Wars. Wait, wait, wait. Before you go into the Carnatic Wars, let us first of all just explain who Robert Clive actually was. Because, you know, in my mind and in my schooling, we only heard Clive of India as if he was some noble who had sort of beamed down into the history book. But he was quite different, wasn't he? Sure.

So Robert Clive is exactly the sort of guy who joins East Indy Company at this period. He is from a sort of posh-ish background. He's the local squire's son. Social aspirations, but not much money.

And a lot of these people are being signed up by the East India Company because it's not a bad way of making a living at this period. And if you are the sort of minor gentry that has high social aspirations but simply doesn't have the money to support it anymore, to put one of your kids out to the East India Company is a good option. It's like one son sometimes goes into the priesthood if you don't know what to do with it. But this is more like, I suppose, putting one son into Goldman Sachs. Okay, but he is by nature a

A delinquent. He is indeed a delinquent. And there is a whole lot of letters from his uncle which survive, which have him being the village bully. He has protection rackets against village shopkeepers in Shropshire. He breaks the windows of shopkeepers who don't pay up.

He even floods somebody's shop just out of spite. So he's this sort of unruly adolescent who is sent off by his uncle eventually to India, where he's signed up as an accountant. And of course, being an unruly delinquent, he hates it. And twice he tries to shoot himself and twice for various reasons he fails. But he regards this as sort of almost as a sort of divine mandate that he's clearly been spared for great things. And so when war breaks out between France and England,

He signs up to become a soldier. And this turns out, unlike a candidacy, to be something that he's very good at. Right up his street. Right up his street. And he's not a professional soldier. He's not in the British Army, but he takes to it like a duck to water. And he's trained up by various veterans of Culloden who have now come out to South India.

And together, Clive and some of his mates basically outwit the French company. French company is hobbled because it's very much state run. Guys that can't quite make it at court in Versailles, slight losers sent out.

And unlike the British company, which is a sort of libertarian, thrusting, hungry, ruthless, ambitious young men, you get a lot of sort of dim aristocrats in the French company. So nobody knows what to do with. And they also haven't got much freedom of movement. Everything has to go through Versailles. They don't get an answer from the king because he's busy with his mistresses and all that sort of stuff.

So the arrival of Clive coincides with the moment that the English East India Company clearly gets an upper hand over the French.

And Clive makes his first fortune at this point, comes back to England and goes into Parliament. And almost immediately, there's a scandal over the fact that he's bribed everyone. And quite soon, having given some money to his dad and bought some land, he finds his coffers, which he thought would be enough to retire on, in fact, are exhausted within three or four years.

So he signs up at exactly the moment when England and France are heading to war again. And this is going to be the conflict that will finally break out in 1756 to 1757 that the Americans call the French and Indian Wars, which we in Britain call the Seven Years' War. Right. Again, the global conflict between Britain and France in all their different colonies and territories.

And rather like the Iraq war a few years ago, everything is set off by a false piece of intelligence. A document is delivered to the East India Company saying that we've just seen that the French are loading up an enormous flotilla in their main base, Port Lorient, and it's clearly going off to Bengal.

and just set sail. And there's descriptions of the number of cannon, the number of warships that have gone. The document is not completely wrong in that there was a big plenary, but they've got the destination wrong. In fact, it's heading to Canada. And so when the Brits send off a rival fleet, they got the company goes to the British Navy and says, you know, you've got to protect our interests. We're about to be wiped off the face of Bengal. Uh,

The Royal Navy produces some ships. Clive is recruited on the company side. And so you have a joint sort of Royal Navy and Marine and East India Company expedition. But they arrive in Madras to find there's no French. There's no opposition at all because they've all gone off to Canada. And they've sailed halfway around the world. They've taken six months and there's no one there.

What the hell did they do? Clive, you know, who could have... Might as well fire. Clive, who very nearly, sort of, you know, career almost ended at this point, having pressed for this expedition, is saved by a complete fluke. Just at the same time as he's arriving to the north in Calcutta, a new governor of Bengal is called Siraj Adala. And he is another sort of angry punk.

He's young. He's already fallen out with everybody. He's the beloved nephew of a man called Ali Verdi Khan, who'd governed Bengal for years very well.

