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Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnon and me William Dalrymple. You're leaping faster now. It's almost as if you now know your name. It's great. I'm learning a lot on this series. Now listen, listen here. So we've been talking about the East India Company. If you are listening to this in sequence and there's no reason why you have to, but if you are, we were last talking about the inexorable rise of one
Robert Clive. Clive of India to some, Clive the villain, boo his to others. So when we last left Clive, he is there receiving the Diwani for India. So this is the right to govern. And so things look pretty rosy. So Clive has the gift throughout his life of astonishing timing. He's always in the right place at the right time. And he has
an amazing ability to outflank his opponents of every sort initially it's the various Indian sorry initially it's the French he comes into contact with and he defeats Dupley who's his great rival the French head of the that's in his youth
Then he outflanks Siraj Udala, appearing out of the blue and retaking Calcutta with armaments that Siraj Udala didn't realise that the East India Company had. And in fact, they didn't normally have because this flotilla has arrived by chance. Yes, the lost navy. The lost navy, which just turned up. And he has developed this way of basically terrifying his opponents. He attacks in a very different way to the way most people in 18th century warfare operate.
80th century warfare, particularly in India, is often a sort of chess game with manoeuvres and both sides trying to bribe each other's generals and money passing backwards and forwards. It's also very much regarded as a sort of game of gentlemen and there are rules of war. Clive's got no time for this. Clive attacks at night from the back in the early morning through fog during thunderstorms and he...
doing sort of daring operations that, you know, in a sense, pre-have what the sort of SAS and modern sort of Spetsnaz do. He comes behind enemy lines. And he's punchy. He's the same punchy guy that he was in his youth, breaking windows and saying, pay me protection and that won't be broken anymore. I mean, there's one extraordinary moment where just after the Siraj Dalla has lost Calcutta to Clive and Siraj's army's gathered there and it's about, you know, again, a
40 times the size of Clive's little force. So what does Clive do? He waits for an early foggy morning and he gets all his troops into canoes and he rows them up the Hooghly and they arrive in the dark about 4 a.m. when the mist is at its thickest.
And with relatively small numbers, with a couple of thousand troops, he walks into the Mogul camp where there are, I can't remember the exact figure, but let's say 40, 50,000, maybe 100,000 troops. And he just starts shooting wildly in all directions. And of course, you know, scares them completely and very nearly kills Siraj Dala. A natural factor shot goes through Siraj Dala's tent by chance. And it's those sort of tactics that he's very good at. But he's also very good at,
operating like that against his enemies in Britain. And once he goes back, he's always coming back and forth. He's an India's young man fighting the kinetic wars. He goes back for the first time as an MP, doesn't have quite enough money and so comes out for the second time and magically pulls off Plassey and this huge sum of money from the Jughead sets, which he banks.
He then goes back and at that point he starts using his guerrilla tactics not against Indian rulers but against his fellow directors of the East India Company. And he builds up his own faction in the East India Company. And he's just very – he always wins. He's like sort of Lord Voldemort or something. He's this figure who has this extraordinary ability to outflank, terrify and surprise his rivals. So, I mean, I think –
We haven't really done justice to the fact that the East India Company, which has so much power and so much wealth, largely due to Clive at this time, is really a tiny operation. I mean, what are we talking about here? This is the extraordinary thing. And this is the thing that most surprised me when I was researching it.
For the first hundred years, there are only 35 employees in the head office. It's tiny. It's smaller than, you know, an estate agent today. And in India, at the time of the Battle of Plassey, when the company is, you know, seizing the most valuable real estate in the world, there are only 250 white men in India.
That's for the civil servants. I mean, there are others who are coming in and out on a military basis. But in terms of administrators, civil servants, form fillers, just 250. Okay, so this now from the Indian side begs the question,
What the hell were they doing? I mean, why is it just a small number of foreigners are able to come into a country where they are vastly outnumbered, where there is enormous wealth and means? You know, we're not talking about military dullards here. Why is it so easy for them to come in and take what they take? So...
That question is very easy to answer, oddly enough, because in a sense, the British had already tried their hand in the 1680s. There's this character called Joshua Child who tries on knocking the moguls around at the height of mogul power during the early reign of Aurangzeb. And what happens at that point before the Brits have got the military edge, before the military revolution, when the Brits are still fighting with sort of Cromwellian pikes and very, very basic muskets.
is that the company is knocked out in 30 seconds flat. Bombay is surrounded. All the factors are put in chains. And across the country, the East India Company factors, as they're called, are thrown into prison. And they have to beg on bended knee and promise to behave themselves. And the ranks let them out.
