Around 600 well-trained Company civil servants, guarded by 155,000 Indian sepoys, were to administer most of peninsular India

Wednesday, April 26th, 2023

After the Battle of Delhi, William Dalrymple explains (in The Anarchy), the East India Company consolidated a land empire that controlled over half a million square miles of territory, which, fifty years later, would become the British Raj:

Around 600 well-trained Company civil servants, guarded by 155,000 Indian sepoys, were to administer most of peninsular India. Here the Company’s army was now unequivocally the dominant military force, and the Governor General who controlled it the real Emperor. Not only had Lord Wellesley gained many more subjects than Britain had lost a decade earlier in North America — around 50 million — he had also created a cadre of young men committed to his imperial project, and who would carry it forward after he had gone. Wellesley’s ambitious protégés were working for the establishment and spread of an Anglicised colonial state that would provide an efficiently regimented but increasingly remote and alien administrative infrastructure for this new empire. As one of them, the young Company diplomat Charles Metcalfe, wrote, ‘Sovereigns you are, and as such must act.’

In London there was surprisingly little awareness as yet of what had been achieved. The country was still obsessed with the struggle with Napoleon, and despite the swathe of territories Lord Wellesley had conquered, there was little interest in what had taken place in India outside those organisations or people directly concerned with it. Even Wellesley’s ultimate boss, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Grenville, declared himself ‘totally unacquainted with every part of this subject’ when Lord Wellesley’s aggressively expansionist Indian policy was briefly discussed in a half-empty House of Lords.

But within India everyone knew that a major revolution had just taken place. Many Muslims, led by the puritanical Delhi imam Shah Abdul Aziz, saw this as the moment that India had slipped out of their hands for the first time since the twelfth century: ‘From here to Calcutta, the Christians are in complete control,’ wrote Shah Abdul Aziz in an 1803 fatwa of jihad. ‘India is no longer Dar ul-Islam.’ Company officials realised it with equal clarity: ‘We are now complete masters of India,’ wrote Thomas Munro, ‘and nothing can shake our power if we take proper measures to confirm it.’

The sinews of British supremacy were now established. With the exception of a few months during the Great Uprising of 1857, for better or worse, India would remain in British hands for another 144 years, finally gaining its freedom only in August 1947.

Comments

  1. Mike-SMO says:

    So it goes. When the flunkies guard the kingdom, they don’t really care who the current head man(men) is(are). It took them almost a century and a half to outgrow that defect. Then they killed millions trying to establish their own empires. Flunkies are like that since they never learned to get along with the “other”. They are still playing that game with nuclear lances. They only learned conquest and the Brits were better at that game than the Islamists. The Brits had a lot more to offer if they had ever been able to put their bayonets down and get to teaching.

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