The question how we conquered India does not at all resemble the questions which I raised in the last course. Our colonists in the new world occupied, to be sure, a vast territory, but it was comparatively an empty territory. The difficulties they encountered arose not so much from the natives, as from the rivalry of other European nations. By what degrees and from what causes we gained the advantage over these rivals, I partly discussed. It was a question to which the answer was not at once obvious, but at the same time not extremely difficult to find. On the other hand it is at first sight extremely perplexing to understand how we could conquer India. Here the population was dense, and its civilisation, though descending along a different stream of tradition, was as real and ancient as our own.
We have learnt from many instances in European history to think it almost impossible really to conquer an intelligent people wholly alien in language and religion from its invaders. The whole power of Spain could not in eighty years conquer the Dutch provinces with their petty population. The Swiss could not be conquered in old time, nor the Greeks the other day. Nay, at the very time when we made the first steps in the conquest of India, we showed ourselves wholly un able to reduce to obedience three millions of our own race in America, who had thrown off their allegiance to the English Crown. What a singular contrast is here ! Never did the English show so much languid incompetence as in the American War, so that it might have seemed evident that their age of greatness was over, and that the decline of England had begun.
But precisely at this time they were appearing as irresistible conquerors in India, and showing a superiority which led them to fancy themselves a nation of heroes. How is the contradiction to be explained? History is studied with so little seriousness, with so little desire or expectation of arriving at any solid result, that the contradiction passes almost unremarked, or at most gives occasion to a triumphant reflection that after all there was life in us yet. And indeed it may seem that, however difficult of explanation the fact may be, there can be no doubt of it. Over and over again in India, at Plassey, at Assaye, and on a hundred other battlefields, our troops have been victorious against great odds, so that here at least it seems that we may indulge our national self-complacency without restraint, and feel that at any rate in comparison with the Hindu races we really are terrible fellows.
But does this hypothesis really remove the difficulty. Suppose that one Englishman is really equal as a soldier to ten or twenty Hindus, can we even then conceive the whole of India conquered by the English? There were not more than twelve millions of Englishmen at the time when the conquest began, and it was made in a period when England had other wars on her hands. Olive’s career falls partly in the Seven Years’ War of Europe, and the great annexations of Lord Wellesley were made in the midst of our war with Napoleon. We are not a military state. We did not in those times profess to be able to put on foot at any moment a great expeditionary army. Accordingly in our European wars we usually confined ourselves to acting with our fleet, while for hostilities on land it was our practice to subsidise any ally we might have among the military states, at one time Austria, at another Prussia. How then in spite of all this weakness by land could we manage to conquer during this time the greater part of India, an enormous region of nearly a million square miles and inhabited by two hundred millions of people! What a drain such a work must have made upon our military force, what a drain upon our treasury ! And yet somehow the drain seems never to have been perceived. Our European wars involved us in a debt that we have never been able to pay. But our Indian wars have not swelled the National Debt. The exertions we had to make there seem to have left no trace behind them.
It seems then that there must be something wrong in the conception which is current, that a number of soldiers went over from England to India, and there by sheer superiority in valour and intelligence con- quered the whole country. In the last great Mahratta war of 1818 we had, it appears, more than a hundred thousand men in the field. But what that was the time of mortal exhaustion that succeeded the great Napoleonic War. Is it possible that only three years after the battle of Waterloo we were at war again on a vast scale and had a much greater army in India than Lord Wellington had in Spain. Again at the present moment the army kept in foot in India amounts to two hundred thousand men. What ! two hundred thousand English soldiers And yet we are not a military State ! You see of course what the fact is that I point at. This Indian army, we all know, does not consist of English soldiers, but mainly of native troops. Out of 200,000 only 65,000, or less than a third, are English. And even this proportion has only been established since the mutiny, after which catastrophe the English troops were increased and the native troops diminished in number. Thus I find that at the time of the mutiny there were 45,000 European troops to 235,000 native troops in India—that is, less than a fifth. In 1808 again I find only 25,000 Englishmen to 130,000 natives—that is, somewhat less than* a fifth. The same proportion obtained in 1773 at the time of the Kegulating Act, when British India first took shape. At that date the Company’s army consisted of 9000 Europeans and 45,000 natives. Before that I find the proportion of Europeans even lower—about a seventh ; and if we go back to the very beginning we find that from the first the Indian army was rather a native than a European force.
