title: 2. Company Rule in India
author: Empire
contenttype: podcast
publication: Empire
published: 2022-08-15T21:05:00-04:00
sourceurl: https://pdst.fm/e/chrt.fm/track/A27C8C/traffic.megaphone.fm/NSR6231992645.mp3?updated=1703674302
word_count: 8741
If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of MPa, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to MPaClub at www.mpaPoduk.com This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills, fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate seat. According to Indeed data, sponsor jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast, Terms and Conditions Apply. This is your fix. I am your host, Stasi Schroder. Welcome to Tell Me Lies, the official podcast. What's the most unhinged thing of these in three? Steven because he's so evil. I do think he is misunderstood. You see everyone based consequences. It's intoxicating. The writers just know how to trick you. There's always a twist in this show. Tell me lies, the official podcast January 6 and stream the new season of Tell Me Lies, January 13 on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+. Hello and welcome to MPa with me and Eita Arnon. And me who will him? That's Rumpul. You leap in faster now. It's cute. It's almost as if you now know your name. I'm learning a lot of this here. 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 Sam, Clive the villain, Boo Hiss to others. So when we last left Clive, he is there receiving the Dewani for India. So this is the right to govern, and so things are pretty raising. 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 very same thing, and sorry, initially it's the French he comes into contact with, and he defeats Duplé, who's his great rival, the French head of the company Desant. That's in his youth. Then he outflanks Surajadal, appearing out of the blue and retaking Calcutta with armaments that Surajadal didn't realise that the East India Company had, and in fact they didn't normally have, because this Fattile has arrived by chance. Yes, the Lost Navy. The Lost Navy, which does turn 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 the 18th-century warfare operate. 18th-century warfare particularly in India is often a sort of chess game with maneuvers and both sides trying to bribe each other's generals and money passing back because of 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 a knight from the back in the early morning through fog during thunderstorms, and he loves doing sort of daring operations that in a sense pre-abort the sort of SAS and modern sort of spetsnats do. He comes behind enemy lines. And he's punchy. He's the same punchy guy that he wasn't his youth, breaking windows and saying pay me protection and that won't be broken anymore. And I mean there's one extraordinary moment where just after the Surajadal has lost Calcutta to Clive, and Surajad Zami has gathered there, and it's about, you know, had again, 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 rose them up the hookley, 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 Surajadal in natural fact, and then the shot goes through Surajadal'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 forward. He's an indios young man, fighting the kinetic wars. He goes back for the first time as an MP, doesn't have quite enough money, and so it comes out for the second time, and magically pulls off Placé and this huge, some money from the Jogged Sets, which he banks. He then goes back, and at that point he starts using his grill 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 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, it's really a tiny operation. 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 100 years, there are only 35 employees in the head office. It's tiny. It's smaller than, you know, than a state agent today. And in India, at the time of the Battle of Placé, 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 from 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, but 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's very easy to answer oddly enough, because in a sense, the British had already tried their hand in the 1680s, there's a 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, 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 32nd 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 vended knee, and promise to behave themselves, and Aurangzeb lets them out. But what's the difference between the 1680s and the 1750s is two things. On the mogul side, the empire shattered, it's all split up into individual towns almost, or at best, you know, small, regional entities, who are just 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, 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, often from enlightenment to operate a Bennett. 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 CPO for these Indian companies, you get paid about triple what typical pay you for the same job, in an rival army further down the peninsula. So, in a time when there is anarchy, when the Mogul 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 do that, it can borrow money from the local bankers. Now, the big question is, why would the local bankers lend money to foreigners, equal to 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 Englishman, eating beef, and on the other hand, you have Mawari Jains picking at Tali's. They understand commercial contracts. There are appetites are the same. They both want to make money, and they both run as 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 for not with white troops against brown troops. It's two armies of brown troops. 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 sea poise to fight the seas, you're immediately creating an enmity between two parts of the country. The North will think, who are these people who with brown skin, who are coming? And there's a hatred that develops. It's the start of fishes, which then can be exploited later on. Well, I think, I mean, I'm the first person to criticize the country, but I don't think in the sense those fishes are very need much creation. I think, you know, the maratas, for example, have been raiding Bengal and raping Bengali women, and to this day, Bengalis put their children to sleep warning about the, what the, the bongies will do, what the maratas armies can do to you. And the periods of Indian history when India has been politically united, a very brief compared to the very strong moments of regional unity, when, say, you know, the maratas form a single unit or the, the, the Tamil's form, the Jolarempa or, or, or, or the Kashmiris under Lalitaditya, when they, these people have, 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 unit. But for, 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, the amoreas of a Shokhar 250 BC, again, under the Gupta's and the early