A London historian of nineteenth-century India opens the files of the East India Company and finds a corporation with an army
The Company That Owned a Subcontinent: A Day Among Nine Miles of Its Paperwork
I spent today, as I spend most days, in a reading room in the Euston Road, at desk 214, with a foam cushion, a pencil and a volume of correspondence the size of a paving slab. Pens are forbidden. So is coffee. At the next desk a man was photographing a ledger page by page with a look of quiet despair. We nodded. We are regulars. We are both working our way through the largest archive ever generated by a private business, and neither of us will live to finish.
I should introduce myself, as this diary is new. I am a historian. My subject is India in the nineteenth century: how it was governed, argued over and taxed. I was born in Walthamstow and have a doctorate that took seven years and a great deal of my mother’s patience. I write a weekly piece for Bohiney, the American humour magazine, and its London sister The London Prat, which is how I pay for the cushion.
A word on my name, since it trips people up. The surname is Flemish; my grandfather came over from Ostend in 1940 with one suitcase. I gather there is a well-known broadcaster on French radio who has the same one. I have never met her, I do not work in radio and my French would shame a schoolchild. I am the one with the pencil.
What Is in the Boxes
The collection is called the India Office Records, and the British Library keeps it on something like nine miles of shelving. It is the paper trail of British rule in South Asia from 1600 to 1947. And the first two and a half centuries of it were produced not by a government but by a company.
I never get used to that sentence, and I try to make sure my students do not either. The East India Company was a business. It was founded by a group of London merchants on the last day of 1600, with a royal charter, to trade in spices. It had shareholders, directors, a dividend and a head office in the City. And by the early 1800s that business governed, directly or through client princes, most of a subcontinent containing perhaps a fifth of the human race.
It collected the taxes. It ran the courts. It minted coins. It made treaties and declared wars. It had an army of well over two hundred thousand men, about twice the size of the British Army itself, most of them Indian soldiers under British officers. Imagine a supermarket chain with nuclear weapons and you are not far off.
The Head Office
All of this was directed from a building in Leadenhall Street, a few minutes’ walk from the Bank of England. East India House was a long classical block with a portico and a museum. It was pulled down in the 1860s. The site is now occupied by the Lloyd’s insurance building, the one with its pipes on the outside, which seems apt.
What fascinates me is who worked there. The Company governed India by letter. A decision taken in Calcutta was written up and sent to London by ship, six months each way round the Cape. In Leadenhall Street a department of clerks read the dispatches and drafted replies in the name of the directors. These men ruled millions of people they had never seen, in a country none of them had visited.
And they included some of the cleverest people in England. The essayist Charles Lamb sat in the accounts office for thirty-three years and complained beautifully about it. A satirical novelist ran the correspondence department. The philosopher James Mill got his post on the strength of a vast history of India, written without setting foot there or learning a language, in which he explained that this made him more objective. His son, John Stuart Mill, the great champion of liberty, joined as a boy of seventeen and stayed thirty-five years, drafting the orders for a despotism each morning and writing on freedom in the evenings.
I have held dispatches in the younger Mill’s hand. They are lucid, humane and utterly sure that he knows best. I find them harder to read than the brutal ones.
How It Ended
By mid-century the Company had long since stopped being a trader. Parliament had taken away its commercial monopoly and left it as a sort of contractor, running India on the Crown’s behalf. Then came the great uprising of 1857, which I shall write about another day. It was put down with terrible violence, and in London the blame fell on Leadenhall Street.
In 1858 an act transferred the government of India to the Crown. The younger Mill wrote the Company’s protest, a fine piece of prose on behalf of a doomed employer, and then retired. The Company lingered as a legal shell to pay its last dividends and was dissolved in 1874. A newspaper said it had accomplished a work such as no other trading company ever attempted, and such as none was likely to attempt again. One hopes so.
The Words It Left
My favourite thing in the reading room is not a file. It is a dictionary on the open shelves, published in 1886 by two old India hands and known by its nonsensical title, which is itself an example: a garbled British soldier’s version of a cry heard at a religious procession. It is a glossary of the words that came into English from India.
There are hundreds, and you used several today. Bungalow. Veranda. Pyjamas. Shampoo. Chutney. Dungarees. Bangle. Jungle. Thug. Juggernaut. And one I make a point of teaching: loot. It is a Hindustani word for plunder, and it was among the first to arrive, in the eighteenth century, because the British in Bengal suddenly had need of it.
The soldiers brought home their own. Cushy, from a word for pleasant. Pukka, meaning properly cooked, hence genuine. Blighty, for home, from a word meaning foreign. And doolally, from the name of a transit camp near Bombay where men waiting months for a ship home went quietly mad. Those went straight into the speech of working London, and the paper’s guide to Cockney rhyming slang is full of their cousins. Half the East End’s vocabulary did time in a barracks in India.
Why I Write Jokes About It
People are sometimes surprised that a historian of empire writes for the comic press. My editor at the Prat was surprised too. I told her that the material is already there; one need only report it straight.
A company with a private army. A philosopher of liberty administering a conquest from a desk in the City. A history of a country by a man who boasted of never having seen it. A word for robbery imported because the old ones were worn out. I did not make any of it up. The house essay on what satirical commentary is, and what it is not says that the method is to describe a real thing so exactly that its absurdity cannot be missed. With the Company, the difficulty is making people believe you are not exaggerating.
I am careful, all the same. The absurdity is the Company’s. The cost was borne by people who had no say in the matter, and whole provinces were ruined by its taxes. I do not make jokes about famine, and the paper’s rule is the same: you aim at the board of directors, never at those under them.
This Week
So here is the piece. A leading retailer, it reports, has reassured customers after acquiring a standing army of two hundred and sixty thousand and the right to levy taxes in a neighbouring continent. A spokesman said the move would deliver value for shareholders and that the firm remained focused on its core business of groceries. The company’s head of correspondence, a philosopher, described liberty as extremely important and said those affected would be informed by sea mail within six months.
It will run on Bohiney and on the British satirical news page in London. Any reader who thinks I have gone too far may consult the checklist for telling satire from real news, and then come and sit at desk 215. I will lend them a pencil. More of my work is here.