Thus Colonel Chesney opens his historical view of it in these words :
" The first establishment of the Company’s Indian Army may be considered to date from the year 1748, when a small body of sepoys was raised at Madras after the example set by the French, for the defence of that settlement. … At the same time a small European force was raised, formed of such sailors as could be spared from the ships on the coast and of men smuggled on board the Company’s vessels in England by the crimps."
In the early battles of the Company by which its power was decisively established, at the siege of Arcot, at Plassey, at Buxar, there seem almost always to have been more sepoys than Europeans on the side of the Company. And let us observe further that we do not hear of the sepoys as fighting ill, or of the English as bearing the whole brunt of the conflict. No one who has remarked the childish eagerness with which historians indulge their national vanity, will be surprised to find that our English writers in describing these battles seem unable to discern the sepoys. Read Macaulay’s Essay on Clive ; every- where it is " the imperial people," " the mighty children of the sea," " none could resist Clive and his Englishmen." But if once it is admitted that the sepoys always outnumbered the English, and that they kept pace with the English in efficiency aa+++(??)+++ in soldiers, the whole theory which attributes our successes to an immeasurable natural superiority in valouf falls to the ground. In those battles in which our troops were to the enemy as one to ten, it will appear that if we may say that one Englishman showed himself equal to ten natives, we may also say that one sepoy did the same.+++(5)+++ It follows that, though no doubt there was a difference, it was not so much a difference of race as a difference of discipline, of military science, and also no doubt in many cases a difference of leadership.
Observe that Mill’s summary explanation of the conquest of India says nothing of any natiu-al supe riority on the part of the English.
“The two important discoveries for conquering India were 1st, the weakness of the native armies against European discipline ; 2ndly, the facility of imparting that discipline to natives in the European service.”
He adds : " Both discoveries were made by the French." And even if we should admit that the English fought better than the sepoys, and took more than their share in those achievements which both performed in common, it remains entirely incorrect to speak of the English nation as having conquered the nations of India. The nations of India have been conquered by an army of which on the average about a fifth part was English. But we not only exaggerate our own share in the achievement ; we at the same time entirely misconceive and misdescribe the achievement itself. For from what race were the other four fifths of the army drawn? From the natives of India themselves ! India can hardly be said to have been conquered at all by foreigners ; she has rather conquered herself. If we were justified, which we are not, in personifying India as we personify France or England, we could not describe her as overwhelmed by a foreign enemy ; we should rather have to say that she elected to put an end to anarchy by submitting to a single Government, even though that Government was in the hands of foreigners.
But that description would be as false and misleading as the other, or as any expression which presupposes India to have been a conscious political whole. The truth is that there was no India in the political, and scarcely in any other, sense. The word was a geographical expression, and therefore India was easily conquered, just as Italy and Germany fell an easy prey to Napoleon, because there was no Italy and no Germany, and not even any strong Italian or German national feeling. Because there was no Germany, Napoleon was able to set one German state against another, so that in fighting with Austria or Prussia he had Bavaria and Wiirttemberg for allies. As Napoleon saw that this means of conquest lay ready to his hand in Central Europe, so the Frenchman Dupleix early perceived that this road to empire in India lay open to any European state that might have factories there. He saw a condition of chronic war between one Indian state and another, and he perceived that by interfering in their quarrels the foreigner might arrive to hold the balance between them. He acted upon this view, and accordingly the whole history of European Empire in India begins with the interference of the French in the war of succession in Hyderabad that broke out on the death of the great Nizam ul Mulk (1748).