centuries, AD, again, under the moguls. But most of the time, it's not like that. Okay, well, they 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, that's the height of its power, 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 a drink at a bar, and yet they are often, you know, 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 official term is called the writer, which basically means someone's scribbling in a ledger. Yeah. Because there's Cal Cal to this, so the writer's building, isn't there? The writer's building, yeah. The writer's come out aged 16, and a lot of them are dead within a couple of years. Two monsoons are said to be the average lifespan of the 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, you know, 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 buyer, buy a nice big house in the country, or build a palladium 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, before they cop it, before they either kill them warfare in terms of if they're soldiers or killed by cholera or whatever else dysentery, if they're civilian. And, you know, 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 can be one of the few big winners, like Clive who come home and buys not one, but, you know, ten 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. See Captain who comes in and just sees the number of new graves in the Graviards of Carcata. 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 Placid and Bucks are, this is the time of maximum repatience. 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 Carcata. It's the worst possible time to be a big quality weaver. At this time, for example, that we have stories of the Brit's coraling weavers into effectively weaving concentration camps, but they're not even allowed home. And telling them 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 up. We should explain this a bit more. It's a really important story. So 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. Oh, that is true. And then they came and as an active vengeance, if we didn't do what they said, they chopped off our thumbs. So that's a... Kill an industry and kill an art form. So that second bit is a psych Confucian. So this is based on one story. Not from a particularly reliable 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 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, and 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 reason that the Indian textile industry declined. Yeah. Was that the wicket-brits cut the cut? They cut their thumbs off they could do anyway. So neither story, I mean, the second story about the bread-cutting the weavers thumbs off is definitely wrong. That sum weavers could have cut their own thumbs off. Well, it just tells 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 Bucks'er 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 an 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 civilise the natives and build railways and so on. But it's actually there, of course, because Empire enriches the mother country. The company has none of this. It's 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 repacious, I think, and far more brutally open about it's aspirations to asset strip India. It's a bit more honest. It's frank about it. And weirdly, though, also, it finds willing collaborators. Carcottr initially is a tax-free bought. And so the Moarees moved there, not because they particularly like the company of the British, but because they don't have to pay taxes, and that they can 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. Exactly. And it's not food, is it? It's... Exactly. They realise that... Since the first thing that happens after Bucks 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 Bucks, 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 salt, to buy the salt peeter, 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. They're selling the goods that they also... They're selling the goods that they sell. And then they have a third brainwave, which again, as far as the coffers of the company's concerned, is a wonderful thing. And again, as far as India's concerned, is awful. They realise they can grow vast quantities of opium, particularly on the more marginal land. And it's initially around the fertile land is used to use food crops, but it's on the rough soils on the edge where the poppy is like growing. And such as the profit, that they then begin to sort of move the opium into previously... into land previously used for food crops. So are we talking about the same areas now? The poppy cultivation takes place sort of in the rocky areas. If Afghanistan and around the edges of Pakistan... So the poppy is very happy on a kind of rumbly hillside. You don't need the same sort of rich, well-irrogated land that you'd need safe for ice. 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. If you're chasing data down instead of seeing it in one place, you need the Intuit ERP. Intuit Enterprise Suite. All your data in one place with built-in AI for real-time insights. Learn more at Intuit.com slash ERP. Quick, choose a meal deal with McValue, the $5 Mexican meal deal, the $6 Mexican meal deal, or the $7 Daily Double Meal Deal. Each with its own small fry is drink and four piece of McNuggets. As actually no rush, I'm just excited for McDonald's. For a limited time, only person to participation may vary. Not bell-dreamy delivery. The monsoon of 1768 brought only the lightest of rains to North East 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 book was the fishponds 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, until it had multiplied five times. By October, as drought began to turn to famine, great dirt and scarcity were reported around Rashida Bad. By November, the farmers were stated to be totally incapacitated to cultivate the valuable crops of cotton and mulberries. James Grant, who was stationed at Country 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 a dying and the dead, he wrote. Multitudes flocked to Rashida Bad. Seven thousand 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 up country in Rashida Bad then come down to Calcutta, in starving multitudes. And by the height of the famine in 1771, there are estimated to be between three and five million deaths in Bengal. I would just hold that number for one moment, three to five million dead. Now, India is 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, Rashida Bad was 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 out. The company does not see itself as responsible for the people of Bengal. It's there merely to make profit. 