The Company's Sword: The East India Company and the Politics of Militarism, 1644–1858 9781108833882, 9781108983112

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
List of Figures
List of Maps
Acknowledgments
A Note on Spelling and Place Names
Maps
Introduction
The Company in Eighteenth-Century India
The Company in British National Politics
Soldiers as Subjects
1 Forging the Sword
1.1 Military Force in Early Colonial Charters
1.2 A Moor to Defend the Empire?
1.3 Military Service and Colonial Belonging
1.4 Spectacular Sepoys
2 The Sepoy’s Oath
2.1 Military Economies: North and South
2.2 The Carnatic Wars
2.3 The Miserable Musket-Bearer
2.4 The Commandant King
2.5 A New Military Economy
2.6 The Spirit of Desertion
3 Mercenaries, Diplomats, and Deserters
3.1 European Mercenaries in India’s Military Economy
3.2 Hat-Men in the Service of the Circar
3.3 Between the Circar and the Company
3.4 The Rise of the Residents
4 The Other Revolution of 1776
4.1 The Marginalization of Madras
4.2 The Conquest of Thanjavur
4.3 “High Time to Correct the System”
4.4 Between Civil and Military Despots
4.5 “A Chain of Cantonments”
4.6 The Power of Court Martial
5 The Empire Preserved
5.1 “Trouble and Ill-Conveniences Inconceivable”
5.2 “Golden Dreams of Eastern Magnificence”
5.3 By the Same Loyalty and in the Same Cause
5.4 A Brotherhood of Officers
5.5 A Military Public and an “Unmilitary” Protest
6 Stratocracy
6.1 When Mars Lost His Sword
6.2 The Mutiny at Vellore
6.3 Syed Ibrahim’s Tomb
6.4 The Rights of Military Men
6.5 “Not Long Before All White Men Gone”
6.6 The Officers’ Triumph
7 Breaking the Officers’ Sword
7.1 Paramountcy and Persistence
7.2 “Nothing Less Than Another Vellore”
7.3 Rebellion and the Restoration of Colonial Order
7.4 The Officers’ Failure
7.5 “John Company Is Dead”
Conclusion
Bibliography
I Archival Sources
II Printed Material (Pre-1900)
III Printed Material (Post-1900)
Index

Citation preview

The Company’s Sword

In the late eighteenth century, it was a cliché that the East India ­Company ruled India “by the sword.” Christina Welsch shows how Indian and European soldiers shaped and challenged the Company’s political expansion and how elite officers turned those dynamics into a bid for “stratocracy” – a state dominated by its army. Combining colonial records with Mughal Persian sources from Indian states, The ­Company’s Sword offers new insight into India’s eighteenth-­ century ­military landscape, showing how elite officers positioned themselves as the sole actors who could navigate, understand, and control those networks. Focusing on South India, rather than the ­ Company’s better-studied territories in Bengal, the analysis provides a new ­ approach, chronology, and geography through which to understand the Company Raj. It offers a fresh perspective of the Company’s collapse after the rebellions of 1857, tracing the deep roots of that conflict to the Company’s eighteenth-century development. Christina Welsch is Assistant Professor of the History of Britain and its Empire at The College of Wooster, Ohio.

Critical Perspectives on Empire Editors Professor Catherine Hall University College London Professor Mrinalini Sinha University of Michigan Professor Kathleen Wilson State University of New York, Stony Brook Critical Perspectives on Empire is a major series of ambitious, cross-disciplinary works in the emerging field of critical imperial studies. Books in the series explore the connections, exchanges, and mediations at the heart of national and global histories, the contributions of local as well as metropolitan knowledge, and the flows of people, ideas and identities facilitated by colonial contact. To that end, the series not only offers a space for outstanding scholars working at the intersection of several disciplines to bring to wider attention the impact of their work; it also takes a leading role in reconfiguring contemporary historical and critical knowledge, of the past and of ourselves. A full list of titles published in the series can be found at: www.cambridge.org/cpempire

The Company’s Sword The East India Company and the Politics of Militarism, 1644–1858 Christina Welsch The College of Wooster, Ohio

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108833882 DOI: 10.1017/9781108983112 © Christina Welsch 2022 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2022 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-108-83388-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures List of Maps Acknowledgments A Note on Spelling and Place Names Maps

page vii viii ix xii xiii

Introduction1 The Company in Eighteenth-Century India The Company in British National Politics Soldiers as Subjects

1 Forging the Sword 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

Military Force in Early Colonial Charters A Moor to Defend the Empire? Military Service and Colonial Belonging Spectacular Sepoys

2 The Sepoy’s Oath 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6

Military Economies: North and South The Carnatic Wars The Miserable Musket-Bearer The Commandant King A New Military Economy The Spirit of Desertion

3 Mercenaries, Diplomats, and Deserters 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

European Mercenaries in India’s Military Economy Hat-Men in the Service of the Circar Between the Circar and the Company The Rise of the Residents

4 The Other Revolution of 1776 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6

The Marginalization of Madras The Conquest of Thanjavur “High Time to Correct the System” Between Civil and Military Despots “A Chain of Cantonments” The Power of Court Martial

7 12 15

23 26 33 40 47

55 57 62 66 69 73 79

85 87 92 99 104

113 116 120 123 127 132 137

v

vi

Contents

5 The Empire Preserved 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5

“Trouble and Ill-Conveniences Inconceivable” “Golden Dreams of Eastern Magnificence” By the Same Loyalty and in the Same Cause A Brotherhood of Officers A Military Public and an “Unmilitary” Protest

