The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [152]
We have examples here of new British possessions opening up new or more intensive connections across the ocean. This applies particularly to connections with the new colonies in Australia, something often ignored by Australian historians who concentrate on ties with the 'mother country'. The first colony, New South Wales, quickly developed extensive ties with India. The first ship from India arrived in Sydney in 1793 with a cargo of stores, livestock and provisions. Four others came in 1794–95 with food. Between 1808 and 1825 no less than ninety India ships came to New South Wales. In 1829 a colony was founded on the western Australian coast, at Perth, and in its first year a ship was sent to Java for food supplies. From the 1840s there were close connections between Mauritius, where the sugar industry was flourishing, and the nascent industry in eastern Australia.
Two particular products provided exports from the Australian colonies to India. India has never been a particularly good place to breed horses. In the nineteenth century in western Australia a new town was set up to breed horses for the Indian market. Its appropriate name was Australind. This project failed, but the eastern colonies for long provided the bulk of the horses used by the Indian army. This trade began in the 1830s and continued for nearly a century. From the late nineteenth century the Indian army depended almost entirely on the again appropriately named 'Walers', though not all of them came from New South Wales. The trade was at its height in the second decade of the twentieth century, thanks to the demands of World War I. In this decade 59,000 were sent from Queensland, 21,000 from Victoria, 19,000 from New South Wales, and 12,000 from South Australia.19 Western Australia also provided an alternative to Baltic fir for use as railway sleepers: in the later nineteenth century there was a significant export of karri and jarrah timber.
We are seeing in all this widespread connections between parts of the British empire scattered all around the shores of the ocean, and in some cases going far inland. I have concentrated on connections to and from India, and for a very good reason. It was India which was the fulcrum of the ocean, both at this time and earlier and later, and consequently I have had to privilege the subcontinent. This was writ large during the nineteenth century, when India was indeed the jewel in the British imperial crown: the only place of which Victoria became Empress was India.
The great proconsul George Curzon put forward a vigorous late-Victorian statement of the centrality of India:
Without India the British Empire could not exist. The possession of India is the inalienable badge of sovereignty in the eastern hemisphere. Since India was known its masters have been lords of half the world. The impulse that drew an Alexander, a Timur, and a Baber eastwards to the Indus was the same that in the sixteenth century gave the Portuguese that brief lease of sovereignty whose outworn shibboleths they have ever since continued to mumble; that early in the last century made a Shah of Persia for ten years the arbiter of the East; that all but gave to France the empire which stouter hearts and a more propitious star have conferred upon our own people; that to this day stirs the ambition and quickens the pulses of the Colossus of the North [Russia].20
The possession of India was vital not only in symbolic terms, but also for hard economics. As Pope vividly points out,
the health of the British imperial structure relied to a great extent on India's commercial relations with the world. Britain's trade deficit with Europe and America was balanced by India's trade surplus with the world economy, giving Britain positive balance of payment figures overall. This accounting relied on the ability of India to export produce....
Australia played a role here too,