The First Indian War of Independence (1857-1858)

by Karl Marx

On the East India Company (June-August 1853)

The Charter of the East India Company, Marx 9 June 1853

Sir Charles Woods’ East India Reforms, Marx 22 June 1853

British Rule in India, Marx 25 June 1853

The East India Company, Marx 11 July 1853

The Government of India, Marx 20 July 1853

The Future Results of British Rule in India, Marx 22 July 1853

The East India Question, Marx 25 July 1853

India, Marx 5 August 1853

In the House of Commons, Marx 16 August 1853

News from India, Marx 20 February 1855 (in Neue Oder Zeitung)

The Charter of the East India Company

Source: the New-York Daily Tribune, June 9, 1853;
Transcribed: by Tony Brown.

London, Tuesday, May 24, 1853

The charter of the East India Company expires in 1854. Lord John Russell has given notice in the House of Commons, that the Government will be enabled to state, through Sir Charles Wood, their views respecting the future Government of India, on the 3d of June. A hint has been thrown out in some ministerial papers, in support of the already credited public rumour, that the Coalition have found the means of reducing even this colossal Indian question to almost Lilliputian dimensions. The Observer prepares the mind of the English people to undergo a new disenchantment.

“Much less,” we read in that confidential journal of Aberdeen, “than is generally supposed will remain to be done in the new organization for the Government of our Eastern Empire.”

Much less even than is supposed, will have to be done by my lords Russell and Aberdeen.

The leading features of the proposed change appear to consist in two very small items. Firstly, the Board of Directors will be “refreshed” by some additional members, appointed directly by the Crown, and even this new blood will be infused “sparingly at first.” The cure of the old directorial system is thus meant to be applied, so that the portion of blood now infused with “great caution” will have ample time to come to a standstill before another second infusion will be proceeded upon. Secondly, the union of judge and of Exciseman in one and the same person, will be put an end to, and the judges shall be educated men. Does it not seem, on hearing such propositions, as if one were transported back into that earliest period of the Middle Ages, when the feudal lords began to be replaced as judges, by lawyers who were required, at any rate, to have a knowledge of reading and writing?

The “Sir Charles Wood” who, as President of the Board of Control, will bring forward this sensible piece of reform, is the same timber who, under the late Whig Administration, displayed such eminent capacities of mind, that the Coalition were at a dreadful loss what to do with him, till they hit upon the idea of making him over to India. Richard the Third offered a kingdom for a horse; — the Coalition offers an ass for a kingdom. Indeed, if the present official idiocy of an Oligarchical Government be the expression of what England can do now, the time of England’s ruling the world must have passed away.

On former occasions we have seen that the Coalition had invariably some fitting reason for postponing every, even the smaller measure. Now, with respect to India their postponing propensities are supported by the public opinion of two worlds. The people of England and the people of India simultaneously demand the postponement of all the legislation on Indian affairs, until the voice of the natives shall have been heard, the necessary materials collected, the pending inquiries completed. Petitions have already reached Downing St., from the three Presidencies deprecating precipitate legislation. The Manchester School have formed an “Indian Society,” which they will put immediately into motion, to get up public meetings in the metropolis and throughout the country, for the purpose of opposing any legislation on the subject for this session. Besides, two Parliamentary Committees are now sitting with a view to report respecting the state of affairs in the Indian Government. But this time the Coalition Ministry is inexorable. It will not wait for the publication of any Committee’s advice. It wants to legislate instantly and directly for 150 millions of people, and to legislate for 20 years at once. Sir Charles Wood is anxious to establish his claim as the modern Manu. Whence, of a sudden, this precipitate legislative rush of our “cautious” political valetudinarians?

They want to renew the old Indian Charter for a period of 20 years. They avail themselves of the eternal pretext of Reform. Why? The English oligarchy have a presentiment of the approaching end of their days of glory, and they have a very justifiable desire to conclude such a treaty with English legislation, that even in the case of England’s escaping soon from their weak and rapacious hands, they shall still retain for themselves and their associates the privilege of plundering India for the space of 20 years.

Sir Charles Woods’ East India Reforms

Source: the New-York Daily Tribune, June 22, 1853;
Transcribed: by Tony Brown.

London, Tuesday, June 7, 1853

The last India Bill of 1783 proved fatal to the Coalition Cabinet of Mr. Fox and Lord North. The new India Bill of 1853 is likely to prove fatal for the Coalition Cabinet of Mr. Gladstone and Lord John Russell. But if the former were thrown overboard, because of their attempt to abolish the Courts of Directors and of Proprietors, the latter are threatened with a similar fate for the opposite reason. On June 3, Sir Charles Wood moved for leave to bring in a bill to provide for the Government of India. Sir Charles commenced by excusing the anomalous length of the speech he was about to deliver, by the “magnitude of the subject,” and “the 150,000,000 of souls he had to deal with.” For every 30,000,000 of his fellow-subjects, Sir Charles could do no less than sacrifice one hour’s breath. But why this precipitate legislation on that “great subject,” while you postpone it “for even the most trifling matters?” Because the Charter of the East India Company expires on the 30th April, 1854. But why not pass a temporary continuance bill, reserving to future discussion more permanent legislation? Because it cannot be expected that we shall ever find again “such an opportunity of dealing quietly with this vast and important question” — i.e., of burking it in a Parliamentary way. Besides, we are fully informed on the matter, the Directors of the East India Company express the opinion that it is necessary to legislate in the course of the present session, and the Governor-General of India, Lord Dalhousie, summons the Government by an express letter by all means to conclude our legislation at once. But the most striking argument wherewith Sir Charles justifies his immediate legislation, is that, prepared as he may appear to speak of a world of questions, “not comprised in the bill he proposed to bring in,” the

“measure which he has to submit is, so far as legislation goes, comprised in a very small compass.”

After this ‘Introduction Sir Charles delivered himself of an apology for the administration of India for the last twenty years. “We must look at India with somewhat of an Indian eye” — which Indian eye seems to have the particular gift of seeing everything bright on the part of England and everything black on the side of India.

“In India you have a race of people slow of change, bound up by religious prejudices and antiquated customs. There are [...],in fact, all obstacles to rapid progress.”

(Perhaps there is a Whig Coalition party in India.)

“The points,” said Sir Charles Wood, “upon which the greatest stress has been laid, and which are the heads of the complaints contained in the petitions presented to the Committee, relate to the administration of justice, the want of public works, and the tenure of land.”

With regard to the Public Works, the Government intends to undertake some of “the greatest magnitude and importance.” With regard to the tenure of lands, Sir Charles proves very successfully that its three existing forms — the Zemindari, the Ryotwari, and the Village systems — are only so many forms of fiscal exploitation in the hands of the Company , none of which could well be made general, nor deserved to be made so. An idea of establishing another form, of an altogether opposite character, does not in the least preoccupy the mind of Sir Charles.

“With regard to the administration of justice,” continues he, “the complaints relate principally to the inconvenience arising from the technicalities of English law, to the alleged incompetency of English judges, and to the corruption of the native officers and judges.”

And now, in order to prove the hard labor of providing for the administration of justice in India, Sir Charles relates that already, as early as 1833, a Law Commission was appointed in India. But in what manner did this Commission act, according to Sir Charles Wood’s own testimony? The first and last result of the labors of that Commission was a penal code, prepared under the auspices of Mr. Macaulay. This code was sent to the various local authorities in India, which sent it back to Calcutta, from which it was sent to England, to be again returned from England to India. In India, Mr. Macaulay having been replaced as legislative counsel by Mr. Bethune, the code was totally altered, and on this plea the Governor-General, not being then of opinion “that delay is a source of weakness and danger,” sent it back to England, and from England it was returned to the Governor-General, with authority to pass the code in whatever shape he thought best. But now, Mr. Bethune having died, the Governor-General thought best to submit the code to a third English lawyer, and to a lawyer who knew nothing about the habits and customs of the Hindoos, reserving himself the right of afterward rejecting a code concocted by wholly incompetent authority. Such have been the adventures of that yet unborn code. As to the technical absurdities of the law in India, Sir Charles takes his stand on the no less absurd technicalities of the English law-procedure itself; but while affirming the perfect incorruptibility of the English judges in India, he nevertheless is ready to sacrifice them by an alteration in the manner of nominating them. The general progress of India is demonstrated by a comparison of the present state of Delhi with that under the invasion of Khuli-Khan. The salt-tax is justified by the arguments of the most renowned political economists, all of whom have advised taxation to be laid on some article of first necessity. But Sir Charles does not add what those same economists would have said, on finding that in the two years from 1849-'50, and 185 1252, there had been a decrease in the consumption of salt, of 60,000 tuns, a loss of revenue to the amount of £415,000, the total salt revenue amounting to £2,000,000. The measures proposed by Sir Charles, and “comprised in a very small compass,” are:

1. The Court of Directors, to consist of eighteen instead of twenty-four members, twelve to be elected by the Proprietors, and six by the Crown.

2. The revenue of Directors to be raised from £300 to £500 a year, the Chairman to receive £1,000.

3. All the ordinary appointments in the civil service, and all the scientific in the military service of India, to be thrown open to public competition, leaving to the Directors the nomination to the Cadetships in the Cavalry-of-the-Line.

4. The Governor-Generalship to be separated from the Governorship of Bengal, and power to be given to the Supreme Government to constitute a new Presidency in the districts on the Indus.