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, the soldiers being sent out with bandits into the villages to gather tax forcibly. And so they're taking money from starving families, as if it was a perfectly normal year. Not the India practice. The Indian practice is always that you wave taxes in the air of famine. News is getting back to London, because I've seen this stuff in Hansard recorded, that in parliamentary debates, there's evidence from Brits who are in India who are justifying their behaviour, who are saying, okay, 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's 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 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 whack of taxation. 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 wag your bear in it as much as you like it, somebody. But if they're starving to death and they die, they're not going to leave for you. Exactly. You're not going to get your cloth for you. So in 1772, like any company today, the East India Company has its own annual general meeting and all the shareholders gather in the 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 beneted or hung. And this reign of terror has allowed the East India Company to gather full taxes in 1772. And the response to the shareholders is to vote for an increase of their dividend from 10 to 12.5%. So that's the kind of attitude they know what's going on. They know there's a famine. But the news is presented to them in such a way that they think this is good news and they vote themselves an extra big dividend from them. But is there certainly possible, if you don't care about or you have othered so much, these natives, that they are less than human, so it doesn't matter if they die, because we matter more. Yes, 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 organisation. This has major repercussions, not just in England, but around the world. In London, for example, you get a play put on the hay market where clive is satirized as Lord Vulture, and people gear him in the streets. But more important for Britain, this news reaches America. And since the passing of the T Act, which is one of the government's measures to help relieve the East India Company of its financial problems following the famine, as we'll hear in a second, the famine ultimately breaks the company. The Americans read all these reports to the gentleman magazine in the spectator, and they're terrified that the East India Company is going to be let loose on them, just as the T 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 T, which has just arrived in his bobbing off the shores of Boston Harbor in the middle of this famine. So we don't want your tea, we don't want your type of government here, get out, get out. And it's a lost participation because you know, Americans' stories are particularly interested in India. And it's only now I've talked to a lot of 18th century American stories, that they're finding all this stuff in the early patriotic 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. Am I wrong in saying actually 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 bits... It's the same basic design. It's the same as the Betsy Ross. So what is that all about? What is that flag? So 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 limited number of designs available for a flag. And the Americans borrow the idea for these Indian companies. That's the biggest irony, isn't it? 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 these studies coming to 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 bet that 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 that it's effectively starved the goose that lays the golden egg to death. And the goose is now dead. And by 1773, there is real anxiety. And let us now come in from Carcata 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 claps across Europe. It's like the financial crisis of 2008. Much much more to it. And it's not just the 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 Carcata. 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 bricks we've had enough. And what to flee, Carcata, because it's now a channelhouse full of dead and dying people. An exceptionally large number come home on the fleet. And put in their demands for one million patents each. They're making so much money. And one after another, these IOUs turn up in lead and hall street. And the banks don'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 figure out the bank. But it hasn't got the cash. It hasn't got the reserves. So there's only one thing for them to do is they have to go to Parliament. And 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 that West. You basically have the state buying a 50% share of these Dindia company. And this is important for two reasons. One is that for the first time the state has got some control over these Dindia companies. 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 moment to be in ordnance on emergencies, like when Britain is about to go to war with France, when the Navy might send a fleet of Marines as happens at the just before placy. 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 run of the thing. But in 1773 Parliament says enough, you know, this is a shocking way to run anything. You can't have a private company, a bunch of merchants running our greatest colony there without any supervision. So a whole new structure is put in place whereby Parliament sends out a bunch of guys to try and thought out what's going on. But this of course is the moment that the state begins to take over of these Dindia companies. It's the seeds of the Raj. It's the seeds of the Raj. Without, you know, it was all perfectly fine to have the East Dindia 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 contextualize 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, Georgia 3rd is on the throne. And he's in the out of hospital, in the out of sanity. And Pitt is prime minister. And Pitt is very sick. Because in Parliament he's saying these terrible East Dindia company men are stripping Bengal bear. But in actual fact, his own family fortune had come from his father, who worked in the East Dindia company in Madras. 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 mean a 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 rota. Clive is the ruthless... When you kind of spoiler alerted that, because we know there's something faster than that. But who is Warren Hastings and what is he like? So Warren Hastings is very different to the kind of plump, pompous, militaristic, British Clive. Clive, you know, never notes a single nice view in Indianism. He's not at all interested in Indian architecture 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 from all one, because he has absolutely no visual sense, no sense of culture, no sense of... No sense of civilisation, 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 a new seat, a linguist. He's been in India since he was 16. Speak was Hindi. Speak's not only Hindi, but Bengali and Persian perfectly. And takes great interest in Sanskrit, which he learns but never quite perfect. 