But he has none of Ali Verdi Khan's tact, diplomacy or sense of state. He's famous for sinking pleasure boats just to have the fun of watching people drown. He's a serial seducer of women who takes women and walls them up. He sounds like a total scumbag. He's a total scumbag. And he...

attacks Calcutta on the very justified grounds that the Brits have been rebuilding the fortifications of Calcutta without his permission. He's the governor. They have to ask if they're going to fortify that. Planning permission, if you will. Exactly. It's a planning permission dispute. And

He thinks that they must be arming it against him because a lot of bankers have recently arrived to Calcutta and the Brits are resisting them paying any taxes to Siraj Dala. In fact, of course, they are arming against the French because they've been given this intelligence and the documents survive in the Indian National Archives. There's an entire flotilla on their way. There's a flotilla on their way. So when news arrives that Siraj Dala has attacked Calcutta,

and put many people into a guardhouse where they died of heat and hysteria in something called the Black Hole of Calcutta in 1756. When news comes that the city has fallen and there's been this apparent abuse of the survivors,

Clive suddenly has a job. He's sent north and he retakes Calcutta. Can we just on the black hole of Calcutta? Because I mean, that is something that did come up when I was at school. And it was hundreds of people were forced into this inhumane, oxygenless hole in the ground and left to die. Men, women and children. It's a very pitiful story. Is that what happened? Is that the truth of it? Well, it's a hugely disputed bit of history.

That many people died is clear, but the numbers seem to have been hugely exaggerated. What happened was that when the Brits lost Calcutta, a lot of them got very drunk and ran amok, and the various people shot guards. Again, Sir Ajah Dala's troops quite reasonably said, we can't have this lot just running loose and taking potshots at us. So they locked them in a guardroom, but they lock...

Probably about 60 people in this guardroom. It's a small space, isn't it? And about 30 people come out alive. So my understanding, having looked at the documents and studied this, is that something happened. There was definitely some extremely unfortunate and avoidable deaths, but it wasn't a sort of dastardly plot to kill them all. The Brits misbehaved, and this was an attempt to keep unruly prisoners under lock and key until somewhere better was found for them.

I mean, Sir Roger Darlick is not somebody we want to stand up for either. I mean, he's quite capable of doing atrocities, but the Black Hole of Calcutta is not one such. Okay, all right. By the time it's arrived in Madras, this story is already... It's given a mandate, isn't it? It gives a mandate and a reason and an honourability to what follows. So the idea is that Clive is going to liberate this captured society

city he's going to vindicate british honor and he's going to teach these savages who've killed our poor women and children a lesson and he's got a big royal navy with some marines he's taken on the east india company's own um nascent mercenary army who are the sepoys who he's trained up a bit and there's not many of them instead of the sepoys at this point there's only a few thousand um and they're really just jumped up security guards given a few muskets

And he arrives in Bengal and he recaptures Calcutta without really much opposition. It's not a very difficult task given the armaments that he has. And he then gets the news that the French have declared war on England and the Seven Year War has begun. So he then takes a second town, which is Chandanagar, the French settlement. That is much more of a conflict. There's an enormous sea battle, in fact, or using naval ships on the Hooghly River.

And a lot of people are killed on both sides. And at this point, having taken not just Calcutta, but the French headquarters at Chandanagar, Clive writes to his dad that he's heading home and that his name is made and he should be now again set up for life. So just as Clive is heading back to Madras and planning to cash in his chips and another nice little victory, a letter arrives that changes everything.

And the letter is from a man called the Juggett set, the banker to the world. And the Juggett sets are like the Rothschilds of 19th century Europe. They are these incredibly rich, very political bankers. They've invented a very clever system of transferring funds around India at a time of disruption.

In the old days, the tax in Bengal, which kept the whole thing going because this was the rich area of India, would be put onto a wagon. A troop of soldiers would go with it and it would literally march overland up the Ganges to Delhi. Now, with war bands roaming around, that's no longer a possibility. And the Jagat Seths come up with this credit idea that basically you pay the tax into our office in Calcutta.

And we will give you a chit and you can withdraw it in our office in Delhi. It's like, it's such a, it feels like such a modern concept, you know, sort of going into a federal express and saying, right, send it, send it over, money order. But they, it's exactly that. But they, they, they take 10 to 15% of the, of the tax load. And given that this is, you know, the main source of money for the Mughal Empire, they make a fortune very, very quickly, become the richest people in Asia.