5. And lastly, the whole of this measure only to continue until the Parliament shall provide otherwise.

The speech and measure of Sir Charles Wood was subjected to a very strong and satirical criticism by Mr. Bright, whose picture of India ruined by the fiscal exertions of the Company and Government did not, of course, receive the supplement of India ruined by Manchester and Free Trade. As to last night’s speech of an old East-Indiaman, Sir J. Hogg, Director or ex-Director of the Company, I really suspect that I have met with it already in 1701, 1730, 1743, 1769, 1772, 1781, 1783, 1784, 1793, 1813, etc., and am induced, by way of answer to his directorial panegyric, to quote merely a few facts from the annual Indian accounts published, I believe, under his own superintendence.

 Total Net-Revenues of India

Total Charges

Land-Tax

have been expended on roads, canals, bridges and other works of public necessity.

Karl Marx in the New-York Herald Tribune 1853

The British Rule in India

Source: MECW Volume 12, p. 125;
Written: June 10, 1853;
First published: in the New-York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853;
Proofread: by Andy Blunden in February 2005.

In writing this article, Marx made use of some of Engels’ ideas as in his letter to Marx of June 6, 1853.

London, Friday, June 10, 1853

Telegraphic dispatches from Vienna announce that the pacific solution of the Turkish, Sardinian and Swiss questions, is regarded there as a certainty.

Last night the debate on India was continued in the House of Commons, in the usual dull manner. Mr. Blackett charged the statements of Sir Charles Wood and Sir J. Hogg with bearing the stamp of optimist falsehood. A lot of Ministerial and Directorial advocates rebuked the charge as well as they could, and the inevitable Mr. Hume summed up by calling on Ministers to withdraw their bill. Debate adjourned.

Hindostan is an Italy of Asiatic dimensions, the Himalayas for the Alps, the Plains of Bengal for the Plains of Lombardy, the Deccan for the Apennines, and the Isle of Ceylon for the Island of Sicily. The same rich variety in the products of the soil, and the same dismemberment in the political configuration. Just as Italy has, from time to time, been compressed by the conqueror’s sword into different national masses, so do we find Hindostan, when not under the pressure of the Mohammedan, or the Mogul^[104], or the Briton, dissolved into as many independent and conflicting States as it numbered towns, or even villages. Yet, in a social point of view, Hindostan is not the Italy, but the Ireland of the East. And this strange combination of Italy and of Ireland, of a world of voluptuousness and of a world of woes, is anticipated in the ancient traditions of the religion of Hindostan. That religion is at once a religion of sensualist exuberance, and a religion of self-torturing asceticism; a religion of the Lingam and of the juggernaut; the religion of the Monk, and of the Bayadere.^[105]

I share not the opinion of those who believe in a golden age of Hindostan, without recurring, however, like Sir Charles Wood, for the confirmation of my view, to the authority of Khuli-Khan. But take, for example, the times of Aurangzeb; or the epoch, when the Mogul appeared in the North, and the Portuguese in the South; or the age of Mohammedan invasion, and of the Heptarchy in Southern India^[106]; or, if you will, go still more back to antiquity, take the mythological chronology of the Brahman himself, who places the commencement of Indian misery in an epoch even more remote than the Christian creation of the world.

There cannot, however, remain any doubt but that the misery inflicted by the British on Hindostan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindostan had to suffer before. I do not allude to European despotism, planted upon Asiatic despotism, by the British East India Company, forming a more monstrous combination than any of the divine monsters startling us in the Temple of Salsette^[107]. This is no distinctive feature of British Colonial rule, but only an imitation of the Dutch, and so much so that in order to characterise the working of the British East India Company, it is sufficient to literally repeat what Sir Stamford Raffles, the English Governor of Java, said of the old Dutch East India Company:

“The Dutch Company, actuated solely by the spirit of gain, and viewing their [Javan] subjects, with less regard or consideration than a West India planter formerly viewed a gang upon his estate, because the latter had paid the purchase money of human property, which the other had not, employed all the existing machinery of despotism to squeeze from the people their utmost mite of contribution, the last dregs of their labor, and thus aggravated the evils of a capricious and semi-barbarous Government, by working it with all the practised ingenuity of politicians, and all the monopolizing selfishness of traders.”

All the civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines, strangely complex, rapid, and destructive as the successive action in Hindostan may appear, did not go deeper than its surface. England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing. This loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindoo, and separates Hindostan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history.

There have been in Asia, generally, from immemorial times, but three departments of Government; that of Finance, or the plunder of the interior; that of War, or the plunder of the exterior; and, finally, the department of Public Works. Climate and territorial conditions, especially the vast tracts of desert, extending from the Sahara, through Arabia, Persia, India, and Tartary, to the most elevated Asiatic highlands, constituted artificial irrigation by canals and water-works the basis of Oriental agriculture. As in Egypt and India, inundations are used for fertilizing the soil in Mesopotamia, Persia, &c.; advantage is taken of a high level for feeding irrigative canals. This prime necessity of an economical and common use of water, which, in the Occident, drove private enterprise to voluntary association, as in Flanders and Italy, necessitated, in the Orient where civilization was too low and the territorial extent too vast to call into life voluntary association, the interference of the centralizing power of Government. Hence an economical function devolved upon all Asiatic Governments, the function of providing public works. This artificial fertilization of the soil, dependent on a Central Government, and immediately decaying with the neglect of irrigation and drainage, explains the otherwise strange fact that we now find whole territories barren and desert that were once brilliantly cultivated, as Palmyra, Petra, the ruins in Yemen, and large provinces of Egypt, Persia, and Hindostan; it also explains how a single war of devastation has been able to depopulate a country for centuries, and to strip it of all its civilization.

Now, the British in East India accepted from their predecessors the department of finance and of war, but they have neglected entirely that of public works. Hence the deterioration of an agriculture which is not capable of being conducted on the British principle of free competition, of laissez-faire and laissez-aller. But in Asiatic empires we are quite accustomed to see agriculture deteriorating under one government and reviving again under some other government. There the harvests correspond to good or bad government, as they change in Europe with good or bad seasons. Thus the oppression and neglect of agriculture, bad as it is, could not be looked upon as the final blow dealt to Indian society by the British intruder, had it not been attended by a circumstance of quite different importance, a novelty in the annals of the whole Asiatic world. However changing the political aspect of India’s past must appear, its social condition has remained unaltered since its remotest antiquity, until the first decennium of the 19th century. The hand-loom and the spinning-wheel, producing their regular myriads of spinners and weavers, were the pivots of the structure of that society. From immemorial times, Europe received the admirable textures of Indian labor, sending in return for them her precious metals, and furnishing thereby his material to the goldsmith, that indispensable member of Indian society, whose love of finery is so great that even the lowest class, those who go about nearly naked, have commonly a pair of golden ear-rings and a gold ornament of some kind hung round their necks. Rings on the fingers and toes have also been common. Women as well as children frequently wore massive bracelets and anklets of gold or silver, and statuettes of divinities in gold and silver were met with in the households. It was the British intruder who broke up the Indian hand-loom and destroyed the spinning-wheel. England began with driving the Indian cottons from the European market; it then introduced twist into Hindostan, and in the end inundated the very mother country of cotton with cottons. From 1818 to 1836 the export of twist from Great Britain to India rose in the proportion of 1 to 5,200. In 1824 the export of British muslins to India hardly amounted to 1,000,000 yards, while in 1837 it surpassed 64,000,000 of yards. But at the same time the population of Dacca decreased from 150,000 inhabitants to 20,000. This decline of Indian towns celebrated for their fabrics was by no means the worst consequence. British steam and science uprooted, over the whole surface of Hindostan, the union between agriculture and manufacturing industry.

These two circumstances – the Hindoo, on the one hand, leaving, like all Oriental peoples, to the Central Government the care of the great public works, the prime condition of his agriculture and commerce, dispersed, on the other hand, over the surface of the country, and agglomerated in small centers by the domestic union of agricultural and manufacturing pursuits – these two circumstances had brought about, since the remotest times, a social system of particular features – the so-called village system, which gave to each of these small unions their independent organization and distinct life. The peculiar character of this system may be judged from the following description, contained in an old official report of the British House of Commons on Indian affairs:

“A village, geographically considered, is a tract of country comprising some hundred or thousand acres of arable and waste lands; politically viewed it resembles a corporation or township. Its proper establishment of officers and servants consists of the following descriptions: The potail, or head inhabitant, who has generally the superintendence of the affairs of the village, settles the disputes of the inhabitants attends to the police, and performs the duty of collecting the revenue within his village, a duty which his personal influence and minute acquaintance with the situation and concerns of the people render him the best qualified for this charge. The kurnum keeps the accounts of cultivation, and registers everything connected with it. The tallier and the totie, the duty of the former of which consists [...] in gaining information of crimes and offenses, and in escorting and protecting persons travelling from one village to another; the province of the latter appearing to be more immediately confined to the village, consisting, among other duties, in guarding the crops and assisting in measuring them. The boundary-man, who preserves the limits of the village, or gives evidence respecting them in cases of dispute. The Superintendent of Tanks and Watercourses distributes the water [...] for the purposes of agriculture. The Brahmin, who performs the village worship. The schoolmaster, who is seen teaching the children in a village to read and write in the sand. The calendar-brahmin, or astrologer, etc. These officers and servants generally constitute the establishment of a village; but in some parts of the country it is of less extent, some of the duties and functions above described being united in the same person; in others it exceeds the above-named number of individuals. [...] Under this simple form of municipal government, the inhabitants of the country have lived from time immemorial. The boundaries of the villages have been but seldom altered; and though the villages themselves have been sometimes injured, and even desolated by war, famine or disease, the same name, the same limits, the same interests, and even the same families have continued for ages. The inhabitants gave themselves no trouble about the breaking up and divisions of kingdoms; while the village remains entire, they care not to what power it is transferred, or to what sovereign it devolves; its internal economy remains unchanged. The potail is still the head inhabitant, and still acts as the petty judge or magistrate, and collector or renter of the village.”

