Abstract
This innovative book describes and analyses several aspects of commercial relations between Britain and South Asia during the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, commerce conducted both under the auspices of and in defiance of the East India Company (EIC). The Twilight of the East India Company is not a history of the Company per se and, though it deals with aspects of domestic trade in north and east India as well as the ‘country trade’ conducted by the EIC between India, southeast Asia and China, the book does not purport to be an economic history of late Mughal India. Anthony Webster recounts well-known features of legitimate ‘private trade’ conducted by Company personnel but also examines the intricacies of private trade in relation to illegal and unauthorised trade, showing how even some of the staunchest opponents of the Company after the 1770s (self-professed ‘free traders’) cooperated with it and indeed helped preserve its privileges in order to serve their own economic and political interests. Eschewing generalisations about the imperial state or the ‘colonial project’, Webster nevertheless powerfully reasserts the view from the metropole over the view of developments on the periphery. The Twilight of the East India Company both substantiates and challenges arguments about the evolution and guidance of British capitalism made by Webster’s teachers, Peter Cain and A.G. Hopkins, in their pioneering two-volume study British Imperialism (1993; 2nd edition 2000). The Cain and Hopkins Thesis about ‘gentlemanly capitalism’—that is, that London financiers prevailed over provincial industrialists in shaping imperial policies—indeed provides the backdrop to this book’s larger arguments about the Anglo-Asian commercial order of the nineteenth century.
Webster carefully examines imperial trade in relation to specific individuals, trading companies and banks, to Europeans and Indians, to Indian (that is, European-dominated) ‘agency houses’ and London banks and trading firms, and to rival associations of traders in London and the British provinces. Like Webster’s earlier book, The Richest East India Merchant: The Life and Business of John Palmer of Calcutta 1767–1836 (2007), this book contributes to the study of British imperial politics and policy and to British business history by focusing on the fortunes of agency houses and the careers of their owners. Agency houses directly or indirectly managed commercial enterprises in India for the Company’s benefit, (literally) banked the salaries and profits of Company personnel and influenced—through their sister firms in London—the decision making of the Board of Control, the Courts of Proprietors and Directors and Parliament itself. Agency houses in Calcutta and Bombay were effectively investment banks that also leveraged the Company’s international currency exchange activities (for example, repatriating Company employees’ salaries to England, exchanging currencies for opium traders in China). As many histories have demonstrated, the rapid booms and busts in commodity trade in north India c. 1815–30 were in several instances the result of incautious investment by the agency houses. John Palmer and Co. (Calcutta) went bankrupt in 1830 after investing in indigo plantations. Documents submitted to the Insolvent Court in Calcutta in May 1830 showed that Palmer and Co. held at least one-third of shares in each of more than twenty indigo factories across north and east India. Palmer and Co. showed debts of ₹16,630,044 in 1831, 38 per cent of this to individuals, including ₹536 to an EIC drummer. 1 Webster concurs with A.K. Bagchi that the losses of banians allied to the agency houses in such sad ventures heavily dampened economic cooperation between Indians and Europeans after the 1820s.
While The Twilight of the East India Company enriches our understanding of Indian socioeconomic history c. 1770–1850, its most notable contribution is probably to appreciation of commercial relations in the ‘metropole’ as drivers of imperial policy. London firms engaged in shipping, banking and financing of international commerce from the eighteenth century worked hand-in-glove with linked firms in the Presidency cities, and the firms were usually linked through family ties, with a father (or son) in Calcutta filling orders of a son (or father) in London. Webster illustrates rivalries between London men of trade, shipping and banking and their counterparts in Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow and other burgeoning commercial centres over their fair shares of imperial and international trade. He also demonstrates through investigations of the provincial East India associations and Chambers of Commerce and London organisations, such as the London East India and China Association, that ‘free trade’, in principle as well as practice, was constituting a meaningful ‘bond’ between London and the provinces as early as the 1830s, when trade leaders cooperated to end the Company’s China monopoly in 1833. London and provincial interests cooperated a few years later—though unsuccessfully—in efforts to establish an Indian central bank, with thirty-two London merchants and bankers (including Thomas Baring) signing a prospectus along with sixty-three merchant and industrialists (among them John Gladstone and William Rathbone) from eight provincial cities. While the complex reasons for the faltering of this project cannot be summarised here, Webster interprets the event to mean that the Cain and Hopkins Thesis (about the antipathy of City and provincial interests) ‘does not hold from the 1830s in respect of commercial interests linked with India’ (p. 110).
Although Webster engages throughout this book with the Cain and Hopkins Thesis, he is reluctant to reject their grand argument about City men in the driver seat of the British empire of the nineteenth century. (By the 1880s, of course, British investors had put far more money to work outside the empire than within it.) Indeed, from the evidence Webster himself provides, the period 1813–33 (between two Charter Acts) appears as the high point of city–provincial cooperation in the conduct of Anglo-Asian trade. He sees the dissolution of the East India Company after 1858 as key evidence of a ‘tilt in favour of the gentlemanly capitalists’ (p. 162), while concurring with Ewen Green that democratisation of British politics from the 1860s meant that coalition-building across lines of class and regional ‘interest’ was necessary for gentlemanly capitalists to achieve their objectives. The force of this book is somewhat weakened by overlap between chapters (five or six chapters might have served better than eight) and by excessive foreshadowing and recapitulation. However, it well repays reading by historians of India and the British Empire and demonstrates how grand theory about imperialism can benefit from micro- and organisation-level historical research.