But what's the difference between the 1680s and the 1750s is two things. On the Mughal side, the empire shattered. It's all split up into individual towns almost, or at best, you know, small regional entities who are discoordinated. They're not acting under a single high command.
But also a military revolution has taken place and there are new techniques of warfare that the Europeans, both English and the French, are deploying that the Indians don't yet have. So, I mean, you said this as well in the last episode that just the sheer firepower is much better. It's better... Why are the Europeans so good at guns? So it's...
There's two things. I mean, first of all, there's just been a military revolution. So there's a whole lot of new technology that the Indians don't have. But also what the Europeans realize is it's not rocket science to deploy this. And you don't need to be some sort of highly educated boffin from enlightenment to operate a bayonet. And very quickly they train up the local Indians and they get the best local soldiers in the military marketplace by paying top dollar.
So if you're a sepoy for the East India Company, you get paid about triple what Tipu will pay you for the same job in another rival army further down the peninsula. So...
In a time when there is anarchy, when the Mughal state has collapsed, when other regional powers are all vying for control, the country is still very rich. It's a time of great prosperity in terms of production of cloth and the raw materials India is producing and the amazing industry of its weavers is still going strong. But there are all these predatory armies backwards and forwards fighting with each other.
And really quite small armies going at each other. And what the company realizes is that it can buy an army for itself and that it can, to do that, it can borrow money from the local bankers. Now, the big question is why would the local bankers
lend money to foreigners. They've got a different religion. They look different. They speak a different language. They're clearly predatory. Why would you do that? The answer is, I think, very simply that the bankers and the company are both city boys. They both understand interest rates, paying on time contracts. Although on one hand, you have these sort of, you know, John Bull Englishmen eating beef. And on the other hand, you have Mawari Janes picking at tallies.
They understand commercial contracts. Their appetites are the same. Their appetites are the same and they both want to make money and they both realize that they very literally can do business. So what the company does, and this is the extraordinary trick, is with very few Brits around...
They borrow money from Indian bankers and buy Indian mercenaries. And the battles are fought not with white troops against brown troops. It's two armies of brown troops. Which is very different to the Bollywood depictions of these battles. But also what's interesting, when they are basically hiring guns, guns for hire. So if you're transplanting an army of sepoys to fight the Sikhs, you're immediately...
creating enmity between two parts of the country. The North will think, who are these people with brown skin who are coming? And there's a hatred that develops. It's the start of fissures which then can be exploited later on. Well, I think, I mean, I'm the first person to criticise the country, but I don't think, in a sense, those fissures need much creation. I think, you know, the Marathas, for example, have been raiding Bengal and raping Bengali women. And to this day, Bengalis put their children to sleep warning about the...
the Bungis will do, what the Marathas armies can do to you. And the periods of Indian history when India has been politically united are very brief compared to the very strong moments of regional unity when, say, the Marathas form a single unit or the
The Tamils formed the Chola Empire or the Kashmiris under Lalita Ditya. When these people have their regional power bases, we now look back from a time when, you know, 75 years of very clear unity in India. And we think of it as both a geographical, cultural and a political unity.
But for a lot of Indian history, India has been united culturally in that there is a common, particularly a common Hindu culture which runs across the region. Geographically, by virtue of the shape of the peninsula girded by the Himalayas.
But politically, there's only brief moments like under the Mauryas of Ashoka at 250 BC, again under the Guptas in the early centuries AD, again under the Mughals. But most of the time, it's not like that. Okay. Well, they're united in unhappiness under the East India Company because the East India Company at its height...
now starts milking the place dry, doesn't it? And actually, in a way, the rapacious attitude of the East India Company, while it's at its height, at the height of its powers, is what leads to its own downfall in many ways. Talk about that. So...
What you have is a lot of kids coming out. You can't join the East India Company after the age of 16. So these are kind of adolescents who wouldn't, you know, in most parts of America wouldn't be allowed to drink at a bar. And yet they are often given entire districts to milk.
And a lot of them die. There's huge death rates for these writers, as they're called, coming out. The lowest grade of an East India Company officialdom is called a writer, which basically means someone's scribbling in a ledger. Yeah. In Calcutta, they're still the writers' building, isn't it? They're still the writers' building. The writers' building, yeah. The writers come out at age 16, and a lot of them are dead within a couple of years. Two monsoons is said to be the average lifespan of a European. But once they've got that sort of immunity...
against Indian diseases and against the things in the Indian water. If they survive that time, they realize that if they play their cards right and bribe the right people and get into the right positions, they can make a massive fortune by the age of about 30, get home, buy a rotten borough, buy a nice big house in the country or build a Palladian mansion and have the life that they dream of. So these people are very much...
trying to make a fortune and enough money to buy a country mansion or a political seat and get out before they cop it, before they're either killed in warfare in terms of if they're soldiers or killed by cholera or whatever else, dysentery, if they're a civilian. And a lot of them don't make it. Like three quarters of them don't come home. And you've got to put that... So it's a huge gamble. It's like a massive lottery.