6 Stratocracy 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6

When Mars Lost His Sword The Mutiny at Vellore Syed Ibrahim’s Tomb The Rights of Military Men “Not Long Before All White Men Gone” The Officers’ Triumph

7 Breaking the Officers’ Sword 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5

Paramountcy and Persistence “Nothing Less Than Another Vellore” Rebellion and the Restoration of Colonial Order The Officers’ Failure “John Company Is Dead”

142 144 149 155 159 162

171 175 180 186 189 194 198

207 210 216 222 229 233

Conclusion

240

Bibliography Index

247 276

Figures

1 William Hodges, The Marmalong Bridge, 1783 2 Charles D’Agar, attr., Sir Streynsham Master, 1714 3 Print after Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1776 4 Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah, Commission of George Buck, June 3, 1779 5 Anonymous, The Unhappy Contrast, Print, 1791 6 Anonymous, Sepoy Drums and Fifes, c. 1800 7 Joseph Noel Paton, In Memoriam, 1858

page 24 32 43 96 150 176 238

vii

Maps

1 India in the early seventeenth century 2 India c. 1750 3 India c. 1805 4 India c. 1857 5 Key locations in South India 6 Key locations in North India

viii

page xiii xiv xv xvi xvii xviii

Acknowledgments

“Why did the East India Company have its own army?” The question arises frequently in my undergraduate seminars on the British Empire in India. Our efforts to answer it push students to challenge their own conceptions about empire, military power, and corporations themselves, especially as they emerged in the seventeenth century. In my first semester at The College of Wooster, though, I was brought up short by a follow-up question from one student: “Why did the Company still have its own army in the nineteenth century?” How had the Company’s autonomous military structures survived more than two centuries of political and social change and of fundamental transformations in the nature of the British Empire? Why did they collapse so precipitously after the rebellions of 1857, when no earlier crisis had managed to displace them? This book is in part an effort to answer those questions. My gratitude thus goes out to that student of mine, who pushed me to reframe my approach to this history. I apologize that you had to wait so long for your answer! Of course, the text that follows would not have been possible without a truly global network of support. My thanks go first to the History Department at Princeton University, where the seeds of this project were first conceived of as a dissertation. The insights of Linda Colley, David A. Bell, and Bhavani Raman were irreplaceable, and I count myself as deeply fortunate to have had such mentors. Robert Travers’s comments and encouragement in the final stages of the dissertation were similarly invaluable. Thanks are also due to the broader faculty, especially Michael Laffan and Gyan Prakash, for their help in developing the project. The Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies provided much-needed material and intellectual support both for researching and writing the dissertation. Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Amineh Mahallati in the Near Eastern Studies Department, whose generosity with her time and energy made it possible to pursue Mughal Persian as a research language. ix

x

Acknowledgments

I am similarly thankful for the institutional and collegial support that I have found at The College of Wooster. The Isabel and Elizabeth Ralston Presidential Endowment for Faculty Development allowed me to undertake international research as a junior faculty member. Conversations in the Cultural Studies Colloquium helped to sharpen and develop early versions of some of the chapters in this book. I am especially grateful to Georgina Tierney and to Cat Long, for their enthusiastic work as my undergraduate research assistants, and without whom the argumentation and evidence in Chapters 1 and 7 (respectively) would be badly incomplete. Thanks also to Lucy Barnhouse, Julia Bernier, Jordan Biro Walters, and Ng Wee Siang Margaret – without our writing group, this book would not exist. Further, thanks are due to the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), funding from which was critical to every stage of this project. The AIIS Junior Research Fellowship cohort for 2013–2014 provided energizing encouragement, and I am grateful for the continued discussions I have had with members of this group. Your research is inspiring! Similarly, the participants in the 2017 session of the AIIS “dissertationto-book” workshop provided much-needed advice on how to revise and transform the scope of this project. Finally, I thank the tutors at the AIIS summer language program in Mughal Persian at Lucknow, especially Dr. S. A. Zafar, for their constant patience, unflagging enthusiasm, and extensive knowledge, without which my use of records from the court of Arcot would have been impossible. This project involved research in archives around the globe. I owe much to the staff at the British Library, the Tamil Nadu State Archives (Chennai), the British National Archives, the National Army Museum (London), the National Library of Scotland, the National Archives of Scotland, the Andhra Pradesh State Archives (Hyderabad), and the Yale Center for British Art. Thanks especially to Neelavan at the Tamil Nadu State Archives, for working with me to find Arcot’s ruznāmah (court diaries), and to Marie at the British Library, who was always willing to help me to locate and transfer materials. Dr. Margaret Makepeace at the British Library was also generous with her time in helping me to frame my research and to navigate the Company’s vast records. I presented early versions of the chapters in this book at several conferences, including the Association of Asian Studies, Britain and the World, and the Society for Military History. I am grateful to the discussants, fellow panelists, and audience members for their feedback, especially Megan Thomas and Hannah Archambault, who helped me conceptualize sepoys as historical actors in broader global networks. Material in Chapter 2 of this book was previously published in Past & Present

Acknowledgments

xi

(“Military Mobility, Authority, and Negotiation in Early Colonial India” [November 2020]), and sections from Chapter 5 appeared in Redcoats to Tommies: The Experience of the British Soldier from the Eighteenth Century (“Our Brother Officers in India: The Military Lobby in Imperial Politics of the 1780s”), published by Boydell & Brewer and edited by Kevin Linch and Matthew Lord. I thank the publishers for their permission to include this material in this book. The editorial team at Cambridge University Press has been a delight. I am grateful for Michael Watson’s insights and support in navigating the publishing process and to the reviewers for the excellent comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. The series editors of Critical Perspectives on Empire – Catherine Hall, Mrinalini Sinha, and Kathleen Wilson – have long been inspirational to me as scholars, and I am immensely grateful to have developed this project with their support. Outside of CUP, Margaret Puskar-Pascewicz did brilliant work producing the index for this manuscript. To Nick and Alex, you have been unfailing sources of encouragement throughout my life. To Jocelyn, your constant enthusiasm has earned you a lifetime of biscotti, and I am so grateful for our friendship. To my mother, your confidence in me has pushed me through countless ­challenges – and your English-teacher eyes saved me from a host of typos! Finally, to Jason, I can only express my deepest gratitude. My life is bright because of you.