These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.

Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.

Then, whatever bitterness the spectacle of the crumbling of an ancient world may have for our personal feelings, we have the right, in point of history, to exclaim with Goethe:

“Sollte these Qual uns quälen
Da sie unsre Lust vermehrt,
Hat nicht myriaden Seelen
Timur’s Herrschaft aufgezehrt?”

[“Should this torture then torment us
Since it brings us greater pleasure?
Were not through the rule of Timur
Souls devoured without measure?”]
[From Goethe’s “An Suleika”, Westöstlicher Diwan]

Karl Marx

Footnotes from MECW Volume 12

104 A reference to the rule in India, mainly in the north, of the Mohammedan invaders who came from Central Asia, Afghanistan and Persia. Early in the thirteenth century the Delhi Sultanate became the bulwark of Moslem domination but at the end of the fourteenth century it declined and was subsequently conquered by the Moguls, new invaders of Turkish descent, who came to India from the east of Central Asia in the early sixteenth century and in 1526 founded the Empire of the Great Moguls (named after the ruling dynasty of the Empire) in Northern India. Contemporaries regarded them as the direct descendants of the Mongol warriors of Genghis Khan’s time, hence the name “Moguls”. In the mid-seventeenth century the Mogul Empire included the greater part of India and part of Afghanistan. Later on, however, the Empire began to decline due to peasant rebellions, the growing resistance of the Indian people to the Mohammedan conquerors and increasing separatist tendencies. In the early half of the eighteenth century the Empire of the Great Moguls practically ceased to exist.

105 Religion of the Lingam – the cult of the God Shiva, particularly widespread among the southern Indian sect of the Lingayat (from the word “linga” - the emblem of Shiva), a Hindu sect which does not recognise distinctions of caste and rejects fasts, sacrifices and pilgrimages.

Juggernaut (jagannath) – a title of Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu. The cult of juggernaut was marked by sumptuous ritual and extreme religious fanaticism which manifested itself in the self-torture and suicide of believers. On feast days some believers threw themselves under the wheels of the chariot bearing the idol of Vishnu-juggernaut.

106 Heptarchy (government by seven rulers) – a term used by English historiographers to describe the political system in England from the sixth to eighth centuries, when the country was divided into seven highly unstable Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, which, in their turn, frequently split up and reunited. Marx uses this term by analogy to describe the disunity of the Deccan (Central and South India) before its conquest by the Mohammedans at the beginning of the fourteenth century.

107 The island of Salsette, north of Bombay, was famous for its 109 Buddhist cave temples.

The East India Company — Its History and Results

Source: MECW Volume 12, p. 148;
Written: June 24, 1853;
First published: in the New-York Daily Tribune, July 11, 1853.

London, Friday, June 24, 1853

The debate on Lord Stanley’s motion to postpone legislation for India, has been deferred until this evening. For the first time since 1783 the India question has become a ministerial one in England. Why is this?

The true commencement of the East India Company cannot be dated from a more remote epoch than the year 1702, when the different societies, claiming the monopoly of the East India trade, united together in one single Company. Till then the very existence of the original East India Company was repeatedly endangered, once suspended for years under the protectorate of Cromwell, and once threatened with utter dissolution by Parliamentary interference under the reign of William III. It was under the ascendancy of that Dutch Prince when the Whigs became the farmers of the revenues of the British Empire, when the Bank of England^[120] sprung into life, when the protective system was firmly established in England, and the balance of power in Europe was definitively settled, that the existence of an East India Company was recognized by Parliament. That era of apparent liberty was in reality the era of monopolies not created by Royal grants, as in the times of Elizabeth and Charles I, but authorized and nationalized by the sanction of Parliament. This epoch in the history of England bears, in fact, an extreme likeness to the epoch of Louis Philippe in France, the old landed aristocracy having been defeated, and the bourgeoisie not being able to take its place except under the banner of moneyocracy, or the “haute finance.” The East India Company excluded the common people from the commerce with India, at the same time that the House of Commons excluded them from Parliamentary representation. In this as well as in other instances, we find the first decisive victory of the bourgeoisie over the feudal aristocracy coinciding with the most pronounced reaction against the people, a phenomenon which has driven more than one popular writer, like Cobbett, to look for popular liberty rather in the past than in the future.

The union between the Constitutional Monarchy and the monopolizing monied interest, between the Company of East India and the “glorious” revolution of 1688^[121] was fostered by the same force by which the liberal interests and a liberal dynasty have at all times and in all countries met and combined, by the force of corruption, that first and last moving power of Constitutional Monarchy, the guardian angel of William III and the fatal demon of Louis Philippe. So early as 1693, it appeared from Parliamentary inquiries, that the annual expenditure of the East India Company, under the head of “gifts” to men in power, which had rarely amounted to above £1,200 before the revolution, reached the sum of £90,000. The Duke of Leeds was impeached for a bribe of £5,000, and the virtuous King himself convicted of having received £10,000. Besides these direct briberies, rival Companies were thrown out by tempting Government with loans of enormous sums at the lowest interest, and by buying off rival Directors.

The power the East India Company had obtained by bribing the Government, as did also the Bank of England, it was forced to maintain by bribing again, as did the Bank of England. At every epoch when its monopoly was expiring, it could only effect a renewal of its Charter by offering fresh loans and by fresh presents made to the Government.

The events of the Seven-Years-War transformed the East India Company from a commercial into a military and territorial power^[122]. It was then that the foundation was laid of the present British Empire in the East. Then East India stock rose to £263, and dividends were then paid at the rate of 12 1/2 per cent. But then there appeared a new enemy to the Company, no longer in the shape of rival societies, but in the shape of rival ministers and of a rival people. It was alleged that the Company’s territory had been conquered by the aid of British fleets and’, British armies, and that no British subjects could hold territorial sovereignties independent of the Crown. The ministers of the day and the people of the day claimed their share in the “wonderful treasures” imagined to have been won by the last conquests. The Company only saved its existence by an agreement made in 1767 that it should annually pay £400,000 into the National Exchequer.

But the East India Company, instead of fulfilling its agreement, got into financial difficulties, and, instead of paying a tribute to the English people, appealed to Parliament for pecuniary aid. Serious alterations in the Charter were the consequence of this step. The Company’s affairs failing to improve, notwithstanding their new condition, and the English nation having simultaneously lost their colonies in North America, the necessity of elsewhere regaining some great Colonial Empire became more and more universally felt. The illustrious Fox thought the opportune moment had arrived, in 1783, for bringing forward his famous India bill, which proposed to abolish the Courts of Directors and Proprietors, and to vest the whole Indian government in the hands of seven Commissioners appointed by Parliament. By the personal influence of the imbecile King [George III] over the House of Lords, the bill of Mr. Fox was defeated, and made the instrument of breaking down the then Coalition Government of Fox and Lord North, and of placing the famous Pitt at the head of the Government. Pitt carried in 1784 a bill through both Houses, which directed the establishment of the Board of Control, consisting of six members of the Privy Council, who were

“to check, superintend and control all acts, operations and concerns which in any wise related to the civil and military Government, or revenues of the territories and possessions of the East India Company.”

On this head, Mill, the historian, says:

“In passing that law two objects were pursued. To avoid the imputation of what was represented as the heinous object of Mr. Fox’s bill, it was necessary that the principal part of the power should appear to remain in the hand of the Directors. For ministerial advantage it was necessary that it should in reality be all taken away. Mr. Pitt’s bill professed to differ from that of his rival, chiefly in this very point, that while the one destroyed the power of the Directors, the other left it almost entire. Under the act of Mr. Fox the powers of the ministers would have been avowedly held. Under the act of Mr. Pitt, they were held in secret and by fraud. The bill of Fox transferred the powers of the Company to Commissioners appointed by Parliament. The bill of Mr, Pitt transferred them to Commissioners appointed by the King.”

The years of 1783 and 1784 were thus the first, and till now the only years, for the India question to become a ministerial one. The bill of Mr. Pitt having been carried, the Charter of the East India Company was renewed, and the Indian question set aside for twenty years. But in 1813 the Anti-Jacobin war, and in 1833 the newly introduced Reform Bill^[123] superseded all other political questions.

This, then, is the first reason of the India question’s having failed to become a great political question, since and before 1784; that before that time the East India Company had first to conquer existence and importance; that after that time the Oligarchy absorbed all of its power which it could assume without incurring responsibility; and that afterwards the English people in general were at the very epochs of the renewal of the Charter, in 1813 and 1833, absorbed by other questions of overbearing interest.

We will now take a different view. The East India Company commenced by attempting merely to establish factories for their agents, and places of deposit for their goods. In order to protect them they erected several forts. Although they had, even as early as 1689, conceived the establishment of a dominion in India, and of making territorial revenue one of their sources of emolument, yet, down to 1744, they had acquired but a few unimportant districts around Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. The war which subsequently broke out in the Carnatic had the effect of rendering them after various struggles, virtual sovereigns of that part of India. Much more considerable results arose from the war in Bengal and the victories of Clive. These results were the real occupation of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa^[124]. At the end of the Eighteenth Century, and in the first years of the present one, there supervened the wars with Tippoo Saib, and in consequence of them a great advance of power, and an immense extension of the subsidiary system.^[125] In the second decennium of the Nineteenth Century the first convenient frontier, that of India within the desert, had at length been conquered. It was not till then that the British Empire in the East reached those parts of Asia, which had been, at all times, the seat of every great central power in India. But the most vulnerable point of the Empire, from which it had been overrun as often as old conquerors were expelled by new ones, the barriers of the Western frontier, were not in the hands of the British. During the period from 1838 to 1849, in the Sikh and Afghan wars, British rule subjected to definitive possession the ethnographical, political, and military frontiers of the East Indian Continent, by the compulsory annexation of the Punjab and of Scinde. These were possessions indispensable to repulse any invading force issuing from Central Asia, and indispensable against Russia advancing to the frontiers of Persia. During this last decennium there have been added to the British Indian territory 167,000 square miles, with a population of 8,572,630 souls. As to the interior, all the native States now became surrounded by British possessions, subjected to British suzeraineté under various forms, and cut off from the sea-coast, with the sole exception of Guzerat and Scinde. As to its exterior, India was now finished. It is only since 1849, that the one great Anglo-Indian Empire has existed.