And, you know, if you're very lucky, you could be one of the few big winners like Clive who come home and buys not one, but, you know, 10 enormous houses and some more in Ireland, too.
But most of them end up in Park Street Cemetery and their bodies rot like the carcasses of sheep, according to one early sea captain who comes in and just sees the number of new graves in the graveyards of Calcutta. But for those who stay the course, there is money to be made. And the models are really, I mean, it's miserable for the Indians, but it's a neat one because it costs the British next to nothing. At this point, just after Plassey and Buxa...
This is the time of maximum rapaciousness. Now, this is a wonderful time if you're a young 20-year-old out to make a fortune and you're a Brit based in Calcutta. It's the worst possible time to be a Bengali weaver. At this time, for example, we have stories of the Brits corralling weavers into effectively sort of weaving concentration camps, but they're not even allowed home, and telling them that they have to produce so much per day or per week.
And this leads to the story of some cutting their thumbs off. So a lot has been made of it. We should explain this a bit more. It's an important story. It's a really important story because in India, this has an enormous currency. We had an industry. We had the best weavers in the world. They did the finest cloth in the world. All that is true.
and then they came and as an act of vengeance if we didn't do what they said they chopped off our thumbs so that kills an industry and killed an art form so that second bit is like confusion so this is based on on one story not from a particularly liable source because he was an enemy of clive who was writing a book to bring clive down but it sounds kind of right he says that in some cases these weavers were being so badly oppressed and made to produce huge amounts of of cloth
that they cut their own thumbs off so they couldn't weave and the company had no option but to release them. Now, later on, at a completely different period of history in the mid-19th century after the Industrial Revolution, when the entire economy of empire has changed and you now have centers of industrialized textile production in the north of England trying to export textiles to India, in other words, the reverse of the original trade.
At that point, this story gets confused and the story is that the way that the reason that the Indian textile industry declined was that the wicked Brits cut their... They cut their thumbs off, they couldn't do it anymore. That's interesting. I mean, neither story... I mean, the second story about the Brits cutting the weavers' thumbs off is definitely wrong. That some weavers...
could have cut their own thumbs off. We just told you the dire state of their lives at that time, if they would do that to get out of it. But what is unequivocally the case is that the East India Company moves in after the Battle of Buxa and has the field to itself.
And it does what a modern asset stripping bank would do, taking over a subject company. They see the things they want, the stuff they don't like, they get rid of. The stuff they do want, they put in a ship and send it back to England. That's mainly money.
I mean, I've heard you use this analogy before. We've got to ask about it because you have said it. It is the East India Company doing this. It's like Jeff Bezos invading a country in many respects. In the sense that you have a massive corporation whose drive is to make maximum profits.
that has no other purpose. And the one quite refreshing thing about the East India Company is that you don't get any of the hypocrisy of the later Raj, which sort of pretends to be there to civilize the natives and build railways and so on, but is actually there, of course, because empire enriches the mother country. The company has none of this. The company just, you know, is clearly a company. It's there to make money. It doesn't pretend to be about anything other than being a money-making machine. And so while it's far more rapacious, I think, and far more,
brutally open about its aspirations to asset strip India. It's a bit more honest. It's frank about it. And weirdly though also it finds willing collaborators. So Calcutta initially is a tax-free port.
And so the Mawaris moved there, not because they particularly liked the company, the British, but because they didn't have to pay taxes and that they could make enormous amounts of money lending cash to the East India Company at high interest that they know will be repaid. So many great fortunes are made by some bankers, while if you're a Bengali weaver out in a village with your loom, things are getting very, very tough.
So then, I mean, life is hard enough for a Bengali weaver. But then you get a slight change in direction from the British in that they want a new crop to be grown. And it's not food, is it? It's opium. Exactly. They realise that... So the first thing that happens after Buxa, really, is that they realise that they no longer need to send money out from England. Since 1600, the Brits have been arriving in ships full of gold from home.
And they use the gold to buy products from India. After the Battle of Buxa, they no longer have to ship a single penny from England. Because what they do instead is they just tax, land tax, the locals. And so with the profits from the land tax, after they paid all their costs, they use that money now to buy the cotton, to buy the silk, to buy the saltpeter and the other stuff thereafter.