A Note on Spelling and Place Names

The names of locations, people, and ranks have always been a source of difficulty for historians engaging with colonial India. Spelling and transliteration practices were hardly standardized in the records of the East India Company during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and even widely agreed upon conventions for transliteration differed strikingly from modern practices. (For instance, the Indo-Persian term for a Mughal provincial administrator was rendered nabob in Company documents but is more accurately transliterated as nawāb or navāb.) Throughout this book, I employ modern spelling conventions for most people and places – with two exceptions. First, I refer to cities of Madras (Chennai), Calcutta (Kolkata), and Bombay (Mumbai) by their former names to reflect that these were colonial settlements and the seats of a colonial administration. Second, in a few cases, Indian individuals adopted their own preferred transliterations (e.g., Sake Dean Mahomet), and so I have accordingly made use of those names. I also include the most widely used “colonial era” spelling parenthetically with the first mention of each major location to aid readers. Spelling and grammar from quoted texts is preserved. Persian texts are transliterated using the Library of Congress’s romanization guide. Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own.

xii

1  India in the early seventeenth century

2  India c. 1750

3  India c. 1805

4  India c. 1857

5  Key locations in South India

6

Key locations in North India

Introduction

Our power in India is altogether unnatural and artificial; and is to be maintained as it was acquired, by the sword only.1

When army captain John Munro wrote this line in 1806, he was invoking what had already become a cliché. British authority in India, administered through the East India Company, was secured “by the sword.” At first glance, the statement seems banal, obtuse, even tautological: Across the globe, violence was embedded in the extractive, expansive dynamics of the British Empire.2 Nevertheless, as Munro’s observation suggests, Britons in the early nineteenth century spoke frequently of their growing territories in India as uniquely militaristic. The rhetoric percolated into British discourse in the 1780s during the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, the Company’s first governor general. The emotive speeches of prosecutor Edmund Burke during the opening stages of the trial, which ultimately ended in Hastings’s acquittal, brought the reality of the Company’s expanding empire dramatically to the forefront of public debate.3 John Munro, “Observations respecting the objections that exist against carrying into effect the arrangement proposed by Lord William Bentinck for reducing three Regiments of Native Infantry and respecting the probable consequences of that Measure,” January 1806, 322, Papers of Major John Munro, BL MSS Eur D1146/1. 2 Of course, this violence has not always been at the forefront of scholarly examinations of this empire. For a discussion of this hesitancy, see Duncan Bell, “Desolation Goes Before Us,” Imperial History by the Book: A Roundtable on John Darwin’s The Empire Project, Antoinette Burton, ed. Journal of British Studies 54, no. 5 (2015): 987–93. 3 Burke’s prosecution of Hastings has been extremely well studied. For the trial as spectacle, see P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (London: Oxford University Press, 1965); Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006); Lida Maxwell, Justice, Sympathy, and Mourning in Burke’s Impeachment of Warren Hastings, Public Trials (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), chap. 2. For the trial’s ideological significance, see Frederick G. Whelan, Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996); Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), chap. 5; Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, 1

1

2

Introduction

Burke accused Hastings of a wide range of misdeeds, from corruption to conspiracy to murder, and excoriated the erstwhile governor for having claimed “that we [Britain] held the dominion of Bengal by the Sword, which he has falsely declared the source of right and the natural charter of dominion.”4 Bengal, in northeast India, was the center of the Company’s colonial administration in this period, the largest and wealthiest of its claimed ­territories. In 1765, the Company had acquired the diwani – the appointment to govern the province – from Shah Alam II, emperor of the declining Mughal Empire. This grant came as a result of conquest, a prize the Company had demanded after defeating Shah Alam II and his allies at the Battle of Buxar in December 1764.5 In response to Burke’s accusation, Hastings thus acceded, “I affirm, as a fact unquestioned, and unquestionable, that we derive our original title to our possessions in Bengal from the sword alone.”6 Where Burke and Hastings clashed, then, was not over how the diwani had been acquired, but rather over its legitimacy. Burke decried conquest as a morally bankrupt source of power. Hastings, in contrast espoused what Burke condemned as “geographical morality,” arguing that, while right by conquest was illegitimate in Europe, India’s purported lack of civil governance justified using force to secure “Asiatic” authority.7 Hastings’s eventual acquittal suggests that it was his version of empire that ultimately carried the day. As late as 1829, one would-be colonial reformer, Gavin Young, complained, “It is a favourite maxim with a large class of politicians, and particularly with those connected with India, that what the sword has conquered, the sword must maintain.”8 Yet, where Hastings had used the language of conquest to vindicate his own authority as governor general, subsequent writers like John Munro



4

5 6

7

8

NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2005), chap. 3. For an alternate view, though, see Daniel I. O’Neill, Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). Edmund Burke, The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 8 (London: John C. Nimmo, 1887), 327. Robert Travers, “A British Empire by Treaty in Eighteenth-Century India,” in Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600–1900, ed. Saliha Belmessous (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 148–51. Warren Hastings, The Defence of Warren Hastings, Esq. (Late Governor General of Bengal,) at the Bar of the House of Commons, upon the Matter of the Several Charges of High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Presented against Him in the Year 1786 (London: Printed for John Stockdale, 1786), 32. Emphasis added. Mithi Mukherjee, “Justice, War, and the Imperium: India and Britain in Edmund Burke’s Prosecutorial Speeches in the Impeachment Trial of Warren Hastings,” Law and History Review 23, no. 3 (2005): 606. Gavin Young, Reflections on the Present State of British India (London: Hurst, Chance, and Co., St. Paul’s Churchyard, 1829), 134.

