The Business of Empire:The Easi India Company and Imperial Britain, A Review

The Business of Empire:The East India Company and Imperial Britain,1756-1833 H V Bowen (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

The East India Company, the first multi national trading organisation of the modern period has had a lively, if at times raucous presence in the history of eighteenth century Britain. Along with the coffee houses, the impeachment of Warren Hastings,the soul stirring speeches of Edmund Burke, the brilliant historiography of Edward Gibbon, and the byzantine bureaucracy of the Leadenhall street East India House,the East India Company imparted a distinct character to the long eighteenth century.

The historians of Great Britain have long neglected the interaction between the East India Company and the rest of the body politic. Marxist historiography that concentrated on the economics of trade neglected the political context in which the economic policies of the East India Company were generated and debated. Lucy Sutherland more than 50 years ago published a path breaking work, The East India Company in Eighteenth century Politics sought to explicate the prosopographical tissue of interests both financial and factional between the House of Commons and the Board of Control of the East India Company. This book was followed by P J Marshall's East Indian Fortunes dealt with the nabobs and the fortunes they made in India, mostly illegally. The East Indian fortunes were invested in the tea trade from China and the sugar trade from the Caribbeans thereby altering the very structures of both these distant economies. Within India the miserable fact was that the military arm of the East India Company was deployed against native rulers who were reduced to penury as a consequence. When the cultural elite of any society is impoverished that society remains deeply troubled, and this is exactly what happened in India.

William Darlymple and others like him can speak of the inter racial cohabitation between Indian women and Englishmen, but this is not based on equality but an assertion of the absolute power of a foreign power in India. Women are the first to be colonised and the inter racial cohabitation's during the eighteenth century documented in The White Mughals is based the military and political subjugation of India, Indians and their society. Darlymple may say that the very fact that 60% of the wills made in the eighteenth century made some provisions for children of interracial cohabitation is proof of the easy and friendly nature of British-Indian social relations. Nothing can be further from the truth than this.

Bowen, the author of the book under review has done a splendid job of investigating the economic impact of India on Britain. The take over of Bengal in 1764 following the grant of the Right of Diwani transformed the Company that was rapidly moving toward economic collapse into a financial powerhouse that quite literally sustained the English state. The book is a good piece of historical research and is a refreshing change from the post colonial excesses of the likes of Nicholas Dirks and Maya Jasanoff.