And it's a win-win situation for the company. They're not spending any money, but they're getting land tax plus. They're selling the goods that they all sell. And then they have a third brainwave, which, again, as far as the coffers of the company is concerned, is a wonderful thing. And again, as far as India is concerned, is awful. They realize they can grow vast quantities of opium.
particularly on the more marginal land. And it's initially around the, you know, the fertile land is used to lose food crops, but it's on the rough soils on the edge where the poppies like growing.
such as the Prophet, that they then begin to sort of move the opium into land previously used for food crops. So are we talking about the same areas now that poppy cultivation takes place, sort of in the rocky areas of Afghanistan and around the edges of Pakistan? So the poppy is very happy on a kind of rubbly hillside. You don't need the same sort of rich, well-irrigated land that you'd need, say, for rice.
But as the profits grow on the opium trade, and this begins in the 1770s and reaches a peak in the 1790s, 1800s, more and more land is given over to poppy and less and less to food. If you're using ground that grows food to grow opium, what happens to the people who need the food? Join us after the break and find out.
Travel is all about choosing your own adventure. With your Chase Sapphire Reserve Card, sometimes that means a ski trip at a luxury lodge in the Swiss Alps.
The monsoon of 1768 brought only the lightest of rains to northeast India.
Then, the following summer 1769, no rain fell at all. Instead, the intense heat continued unabated. The rivers dwindled, the tanks dried up, and the pukurs, the fish ponds at the centre of every Bengali village, turned first to sticky mud, then to dry earth, then to rain.
The price of rice rose steadily week by week until it had multiplied five times. By October, as drought began to turn to famine, great dearth and scarcity were reported around Mashidabad. By November, the farmers were stated to be totally incapacitated to cultivate the valuable crops of cotton and mulberries. James Grant, who was stationed upcountry near Raj Mahal, reported a growing deprivation in his district.
In the country the highway and fields were strewn, in towns the streets and passages choked with the dying and the dead, he wrote. Multitudes flocked to Mashidabad.
7,000 were daily fed for several months. The same practice was followed in other places, but the good effects was hardly discernible amidst the general devastation. It was impossible to stir abroad without breathing the offensive air, without hearing the frantic cries, and seeing numbers of different ages and sexes in every stage of suffering and death. At length, a gloomy calm succeeded.
It's an indication, but only an indication of the human suffering that goes on. So it gets much worse after that. A lot of these people who are upcountry in Mashidabad then come down to Calcutta in starving multitudes. And by the height of the famine in 1771, there are estimated to be between 30,000
Three and five million deaths in Bengal. I mean, just hold that number for one moment. Three to five million dead. Now, India's not a stranger to famines. There have been famines, but there are failed monsoons which cause catastrophic events, even before the British have turned up. But there is a difference, isn't there? Because when those famines take place, whoever the local potentate is...
they will do some kind of famine relief, won't they? Well, that was interesting. You see, in that reading, Mashidabad still had a princely family and they were giving out food. But in Calcutta, where you have total rule of the company, not one soup kitchen is put up. The company does not see itself as responsible for the people of Bengal. It's there merely to make profit. And they're very cold-hearted and clear-headed about this. They just want to gather taxes. So,
The first year, even as these bodies are piling up, as flies are circling, as dogs and vultures are picking at human bodies in the streets of every town of Bengal, even as that's happening, these soldiers are being sent out with bayonets into the villages to gather tax forcibly. And so they're taking money from starving families as if it was a perfectly normal year. Again, this is not what the Indian practice. The Indian practice is always that you waive taxes in a year of famine.
News is getting back to London because I've seen this stuff in Hansard recorded that, you know, in parliamentary debates, there's evidence from Brits who are in India who are justifying their behaviour, who are saying, you know, OK, so the planes are filled. I'm paraphrasing with the bleached white bones of Bengali weavers, but it's better that they should suffer than my family suffers. It's really quite brutal.
So it is interesting because this is the first time that you really get whistleblowers. Remember that the East India Company controls all access to India from Britain. So there's no sort of Robert Fisk or Christina Lamb landing up on a plane and reporting the horrors. No BBC reports every night telling about the suffering multitudes.