Introduction

3

transformed the meaning of his words. “Rule by the sword” instead became a shorthand for a colonial state controlled by military actors. In the case of the Company state, it more specifically meant domination by its white, commissioned officers. The cliché went beyond what Douglas Peers, in his seminal study of the Company’s armies, called the colonial garrison state, in which the army was the most visible embodiment of state power.9 At its most extreme, “rule by the sword” positioned officers as the authors of state power, outside of and sometimes in conflict with their civil counterparts. To distinguish this from other forms of governmental militarism, I refer to this arrangement as a “stratocracy,” a state ruled by its army. The term was dredged forth by a civil judge in 1809 in the midst of a formidable crisis, when more than 90 percent of the white officers in the Company’s southern territories mutinied in a bid to overthrow the governor. It was, the judge insisted, “the worst of all Governments,” but it was one that I argue prevailed in the Company’s institutions long after the extremity of the mutiny had faded.10 The negative connotations of “stratocracy” meant that even its advocates tended to hedge their vision of militarized empire as a temporary exigency, rather than an ideal. Especially in the early nineteenth century, when calls for “good governance” within the British Empire were on the rise, would-be stratocrats insisted that military rule would pave the way for civil institutions.11 Such possibilities, though, were firmly bound up in what Dipesh Chakrabarty described as the perpetual “not yet” of imperial rule.12 Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, when the Company Raj reached the peak of its power, those elusive promises had much less power than the reality of the Company’s military establishment. As one officer, John Taylor, put it in 1800: “Let it be remembered that it is by the sword that India is to be governed. The army is the palladium which can alone secure that country to the British crown.”13 Indeed, the independence of its army would prove one of the

9 Douglas M. Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in India, 1819–1835 (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1995). 10 Thomas Stranger, “Extract of the Hon Sir Thomas Stranger’s Address to the Grand Jury,” Memorandum Book, 250, NLS Acc. 8954. 11 Young, Reflections on the Present State of British India, 134. 12 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 10. 13 John Taylor, Letters on India, Political, Commercial, and Military, Relative to Subjects Important to the British Interests in the East. Addresses to a Proprietor of East-India Stock (London: Printed by S. Hamilton, Falcon-Court, Fleet-Street: for Messrs. Carpenter and Co. Old Bond-Street; Egerton, Whitehall; Murray and Highley, Fleet-Street; Wallis, Paternoster-Row; Vernor and Hood, Poultry; and Black and Parry, Leadenhall-Street, 1800), 222.

4

Introduction

most enduring aspects of the Company itself. In 1813, it lost its trade monopoly, but, as late as 1853, the Company retained its authority to appoint and to maintain an independent European officer corps.14 Despite the colonial army’s significance, though, scholars examining the nature of the Company Raj have tended to focus on its civil administration. As the Company expanded in the late eighteenth and early ­nineteenth centuries, its growth created a wide range of new relationships between the state and its subjects – for instance, through civil and criminal courts,15 in the context of schools and education,16 through recordkeeping,17 or as a part of revenue collection.18 Scholars examining the colonial state have stressed the transformative effect of these interactions on Indian society, both through intentional efforts by colonial officials to effect “civilizing” reform and more inadvertently when officials’ efforts to translate unfamiliar concepts and practices distorted social systems.19 Such studies, though, have rarely extended that approach to the Company’s armies, which appear instead as mechanisms through which the colonial policy could be strengthened, extended, and enforced.20 14 Anthony Webster, The Twilight of the East India Company: The Evolution of Anglo-Asian Commerce and Politics, 1790–1860 (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2009), 11–12, 14–15. 15 See, for instance, Marc Galanter, “The Displacement of Traditional Law in Modern India,” Journal of Social Issues 24, no. 4 (1968): 65–90; Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India: The British in Bengal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 16 Catriona Ellis, “Education for All: Reassessing the Historiography of Education in Colonial India,” History Compass 7, no. 2 (2009): 363–75. 17 C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012); James Lees, “Administrator-Scholars and the Writing of History in Early British India: A Review Article,” Modern Asian Studies 48, no. 3 (2014): 826–43. 18 Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal; an Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Paris: Mouton, 1963); Burton Stein, Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); D. A. Washbrook, “Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies 15, no. 3 (January 1, 1981): 649–721. 19 Scholars have fiercely debated whether the Company’s expansion represented a change or a continuity with precolonial systems. A good primer on this debate is David Washbrook, “South India, 1770–1840: The Colonial Transition,” Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (July 2004): 479–81. Recent scholarship, though, has shifted toward emphasizing change over continuity. 20 Most work on the Company’s armies focuses on its tactics and strategies. See, for instance, Kaushik Roy, “Military Synthesis in South Asia: Armies, Warfare, and Indian Society, c. 1740–1849,” Journal of Military History 69, no. 3 (2005): 651–90; Kaushik Roy, War, Culture, and Society in Early Modern South Asia, 1740–1849 (Milton Park, Abingdon: Routledge, 2011); G. J. Bryant, The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784: A Grand Strategic Interpretation (New York: Boydell & Brewer Ltd., 2013).