Thus the British Government has been fighting, under the Company’s name, for two centuries, till at last the natural limits of India were reached. We understand now, why during ail this time all parties in England have connived in silence, even those which had resolved to become the loudest with their hypocritical peace-cant, after the arrondissement of the one Indian Empire should have been completed. Firstly, of course, they had to get it, in order to subject it afterward to their sharp philanthropy. From this view we understand the altered position of the Indian question in the present year, 1853, compared with all former periods of Charter renewal.

Again, let us take a different view. We shall still better understand the peculiar crisis in Indian legislation, on reviewing the course of British commercial intercourse with India through its different phases.

At the commencement of the East India Company’s operations, under the reign of Elizabeth, the Company was permitted for the purpose of profitably carrying on its trade with India, for export an annual value of £30,000 in silver, gold, and foreign coin. This was an infraction against all the prejudices of the age, and Thomas Mun was forced to lay down in A Discourse on Trade from England to the East Indies, the foundation of the “mercantile system,” admitting that the precious metals were the only real wealth a country could possess, but contending at the same time that their exportation might be safely allowed, provided the balance of payments was in favor of the exporting nation. In this sense, he contended that the commodities imported from East India were chiefly re-exported to other countries, from which a much greater quantity of bullion was obtained than had been required to pay for them in India. In the same spirit, Sir Josiah Child wrote A Treatise wherein It Is Demonstrated That the East India Trade Is the Most National Trade of All Trades. By-and-by the partisans of the East India Company grew more audacious, and it may be noticed as a curiosity, in this strange Indian history, that the Indian monopolises were the first preachers of free trade in England.

Parliamentary intervention, with regard to the East India Company, was again claimed, not by the commercial, but by the industrial class, at the latter end of the 17th century, and during the greater part of the 18th, when the importation of East Indian cotton and silk stuffs was declared to ruin the poor British manufacturers, an opinion put forward in John Pollexfen: England and India Inconsistent in Their Manufactures, London, 1697^[127], a title strangely verified a century and a half later, but in a very different sense. Parliament did then interfere. By the Act 11 and 12 William III, cap. 10, it was enacted that the wearing of wrought silks and of printed or dyed calicoes from India, Persia and China should be prohibited, and a penalty of £200 imposed on all persons having or selling the same. Similar laws were enacted under George I, II and III, in consequence of the repeated lamentations of the afterward so “enlightened” British manufacturers. And thus, during the greater part of the 18th century, Indian manufactures were generally imported into England in order to he sold on the Continent, and to remain excluded from the English market itself.

Besides this Parliamentary interference with East India, solicited by the greedy home manufacturer, efforts were made at every epoch of the renewal of the Charter, by the merchants of London, Liverpool and Bristol, to break down the commercial monopoly of the Company, and to participate in that commerce, estimated to be a true mine of gold. In consequence of these efforts, a provision was made in the Act of 1773 prolonging the Company’s Charter till March 1, 1814, by which private British individuals were authorized to export from, and the Company’s Indian servants permitted to import into England, almost all sorts of commodities. But this concession was surrounded with conditions annihilating its effects, in respect to the exports to British India by private merchants. In 1813 the Company was unable to further withstand the pressure of general commerce, and except the monopoly of the Chinese trade, the trade to India was opened, under certain conditions, to private competition. At the renewal of the Charter in 1833, these last restrictions were at length superseded, the Company forbidden to carry on any trade at all — their commercial character destroyed, and their privilege of excluding British subjects from the Indian territories withdrawn.

Meanwhile the East India trade had undergone very serious revolutions, altogether altering the position of the different class interests in England with regard to it. During the whole course of the 18th century the treasures transported from India to England were gained much less by comparatively insignificant commerce, than by the direct exploitation of that country, and by the colossal fortunes there extorted and transmitted to England. After the opening of the trade in 1813 the commerce with India more than trebled in a very short time. But this was not all. The whole character of the trade was changed. Till 1813 India had been chiefly an exporting country, while it now became an importing one; and in such a quick progression, that already in 1823 the rate of exchange, which had generally been 2/6 per rupee, sunk down to 2/ per rupee. India, the great workshop of cotton manufacture for the world, since immemorial times, became now inundated with English twists and cotton stuffs. After its own produce had been excluded from England, or only admitted on the most cruel terms, British manufactures were poured into it at a small and merely nominal duty, to the ruin of the native cotton fabrics once so celebrated. In 1780 the value of British produce and manufactures amounted only to £386;152, the bullion exported during the same year to £15,041, the total value of exports during 1780 being £12,648,616, so that the India trade amounted to only 1-32 of the entire foreign trade. In 1850 the total exports to India from Great Britain and Ireland were £8,024,000, of which cotton goods alone amounted to £5,220,000, so that it reached more than ‘/s of the whole export, and more than 1/4 of the foreign cotton trade. But the cotton manufacture also employed now 1/8 of the population of Britain, and contributed 1/12th of the whole national revenue. After each commercial crisis the East Indian trade grew of more paramount importance for the British cotton manufacturers, and the East India Continent became actually their best market. At the same rate at which the cotton manufactures became of vital interest for the whole social frame of Great Britain, East India became of vital interest for the British cotton manufacture.

Till then the interests of the moneyocracy which had converted India into its landed estates, of the oligarchy who had conquered it by their armies, and of the millocracy who had inundated it with their fabrics, had gone hand in hand. But the more the industrial interest became dependent on the Indian market, the more it fell the necessity of creating fresh productive powers in India, after having ruined her native industry. You cannot continue to inundate a country with your manufactures, unless you enable it to give you some produce in return. The industrial interest found that their trade declined instead of increasing. For the four years ending with 1846, the imports to India from Great Britain were to the amount of 261 million rupees; for the four years ending 1850 they were only 253 millions, while the exports for the former period 274 millions of rupees, and for the latter period 254 millions. They found out that the power of consuming their goods was contracted in India to the lowest possible point, that the consumption of their manufactures by the British West Indies, was of the value of about 14s. per head of the population per annum, by Chile, of 9s. 3d., by Brazil, of 6s. 5d., by Cuba, of 6s. 2d., by Peru, of 5s. 7d., by Central America, of 10d., while it amounted in India only to about 9d. Then came the short cotton crop in the United States, which caused them a loss of £11,000,000 in 1850, and they were exasperated at depending on America, instead of deriving a sufficiency of raw cotton from the East Indies. Besides, they found that in all attempts to apply capital to India they met with impediments and chicanery on the part of the India authorities. Thus India became the battle-field in the contest of the industrial interest on the one side, and of the moneyocracy and oligarchy on the other. The manufacturers, conscious of their ascendancy in England, ask now for the annihilation of these antagonistic powers in India, for the destruction of the whole ancient fabric of Indian government, and for the final eclipse of the East India Company.

And now to the fourth and last point of view, from which the Indian question must be judged. Since 1784 Indian finances have got more and more deeply into difficulty. There exists now a national debt of 50 million pounds, a continual decrease in the resources of the revenue, and a corresponding increase in the expenditure, dubiously balanced by the gambling income of the opium tax, now threatened. with extinction by the Chinese beginning themselves to cultivate the poppy, and aggravated by the expenses to be anticipated from the senseless Burmese war^[128].

“As the case stands,” says Mr. Dickinson, “as it would ruin England to lose her Empire in India, it is threatening our own finances with ruin, to be obliged to keep it.”

I have shown thus, how the Indian question has become for the first time since 1783, an English question, and a ministerial question.

Footnotes from MECW Volume 12

120 The Bank of England was founded by private persons in 1694. The founders loaned its fixed capital to the government, which explains the origin of the British national debt. The Bank was actually controlled by the government and functioned as the state bank, e.g. it was entitled to issue money. It remained nominally a private establishment, however, until the end of the Second World War.

121 A reference to the overthrow of the Stuart dynasty and the enthronement of William Ill of Orange, after which constitutional monarchy was consolidated in England on the basis of a compromise between the landed aristocracy and the financial bourgeoisie. p. 149

122 The Seven Years’ War (1756-63)-a war between the Anglo-Prussian and the Franco-Russo-Austrian coalitions. One of the chief causes of the war was the colonial and commercial rivalry between England and France. The main theatre of operations in the East was India where the French and their puppets among the local princes were opposed by the British East India Company, which took advantage of the war to seize new Indian territories. The war ended with France losing almost all her possessions in India (except five coastal towns whose fortifications she was compelled to demolish), while England considerably strengthened her colonial might.

123 A reference to the Reform Bill which was passed by Parliament in June 1832. The Bill was directed against the political monopoly of the landed and financial aristocracy and gave representatives of the industrial bourgeoisie access to Parliament. The proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie, the main forces in the struggle for the reform, received no electoral rights.

124 Marx lists a number of wars of conquest waged by the British East India Company. The war in the Carnatic (a principality in South-Eastern India) lasted at intervals from 1746 to 1763. The warring sides-the British and French East India Companies-sought to subjugate the Carnatic under the guise of supporting different local pretenders to the principality. The British, who in January 1761 took possession of Pondichery, the principal French bastion in the south, ultimately won the day.