The fundamental fact then is that India had no jealousy of the foreigner, because India had no sense whatever of national unity, because there was no India, and therefore, properly speaking, no foreigner. So far, as I have pointed out, parallel examples may be found in Europe. But we must imagine a much greater degree of political deadness in India than in Germany eighty years ago, if we would understand the fact now under consideration, the fact namely that the English conquered India by means of a sepoy army. In Germany there was scarcely any German feeling, but there was a certain amount, though not a very great amount, of Prussian feeling, Austrian feeling, Bavarian feeling, Suabian feeling. Napoleon is able to set Bavaria against Austria or both against Prussia, but he does not attempt to set Bavaria or Austria or Prussia against itself. To speak more distinctly, he procures by treaties that the Elector of Bavaria shall furnish a contingent to the army which he leads against Austria; but he does not, simply by offering pay, raise an army of Germans and then use them in the conquest of Germany. This would be the exact parallel to what lias been witnessed in India. A parallel to the fact that India has been conquered by an army of which four-fifths were natives and only one -fifth English, would be found in Europe, if England had invaded France, and then by offering good pay had raised an army of Frenchmen large enough to conquer the country. The very idea seems monstrous.+++(5)+++ What you exclaim, an army of Frenchmen quietly under- take to make war upon France ! And yet, if you reflect, you will see that such a thing is abstractedly quite possible, and that it might have been witnessed if the past history of France had been different. We can imagine that a national feeling had never sprung up in France ; this we can easily imagine, because we know that the twelfth century is full of wars between a king who reigned at Paris and another who reigned at Rouen. But let us imagine further that the different Governments established in different parts of France were mostly foreign Governments, that in fact the country had been conquered before and was still living under the yoke of foreign rulers. We can well understand that if in a country thus broken to the foreign yoke a disturbed state of affairs supervened, making mercenary war a lucrative profession, such a country might come to be full of professional soldiers equally , ready to take service with any Government and against any Government, native or foreign.
Now the condition of India was such as this. The English did not introduce a foreign domination into it, for the foreign domination was there already. In fact we bring to the subject a fixed misconception. The homogeneous European community, a definite territory possessed by a definite race—in one word, the Nation -State, — though we assume it as if it were a matter of course, is in fact much more exceptional than we suppose, and yet it is upon the assumption of such a homogeneous community that all our ideas of patriotism and public virtue depend. The idea of nationality seems in India to be thoroughly confused. The distinction of national and foreign seems to be lost. Not only has a tide of Mussulman invasion covered the country ever since the eleventh century, but even if we go back to the earliest times we still find a mixture of races, a domination of race by race. That Aryan, Sanscrit- speaking race which, as the creators of Brahminism, have given to India whatever unity it can be said to have, appear themselves as invaders, and as invaders who have not succeeded in swallowing up and absorbing the older nationalities. The older, not Indo- Germanic race, has in Europe almost disappeared, and at any rate has left no trace in our European languages, but in India the older stratum is every- where visible. The spoken languages there are not mere corruptions of Sanscrit, but mixtures of Sanscrit with older languages wholly different, and in the south not Sanscrit at all. Brahminism too, which at first sight seems universal, turns out on examination to be a mere vague eclecticism, which has given a show of imity to superstitions wholly unlike and unrelated to each other. It follows that in India the fundamental postulate cannot be granted, upon which the whole political ethics of the West depend. The homogeneous community does not exist there, out of which the State properly so called arises. Indeed to satisfy ourselves of this it is not necessary to travel so far back into the past. It is enough to notice that since the time of Mahmoud of Ghazni a steady stream of Mussulman invasion has poured into India. The majority of the Governments of India were Mussulman long before the arrival of the Mogul in the sixteenth century. From this time therefore in most of the Indian States the tie of nationality was broken. Government ceased to rest upon right; the State lost its right to appeal to patriotism.
In such a state of affairs what is called the conquest of India by the English can be explained without supposing the natives of India to be below other races, just as it does not force us to regard the English as superior to other races. We regard it as the duty of a man to fight for his country against the foreigner.
But what is a man’s country? When we analyse the notion, we find it presupposes the man to have been bred up in a community which may be regarded as a great family, so that it is natural for him to think of the land itself as a mother. But if the community has not been at all of the nature of a family, but has been composed of two or three races hating each other, if not the country, but at most the village has been regarded as a home, then it is not the fault of the natives of it that they have no patriotism but village-patriotism. It is one thing to receive a foreign yoke for the first time, and quite a different thing to exchange one foreign yoke for another.