Introduction

5

The Company’s Sword flips this dynamic. Rather than tools of the colonial state, this book approaches the Company’s armies as key spaces in which the nature of that state took shape and in which it would be contested. From its start in the early seventeenth century, the East India Company drew on a wide range of networks for military labor, including both Indians and Europeans. Those military establishments grew quickly and exploded by several orders of magnitude during the second half of the eighteenth century. By 1805, the Company’s standing army was larger than the British Army proper, composed of more than one hundred and fifty thousand troops, the vast majority of whom were sepoys (Indian soldiers).21 As ever more numerous sepoys, officers, and European soldiers engaged with the Company, questions about how these troops could be mobilized, managed, and made to enhance the colonial state would precipitate new assumptions about how the empire’s metaphorical “sword” should function. The men – and the very occasional women – who enlisted in those armies were not passive objects in this negotiation of meaning.22 On the contrary, individuals recruited into the Company’s heterogeneous forces brought with them their own interpretations and expectations about their roles within the Company. In the chapters that follow, I explore those views, tracing the ways that the distinct ambitions of individual military actors produced conflicts, confrontations, and sometimes creative collaborations, both among the soldiers themselves and between them and the civil government that employed them. Of course, their maneuvers did not occur on a level playing field. Even in the Company’s earliest operations, English officials came to India with distinct ideas about martial prestige and social virtue.23 As a result, the Company’s military institutions were among the first sites in which the colonial state codified a system of segregation on racial lines. The separate categories of “European” and “Indian” troops facilitated the solidification of colonial categories of differences. Familiar Saidian binaries, pitting Europeans as

21 Raymond Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reform, 1783–1798 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 6; Kevin Linch and Matthew McCormack, “Defining Soldiers: Britain’s Military, c.1740–1815,” War In History 20, no. 2 (April 2013): 145. 22 Hannah Snell, who cross-dressed and joined the army as James Grey, supposedly to  find her/his husband, fought at the siege of Pondicherry in 1748. Anonymous, The Female Soldier: Or, the Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (London: R. Walker, the Corner of Elliot’s-Court, in the Little Old-Bailey, 1750). 23 Philip Stern, “Soldier and Citizen in the Seventeenth-Century English East India Company,” Journal of Early Modern History 15, no. 1–2 (2011): 83–104.

6

Introduction

rational, active, and masculine against Indians as irrational, passive, and feminine, were given a militarized slant.24 It was against this backdrop that the central framework of “rule by the sword” ultimately took shape. Though the rhetoric would spread widely, it was most stridently expounded by the Company’s European officers themselves, the most elite part of the colonial garrison state. Eager to advance their ambitions at both an individual and a collective level, officers such as John Munro offered an interpretation of power in India that vindicated and indeed required their primacy in colonial politics. This view developed from three major precepts. First, it drew and borrowed from the view of Indian society promoted by Hastings and others in the eighteenth century as one characterized by a constant cycle of war and martial despotism. Second, it identified the Company’s sepoy armies as necessary to secure or to maintain Britain’s preeminence within that cycle. In the eighteenth century, this argument tended to focus on external enemies, but, as the Company gained power, it would shift toward the maintenance of internal, civil order. Third and finally, it pointed to examples of unrest, discontent, and even mutiny within sepoy regiments to emphasize those troops’ unreliability, while simultaneously positioning the Company’s European officers as the sole agents through which sepoys could be controlled. John Malcolm, a contemporary of Munro and one of the most prolific supporters of “rule by the sword,” offered in 1830 a neat encapsulation of its central claim: “It cannot be too often repeated this Army is our safety and our danger.”25 The prevalence of these ideas throughout Company’s administration also suggests a new explanation for its abrupt collapse. In 1857, massive rebellions broke out across northern India, originating among the Company’s sepoy regiments. After a bloody fight to suppress the revolt, the British state dissolved the Company as a governing body, transferring India’s administration to the Crown. Many in Victorian Britain understood the rebellions as a “mutiny,” a breakdown of military order.26 The label persists in British historical consciousness, but has been criticized by scholars and Indian activists alike as an oversimplification that obfuscates the wider scope of the rebellion and as a loaded word that 24 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 25th Anniversary Edition (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 49. For more on how Said’s binaries can be seen in the Company’s descriptions of its soldiers, see Channa Wickremesekera, Best Black Troops in the World: British Perceptions and the Making of the Sepoy, 1746–1805 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2002). 25 John Malcolm, “Report to Lord Wm. Bentinck on the Bombay Army and the Army Generally,” 319 v, BL IOR/L/Mil/5/397. 26 Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 11.

The Company in Eighteenth-Century India

7

delegitimizes the conflict.27 While acknowledging these points, I argue that the widespread interpretation of the rebellions as “mutiny” had added significance in the context of the Company’s “stratocracy.” The specter of revolt by sepoys had long preoccupied colonial officials, and its European officers had secured their authority and autonomy in the colonial state by positioning themselves as the sole actors able to prevent that threat. In 1857, “rule by sword” proved incapable of fulfilling its most basic guarantee, and the colonial state it upheld would not long survive that failure.

