A friend of mine posted recently on Facebook that she was baffled by the lack of British coverage of the Bangladesh floods, in the country of her family roots.
It’s true that they were pretty much the worst floods in a century, leading to over a hundred deaths and millions of displaced persons. That’s pretty disastrous as disasters go, so bafflement seems to be in order. Until you take a look at the long relationship Britain has had with Bangladesh.
That’s something I’ve been doing as I write the episodes for my podcast, A History of England. More accurately, I’ve been finding out a bit about Bengal, of which today’s Bangladesh was once a part.
Not everyone knows that the British Empire in India wasn’t initially built by Britain, but by a private corporation, the East India Company. Its initial aim was to set up trading stations and use them to trade in Indian products or raw materials for Britain, and British manufactured goods for India.
The trouble was that the rise of the East India Company coincided with the decline of the Mughal Empire was beginning to fail in India. Local rulers were rising and challenging its central authority, and quickly beginning to challenge each other. That was a game the East India Company decided it could profitably join.
Mostly the Company did well, and when it didn’t, it went cap in hand to the British government for a bail out (‘too big to fail’ isn’t a new concept). One of its major costs was raising a military force. Initially, it was just to guard the company’s posts but, as it got further and further stuck in to the squabbling between various bits of the fragmenting Moghul Empire, it increasingly needed a significant fighting force. It recruited extensively, mostly Indian soldiers with British officers.
Obviously, that didn’t come cheap.
Here comes the really clever trick in the Company’s strategy in India. And nowhere was it demonstrated better than in Bengal.
The Company fought a long military campaign in Bengal. Its forces were led by a man who’d been a juvenile delinquent, including running a protection racket targeted at shopkeepers in the Shropshire town of Market Drayton as a boy.
His father pulled a few strings to get him a job as a clerk with the East India Company. When war engulfed the post where he was working, he volunteered to join the fighting and quickly emerged as a highly effective leader of men and the possessor of extraordinary physical courage.
His name was Robert Clive.
Using his skills, mixed with a good degree of luck (but Napoleon always said he looked for generals with luck) and a great deal of bribery, he was able to defeat the forces arrayed against him in Bengal. His efforts were crowned by the Mughal Emperor, still the titular ruler, granting him the ‘diwani’, the authority to collect taxes in Bengal.
 |
| The former juvenile delinquent Clive, now a hero of the British Empire, receiving the authority to collect taxes in Bengal from the Mughal Emperor. A highly romanticised image: in reality, they stuck a chair on a table |
The money was, indeed, enough to make sure the those of the Company’s men who returned home didn’t leave India emptyhanded. Clive brought home the equivalent of £90 million in today’s money and an annual income of £8 million.
Obviously, to support the Company’s operations and its Executives, to say nothing of its shareholders, taxes had to rise a bit. Within four years of the East India Company taking over taxation in Bengal, a famine hit the country and, sadly, local authorities no longer had the tax revenue to provide the kind of relief that had traditionally been distributed. Estimates of the deaths vary between 1 and 2 million.
One of the interesting things about India back then, and Bengal in particular, was that it was a huge exporter of textiles. Perhaps the world’s greatest. So much so that back in Imperial Rome, the writer Pliny had complained about the way the insatiable demand for Indian fabrics was draining the city of its gold reserves.
When the East India Company started importing Indian textiles into Britain, it met consternation among local weavers. The new cotton fabrics were doing massive damage to the traditional linens and wools. But before long, the British were hard at work making their own calicoes and muslins. What’s more, they demanded free market access to India. Only in one direction, though: they were just as much in favour of tariffs on imports from India as they were keen on exporting tariff-free the other way. In the early nineteenth century, British import tariffs on Indian Calicoes stood at 78%, while on muslins they were 31%.
What’s more, the new factory methods introduced by the industrial revolution made British cotton mills hugely competitive with old hand loom weavers both in Britain and India. By 1793, a Lancashire mill operative would be 400 times more productive than an India weaver.
Between 1753 and the end of the eighteenth century, Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh, saw its fabric exports to Britain fall by more than half. In 1818, the East India Company simply shut down its textile operation in Dhaka. In the words of Nick Robins, in his excellent The Corporation that Changed the World, ‘by 1840, [Dhaka’s] population had fallen from 150,000 to just 20,000, with jungle and malaria ‘fast encroaching upon the town’.”
Britain finally left India in 1947. But not before delivering one more gift to Bengal: another famine, in 1943. This time estimates of the number dead range between 2.1 and 3.8 million. Slowness in distributing relief and general maladministration contributed significantly to the extent of the disaster.
Doesn’t all that leave us plenty to think about?
Like, perhaps British indifference to the plight of Bengal is nothing new.
And, maybe, that those who denounce as woke any criticism of that fine institution, the British Empire, need to think again. Suggesting it didn’t much benefit its subject people may be woke. But it’s pretty accurate too, isn’t it?
No comments:
Post a Comment