The Empire demystified

Peace, Poverty and Betrayal: A New History of British India

Author:  Roderick Matthews

Publisher: HarperCollins India

Pages: 434

Price: Rs 799

India as part of the British Empire is ancient history to working age Indians. Even to us oldies, it is a chapter sandwiched between a British prime minister who thundered that he had not become the King’s First Minister to preside over the dissolution of the King’s Empire and his post-war successor who did just that to save Great Britain from shrinking into Little England.  So, I was not much enthused when offered this book to review.  But as I started reading it, I could not put it down.  I wouldn’t call it a page-turner, because reading it requires thought and I must warn, a good deal of contextual knowledge. But a truly absorbing and provocative work nonetheless for those who possess it.

The extremely well-researched book debunks many myths about the East India Company (EIC) and British rule.  We all believed that EIC looted India and that’s what funded the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. 

Mr Matthews shows that by 1714, the EIC profits had fallen substantially.  Such “loot”, as was garnered, was nowhere near enough to finance powerlooms; it went instead mainly to buy country mansions and political careers. It was never approved, though.  Warren Hastings had to stand trial for what was described as his greed.

But the Britons did take away something more precious. “The most significant thing the British stole from the Indians was the opportunity to design their own future, to fashion modern patterns of political, economic and social behaviour with a sustainable, integrated dynamic that did not leave so many Indians resisting, resenting or adrift from modernity.”

It was the China trade that generated more surplus, and later the West Indies traffic.  By 1757, after the War of Plassey, EIC had nearly ceased being a trading house in India (except for tea, indigo and jute) and had become a proxy administrator first in Bengal and then in the South. Its surplus from tax collection just barely paid for maintaining the troops.

Britain continued to remain in India for one strong reason.  It was the Britons’ belief that their Whig compromise (a system of sharing power in Parliament) that was superior and must be spread all over the world.  Whiggism became as much a part of their mission as was Protestantism.  The spread of the Empire became their “work.”  The book quotes Lord Curzon, the viceroy in 1905, thus: “Our work is virtuous and shall endure.”  This phrase was used by the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin, the Labour Chancellor Lord Jowitt and the liberal sceptic J A Hobson with equal fervour, which suggests strong consensus cutting across party and ideological lines.  The work meant upliftment of the masses, with education, better health and infrastructure and suchlike.

Why then did India remain where it did by the time the British left in 1947?  Mr Matthews sees the answer in the overwhelming priority the British gave to disarming Indians against each other to ensure peace, which meant little or no investment.  So if India had a 23 per cent share of the world’s wealth with 23 per cent population in 1700 and it had a mere 3 per cent share of the wealth in 1947, while the population share remained at 23 per cent, it implied that in the 250 years, India continued to be predominantly agricultural, while the world had industrialised. And that was the betrayal, which perpetuated poverty.  But we have to wait until the end of the book to discover the root of its title.

Although Whiggism meant liberalism and transparency, EIC and then later the British government found rule through a single person, not a council, more attractive in India.  The viceroys came from titled gentry and the district officers were mostly young Oxbridge graduates on their way up.  Mr Matthews shows the symbiotic interdependence and a pyramid of development in the Raj thus:  “A long list of major Indian figures formed types of partnership, political or commercial, with the British, including Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, several generations of the Tagore family, dozens of major bankers and merchants, hundreds of native rulers, thousands of lawyers, tens of thousands of petty officials, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers (sepoys).”

The book has a particularly illuminating section on religion and politics in India.  If I had the power, I would make it required reading for all politicians and religious leaders.  The author’s conclusion that “modernity developed organically in Europe through internal stresses, while in South Asia came as external shock” is particularly sanguine.

Mr Matthews engages in a speculative “what-if” game.  Suppose the result of the 1857 rebellion had been different, that is the British had lost. He describes a not entirely attractive picture of dissolute potentates, including Zafar, with India “nibbled at the edges and chaos reigned at the centre.”  And if 1857 had never happened, “the most constructive partnership possible in India — between British technocrats and progressive Indian entrepreneurs — might have had a chance to flourish.”  Interesting scenarios!

The book has so many insights worth quoting that it would need several such reviews to accommodate them.  But one is particularly relevant now: “Indian conditions tended to undermine or hamper all national political movements …because of a range of well-understood factors, such as diversity of population, problems of scale and difficulties of communication.”  Mr Matthews was talking of conditions in 1947, but are we any different now?

The book shows enormous scholarship. Mr Matthews, who has obviously read a large number of sources, both Indian and English, comes off as very impressive.  Yet the book is never tedious, although it contains a few avoidable typos.

In 1968, I was given a copy of Barrington Moore Jr’s Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship, a comparative study of modernisation of several societies, including India.  I found it invaluable because of its insights into Indian peasantry of pre-colonial and colonial era. An ungrateful borrower never returned it and now it is out of print. I think I have found a worthy companion to it in Peace, Poverty and Betrayal.