But, as I have pointed out, the surprising feature in the English conquest of India is not so much that it should have been made, as that it should have cost England no effort and no trouble. The English people have not paid taxes, the English Government has not opened loans, no conscription was ever introduced, nay, no drain of men was ever perceived, and no difficulty was ever felt in carrying on other wars at the same time, because we were engaged in conquering a population equal to that of Europe. This seems at first sight incredible, but I have already given the explanation of it. As to the finance of all these wars, it falls under the general principle which applies to all wars of conquest. Conquest pays its own expenses. As Napoleon had never any financial difficulties, because he lived at the expense of those whom he vanquished in war, so the conquest of India was made, as a matter of course, at the expense of India. The only difficulty then is to understand how the army could be created. And this difficulty too disappears, when we observe that four-fifths of this army was always composed of native troops.
If we fix our attention upon this all-important fact we shall be led, if I mistake not, to perceive that the expression " conquest," as applied to the acquisition of sovereignty by the East India Company in India, is not merely loose but thoroughly misleading, and tempts us to class the event among events which it in no way resembles. I have indeed remarked more than once before that this expression, whenever it is used, requires far more definition than it commonly receives, and that it may bear several different meanings. But surely the word is only applicable at all when it refers to some action done to one state by another. There is war between two states ; the army of the one state invades the other and overturns the Government of it, or at least forces the Govern- ment to such humiliating terms that it is practically deprived of its independence ; this is conquest in the proper sense. Now when we say that England has conquered India, we ought to mean that something of this sort has happened between England and India. When Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire, there was war between the Macedonian state and the Persian, in which the latter was subjugated. When Caesar conquered Gaul, he acted in the name of the Roman Republic, holding an office conferred on him by the senate, and commanding the army of the Roman state. But nothing of this sort happened in India.
The King of England did not declare war upon the Great Mogul or upon any Nawab or Rajah in India. The English state would perhaps have had no concern from first to last in the conquest of India but for this circumstance, that it engaged five times in war with France after the French settlements in India had become considerable, and that these wars, being partly waged in India, were in a certain degree mixed up with the wars between the East India Company and the native Powers of India. If we wish clearly to understand the natiu-e of the phenomenon, we ought to put this circumstance, which was accidental, on one side. We shall then see that nothing like what is strictly called a conquest took place, but that certain traders inhabiting certain sea-port towns in India, were induced, almost forced, in the anarchy caused by the fall of the Mogul Empire, to give themselves a military character and employ troops, that by means of these troops they acquired territory and at last almost all the territory of India, and that these traders happened to be Englishmen, and to employ a certain, though not a large, propor tion of English troops in their army.
Now this is not a foreign conquest, but rather an internal revolution. In any country when government breaks down and anarchy sets in, the general law is that a struggle follows between such organised powers as remain in the country, and that the most powerful of these sets up a Government. In France for instance after the fall of the House of Bourbon in 1792 a new Government was set up chiefly through the influence of the Municipality of Paris; this Government having fallen into discredit a few years later was superseded by a military Government wielded by Bonaparte. Now India about 1750 was in a condition of anarchy caused by a decay in the Mogul Empire, which had begun at the death of Aurungzebe in 1707. The imperial authority having everywhere lost its force over so vast a territory, the general law began to operate. Everywhere the minor organised powers began to make themselves supreme. These powers, after the fashion of India, were most commonly mercenary bands of soldiers, commanded either by some provincial governor of the falling Empire, or by some adventurer who seized an opportunity of rising to the command of them, or lastly by some local power which had existed before the establishment of the Mogul supremacy and had never completely yielded to it. To give an example of each kind of power, the state of Hyderabad was founded by the satrap of the Great Mogul called the Nizam, the state of Mysore was founded by the Mussulman adventurer Hyder Ali, who rose from the ranks by mere military ability, the great Mahratta confederacy of chieftains headed by the Peishwa, a Brahminical not a Mussulman Power, represented the older India of the time before the Mogul. But all these powers alike subsisted by means of mercenary armies ; they lived in a state of chronic war and mutual plunder such as, I suppose, has hardly been witnessed in Europe except perhaps in the dissolution of the Carolingian Empire.
Such a state of affairs was peculiarly favourable to the rise of new powers. In other circumstances conquest presupposes what I may call a capital fund of power. No one can undertake it that does not already possess a recognised authority and an army. In those circumstances it was otherwise. Hyder Ali had nothing but his head and his right arm, and he became Sultan of Mysore. For mercenary armies were everywhere; they were at the service of every one who could pay them or win an influence over them ; and any one who commanded a mercenary army was on a level with the greatest potentates of India, since in the dissolution of authority the only force left was military force.