The Company in Eighteenth-Century India

The Company’s Sword presents the Company’s military expansion as the product of two distinct political contexts: eighteenth-century India during the decline of the Mughal Empire and the British Empire during what some have called the “Second Hundred Years War.”28 Both of these settings were dynamic spaces in which concepts of the state, of power, and of political identity were being busily transformed. The Company, its agents, and those it employed were participants in these processes, influenced by their developments and eager to define their own status therein. Where the two contexts overlapped, though, they inevitably produced contradictions. Burke’s attempted prosecution of Hastings was a symptom of these tensions, a bitter debate over how the Company’s expanding political claims in India could fit into contemporary, shifting concepts of Britishness.29 These same questions, alongside other issues of political, social, and professional belonging, would resonate across the Company’s networks throughout this period. Eighteenth-century India saw an explosion of new states, new claims to power, and new political structures. In the previous century, the Mughal Empire had reached the peak of its political power and territorial expanse. Founded in the sixteenth century by Babur, a descendant of Timur, the Mughal state had expanded rapidly across the subcontinent, establishing a highly mobile empire of trade routes, tributaries, For the continued use in British popular history, see Saul David, The Indian Mutiny: 1857 (London: Penguin, 2003). For debates about naming the conflict, see Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, ed., 1857, Essays from Economic and Political Weekly (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007), 1–2. 28 This last term was coined by Arthur H. Buffinton, The Second Hundred Years War, 1689–1815 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1929). For a debate about the periodization, see H. M. Scott, “The Second ‘Hundred Years War’, 1689–1815,” The Historical Journal 35, no. 2 (1992): 444. 29 Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 156. Nicholas Dirks has argued that the trial acted as a sort of expiation-by-spectacle for the British public in The Scandal of Empire, 129–31. 27

8

Introduction

and military alliances.30 By the end of the seventeenth century, though, political power in the system had already begun to shift from a unified center in Delhi to a more regionalized system. Aurangzeb, under whose rule the Mughals reached their territorial peak, relocated his capital from Delhi to the more southerly Deccan in a bid to assert stronger control over newly acquired territories.31 Subsequent emperors, though, returned to Delhi and exercised an increasingly symbolic form of authority over their provinces. In the Victorian era, British scholars often referred to the subsequent period as a “dark century,” beset by chaos and anarchy, which British rule set to right.32 Recently, William Dalrymple in his popular 2019 book, The Anarchy, revived elements of this interpretation, though with the less triumphalist framing, arguing that the Company’s expansion into this “fraught, chaotic, and very violent military history” was an unparalleled example of predatory capitalism.33 In fact, the Indian political landscape that emerged in the wake of Delhi’s decline was far from anarchic. The growing autonomy of Mughal provinces like Bengal, Awadh, and Hyderabad was less a reflection of Delhi’s incapacity than it was evidence of the expanding strength of their political systems, themselves reflections of the Mughal model.34 At the same time, other states also emerged from outside Mughal structures, the most successful example of which was the rapidly growing Maratha Confederacy.35 The ability of rulers and would-be rulers to tap into the 30 For warfare and state formation in the Mughal Empire, see Jos L. Gommans, Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and Highroads to Empire 1500–1700 (New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2002); Pratyay Nath, Climate of Conquest: War, Environment, and Empire in Mughal North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019). For a discussion of Mughal strategies of alliances, see Munis D. Faruqui, Princes of the Mughal Empire, 1504–1719 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 31 Audrey Truschke, Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 89–90. 32 For instance, see Thomas Babington Macaulay, Macaulay’s Essay on Clive (New York: Macmillan & Company, 1907), 11–13. For a discussion of this historiography, see P.  J. Marshall, The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Revolution or Evolution?, Oxford in India Readings: Themes in Indian History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 33 William Dalrymple, The Anarchy:The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019), xxxii. 34 Richard B. Barnett, North India between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals, and the British, 1720–1801 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Munis D. Faruqi, “At Empire’s End: The Nizam, Hyderabad and Eighteenth-Century India,” in Expanding Frontiers in South Asian and World History: Essays in Honour of John F. Richards, ed. Richard Maxwell Eaton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–38; Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and Punjab, 1707– 1748, 2nd ed. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013). 35 For a typology of these states, see C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770–1870 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 18–36.

The Company in Eighteenth-Century India

9

region’s military economies – or, better yet, to create new economies of their own – was crucial to asserting authority. Soldiers were among what C. A. Bayly termed “service people,” an emerging elite of courtiers, artisans, and other professionals courted by states to enhance their ­prestige.36 The nawabs of Awadh, for instance, reduced their dependence on the Mughal center by cultivating a steady supply of military labor in the form of peasant-soldiers in their province in lieu of the urbanized military networks emanating out of Delhi. The Company would in fact co-opt this recruiting pool to form the core of the sepoy regiments in the Bengal Army.37 Martial renown was also important for rulers themselves. Again, this was not just a matter of conquest. Most of the Mughal officials who administered the increasingly independent “successor states” had risen through Mughal armies and cultivated their growing claims to sovereignty in ways that reflected their martial prowess and backgrounds.38 The most famous officer-turned-ruler of the eighteenth century, Haider Ali of Mysore, had a familial history of service on Mughal campaigns and had distinguished himself fighting in the armies of the Wodeyar rajahs of Mysore before he amassed sufficient power to seize control of that state.39 Elsewhere, military adventurers were able to use their professional reputations to carve out new political domains, as in the case of Himmat Bahadur (Anupgiri Gosain), a religious soldier who held power in modern-day Bundelkhund at the end of the eighteenth century.40 Chapter 2 examines the rise and fall of Muhammad Yusuf Khan, an Indian officer in the Company’s service who made a similar bid for political sovereignty in Madurai and Tirunelveli in the 1760s. In short, warfare in eighteenth-century India, violent as it was, had a complex effect on India’s political landscapes: Military hierarchies, claims of prestige and expertise, and networks of patronage between soldiers helped to shape the emergence of new states. As Yusuf Khan’s career suggests, the Company’s settlements across India were deeply entangled in the diplomatic negotiations and political innovation going on in this period, and its armies were necessarily Bayly, 40–41. 37 Seema Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India, 1770–1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 13–26, 41–45. Alavi’s argument is discussed in more detail in Chapter 2. 38 Faruqi, “At Empire’s End: The Nizam, Hyderabad and Eighteenth-Century India,” 4. 39 Irfan Habib, Confronting Colonialism: Resistance and Modernization under Haider Ali & Tipu Sultan (London: Anthem Press, 2002), xix–xx. 40 William R. Pinch, “Who Was Himmat Bahadur? Gossains, Rajputs and the British in Bundelkhund, ca. 1800,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 35, no. 3 (1998): 293–335. 36