And according to one mogul source, money flows into the coffers of the jagat sets like the Ganges flows into the sea. And so these guys reach out to Clive and say, we've seen that you've just defeated Siraj Adala and taken back Calcutta. We've got a proposal for you. We think Siraj Adala is a psycho. He has threatened us. He's forced us to give him loans. He's threatened to circumcise us and make us Muslims. And we're not standing for this. What we propose is that you attack Siraj

Seraj Dala at his capital in Moshi Dabat. We will pay off his generals so they don't fight.

And for that service, sir, we will pay you personally one million pounds and we will pay the company another million pounds. What does that mean in those days? What is one? I mean, it sounds like one million pounds. What does it actually mean in those days? It means that Clive becomes the richest self-made man in Europe overnight. It's a colossal offer. And he has no authority to do this. He's been sent to fight the French, which he's done.

But he takes this and no one is going to say no to this kind of money. It's outrageous sums of money. No one's ever been offered this. And the fact that the company's been offered a million too means that Clive thinks that he can get away with it. So he goes north and for a week there's a terrible silence and he wonders whether he's falling into a trap because there's no letters reaching him. But eventually he brazenly zits out and they meet at the battlefield of Palashie.

known in English textbooks as Palashie. Palashie is actually a type of tree. A Palash tree is this gorgeous orange tree that produces these wonderful bright blossoms in April. But anyway, there's mangrove groves there. Clive camps at night. In the morning, he finds the Mughal army has encircled him.

And there's a terrible moment when it looks like he's bitten off more. It's a trap. He's bitten off more than he can chew. And then the fire from this army, supported by, incidentally, a French contingent that are very keen to wipe out the English, starts. And Clive's army has to hide. They hide on the banks of the river. They hide in the mango groves. And it looks like they're going to have to leg it back to Calcutta at night as the only possible option.

But at the vital moment, a monsoon storm breaks and there's a terrific downpour. And while the British remember to cover their gunpowder with tarpaulins, the Mughals don't. You are joking. Literally, this crucial moment, this one accident, that basic thing. Could have turned history. Totally, it does turn history. Extraordinary.

So when the Mogul cavalry think that the same must have happened to the English and the English cannon are out of commission, immediately the monsoon storm ends. The Mogul cavalry charge forward and they're met by a coruscating, enormous volley from the English cannon killing all the leaders of the cavalry. And that's it. And that's the end of Plassey. That is the Battle of Plassey. At that point, Mir Jaffa, who is the general in the Pay of the Jugger sets as well,

takes his half of the army and marches off the battlefield. Sirajah Dala realises that he's been betrayed, flees off. He is eventually captured, hacked to bits, and his mutilated body is paraded on the back of a donkey through Mashidabad. The next day, Clive walks into Mashidabad with the jug, it says, and literally helps himself to everything in the treasury. He stuffs his pockets.

And years later, when he's called before Parliament, rather like sort of Boris Johnson, he brazenly out and says,

My lords, there was a prostrate city at my feet. The bankers waited on my pleasure. My lords, I was astonished at my own moderation. Oh, for heaven's sake. And everyone laughs and he's off the hook. Oh, Clive. But that explains where we started. Paris Castle, stuffed. Not quite. Not quite. No, no, nearly. So what happens then is that Clive gets his million. And eight years later, all the people that he has put into power as puppets

again rise up against English because the English have behaved so incredibly badly and basically killed the goose that was laying the golden egg. In just eight years, they lay waste to Bengal by asset stripping it. And there is another big act of resistance and not just the Nawab of Bengal this time, who's now called Mirkasim, a man actually put in by Clive,

But also the Nawab of Awadh, which is basically Uttar Pradesh, who's called Shuja Udawla, and the Mughal emperor himself, Shah Alam, all meet at the Battle of Buxa.

and they take on the East India Company. But again, the company has used the money that it's gathered to enormously increase the size of its sepoy army, and it's bought an enormous number of sepoys. And there are now 40,000 trained up sepoys, trained in the latest European techniques of warfare. Horse artillery, 18th century ballistics, muskets, bayonets. And it's a hard-fought battle, but the East India Company's army defeats all three of these armies massed together.

And this is the moment when Clive returns to India and makes Shah Alam sign the Duwani. And suddenly you find that the richest provinces of India, three rich provinces, Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, are signed over, not to the British government, not to the British army, but to a private corporation.

The East India Company. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you tell a story. And it's not even the end, is it? It's just the end of the beginning. This is now the moment that the company moves from being a trading organisation to suddenly it's an imperial territorial power. And if you want to know more about that, do listen to the next podcast. That's all from me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Durhampool. Thank you.