In 1756, in an effort to avert a British invasion, the Nawab of Bengal started a war, seizing Calcutta, the British base in North-Eastern India. But the armed forces of the British East India Company under Robert Clive’s command soon recaptured the city, demolished the Bengal fortifications of the French, who supported the Nawab, and defeated him at Plassey on June 23, 1757. In 1763 they crushed the uprising that broke out in Bengal against British rule. Along with Bengal, the British took possession of Bibar, a region on the Ganges, which was under the rule of the Nawab of Bengal. In 1803, the British completed the conquest of several feudal principalities of Orissa situated south of Bengal.

125 In 1790-92 and 1799 the British East India Company waged wars with Mysore, an independent feudal state in South India. Its ruler Tippoo Saib had taken part in previous Mysore campaigns against the British and was a sworn enemy of the British colonialists. In the first of these wars Mysore lost half of its dominions, which were seized by the East India Company and its allied feudal princes. The second war ended with the total defeat and the death of Tippoo. Mysore became a vassal principality.

The subsidiary system or the system of so-called subsidiary agreements-a method of turning the potentates of Indian principalities into vassals of the East India Company. Most widespread were agreements under which the princes had to maintain (subsidise) the Company’s troops stationed on their territory and agreements which saddled the princes with loans on exorbitant terms. Failure to fulfil them resulted in the confiscation of their possessions.

127 Marx’s preparatory materials on India (Notebook XXI) include passages from J. R. MacCulloch’s The Literature of Political Economy, London, 1845. The book contains extracts from the works of English economists of an earlier period on British trade with India, among them the above-mentioned treatises of J. Child, Th. Mun and J. Pollexfen. p. 153

128 In the first Burmese war of 1824-26 the troops of the East India Company seized the Province of Assam, bordering on Bengal, and the coastal districts of Arakan and Tenasserim. The second Burmese war (1852) resulted in the seizure by the British of the Province of Pegu. Burma did not sign a peace treaty, however, and refused to recognise the seizure of Pegu. In 1853 the British authorities threatened to resume military operations but abstained from this step, largely due to the guerrilla warfare in Pegu against the foreign invaders, which continued until 1860. In the 1860s Britain imposed on Burma a number of unequal treaties and in 1885, as a result of the third Burmese war, annexed the whole territory of Burma.

The Government of India

Source: the New-York Daily Tribune, July 20, 1853;
Transcribed: by Tony Brown.

London, Tuesday, 5th July, 1853

Mr. Halliday, one of the officials of the East India Company, when examined before a Committee of Inquiry, stated:

“That the Charter giving a twenty years lease to the East India Company was considered by the natives of India as farming them out.”

This time at least, the Charter has not been renewed for a definite period, but is revokable at will by Parliament. The Company, therefore, will come down from the respectable situation of hereditary farmers, to the precarious condition of tenants-at-will. This is so much gain for the natives. The Coalition Ministry has succeeded in transforming the Indian Government, like all other questions, into an open question. The House of Commons, on the other hand, has given itself a new testimonial of poverty, in confessing by the same division, its impotency for legislating, and its unwillingness to delay legislating.

Since the days of Aristotle the world has been inundated with a frightful quantity of dissertations, ingenious or absurd, as it might happen, on that question: Who shall be the governing power? But for the first time in the annals of history, the Senate of a people ruling over another people numbering 156 millions of human beings and spreading over a surface of 1,368,113 square miles, have put their heads together in solemn and public congregation, in order to answer the irregular question: Who among us is the actual governing power over that foreign people of 150 millions of souls? There was no Oedipus in the British Senate capable of extricating this riddle. The whole debate exclusively twined around it, as although a division took place, no definition of the Indian Government was arrived at.

That there is in India a permanent financial deficit, a regular over-supply of wars, and no supply at all of public works, an abominable system of taxation, and a no less abominable state of justice and law, that these five items constitute, as it were, the five points of the East Indian Charter, was settled beyond all doubt in the debates of 1853, as it had been in the debates of 1833, and in the debates of 1813, and in all former debates on India. The only thing never found out, was the party responsible for all this.

There exists, unquestionably, a Governor-General of India, holding the supreme power, but that Governor is governed in his turn by a home government. Who is that home government? Is it the Indian Minister, disguised under the modest title of President of the Board of Control, or is it the twenty-four Directors of the East India Company? On the threshold of the Indian religion we find a divine trinity, and thus we find a profane trinity on the threshold of the Indian Government.

Leaving, for a while, the Governor-General altogether one side, the question at issue resolves itself into that of the double Government, in which form it is familiar to the English mind. The Ministers in their bill, and the House in its division, cling to this dualism.

When the Company of English merchant adventurers, who conquered India to make money out of it, began to enlarge their factories into an empire, when their competition with the Dutch and French private merchants assumed the character of national rivalry, then, of course, the British Government commenced meddling with the affairs of the East India Company, and the double Government of India sprung up in fact if not in name. Pitt’s act of 1784, by entering into a compromise with the Company, by subjecting it to the superintendence of the Board of Control, and by making the Board of Control an appendage to the Ministry, accepted, regulated and settled that double Government arisen, from circumstances in name as well as in fact.

The act of 1833 strengthened the Board of Control, changed the proprietors of the East India Company into mere mortgagees of the East India revenues, ordered the Company to sell off its stock, dissolved its commercial existence, transformed it; as far as it existed politically, into a mere trustee of the Crown, and did thus with the East India Company, what the Company had been in the habit of doing with the East India Princes. After having superseded them, it continued, for a while, still to govern in their name. So far, the East India Company has, since 1833, no longer existed but in name and on sufferance. While thus on one hand, there seems to be no difficulty in getting rid of the Company altogether, it is, on the other hand, very indifferent whether the English nation rules over India under the personal name of Queen Victoria, or under the traditional firm of an anonymous society. The whole question, therefore, appears to turn about a technicality of very questionable importance. Still, the thing is not quite so plain.

It is to be remarked, in the first instance, that the Ministerial Board of Control, residing in Cannon-row, is as much a fiction as the East India Company, supposed to reside in Leadenhall-st. The members composing the Board of Control are a mere cloak for the supreme rule of the President of the Board. The President is himself but a subordinate though independent member of the Imperial Ministry. In India it seems to be assumed that if a man is fit for nothing it is best to make him a Judge, and get rid of him. In Great Britain, when a party comes into office and finds itself encumbered with a tenth-rate “statesman,” it is considered best to make him President of the Board of Control, successor of the Great Mogul, and in that way to get rid of him- teste Carolo Wood.

The letter of the law entrusts the Board of Control, which is but another name for its President, with

“full power and authority to superintend, direct, and control all acts, operations and concerns of the East India Company which in any wise relate to or concern the Government or revenues of the Indian territories.”

Directors are prohibited

“from issuing any orders, instructions, dispatches, official letters, or communications whatever relating to India, or to the Government thereof, until the same shall have been sanctioned by the Board.”

Directors are ordered to

“prepare instructions or orders upon any subject whatever at fourteen days’ notice from the Board, or else to transmit the orders of the Board on the subject of India.”

The Board is authorized to inspect all correspondence and dispatches to and from India, and the proceedings of the Courts of Proprietors and Directors. Lastly, the Court of Directors has to appoint a Secret Committee, consisting of their Chairman, their Deputy Chairman and their senior member, who are sworn to secrecy, and through whom, in all political and military matters, the President of the Board may transmit his personal orders to India, while the Committee acts as a mere channel of his communications. The orders respecting the Afghan and Burmese wars, and as to the occupation of Scinde were transmitted through this Secret Committee, without the Court of Directors being any more informed of them than the general public or Parliament. So far, therefore, the President of the Board of Control would appear to be the real Mogul, and, under all circumstances, he retains an unlimited power for doing mischief, as, for instance, for causing the most ruinous wars, all the while being hidden under the name of the irresponsible Court of Directors. On the other hand, the Court of Directors is not without real power. As they generally exercise the initiative in administrative measures, as they form, when compared with the Board of Control, a more permanent and steady body, with traditional rules for action and a certain knowledge of details, the whole of the ordinary internal administration necessarily falls to their share. They appoint, too, under sanction of the Crown, the Supreme Government of India, the Governor-General and his Councils; possessing, besides, the unrestricted power to recall the highest servants, and even the Governor-General, as they did under Sir Robert Peel, with Lord Ellenborough. But this is still not their most important privilege. Receiving only £300 per annum, they are really paid in patronage, distributing all the writerships and cadetships, from whose number the Governor-General of India and the Provincial Governors are obliged to fill up all the higher places withheld from the natives. When the number of appointments for the year is ascertained, the whole are divided into 28 equal parts — of which two are allotted to the Chairman and Deputy Chairman, two to the President of the Board of Control, and one to each of the Directors. The annual value of each share of patronage seldom falls short of £14,000.

“All nominations,” says Mr. Campbell, “are now, as it were, the private property of individuals, being divided among the Directors, and each disposing of his share as he thinks fit.”

Now, it is evident that the spirit of the Court of Directors must pervade the whole of the Indian Upper Administration, trained, as it is, at schools of Addiscombe and Haileybury, and appointed, as it is, by their patronage. It is no less evident that this Court of Directors, who have to distribute, year after year, appointments of the value of nearly £400,000 among the upper classes of Great Britain, will find little or no check from the public opinion directed by those very classes. What the spirit of the Court of Directors is, I will show in a following letter on the actual state of India.’ For the present it may suffice to say that Mr. Macaulay, in the course of the pending debates, defended the Court by the particular plea, that it was impotent to effect all the evils it might intend, so much so, that all improvements had been effected in opposition to it, and against it by individual Governors who had acted on their own responsibility. Thus with regard to the suppression of the Suttee, the abolition of the abominable transit duties, and the emancipation of the East India press.