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Introduction

a part of this process. Nowhere were these interactions more visible or more significant than in the southerly Madras Presidency – one of the Company’s three major administrative hubs in India, along with Bengal and Bombay.41 In 1773, Madras was officially made a “subordinate” presidency under Bengal, which was elevated to the status of Supreme Government in India, and subsequent scholarship has tended to reflect this divide.42 From a military perspective, though, things look different. It was in Madras where the Company built its first fortifications (Fort St. George was completed in 1644), undertook its first sustained military campaigns and developed its first standing armies – including its first sepoy battalions. Indeed, the Madras Presidency would remain the focus of military development for much of the eighteenth century, in part because of its proximity to and rivalry with Mysore under Haider Ali and his son Tipu Sultan.43 The development of the formal Madras Army in the mid-eighteenth century, conventionally explored as a tactical innovation, can in fact be understood as an institutional construct that facilitated the Company’s engagement with the local military landscape. The term sepoy itself, along with the ranks of Indian officers formalized in this period (subedar, jemadar, havildar, and naig), provides insight into the Company’s complex engagement with multiple recruiting networks and social hierarchies. Each rank was drawn from regional military hierarchies and political networks, but recontextualized to take on new meanings within the Company’s infrastructure. Until the last decades of the eighteenth century, military actors connected to the Company moved fluidly in those networks, and their movements in turn became a part of political negotiations taking place across southern India. Drawing out these entanglements requires a geographical shift in the way that the Company Raj has been imagined. Far from a local backwater, subordinate to developments in Bengal, the Madras Presidency can thus be imagined as an active site in which the nature of the Company was constructed, producing a set of relationships along a military axis that served to compete with and complicate the civil colonial rule taking shape in the north. For part of the eighteenth century, Bencoolen operated as a separate presidency, but this was later folded into Bengal. 42 For the importance of Bengal, see P. J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead: Eastern India 1740–1828 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India. For a challenge to this, see Thomas R. Trautmann, ed., The Madras School of Orientalism: Producing Knowledge in Colonial South India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 43 The Anglo-Mysore wars are curiously understudied, given the attention that contemporaries in India and in Britain paid to them, but a recent operational history can be found in Bryant, The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784. 41

The Company in Eighteenth-Century India

11

To examine this military landscape, The Company’s Sword relies ­ rincipally on the records of the Governor in Council at Fort St. George, p the Company’s government in Madras. Starting in 1750, all official letters, memoranda, and consultations relating to military affairs were collected in the Military Department.44 Minutes from this body were sent regularly back to Britain and form part of the India Office Records now held in the British Library.45 However, many reports and correspondence, especially those related to the Madras Army’s interactions with “country powers” (Indian states) and to the status of sepoys and Indian officers, were not transferred. Thus, the fuller series of records held in the Tamil Nadu State Archives (in Chennai) was invaluable for exploring the Madras Presidency’s position within India’s diplomatic landscape. In addition to the Company’s own archives, this study also makes use of material from the court of Arcot, a Mughal “successor state” that from 1748 onward was the Madras Presidency’s most consistent “country” ally.46 Though surviving records from Arcot are somewhat scattered, they include court chronicles, ruznāmah (diaries of daily governmental activity), and some correspondence and administrative records, all written in the Mughal Persian that served as the region’s diplomatic lingua franca.47 Despite Arcot’s gradual decline into a Company dependency, the alliance between Madras and its nawab, Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah, was never static or one sided. Wallajah engaged creatively with the Madras Government through both official and unofficial avenues, which he used to enhance his own claims to sovereignty. European soldiers and officers in the Madras Army used those connections to elevate their 44 William Foster, A Guide to the India Office Records, 1600–1858 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, Ltd., 1919), 74. 45 For more on how this trans-imperial bureaucratic system developed, see Martin Moir, “Kaghazi Raj: Notes of the Documentary Basis of Company Rule, 1783–1858,” IndoBritish Review 21, no. 2 (1993): 185–86; H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), x–xi. 46 Scholarship on Arcot is underdeveloped, but see Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Muzaffar Alam, “Commerce, Politics, and the Early Arcot State,” in Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South India (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 94–142; Pimmanus Wibulsilp, “Nawabi Karnatak: Muhammad Ali Khan and the Making of a Mughal Successor State in Pre-Colonial South India, 1749–1795” (PhD Dissertation, Leiden, University of Leiden, 2019), https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/71028. 47 For more on the use of Persian in India, see Muzaffar Alam, “The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan,” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 131–98. For a detailed examination of Indo-Persian manuscripts produced in southern India, see Muhammad Yusuf Kokan, Arabic and Persian in Carnatic, 1710–1960 (Madras: Ameera & Co., 1974).