But this horror is so terrible that many whistleblowers anonymously write letters to The Spectator or The Gentleman's Magazine or Blackwoods or whatever the magazine is, giving horrific reports of what's going on. So this is the first time the British public is aware of
that the East India Company, rather than just bringing delicious things to the ports of London, is doing so in a terrible way. But also there are those who very clearly know what's going on, and that includes the East India Company shareholders. And at the annual general meeting in 1772, they are told that the company, despite the famine, has still managed to gather the full amount
So reports may be filtering back, but this does not deter the behaviour because the East India Company is doing what the East India Company does. But what is astonishing is the short-sightedness. You can waggle your bayonet as much as you like at somebody, but if they're starving to death and they die, they're not going to weave for you. Exactly. You're not going to get your cloth, are you? So in 1772, like any company today, the East India Company has its annual general meeting and all the shareholders gather in a hall in London.
And they are presented with what they are told is the great news that despite the famine, the East India Company has got its taxes in full. Now, what that means on the ground is that people are hanging from gibbets, starving people who refuse to give up their last rupees.
have been either banneted or hung. And this reign of terror has allowed the East India Company to gather full taxes in 1772. And the response of the shareholders is to vote for an increase of their dividend from 10 to 12.5%. So that's the kind of attitudes. They know what's going on. They know there's a famine.
But the news is presented to them certainly in such a way that they think this is good news and they vote themselves an extra big dividend. But this is only possible if you don't care about or you have othered so much these natives. Correct. That they are less than human. So it doesn't matter if they die because it doesn't, you know, we matter more, you know. Yes, it does.
But it's also interesting how very quickly after this and after these news of starving multitudes of mountains of dead bodies of vultures and so on spreads around the country, there is a huge amount of pushback from the British public. And the East India Company gets a reputation of being this sort of murderous, brutal organization. This has major repercussions, not just in England, but around the world.
In London, for example, you get a play put on at the Haymarket where Clive is satirized as Lord Vulture and people jeer him in the streets. But more important for Britain, this news reaches America. And since the passing of the Tea Act, which is one of the government's measures to help relieve the East India Company of its financial problems following the famine, because as we'll hear in a second, the famine ultimately breaks the company.
The Americans read all these reports in the Gentleman's Magazine and the Spectator and are terrified that the East India Company is going to be let loose on them, just as the tea is now being sold by the East India Company. What's to stop them moving in and doing to us what they've done to the Bengalis? So the Boston Tea Party is East India Company tea, which has just arrived and is bobbing off the shores of Boston Harbour in the middle of this famine. So we don't want your tea. We don't want your type of tea.
here, get out, get out. And it's a lost bit of history because American historians aren't particularly interested in India. And it's only now, I've talked to a lot of 18th century American historians, that they're finding all this stuff in the early Patriot things. And the tide in many ways turns against the British when the Bostonians and so on and the people in Massachusetts are reading these horror reports from Bengal. And
I wrong in saying actually that there's another link between East India Company and America is there not a very similar flag that exists I saw this for the first time in one of your books and it just blew my mind actually can I describe it first it looks like the stars and stripes without the stars on it and where the stars should be in the corner there is a union flag and then you've still got I mean fewer red stripes going across I can't recall how many but it's the same basic design
as the Betsy Ross. Yeah. So what is that all about? What is that flag? So the, I mean, no one has sort of proven the link, but anyone looking at the two flags can clearly see an influence. I suppose if you're coming up for a, you know, there's a limited number of designs available for a flag and the Americans are,
borrow the idea for the East India Company colours. That's the biggest irony, isn't it? It's what starts the revolution in America is the East India Company and then they sort of adopt the flag. It's very, very odd. Okay, so let's get back to India now. So the famine has started to change people's attitudes, but it has also started to hit the balance sheet of the East India Company, hit it hard. And the first year, you know, enough people have got enough savings.
that the East India Company, at the point of a better net, can extract the full tax, even if it involves hanging hundreds of people. But the next year, there's nothing left. There's no new crops. Everyone's last piggy bank is broken into. People have started selling their children. People have started selling their farming implements. People have started eating each other. There's reports of cannibalism from the north of Bengal. And at that point...
The East India Company realizes the effect of its actions and it's effectively starved the goose that lays the golden egg and the goose is now dead. And by 1773, there is real anxiety. Letters now coming from Calcutta saying there's no money. We're not going to be able to buy anything. You have to bail us out because we're making vast losses. And when these letters start arriving in London, there is a run on the banks.
And the first bank to go down is in Scotland, the Air Bank, AYR as opposed to AIR.
And in the next two months, 32 banks collapse across Europe. It's like the... It's like the financial crisis of 2008. It's worse. Much worse. And it's not just Lehman Brothers and Northern Rock. It's 32 banks go down. But I guess from what we know of what happens in the next few years, the East India Company is judged to be too big to fail. Well, it's very interesting how it all breaks out. And it's, again, a measure of how the company operates. So the company...
