The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [149]
should have insisted upon Mecca being opened to the world, and upon all travellers being protected there as they are at Jerusalem and other 'Holy Cities.' It is high time that these obsolete obstructions to the march of civilisation should everywhere be swept away; the world will endure them no longer. Mecca is not only a great centre of religion and commerce; it is also the prime source of political intrigues, the very nest where plans of conquest and schemes of revenge upon the Infidel are hatched; and, as I have before said, the focus whence cholera is dispersed over the West. Shall a misplaced sentiment of tolerating intolerance allow her to work in the dark against humanity? Allah forbid it!5
The broad sequence of the extension of British control sees at first the acquisition of a series of littoral bases, much like those acquired earlier by the Portuguese, and then the Dutch. Examples we have already noted are ports on the Indian coast, and Singapore, Aden and Cape Town. However, once the British economy made the transition from merchant capital to industrial capital, there was a need for control over the supply of raw materials for the new industries. Territorial acquisitions were the result. In terms of the schema we have been using (see page 114), the British now moved from controlling port cities, and then to having some influence over production, to the third stage of controlling territory and so the whole productive process.
The consequences of this extension of British control over large areas of land around the Indian Ocean have been much discussed. Our concern is with the maritime consequences of British dominance, but to set the scene we will provide a few suitable examples from India designed to show the broad impact on land. Arasaratnam's study of Coromandel in the later eighteenth century gets well the nexus between economic and political control. Cloth was the main product of coastal Coromandel, and the British were concerned to cut out competition from other purchasers, whether they be Indian or European. In the 1770s the English East India Company began to set up direct relations with the actual producers of cloth, the weavers. Middle men were cut out, and so the Indian version of the 'putting out' system was undercut as the EIC got closer to controlling and subordinating the weavers.
There was vigorous opposition from both the weavers and other would-be purchasers. However, as the area ruled or controlled by the EIC expanded, more and more coercion, some of it physical, was applied. Hand in hand with these events in India, in Britain machine-made cloth was being produced with greater and greater efficiency. By the end of the story, in 1800, the EIC had done away with all European competitors. The position of the weavers was greatly reduced. So also with Indian financiers and merchants, who suffered from a confinement of the space in which they could operate, and ended up losing their autonomy, and becoming instead intermediaries between the producers and the EIC.
Further north, in Bengal, much the same thing happened once the EIC acquired the right to collect land revenue in this prosperous province in 1765. Now Bengal weavers had to fill the demands of the EIC before they could sell their cloth elsewhere, and the compulsory price the EIC paid was, in the words of an historian of this process, 'extraordinarily poor'. We see again in Bengal the nexus between political and economic control,