The President of the Board of Control accordingly involves India in ruinous wars under cover of the Court of Directors, while the Court of Directors corrupt the Indian Administration under the cloak of the Board of Control.

On looking deeper into the framework of this anomalous government we find at its bottom a third power, more supreme than either the Board or the Court, more irresponsible, and more concealed from and guarded against the superintendence of public opinion. The transient President of the Board depends on the permanent clerks of his establishment in Cannon-row, and for those clerks India exists not in India, but in Leadenhall-st. Now, who is the master at Leadenhall-st.?

Two thousand persons, elderly ladies and valetudinarian gentlemen, possessing Indian stock, having no other interest in India except to be paid their dividends out of Indian revenue, elect twenty-four Directors, whose only qualification is the holding of £1,000 stock. Merchants, bankers and directors of companies incur great trouble in order to get into the Court for the interest of their private concerns.

“A banker,” said Mr. Bright, “in the City of London commands 300 votes of the East India Company, whose word for the election of Directors is almost absolute law.”

Hence the Court of Directors is nothing but a succursal to the English moneyocracy. The so-elected Court forms, in its turn, besides the above-mentioned Secret Committee, three other Committees, which are 1. Political and Military. 2. Finance and Home. 3. Revenue, judicial and Legislative. These Committees are every year appointed by rotation, so that a financier is one year on the judicial and the next year on the Military Committee, and no one has any chance of a continued supervision over a particular department. The mode of election having brought in men utterly unfit for their duties, the system of rotation gives to whatever fitness they might perchance retain, the final blow. Who, then, govern in fact under the name of the Direction? A large stuff of irresponsible secretaries, examiners and clerks at the India House, of whom, as Mr. Campbell observes, in his Scheme for the Government of India, only one individual has ever been in India, and he only by accident. Apart from the trade in patronage, it is therefore a mere fiction to speak of the politics, the principles, and the system of the Court of Directors. The real Court of Directors and the real Home Government, &c., of India are the permanent and irresponsible bureaucracy, “the creatures of the desk and the creatures of favor” residing in Leadenhall-st. We have thus a Corporation ruling over an immense Empire, not formed, as in Venice, by eminent patricians, but by old obstinate clerks, and the like odd fellows.

No wonder, then, that there exists no government by which so much is written and so little done, as the Government of India. When the East India Company was only a commercial association, they, of course, requested a most detailed report on every item from the managers of their Indian factories, as is done by every trading concern. When the factories grew into an Empire, the commercial items into ship loads of correspondence and documents, the Leadenhall clerks went on in their system, which made the Directors and the Board their dependents; and they succeeded in transforming the Indian Government into one immense writing-machine. Lord Broughton stated in his evidence before the Official Salaries Committee, that with one single dispatch 45,000 pages of collection were sent.

In order to give you some idea of the time-killing manner in which business is transacted at the India House, I will quote a passage from Mr. Dickinson:

“When a dispatch arrives from India, it is referred, in the first instance, to the Examiners’ Department, to which it belongs; after which the Chairs confer with the official in charge of that department, and settle with him the tenor of a reply, and transmit a draught of this reply to the Indian Minister,’ in what is technically called P.C., i.e. previous communication. [...] The Chairs, [...] in this preliminary state of P.C. depend mainly on the clerks. [...] Such is this dependence that even in a discussion in the Court of Proprietors, after previous notice, it is pitiable [...] to see the chairman referring to a secretary who sits by his side, and keeps on whispering and prompting and chaffing him as if he were a mere puppet, and [...] the Minister at the other end of the system is in the same predicament. [...] In this stage of P.C., if there is a difference of opinion on the draught it is discussed, and almost invariably settled in friendly communication between the Minister and the Chair; finally the draught is returned by the Minister, either adopted or altered; and then it is submitted to the Committee of Directors superintending the department to which it belongs, with all papers bearing on the case, to be considered and discussed, and adopted or altered, and afterward it is .exposed to the same process in the aggregate Court, and then goes, for the first time, as an official communication to the Minister,” after which it undergoes the same process in the opposite direction.

“When a measure is discussed in India,” says Mr. Campbell, “the announcement that it has been referred to the Court of Directors, is regarded as an indefinite postponement.”

The close and abject spirit of this bureaucracy deserves to he stigmatised in the celebrated words of Burke:

“This tribe of vulgar politicians are the lowest of our species. There is no trade so vile and mechanical as Government in their hands. Virtue is not their habit. They are out of themselves in any course of conduct recommended only by conscience and glory. A large, liberal and prospective view of the interests of States passes with them for romance; and the principles that recommend it, for the wanderings of a disordered imagination. The calculators compute them out of their senses. The jesters and buffoons shame them out of everything grand and elevated. Littleness in object and in means to them appears soundness and sobriety.”

The clerical establishments of Leadenhall-st. and Cannon-row cost the Indian people the trifle of £160,000 annually. The oligarchy involves India in wars, in order to find employment for their younger sons; the moneyocracy consigns it to the highest bidder; and a subordinate Bureaucracy paralyse its administration and perpetuate its abuses as the vital condition of their own perpetuation.

Sir Charles Wood’s bill alters nothing in the existing system. It enlarges the power of the Ministry, without adding to its responsibility.

The Future Results of British Rule in India

Written: on July 22, 1853
First published: in the New-York Daily Tribune, August 8, 1853; reprinted in the New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, No. 856, August 9, 1853.

London, Friday, July 22, 1853

I propose in this letter to conclude my observations on India.

How came it that English supremacy was established in India? The paramount power of the Great Mogul was broken by the Mogul Viceroys. The power of the Viceroys was broken by the Mahrattas. The power of the Mahrattas was broken by the Afghans, and while all were struggling against all, the Briton rushed in and was enabled to subdue them all. A country not only divided between Mahommedan and Hindoo, but between tribe and tribe, between caste and caste; a society whose framework was based on a sort of equilibrium, resulting from a. general repulsion and constitutional exclusiveness between all its members. Such a country and such a society, were they not the predestined prey of conquest? If we knew nothing of the past history of Hindostan, would there not be the one great and incontestable fact, that even at this moment India is held in English thraldom by an Indian army maintained at the cost of India? India, then, could not escape the fate of being conquered, and the whole of her past history, if it be anything, is the history of the successive conquests she has undergone. Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history, is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society. The question, therefore, is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton.

England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.

Arabs, Turks, Tartars, Moguls, who had successively overrun India, soon became Hindooized, the barbarian conquerors being, by an eternal law of history, conquered themselves by the superior civilization of their subjects. The British were the first conquerors superior, and therefore, inaccessible to Hindoo civilization. They destroyed it by breaking up the native communities, by uprooting the native industry, and by levelling all that was great and elevated in the native society. The historic pages of their rule in India report hardly anything beyond that destruction. The work of regeneration hardly transpires through a heap of ruins. Nevertheless it has begun.

The political unity of India, more consolidated, and extending farther than it ever did under the Great Moguls, was the first condition of its regeneration. That unity, imposed by the British sword, will now be strengthened and perpetuated by the electric telegraph. The native army, organized and trained by the British drill-sergeant, was the sine qua non of Indian self-emancipation, and of India ceasing to be the prey of the first foreign intruder. The free press, introduced for the first time into Asiatic society, and managed principally by the common offspring of Hindoos and Europeans, is a new and powerful agent of reconstruction. The Zemindari and Ryotwar themselves, abominable as they are, involve two distinct forms of private property in land — the great desideratum of Asiatic society. From the Indian natives, reluctantly and sparingly educated at Calcutta, under English superintendence, a fresh class is springing up, endowed with the requirements for government and imbued with European science. Steam has brought India into regular and rapid communication with Europe, has connected its chief ports with those of the whole south-eastern ocean, and has revindicated it from the isolated position which was the prime law of its stagnation. The day is not far distant when, by a combination of railways and steam-vessels, the distance between England and India, measured by time, will be shortened to eight days, and when that once fabulous country will thus be actually annexed to the Western world.

The ruling classes of Great Britain have had, till now, but an accidental, transitory and exceptional interest in the progress of India. The aristocracy wanted to conquer it, the moneyocracy to plunder it, and the millocracy to undersell it. But now the tables are turned. The millocracy have discovered that the transformation of India into a reproductive country has become of vital importance to them, and that, to that end, it is necessary, above all, to gift her with means of irrigation and of internal communication. They intend now drawing a net of railroads over India. And they will do it. The results must be inappreciable.

It is notorious that the productive powers of India are paralysed by the utter want of means for conveying and exchanging its various produce. Nowhere, more than in India, do we meet with social destitution in the midst of natural plenty, for want of the means of exchange. It was proved before a Committee of the British House of Commons, which sat in 1848, that

“when grain was selling from 6/- to 8/- a quarter at Khandesh, it was sold at 64/ to 70/- at Poona, where the people were dying in the streets of famine, without the possibility of gaining supplies from Khandesh, because the clay-roads were impracticable.”

The introduction of railroads may be easily made to subserve agricultural purposes by the formation of tanks, where ground is required for embankment, and by the conveyance of water along the different lines. Thus irrigation, the sine qua non of farming in the East, might be greatly extended, and the frequently recurring local famines, arising from the want of water, would be averted. The general importance of railways, viewed under this head, must become evident, when we remember that irrigated lands, even in the districts near Ghauts, pay three times as much in taxes, afford ten or twelve times as much employment, and yield twelve or fifteen times as much profit, as the same area without irrigation.