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 repacious 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 Gullah, 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, 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 a scholar, a professor, and he's personally very ascetic. 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 George and England when Gibbon, Sheridan, all the great names of the period. 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 thin, ascetic figure dressed in black with white stockings and grey hair. And he looks more like a puritan peacher about to give a sermon than the kind of poachy plunderer that they've been expecting. I feel we're sort of leap-rogging. Was there perhaps an impeachment? 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 them? So, he is put in charge after the regulating. 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 arrive. The regulating act has this central poll, 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 that receives them for lunch in what is considered to be undress. In other words, almost in his slippers. And both things cause enormous offence. But it's just an ego slide. Absolutely, these are important. Well, they're human beings, upon whom history turns, you forget sometimes. But these guys also have already in a sense made up their minds. And interestingly, they are set against foreign Hastings before they set off by none other than Clive. And Clive doesn't like foreign 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 slandering. He's probably the author of a famous set of letters called the Junior Sletters, which were the, what the modern equipment would be, Guido Forks or one of those sort of political blogs that sort of breaks scandal in Parliament or something. And he has a real talent for malice. And he tries to bring down more 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 Tipu Sultana are busy defeating the company troops. The same night that the British received their first major defeat at the Battle of Polo in 1784, Warren Hastings and Philip Francis actually meet in Calcutta to fight a duel. Wow. And this is one of the great, so comic moments of Indian history. Because both Hastings and Francis are men of the pen. They're not fighters of social thinking, you know, they just stand up. And they both turn up. And it turns out that neither of, neither have the slightest idea of a load of pistol. Hastings has in fact fired a pistol once. He'd been involved in the attack on Calcutta underclive in 1757. But Philip Francis had never picked up a pistol in his life. And has arrived without the primer which you need to fire a muskets. He has to borrow primer and I think a ball from Warren Hastings. From Warren Hastings and then 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 Ames pulls the trigger. And he doesn't go off. And this happens two or three times. And eventually Hastings has to show him how to do it. He takes the shot and misses my 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 it. But he doesn't kill him. And so Francis is carried off and there is this brief reconciliation that appears when Hastings goes and says I'm very sorry. I hope this, you know, will be the end of the world. He's still be friends. He's still be friends. He's still be friends. And for a moment, it looks as if Francis actually might sort of bury the hatchet. But of course, no. 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 extended company are responsible. Other responsibility of Warren Hastings. Is it 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 and this is a very important one. 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 hay market. 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 arteries with a paper knife and is found in a toilet with blood all over him, clapsed on the ground. And he was always this sort of depressive and twice a try to commit suicide, but in 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 vanillaity and evil. And he turns up in Parliament. And he's not bad at all. He's a grey head scholar. But he still goes through that whole impeachment process anyway. But when they see who he really is... They ultimately let him off. They're 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 indow file character. And under him, all sorts of things happen. You get the first translations from Sanskrit. You get William Jones founding the Royal Eseatic Society. And the English, for the first time, really realised that India's an extraordinary civilisation. Jones realises that there's a family of languages, which Indian 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. And the Hastings, there's at least some element of civilisation and learning and scholarship. And maybe some accountability. And some accountability. 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 could be passed, no armies could 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's, it's, it's got some very serious new enemies. It's got to Pulsartan in the south. And it's got the Maratas who started in the Deccan in the middle of India but have now filtered all over and an extremely powerful force under a series of, of, of rival warlords, particularly Sindir and Holka 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 any more it has this military edge, because to put it and the Maratas have both learnt the lessons. They've got the new cannon, they've got the new ballistics, they've got the same muskets, very similar bandits. 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 has 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, and with that money, more soldiers can be bought and trained up and armed. So ultimately they've 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 Indian company. So they have a constant line of credit and an 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, bandits, cannon. And the battles against these two enemies, Tuba Sultana of Mysore and the various Marata forces are very close. And if India had managed, even at that stage in the 1780s at the time of war on Hastings, if the Maratas and Tippu had managed to stand together. And there's a moment when a brilliant Marata statesman called Nanafadnavis nearly pulls this off. And he realizes that the danger that the company and 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 Tippu with Marata help. And then it's able to divide the Maratas between each other. So, India and Holka 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 200,000 troops just at a point when the British army is only 100,000. And this I think is in the 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... Well the bumpy fate of the East India company from here on in. It looks very rosy, but it doesn't remain so. And that's it from me and Eta Arnon. And me William Starrimful.