Now among the different local powers in India, Ill HOW WE CONQUERED INDIA 243 which in such peculiar circumstances might strike for empire with some chance of success, were certain merchants who had factories in the seaport towns. They were foreigners indeed, but, as I have pointed out, this could make no difference in India, where most Governments were foreign, where the Great Mogul himself was a foreigner. Much rhetoric has been spent on the miraculousness of the fortune of the East India Company. It is true that there had been no previous example of such a fortune, and that for this reason it would not have occurred to any one to predict such a fortune. But it was not miraculous in the sense of being hard to account for or having no visible cause. For the East India Company had really some capital to start with. It had a command of money, it had two or three fortresses, the command of the sea, and it had the advantage of being a cor- poration—that is, it was not liable to be killed in battle or to die of a fever. We are not much astonished when an individual rises from some private station into empire over a great territory, because this has happened often. And yet intrinsic- ally it is much more astonishing. That the younger son of a poor nobleman in Corsica should control the greater part of Europe with despotic power, is intrinsically far more wonderful than that the East India Company should conquer India, for Bonaparte began without interest, without friends, without a penny in his pocket, and yet he not only gained his empire but lost it again in less than twenty years. In like manner the rise of Hyder Ali, or of Scindiah, or of Holkar, was more wonderful and demanded more of the special favour of fortune than the rise of the East India Company.
You see that I wish you to place this event in a different class of events from that in which it is commonly placed. It is not the conquest of one state by another. It is not an event in which two states are concerned, at least directly it is not an event belonging to the foreign department. It is an internal revolution in Indian society, and is to be compared to one of those sudden usurpations or coups d’dtat, by which a period of disturbance within a community is closed. Let us imagine for a moment that the merchants who rose to power had not been foreign at all, —the nature of the event is not thereby altered. We may suppose that a number of Parsee merchants in Bombay, tired of the anarchy which disturbed their trade, had subscribed together to establish fortresses and raise troops, and then that they had had the good fortune to employ able generals. In that case they too might have had their Plassey and their Buxar; they too might have extorted from the Great Mogul the Dewannee, or financial administration of a province, and so laid the foundations of an Empire, which might in time have extended over all India. In that case we should have had substantially the same event, but it would have appeared clearly in its true light. We should have recognised it as having the nature of an internal revolution, as being the effect of the natural struggle which every community makes to put down the anarchy which is tearing it to pieces. In such an event as that there would have been nothing very miraculous, and yet the rise of the East India Company was mucli less miraculous. For the Company was closely connected with Europe, and could call in the military science and discipline of Europe, which was evidently superior to that of India.+++(4)+++ That same Frenchman Dupleix, who laid down so clearly the theory of the conquest of India, perceived that the native armies could not for a moment stand before European troops, but he perceived also that the native of India was quite capable of receiving European discipline and learning to fight with European efficiency. This then was the talisman which the Company possessed, and which enabled it not merely to hold its own among the Powers of India but to surpass them,—not some incommunic able physical or moral superiority, as we love to imagine —but a superior discipline and military system, which could be communicated to the natives of India.
Beyond this they had another great advantage. They did not, to be sure, represent the English State, but yet their connection with England was of infinite service to them. They had indeed to procure in the main for themselves the money and the men by which India was conquered. But as a chartered Company which had the monopoly of English trade in India and China, they were an object of interest to the P]nglish Government and to Parliament. It several times happened that the war by which they acquired Indian territory wore the appearance before the English public of a war between England and France, and was therefore heartily supported by the nation. This is a fact of fundamental importance, which has not often been sufficiently considered.