Railways will afford the means of diminishing the amount and the cost of the military establishments. Col. Warren, Town Major of the Fort St. William, stated before a Select Committee of the House of Commons:

“The practicability of receiving intelligence from distant parts of the country, in as many hours as at present it requires days and even weeks, and of sending instructions, with troops and stores, in the more brief period, are considerations which cannot be too highly estimated. Troops could be kept at more distant and healthier stations than at present, and much loss of life from sickness would by this means be spared. Stores could not to the same extent he required at the various depots, and. the loss by decay, and the destruction incidental to the climate, would also be avoided. The number of troops might be diminished in direct proportion to their effectiveness.”

We know that the municipal organization and the economical basis of the village communities has been broken up, but their worst feature, the dissolution of society into stereotype and disconnected atoms, has survived their vitality. The village isolation produced the absence of roads in India, and the absence of roads perpetuated the village isolation. On this plan a community existed with a given scale of low conveniences, almost without intercourse with other villages, without the desires and efforts indispensable to social advance. The British having broken up this self-sufficient inertia of the villages, railways will provide the new want of communication and intercourse. Besides,

“one of the effects of the railway system will he to bring into every village affected by it such knowledge of the contrivances and appliances of other countries, and such means of obtaining them, as will first put the hereditary and stipendiary village artisanship of India to full proof of its capabilities, and then supply its defects.” (Chapman, The Cotton and Commerce of India [pp. 95-97].)

I know that the English millocracy intend to endow India with railways with the exclusive view of extracting at diminished expenses the cotton and other raw materials for their manufactures. But when you have once introduced machinery into the locomotion of a country, which possesses iron and coals, you are unable to withhold it from its fabrication. You cannot maintain a net of railways over an immense country without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion, and out of which there must grow the application of machinery to those branches of industry not immediately connected with railways. The railway-system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry. This is the more certain as the Hindoos are allowed by British authorities themselves to possess particular aptitude. for accommodating themselves to entirely new labor, and acquiring the requisite knowledge of machinery. Ample proof of this fact is afforded by the capacities and expertness of the native engineers in the Calcutta mint, where they have been for years employed in working the steam machinery, by the natives attached to the several steam engines in the Burdwan coal districts, and by other instances. Mr. Campbell himself, greatly influenced as he is by the prejudices of the East India Company, is obliged to avow

“that the great mass of the Indian people possesses a great industrial energy, is well fitted to accumulate capital, and remarkable for a mathematical clearness of head and talent for figures and exact sciences.” “Their intellects,” he says, “are excellent.”

Modern industry, resulting from the railway system, will dissolve the hereditary divisions of labor, upon which rest the Indian castes, those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian power.

All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the development of the productive powers, but on their appropriation by the people. But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?

The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether. At all events, we may safely expect to see, at a more or less remote period, the regeneration of that great and interesting country, whose gentle natives are, to use the expression of Prince Soltykov, even in the most inferior classes, “plus fins et plus adroits que les Italiens” [more subtle and adroit than the Italians], a whose submission even is counterbalanced by a certain calm nobility, who, notwithstanding their natural langor, have astonished the British officers by their bravery, whose country has been the source of our languages, our religions, and who represent the type of the ancient German in the Jat, and the type of the ancient Greek in the Brahmin.

I cannot part with the subject of India without some concluding remarks.

The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked. They are the defenders of property, but did any revolutionary party ever originate agrarian revolutions like those in Bengal, in Madras, and in Bombay? Did they not, in India, to borrow an expression of. that great robber, Lord Clive himself, resort to atrocious extortion, when simple corruption could not keep pace with their rapacity? While they prated in Europe about the inviolable sanctity of the national debt, did they not confiscate in India the dividends of the rajahs, 171 who had invested their private savings in the Company’s own funds? While they combatted the French revolution under the pretext of defending “our holy religion,” did they not forbid, at the same time, Christianity to be propagated in India, and did they not, in order to make money out of the pilgrims streaming to the temples of Orissa and Bengal, take up the trade in the murder and prostitution perpetrated in the temple of juggernaut? These are the men of “Property, Order, Family, and Religion.”

The devastating effects of English industry, when contemplated with regard to India, a country as vast as Europe, and containing 150 millions of acres, are palpable and confounding. But we must not forget that they are only the organic results of the whole system of production as it is now constituted. That production rests on the supreme rule of capital. The centralization of capital is essential to the existence of capital as an independent power. The destructive influence of that centralization upon the markets of the world does but reveal, in the most gigantic dimensions, the inherent organic laws of political economy now at work in every civilized town. The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world — on the one hand universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of that intercourse; on the other hand the development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.

The East India Question

Source: the New-York Daily Tribune, July 25, 1853;
Transcribed: by Tony Brown.

London, Tuesday, July 12, 1853

The clauses of the India Bill are passing one by one, the debate scarcely offering any remarkable features, except the inconsistency of the so-called India Reformers. There is, for instance, my Lord Jocelyn, M. P. who has made a kind of political livelihood by his periodical denunciation of Indian wrongs, and of the maladministration of the East India Company. What do you think his amendment amounted to? To give the East India Company a lease for 10 years. Happily, it compromised no one but himself. There is another professional “Reformer,” Mr. Jos. Hume, who, during his long Parliamentary life, has succeeded in transforming opposition itself into a particular manner of supporting the ministry. He proposed not to reduce the number of East India Directors from 24 to 18. The only amendment of common sense, yet agreed to, was that of Mr. Bright, exempting Directors nominated by the Government from the qualification in East India Stock, imposed by the Directors elected by the Court of Proprietors. Go through the pamphlets published by the East Indian Reform Association, and you will feel a similar sensation as when, hearing of one great act of accusation against Bonaparte, devised in common by Legitimists, Orleanists, Blue and Red Republicans, and even disappointed Bonapartists. Their only merit until now has been to draw public attention to Indian affairs in general, and further they cannot go in their present form of eclectic opposition. For instance, while they attack the doings of the English aristocracy in India, they protest against the destruction of the Indian aristocracy of native princes.

After the British intruders had once put their feet on India, and made up their mind to hold it, there remained no alternative but to break the power of the native princes by force or by intrigue. Placed with regard to them in similar circumstances as the ancient Romans with regard to their allies, they followed in the track of Roman politics. “It was,” says an English writer, “a system of fattening allies, as we fatten oxen, till they were worthy of being devoured.” After having won over their allies in the way of ancient Rome, the East India Company executed them in the modern manner of Change-Alley. In order to discharge the engagements they had entered into with the Company, the native princes were forced to borrow enormous sums from Englishmen at usurious interest. When their embarrassment had reached the highest pitch, the creditor got inexorable, “the screw was turned” and the princes were compelled either to concede their territories amicably to the Company, or to begin war; to become pensioners on their usurpers in one case, or to be deposed as traitors in the other. At this moment the native States occupy an area of 699,961 square miles, with a population of 52,941,263 souls, being, however, no longer the allies, but only the dependents of the British Government, upon multifarious conditions, and under the various forms of the subsidiary and of the protective systems. These systems have in common the relinquishment, by the native States of the right of self-defense, of maintaining diplomatic relations, and of settling the disputes among themselves without the interference of the Governor-General. All of them have to pay a tribute, either in hard cash, or in a contingent of armed forces commanded by British officers. The final absorption or annexation of these native States is at present eagerly controverted between the Reformers who denounce it as a crime, and the men of business who excuse it as a necessity.

In my opinion the question itself is altogether improperly put. As to the native States they virtually ceased to exist from the moment they became subsidiary to or protected by the Company. If you divide the revenue of a country between two governments, you are sure to cripple the resources of the one and the administration of both. Under the present system the native States succumb under the double incubus of their native Administration and the tributes and inordinate military establishments imposed upon them by the Company. The conditions under which they are allowed to retain their apparent independence are at the same time the conditions of a permanent decay, and of an utter inability of improvement. Organic weakness is the constitutional law of their existence, as of all existences living upon sufferance. It is, therefore, not the native States, but the native Princes and Courts about whose maintenance the question revolves. Now, is it not a strange thing that the same men who denounce “the barbarous splendors of the Crown and Aristocracy of England” are shedding tears at the downfall of Indian Nabobs, Rajahs, and Jagheerdars, the great majority of whom possess not even the prestige of antiquity, being generally usurpers of very recent date, set up by English intrigue! There exists in the whole world no despotism more ridiculous, absurd and childish than that of those Schazenans and Schariars of the Arabian Nights. The Duke of Wellington, Sir J. Malcolm, Sir Henry Russell, Lord Ellenborough, General Briggs, and other authorities, have pronounced in favor of the status quo; but on what grounds? Because the native troops under English rule want employment in the petty warfares with their own countrymen, in order to prevent them from turning their strength against their own European masters. Because the existence of independent States gives occasional employment to the English troops. Because the hereditary princes are the most servile tools of English despotism, and check the rise of those bold military adventurers with whom India has and ever will abound. Because the independent territories afford a refuge to all discontented and enterprising native spirits. Leaving aside all these arguments, which state in so many words that the native princes are the strongholds of the present abominable English system and the greatest obstacles to Indian progress, I come to Sir Thomas Munro and Lord Elphinstone, who were at least men of superior genius, and of real sympathy for the Indian people. They think that without a native aristocracy there can be no energy in any other class of the community, and that the subversion of that aristocracy will not raise but debase a whole people. They may be right as long as the natives, under direct English rule, are systematically excluded from all superior offices, military and civil. Where there can be no great men by their own exertion, there must be great men by birth, to leave to a conquered people some greatness of their own. That exclusion, however, of the native people from the English territory, has been effected only by the maintenance of the hereditary princes in the so-called independent territories. And one of these two concessions had to be made to the native army, on whose strength all British rule in India depends. I think we may trust the assertion of Mr. Campbell, that the native Indian Aristocracy are the least enabled to fill higher offices; that for all fresh requirements it is necessary to create a fresh class; and that

“from the acuteness and aptness to learn of the inferior classes, this can be done in India as it can be done in no other country.”

