GCSE AQA History: The East India Company
The British Empire in India:
What was the East India Company and how did it come to dominate India by 1858?
Three specific periods –
Firstly, from 1600 to 1700 when its sole focus was trade.
From 1700 to 1757 when a transformation takes place and it started to take control of India
And finally from 1757 to 1858 when it set about building an empire for Britain.
So, to start with, let’s look at that period from 1600 when it was first granted a royal charter by Queen Elizabeth. The Company had actually been formed in the previous year, 1599, when approximately 200 business men of the city of London joined together to invest their money in a trading company that would target India. However, the ability to sail such long distances made trading slightly easier by this point. Indeed, those 200 businessmen recruited privateers, experienced in the Atlantic trade, to crew their ships. India was targeted because of the desirable products that could be obtained there, especially spices such as pepper, nutmeg and mace.
Indian textiles: calicoes, indigo and silk
Big profits: from the very start they were making a 250% profit
By 1700 the Company was making £500,000 per year.
So in those first hundred years after the Company’s arrival in India, it managed to accelerate the demand for manufactured textile goods. Factories sprung up from Madras to Bengal. Indeed, Bengal was then the workshop of the world with over 1 million weavers working in the state.
Between 1700 and 1757 a change started to take place as the EIC became increasingly sophisticated as well as profitable. The Company went from being a trading company to controlling significant parts of India. One of the reasons for this was the fact that the Company recruited Indian soldiers, sepoys, into its own army. Remember, this was a private army owned by the EIC and not the official army of the British government. The best example of this was at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, where Colonel Robert Clive, leader of the Company’s army, had 750 European soldiers but over 2000 Indian soldiers fighting under him.
After 1757 the British government started to support the EIC by supplying them with soldiers and weapons. If you remember our study of America, you will realise that this coincides with Britain’s loss of the American colonies. As a result, Professor Linda Colley argues that by 1783 Britain’s “interest, emotion and lust for empire shifted from North America to the Indian Peninsula”.
Finally, we need to consider the impact the Company had on India as it built the empire between 1757 and 1858. The Company was largely based around Bengal in the North East of India and it started to realise that it needed to govern Bengal in the interests of the Indians. However, it did this with an attitude of cultural superiority – in other words Social Darwinism - the belief that as white Europeans they were superior to the Indians. This is something else we saw when we studied the colonisation of America and the British attitudes towards the Native Americans there, as well as the Africans brought to the Americas as slaves.
The Company also applied four key principles to governing not just India but its empire generally.
Firstly, there was to be no charity – no support to be given to the people - they believed this made the people idle.
Secondly, they believed they shouldn’t do anything that kept the price of food deliberately low – remember, profit was always most important.
Thirdly, if the people couldn’t grow enough food on the land to feed themselves then people would die – the Company would do nothing to interfere with this.
And finally, they refused to spend any money that they hadn’t budgeted for.
Now the problem here was that in the 1770s (and in the years afterwards) a famine hit the state of Bengal and a third of the population, one in three people, died. Again, think back to our study of Ireland – an identical attitude was shown there and approximately one million Irish died.
So why ‘1858’ as the end date for the EIC? 1857 saw India’s First War of Independence, an uprising against British control. This was unsuccessful as British rule would continue for the next 100 years. However, it did make the British government question the ability of the Company to run India effectively. The following year the Company had its Royal Charter withdrawn and India was governed directly from London.
So, what should you know about the East India Company. You should make your own notes on the reasons why the Company went to India in the first place – what attracted them to the subcontinent? You should also understand how the Company transformed from being a group of traders to a sophisticated governing organisation with its own huge private army. And finally you should also be aware of the impact the Company had on India and consider what the Indian attitude towards the Company would have been.