ABSTRACT
In our last chapter we looked at the way both the English East India Company and its competitors sought to develop fiscal military states. Our attempt was informed by the way in which the Mughal empire had devolved in both Bengal and in the Carnatic. In the case of Hyder Ali, we also considered the way in which this development helped to create strong bonds between those on the battlefield and Hyder himself on the one hand, and both institutions of his increasingly centralized state and his drive for sovereignty on the other. Our interest led us to conclude that Hyder was helping to develop what we have described as a pastoral state-one in which the bonds we noted acclimatized the soldiers and their dependents to engender and show increasing personal discipline in battle. In this chapter we shall continue some of these interests but extend our
examination in both time and space. In particular, we shall examine the way in which further conquests and economic activity by the Company illustrated the means by which it prepared the way to control the land. Specifically, we shall look at how the Company followed the path to sovereignty in Bengal, north India and Madras. Equally important, we shall consider how Hyder Ali’s son, Tipu Sultan, carried Hyder’s project of connecting the state to individuals in the society much further down the social ladder. When the Company was appointed Diwan of the old Mughal Subah or
province of Bengal, in this role it collected the land tax and administered justice. During this period the Company made a limited attempt to understand or “govern” the people of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, or to monitor their behavior. This was because the Company, as its name implies, was a mercantile organization with interests mirroring those of a sovereign. Like a sovereign, the will and interests of the Company were to enable it to increase wealth and create a fiscal military state to carry out its policies. Moreover, the Company employed instruments like laws, decrees and regulations-the same as those of a sovereign-to be its primary instruments to control the population. We shall see later in this chapter and in the next that, somewhat later in its Indian life, the Company reinserted the options suggested by a kind of government of a population, but within the mental and institutional thinking of a sovereign, which by definition tended both to obstruct and diminish each
individual. In this chapter we shall look at the way in which this mercantilist thinking operated in north India, Bengal and Madras. In our next chapter, we shall consider some of the ways by which this mercantilist/sovereign mentality started to govern the population and their behavior. After the battle of Baksar in 1764, and even before Clive arrived back in
India, the Company army and its commanders made their way up into north India and took over all the constituent parts of the kingdom of Awadh, including forts and the cities of Faizabad and Lucknow. Even the Company military commander, Carnac, took over the Nawab’s mansion in Faizabad as his personal residence to hold a durbar for some time as a Nawab himself. It was also at this time that the Company put Emperor Shah Alam II in the Allahabad fort so that he could sign letters on behalf of the Company. Once the Company had taken over Awadh and had placed the emperor in the fort, it articulated its goals: “To avoid giving any umbrage of Jealousy of our Power to the King [the Mughal emperor] or the Nobles of the Empire,” went the pronouncement, “We would have everything done under the Sanction of his Authority; and that We may appear as holding our Acquisitions from him, and acting … under his Authority … and not he in holding these Rights from us.”1 This was an important step in creating sovereignty for itself to control territory in India.2