The native princes themselves are fast disappearing by, the extinction of their houses; but, since the commencement of this century, the British Government has observed the policy of allowing them to make heirs by adoption, or of filling up their vacant seats with puppets of English creation. The great Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, was the first to protest openly, against this system. Were not the natural course of things artificially resisted, there would be wanted neither wars nor expenses to do away with the native princes.

As to the pensioned princes, the £2,468,969 assigned to them by the British Government on the Indian revenue is a most heavy charge upon a people living on rice, and deprived of the first necessaries of life. If they are good for anything, it is for exhibiting Royalty in its lowest stage of degradation and ridicule. Take, for instance, the Great Mogul, the descendant of Timour Tamerlane: He is allowed £120,000 a year. His authority does not extend beyond the walls of his palace, within which the Royal idiotic race, left to itself, propagates as freely as rabbits. Even the police of Delhi is held by Englishmen above his control. There he sits on his throne, a little shriveled yellow old man, trimmed in a theatrical dress, embroidered with gold, much like that of the dancing girls of Hindostan. On certain State occasions, the tinsel-covered puppet issues forth to gladden the hearts of the loyal. On his days of reception strangers have to pay a fee, in the form of guineas, as to any other saltimbanque exhibiting himself in public; while he, in his turn, presents them with turbans, diamonds, etc. On looking nearer at them, they find that the Royal diamonds are, like so many pieces of ordinary glass, grossly painted and imitating as roughly as possible the precious stones, and jointed so wretchedly, that they break in the hand like gingerbread.

The English money-lenders, combined with the English Aristocracy, understand, we must own, the art of degrading Royalty, reducing it to the nullity of constitutionalism at home, and to the seclusion of etiquette abroad. And now, here are the Radicals, exasperated at this spectacle!

Karl Marx

India

Source: the New-York Daily Tribune, August 5, 1853;
Transcribed: by Tony Brown.

London, Tuesday, July 19, 1853

The progress of the India bill through the Committee has little interest. It is significant, that all amendments are thrown out now by the Coalition coalescing with the Tories against their own allies of the Manchester School.

The actual state of India may be illustrated by a few facts. The Home Establishment absorbs 3 per cent. of the net revenue, and the annual interest for Home Debt and Dividends 14 per cent-together 17 per cent. If we deduct these annual remittances from India to England, the military charges amount to about two-thirds of the whole expenditure available for India, or to 66 per cent., while the charges for Public Works do not amount to more than 2 3/4 per cent. of the general revenue, or for Bengal 1 per cent., Agra 7 3/4, Punjab 1/8, Madras 1/2, and Bombay 1 per cent. of their respective revenues. These figures are the official ones of the Company itself.

On the other hand nearly three-fifths of the whole net revenue are derived from the land, about one-seventh from opium, and upward of one-ninth from salt. These resources together yield 85 per cent. of the whole receipts.

As to minor items of receipts and charges, it may suffice to state that the Moturpha revenue maintained in the Presidency of Madras, and levied on shops, looms, sheep, cattle, sundry professions, &c., yields somewhat about £50,000, while the yearly dinners of the East India House cost about the same sum.

The great bulk of the revenue is derived from the land. As the various kinds of Indian land-tenure have recently been described in so many places, and in popular style, too, I propose to limit my observations on the subject to a few general remarks on the Zemindari and Ryotwar systems.

The Zemindari and the Ryotwar were both of them agrarian revolutions, effected by British ukases, and opposed to each other, the one aristocratic, the other democratic; the one a caricature of English landlordism, the other of French peasant-proprietorship; but pernicious, both combining the most contradictory character — both made not for the people, who cultivate the soil, nor for the holder, who owns it, but for the Government that taxes it.

By the Zemindari system, the people of the Presidency of Bengal were depossessed at once of their hereditary claims to the soil, in favor of the native tax gatherers called Zemindars. By the Ryotwar system introduced into the Presidencies of Madras and Bombay, the native nobility, with their territorial claims, meras sees, jagheers, &c., were reduced with the common people to the holding of minute fields, cultivated by themselves in favor of the Collector of the East India Company."’ But a curious sort of English landlord was the Zemindar, receiving only one-tenth of the rent, while he had to make over nine-tenths of it to the Government. A curious sort of French peasant was the Ryot, without any permanent title in the soil, and with the taxation changing every year in proportion to his harvest. The original class of Zemindars, notwithstanding their unmitigated and uncontrolled rapacity against the depossessed mass of the ex-hereditary landholders, soon melted away under the pressure of the Company, in order to be replaced by mercantile speculators who now hold all the land of Bengal, with exception of the estates returned under the direct management of the Government. These speculators have introduced a variety of the Zemindari tenure called patnee. Not content to be placed with regard to the British Government in the situation of’ middlemen, they have created in their turn a class of “hereditary” middlemen called patnetas, who created again their sub-patnetas, &c., so that a perfect scale of hierarchy of middlemen has sprung up, which presses with its entire weight on the unfortunate cultivator. As to the Ryots in Madras and Bombay, the system soon degenerated into one of forced cultivation, and the land lost all its value.

“The land,” says Mr. Campbell, “would be sold for balances by the Collector, as in Bengal, but generally is not, for a very good reason, viz.: that nobody will buy it.”

Thus, in Bengal, we have a combination of English landlordism, of the Irish middlemen system, of the Austrian system, transforming the landlord into the tax-gatherer, and of the Asiatic system making the State the real landlord. In Madras and Bombay we have a French peasant proprietor who is at the same time a serf, and a métayer of the State. The drawbacks of all these various systems accumulate upon him without his enjoying any of their redeeming features. The Ryot is subject, like the French peasant, to the extortion of the private usurer; but he has no hereditary, no permanent title in his land, like the French peasant. Like the serf’ he is forced to cultivation, but he is not secured against want like the serf. Like the métayer he has to divide his produce with the State, but the State is not obliged, with regard to him, to advance the funds and the stock, as it is obliged to do with regard to the métayer. In Bengal, as in Madras and Bombay, under the Zemindari as under the Ryotwar, the Ryots-and they form 11-12ths of the whole Indian population — have been wretchedly pauperized; and if they are, morally speaking, not sunk as low as the Irish cottiers, they owe it to their climate, the men of the South being possessed of less wants, and of more imagination than the men of the North.

Conjointly with the land-tax we have to consider the salt-tax. Notoriously the Company retain the monopoly of that article which they sell at three times its mercantile value — and this in a country where it is furnished by the sea, by the lakes, by the mountains and the earth itself. The practical working of this monopoly was described by the Earl of Albemarle in the following words:

“A great proportion of the salt for inland consumption throughout the country is purchased from the Company by large wholesale merchants at less than 4 rupees per maund; these mix a fixed proportion of sand, chiefly got a few miles to the south-east of Dacca, and send the mixture to a second, or, counting the Government as the first, to a third monopolist at about 5 or 6 rupees. This dealer adds more earth or ashes, and thus passing through more bands, from the large towns to villages, the price is still raised from 8 to 10 rupees and the proportion of adulteration from 25 to 40 per cent. [...] It appears the ‘ n that the people [...] pay from £21, 17s. 2d. to £27, 6s. 2d. for their salt, or in other words, from 30 to 36 times as much as the wealthy people of Great Britain.”

As an in stance of English bourgeois morals, I may allege, that Mr. Campbell defends the Opium monopoly because it prevents the Chinese from consuming too much of the drug, and that he defends the Brandy monopoly (licenses for spirit-selling in India) because it has wonderfully increased the consumption of Brandy in India.

The Zemindar tenure, the Ryotwar, and the salt tax, combined with the Indian climate, were the hotbeds of the cholera — India’s ravages upon the Western World — a striking and severe example of the solidarity of human woes and wrongs.

In the House of Commons

Source: the New-York Daily Tribune, August 16, 1853;
Transcribed: by Tony Brown.

London, Tuesday, Aug. 2, 1853

The India bill has passed on Friday through its last stage, after the Ministerial propositions for raising the Directors’ and Chairmen’s salaries had been rejected, and the latter reduced to £900 and £1,000 respectively. The Special Court of East India Proprietors which met on Friday last, offered a most lugubrious spectacle, the desponding cries and speeches clearly betraying the apprehensions of the worthy proprietors, that the Indian Empire might have been their property for the better time. One right honorable gentleman gave notice of his intention to move resolutions in the House of Commons rejecting the present bill, and on the part of the Proprietors and Directors declining to accept the part assigned to them by the Ministerial measure. A strike of the honorable East India Proprietors and Directors. Very striking, indeed! The Abolition of the Company’s Salt-monopoly by the British House of Commons was the first step to bringing the finances of India under its direct management.

News from India

Source: the Neue Oder-Zeitung,, February 20, 1855;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

London, February 16.

The latest news from India is important because it describes the deplorable state of business in Calcutta and Bombay. In the manufacturing districts the crisis is slowly but surely advancing. The owners of spinning-mills of fine yarn in Manchester decided at a meeting held the day before yesterday only to open their factories four days a week from February 26 and in the meantime to call on the manufacturers in the surrounding area to follow their example. In the factories in Blackburn, Preston and Bolton notice has already been given to the workers that there will henceforth only be “short time.” The fact that in the past year many manufacturers have tried to force the markets by circumventing the commission-houses and taking their export business into their own hands means that bankruptcies will be all the larger in number and in size. The Manchester Guardian admitted last Wednesday that there was overproduction not only of manufactured goods but also of factories