The English conquest of India began not in some quarrel between the Company and a native Power. It began in an alarming attempt made by the French to get control over the Deccan, and so among other things to destroy the English settlements at Madras and Bombay, by interfering in the question of the Hyderabad succession. Our first military step in the East was to defend ourselves against the French attack. And from that time for nearly seventy years —that is, to the end of the war with Napoleon,—our wars in India never ceased to wear more or less the appearance of defensive wars against France. The effect of this was that, though they were not waged in the name or at the expense of the State, yet they seemed to a certain extent national wars,—wars in which England was deeply concerned. To a consider- able extent therefore the Company’s troops were aided by Royal troops, and from 1785, when Lord Cornwallis went out as Governor-General, an English statesman of mark was sent out to preside over the political and -military aflfairs. The attacks that were made upon the Company in Parliament, the vote of censure moved against Lord Clive, the impeachment brought against Hastings, the successive ministerial schemes for regulating the Company’s affairs, one of which in 1783 convulsed the whole political world of England, all these interferences contributed to make Ill HOW WE CONQUEEED INDIA 247 our Indian wars seem national wars, and to identify the Company Avitli the EngKsh nation. In this way the Company was practically backed by the credit and renown of a first-class European state, though at the same time that state contributed little to the wars by which the Company acquired territory.
The words " wonderful," " strange," are often ap- plied to great historical events, and there is no event to which they have been applied more freely than to our conquest of India. But an event may be wonderful or strange without being necessarily at all difficult to account for. The conquest of India is very wonderful in the sense that nothing similar to it had ever happened before, and that therefore nothing similar coiild be expected by those who for the first century and a half administered the afiairs of the Company in India. No doubt Job Charnock, or Josiah Child, or Governor Pitt of Madras (grand father of the great Lord Chatham), or perhaps Major Lawrence, never dreamed that we should one day suppress the authority alike of the Peishwa of the Mahrattas and of the Great Mogul himself. But the event was not wonderful in the sense that it is diffi- cult to discover adequate causes by which it could have been produced. If we begin by remarking that authority in India had fallen on the ground through the decay of the Mogul Empire, that it lay there waiting to be picked up by somebody, and that all over India in that period adventurers of one kind or another were founding Empires, it is really not sur- prising that a mercantile corporation which had money to pay a mercenary force, should be able to compete with other adventurers, nor yet that it should out strip all its competitors by bringing into the field English military science and generalship, especially when it was backed over and over again by the whole power and credit of England and directed by English statesmen.
The sum of what I have urged is that the conquest of India is not in the ordinary sense a conquest at all, because it was not the act of a state and was not accomplished by the army and the money of a state. I have pointed this out in order to remove the per- plexity which must be caused by the statement that England conquered India—that is, a population as large as that of Europe and many thousand miles off, —and yet that England is not a military state, though this enormous conquest was achieved by England •svithout any exhausting effort and without any ex- pense. The explanation of this contradiction is that England did not in the strict sense conquer India, but that certain Englishmen, who happened to reside in India at the time when the Mogul Empire fell, had a fortune like that of Hyder Ali or Kunjeet Singh, and rose to supreme power there.
But yet of course in its practical result the event has proved to be a conquest of India by England. For now that the process is comjflete and the East India Company has been swept away, we see that Queen Victoria is Empress of India, and that a Secretary, who is a member of the English Cabinet and sits in the English Parliament, is responsible for the administration of India. England as a state did not make the acquisition, yet it has fallen to England. This is merely an exemplification of the general principle, which, as I pointed out above, has governed all the settlements of Europeans outside Europe since the time of Columbus. However far they roamed, however strange and wonderful was their success, they were never able at the outset to shake off their European citizenship. Cortez and Pizarro trampled under their feet the Governments they found in America. With scarcely an effort they made themselves supreme wherever they came. But though they could set at nought in Mexico the authority of Montezuma, they could not resist or dream of resisting the authority of Charles V., who was on the other side of the Atlantic. The conse- quence was that whatever conquests they made by their own unassisted audacity and effort were con fiscated at once and as a matter of course by Spain. So with the English in India. After 1765 the East India Company held nominally a high office in the Empire of the Great Mogul. But it was asserted at once by the English Parliament that whatever terri- torial acquisitions might be made by the Company were under the control of Parliament. The Great Mogul’s name was scarcely mentioned in the discus sion, and the question seems never to have been raised whether he would consent to the administra tion of his provinces of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa being thus conducted under the control of a foreign Government. The Company made part of two states 250 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect. ill at once. It was a Company under a Charter from the King of England; it was a Dewan under the Great Mogul. But it swept away the Great Mogul, as Cortez swept away Montezuma ; on the other hand it submitted all its boundless acquisitions meekly to the control of England, and at last, when a century was completed from the battle of Plassey, it suffered itself to be abolished and surrendered India to the English Government.