Once you retire in Bengal, you put in a chit into the headquarters in Calcutta. And the idea is you then sail home and you can withdraw your winnings in London.
In 1772, just as all these letters are arriving saying there's going to be, there's no money this year, we're completely out, a whole load of Brits who've had enough and want to flee Calcutta because it's now a charnel house full of dead and dying people. An exceptionally large number come home on the fleet and put in their demands for one million pounds each. They're making so much money.
And one after another, these IOUs turn up in Lead and Hall Street and there's no money to pay them. And the banks don't have it. They don't have it. Lead and Hall Street doesn't have it. So the first thing they do is they go to the newly established Bank of England and the Bank of England doesn't have it. And we're talking really new. I mean, these are contemporaneous events. The Bank of England is really freshly minted, to forgive the bad language. It is, isn't it? It hasn't got the cash. It just hasn't got the reserves at all at this time. So there's only one thing for them to do is they have to go to Parliament. And what
What effectively happens after lots of back and forth and parliamentary debates and various bills are proposed and shot down is that finally in 1773, something called the Regulating Act goes out. And that's a bit like the moment that Gordon Brown took over NatWest. You basically have the state buying a 50 percent share of the East India Company.
And this is important for two reasons. One is that for the first time, the state has got some control over the East India Company. But the second point is that it's the first time that you actually have the state becoming involved in British imperialism in India. Up to this point, the only involvement had been in odd national emergencies, like when Britain's about to go to war with France, when the Navy might send a fleet of Marines, as happens just before Plassey.
But it's basically all this time from 1600 through to 1773, a self-governing libertarian dream or nightmare if you're part of the occupied Bengal. And these guys have had the run of the thing. But in 1773, Parliament says, enough. This is a shocking way to run anything. You can't have a private company, a bunch of merchants running our greatest colony now.
without any supervision. So a whole new structure is put in place whereby Parliament sends out a bunch of guys to try and sort out what's going on. But this, of course, is the moment that the state begins the takeover of the East India Company. It's the seeds of the Raj. It's the seeds of the Raj. It was all perfectly fine to have the East India Company do this if the revenues are coming into England and it's great and fine. But now they have to step in.
So just to contextualise this a little bit, who is the Prime Minister? Who's on the throne? And what else is going on in Europe at the time? So 1773, George III is on the throne.
And he's in and out of hospital, in and out of sanity. And Pitt is prime minister. And Pitt is very, because he, in parliament, he's saying these terrible East India Company men are stripping Bengal bear. But in actual fact, his own family fortune had come from his father, who worked in the East India Company in Madras. And,
and had famously sold an enormous diamond, the Pitt Diamond, which was the source of the family fortune. And both Pitt the Younger and Pitt the Older managed to finance their entire political career with basically Indian diamond money. There is such a beautiful symmetry. I mean, not beautiful, but it is a symmetry. So we've got Mad King George...
We have got Clive on the downs and we have a new name that comes up at this time, which is very, very important. And I know this is a name that you defend very much. Warren Hastings, who does have a really rough ride of it, doesn't he? British public opinion. In my view, and this is not the universal view, Parliament, when it impeaches Warren Hastings, in a sense goes for the wrong guy.
The guy they should have gone for was Clive. Clive was the rotter. Clive is the ruthless. Well, you kind of spoiler alerted that because we know there's something bad down the track. But who is Warren Hastings and what is he like? So Warren Hastings is very different to the kind of plump, pompous, militaristic...
brutish clive clive you know never notes a single nice view in india in his letters he he's not at all interested in indian architecture or or indian culture he just sees it basically as a money box waiting to be prized open and he's very clear about that you know you're dealing with a man who from all one because he has absolutely no visual sense no sense of culture no sense of of civilization or philosophy he doesn't care he's a money man and a soldier
Warren Hastings couldn't be more different from that. Warren Hastings is an East seat, a linguist. He's been in India since he was 16. Speaks Hindi. Speaks not only Hindi, but Bengali and Persian perfectly and takes great interest in Sanskrit, which he learns, but never quite perfects. And he is the man who sponsors the first translation of the Bhagavad Gita into English, for example. And he writes in his letters, I love India a little more than my own country.
That said, he's working for the most rapacious multinational in the world. And while he reforms it and while he's responsible, for example, for building granaries for the first time. So when you go to Patna, there's that famous Gola, which is one of the great monuments of the city that's built by Warren Hastings to store grain to make sure there's not another famine.
