False Economy - Alan Beattie [127]
In the event, it was competition from the British and the Dutch that ensured that Portugal's would be an abbreviated chapter in the colonial history of Asia. What ruined the Portuguese empire was not just the actions of a few reprobates but the perverse incentives of the entire system. A powerful nobility was spoiled and indulged and given a monopoly on the officerships of the military and the governorships of the colonies. Insulated from competition and accountability, they developed a collective culture of plunder.
The British East India Company was also involved in corruption and self-enrichment on a grand scale. But like Suharto's regime, it did so as part of a system that largely worked. And again like Suharto's regime, though the corruption attracted disapprobation, it was not until it failed on its own terms that the Company was entirely relieved of its power.
By then, the Company had gone beyond simply operating trading posts and was starting to extend its control over more of the subcontinent. Its relations with the Mughal emperor of India, Jahangir, had been established when it impressed him by twice defeating a Portuguese force in battle, in 1613 and 1615. Jahangir allowed them to establish permanent trading posts. The Company got a further boost when Charles II married Catherine of Braganza in 1662. The bride's dowry included the port city of Bombay. Charles, not particularly impressed by his new possession, leased it to the East India Company for an upfront fee of £50,000 and a rent of £10 per annum. It introduced judicial, fiscal, and administrative institutions and collected land rent on its own behalf.
The warning by de Couto's old soldier, that it was only the power of Mughal rule that was keeping local Indian rulers in check, came true in the first half of the eighteenth century. Provincial governors, or na-wabs, were establishing their own dynastic rule in parts of India, chiefly in Bengal, in the east. As the East India Company sought to extend its power over the subcontinent, it repeatedly had to pay them off so that its trading activities be allowed to continue. When they became too demanding and troublesome, the Company took more drastic action.
If there was a moment at which the Company stopped being an armed trading enterprise and became an empire, it was in 1757, at the Battle of Plassey. The new nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daula, annoyed with what he saw as British abuse of its trade concessions, attacked the Company's settlement at Calcutta. After trying to parley peacefully, if craftily, in the usual way, the local commander, Robert Clive, decided to negotiate by other means. Having bribed conspirators in the nawab's court, he defeated him in battle and installed one of his collaborators, Mir Jafar, on the throne in Bengal.
Thus was set the culture of the Company in its rule in India: bribery and conspiracy to exploit local internecine feuds, with the ultimate threat of military action kept in reserve. The Company in India was at heart a gang of traders on the make (and on the take), not a legion of imperial warriors. They were always happier to buy someone off than to send soldiers against him, and more concerned with making money than fulfilling a principled mission to spread British ideas of civilization.
Mir Jafar showed his gratitude for being made nawab of Bengal by rewarding Clive and others with lavish presents. Clive received the right for life to receive rent from land in Bengal, a gift worth £27,000 a year. Through a treaty with the Mughal emperor in 1765, the Company gained the right to collect revenue as well as to dispense civil justice, thus increasing its resemblance to a state. The nawabs who nominally ruled Bengal thereafter were closer to being colonial employees than sovereign rulers, their reigns dependent on their ability to deliver stability and business for their employer. And they acted not just to boost the Company itself but also to perpetuate the thriving culture of British officials on the take.
One of the reasons, perhaps, that the East India Company