So I'm not for a minute saying he's an angel. He is a man of the 18th century making a fortune in India like everyone else. But he is on the Clive scale. But he is compared to Clive. He is he's a scholar, a professor, and he's personally very ascetic about.
So when he is put on trial by Parliament, the famous impeachment of Warren Hastings in 1784, which is one of the great events of Georgian England, when Gibbon, Sheridan, all the great names of the period line up to punch Warren Hastings. They're expecting some fat, flamboyant nouveau riche monster. And instead, the man that turns up at the bar is this
aesthetic figure dressed in black with white stockings and grey hair and he looks more like a Puritan preacher about to give a sermon than the kind of paunchy plunderer that they've been expecting. I feel we're sort of leapfrogging. Was there perhaps an impeachment? LAUGHTER
Okay, so Warren Hastings is the man in charge. He is, by comparison, a better guy than Clive, but he's still running the East India Company. At what point did the wheels fall off for Warren Hastings? I mean, clearly we know they do because you've said impeachment three times, but what happens to cause that? So he is put in charge after the regulating act. So we've had the famine, we've had the death.
And Warren Hastings, who is an East India Company man, is put in charge as governor of Bengal. And he immediately does all sorts of really excellent things. He builds granaries. He makes sure there's not going to be another famine. He is concerned to sort out the legal system, which is a complete mess and is completely inadequate.
And then a whole bunch of regulators arrived. The Regulating Act has as its central pole the fact that some regulators appointed by the government will go out and watch out what's happening. And things get off to a bad start when Hastings doesn't go to meet them at the port and then receives them for lunch in what is considered to be undress. In other words, almost in his slippers, basically.
both things cause enormous offence. Well it's just an ego slide. Absolutely. These are important. They're human beings upon whom history turns. You forget sometimes but yeah. But these guys also have already in a sense made up their minds. Interestingly they are set against Warren Hastings before they set off by none other than Clive. And Clive doesn't like Warren Hastings. He thinks he's soft. He thinks he's far too sort of pro-Indian. He's not strong enough for the job.
So Philip Francis, who's a particularly nasty piece of work, comes out determined that he's going to basically sack Hastings and take the job for himself.
And he's this ambitious, I mean, his letters are full of sort of malice and slander. He's probably the author of a famous set of letters called the Junius Letters, which were the, I don't know what the modern equivalent would be, Guido Forks or one of those sort of political blogs that sort of break scandal in parliament or something. And he has a real talent for malice.
And he tries to bring down Warren Hastings. And the two are locked in political combat and deadlocking the action on the ground of the company, even as the company's military enemies like Tupou Sultan are busy defeating the company troops. The same night that the British received their first major defeat at the Battle of Polilor in 1784.
Warren Hastings and Philip Francis actually meet in Calcutta to fight a duel. Wow. And this is one of the great sort of comic moments of Indian history because
Both Hastings and Francis are men of the pen. They're not fighters. I was just thinking. And they both turn up. And it turns out that neither have the slightest idea how to load a pistol. Hastings has, in fact, fired a pistol once. He'd been involved in the attack on Calcutta under Clive in 1757.
Philip Francis had never picked up a pistol in his life and has arrived without the primer which you need to fire a musket. So he has to borrow primer and I think a ball from Warren Hastings. From Warren Hastings, the man he wants to shoot. That's just priceless. And so first of all, Francis is offered the first shot by the gentleman Hastings and he...
lines up, aims, pulls the trigger. It doesn't go off. And this happens two or three times. And eventually Hastings has to show him how to do it. This is how you shoot me. He takes the shot and misses by a long way. The shot goes wild over his head. And then Hastings, who I said has had a little military training in his youth and has some idea how to operate a gun, takes a shot at Francis and he hits him, but he doesn't kill him.
And so Francis is carried off and there is this brief reconciliation, it appears, when Hastings goes and says, I'm very sorry, I hope this will be the end of our... Can we still be friends? Can we still be friends? Can we still be friends? And for a moment it looks as if Francis actually might sort of bury the hatchet. But of course, no, he goes back to England and he stirs up the whole country. He joins Parliament and he works on all these other characters and tells them,
that the entire evils of the East India Company are responsible, are the responsibility of Warren Hastings. Is there in any way a bit of string pulling going on in the background from Clive? Because they do, in effect, get the wrong man, don't they? They absolutely do. And Clive has definitely set the regulators against Hastings and they go out with these ideas that they're going to sort out a crook.
But by this stage, Clive is dead. So probably not. Very important what happens. So Clive, in the aftermath of the famine, becomes this hated figure. There is massive press reporting on the horrors of the Bengal famine.
And there are plays put on the Haymarket and Clive becomes a hated figure and people boo him and hiss at him in the streets of London. And eventually he's called before Parliament and he actually manages to talk his way out rather like Boris Johnson. He's an incredibly eloquent man.
This Ruth of the Soldier is also a fantastic debater. He gathers the chamber and says, you know, give me my life for my honour and walks out of the chamber. And he narrowly gets let off by Parliament. It's a very close vote.
But he is, after that, a marked man. And rather like Boris Johnson being booed outside Westminster Cathedral, Clive gets booed wherever he goes around London. And eventually, he takes his own life. He cuts his archeries with a paper knife and is found in a toilet with blood all over him, collapsed on the ground.
And he was always this sort of depressive and twice tried to commit suicide, but the third time succeeds. So he's not around anymore. And in his absence, Hastings becomes the hate figure. So everyone expects Hastings to be this sort of mega corrupt symbol of venality and evil.
And he turns up in Parliament. And he's not that at all. He's a grey-haired scholar. But he still goes through that whole impeachment process anyway. But when they see who he really is... They ultimately let him off. The trial drags on for many years. So I don't in any sense want to pretend that Warren Hastings is an angel. He's not. But he's a far more civilised and he's far more an endophile character.
And under him, all sorts of things happen. You get the first translations from Sanskrit. You get William Jones founding the Royal Asiatic Society. And the English for the first time really realized that India is an extraordinary civilization. Jones realizes that there's a family of languages which Hindi and Sanskrit are part of.
which is the same family as ours, the Indo-European languages. You begin to get British officials in India commissioning artworks from Indian and Mughal painters. So,
It's still the same extractive and venal organisation it always has been. But under Hastings, there's at least some element of civilisation and learning and scholarship. And maybe some accountability. And some accountability. You've got somebody who wants to show the workings. So the East India Company, what happens then after the impeachment process? So...
The company throughout the deadlock of Warren Hastings and Philip Francis can almost not defend itself because no laws can be passed, no armies can be moved. And it's only when Hastings goes home to defend himself in Parliament that the East India Company can get its act together. And by this stage, it is...
got some very serious new enemies. It's got Tipu Sultan in the south and it's got the Marathas who started in the decade in the middle of India, but have now filtered all over and an extremely powerful force under a series of rival warlords, particularly Sindhya and Holkar at this period. And so what you have now, that is between the departure of Warren Hastings in the 1780s and the peak of company influence in about 1800.
is a series of military campaigns. And the company wins, not because anymore it has this military edge, because Tipu and the Marathas have both learned the lessons. They've got the new cannon. They've got the new ballistics. They've got the same muskets, very similar bayonets. They fight in the same way. They've got a whole load of French and various other Europeans to teach them these new modes of European warfare. So the company's lost that edge.
And the reason ultimately that the company prevails is two things. First of all, it's got Bengal, which is the richest province and can just generate more revenue. And with that money, more soldiers can be bought and trained up and armed. So ultimately, it's got bigger armies than the others.
And secondly, they're always supported by the bankers because the bankers know that they can get their money back without trouble from the East India Company. So they have a constant line of credit. And in emergencies, they can go to the bankers and say, we need a million pounds and the bankers will give it to them. And that can instantly be transferred into muskets, bayonets, cannon. And the battles against these two enemies, Tupu Sultan of Mysore and the various Maratha forces are very close.
And if India had managed, even at that stage of the 1780s, at the time of Warren Hastings, if the Marathas and Tipu had managed to stand together. And there's a moment when a brilliant Maratha statesman called Nana Fadnavis nearly pulls this off. And he realizes that the danger that the company, an existential danger to India that the company represents. And even at that point, had they stood together, they could have defeated the company.
But instead, the company is able first to take out Tipu with Maratha help. And then it's able to divide the Marathas between each other. So Sindhya and Holkar fight separately. They never unite and fight together. And so one by one, the enemies go down. And that leaves us in 1799.
at this moment when suddenly the East India Company armies have grown to 200,000 troops just at a point when the British Army is only 100,000. And this, I think, is in a sense the climax of company rule. It has this vast army. It's conquered or has taken control by proxy
of every court in India south of the Himalayas, and only Ranjit Singh and the Punjabis are holding out. It's a story in another podcast. I think we'll leave it there, and we'll pick up next time on the bumpy fate of the East India Company from here on in. It looks very rosy, but it doesn't remain so. That's it from me, Anita Anand. And me, William Dalrymple. ♪