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Introduction

own status with the Company, while Yusuf Khan – the above-mentioned politically minded officer of Madurai – did the inverse, using the Company’s hierarchies to challenge Wallajah. Each of these relationships highlights the significance of the Madras Army as a political body.

The Company in British National Politics

Despite the Company’s involvement in India’s eighteenth-century diplomatic networks, it was not fully or even principally an Indian political entity. At the most basic level, it was an extension of the British state, chartered with the expectation that its operations in India would serve national interests. Those interests were themselves undergoing political reinvention – or, rather, invention. Britain only came into being in 1707 with the Act of Union between England and Scotland.48 The merger launched new debates about what it meant to be British, which would continue throughout the century in an increasingly global context throughout its imperial networks.49 Britain’s political position in Europe, especially its spiraling rivalry with France, played a crucial role in shaping its emerging national identity.50 Throughout much of the eighteenth century, the two states were at war. These conflicts provided crucial fuel for the Company’s own accelerating military expansion, but at the same time called the corporation’s relationship with the British state and indeed its very existence into question in new ways. In the seventeenth century, the early English empire had been characterized by a patchwork of networks and institutions through which the state’s reach could be extended beyond its resources: Chartered The Act of Union catalyzed a major change in the East India Company as well. During the political tumult in England and Scotland at the end of the seventeenth century, two corporations – designated the “old” and the “new” companies – had emerged, with the latter drawing much of its investment from Scotland. These two bodies had  their own “act of union” in 1709, resulting in the United East India Company. K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 434–36. 49 The classic study of British nationalism is Linda Colley, Britons : Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). For how British national identity intersected (or clashed) with imperial expansion, see Kathleen Wilson, A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660– 1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas, eds., The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 1–7; Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002); Hannah Weiss Muller, Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017). 50 Allan I. Macinnes, Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 238–39. 48

The Company in British National Politics

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companies with their own military and political privileges were but one example of this.51 However, the British state developed a much more centralized military establishment in the eighteenth century. Despite widespread social unease with the prospect of a large standing army, the peacetime establishment of the British armed forces increased at least fourfold in the course of the eighteenth century, a statistic that does not include simultaneous growth in the navy.52 John Brewer famously described Britain in the eighteenth century as a “military-fiscal state,” in which increasingly expansive wars fed into and required an increasingly extensive governing infrastructure of revenue collection, bureaucracy, and logistics.53 In the face of these changes, the Company’s status as a privatized military force collided with the central government both for martial prestige and for a tightening pool of recruits. Laws were passed to restrict the Company’s access to that labor market, pushing the Company to increase its reliance on non-European combatants as well as on European troops drawn from outside of Britain, including Ireland and the German states.54 Yet those far-flung recruiting networks only introduced new obstacles for the Company, this time in terms of how its militarization fit with societal ideas about force in Britain. Despite the push for centralization, the British Army and Navy proper hardly enjoyed a monopoly on martial force. On the contrary, most of Britain’s “soldiers” – men trained, equipped, and organized for warfare – came from various irregular bodies such as fencibles, militias, and other volunteer forces, reflecting what Ian Beckett termed Britain’s “amateur military tradition.”55 In the mideighteenth century, the early modern idea of the militia as an obligation of civic virtue was revived and transformed as a central plank in

51 Elizabeth Mancke, “Chartered Enterprises and the Evolution of the British Atlantic World,” in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 236–62. 52 Lawrence Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (New York: Routledge, 1994), 23. For anti-army sentiments in Britain in this period, see Jeremy Black, Britain as a Military Power, 1688–1815 (Philadelphia: UCL Press, 1999), 271–72. 53 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), chap. 2. For the application of this model to the empire, see Stone, An Imperial State at War. 54 Thomas Bartlett, “The Irish Soldier in India, 1750–1947,” in Ireland and India: Connections, Comparisons, and Contrasts, ed. Denis Holmes, Michael Holmes, and Thomas Bartlett (Dublin: Folens, 1997), 12–28; Chen Tzoref-Ashkenazi, German Soldiers in Colonial India (Brookfield, VT: Pickering & Chatto, 2014). 55 Linch and McCormack, “Defining Soldiers,” 145–46; Ian F. W. Beckett, Britain’s Part-Time Soldiers: The Amateur Military Tradition 1558–1945 (Barnsley: Pen and Sword Military, 2011).

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Introduction

burgeoning conceptions of Britishness.56 Such “amateur” groups are sometimes seen as hostile toward Britain’s centralized armies, but, while disagreements over precedence could occur, recent scholarship has suggested that the two versions of military service were not so opposed as has been assumed. Soldiers and officers in the British Army made use of the same conceptions of civic virtue seen in the militia to depict themselves as patriotic “soldier-citizens.”57 Officers in civic militias in turn appropriated many of the trappings of military prestige from the British Army, from officers’ commissions to uniforms to spectacular elements like military bands.58 Both phenomena helped to knit together British national identity and military virtue. The wars of the late eighteenth century, especially the American Revolution and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which affected and mobilized a large swath of the British population, only accelerated this process. The Company’s armies, though, seemed to stand outside of this nexus of militarism and patriotism. Most obviously, the Company’s forces were predominantly not British. In Britain, even troops from Hanover, the German principality that shared a sovereign with Britain from 1714 to 1837, faced public protests for failing to embody the model of the British soldier-citizen.59 Those outcries were somewhat misleading: Britain’s barracks and naval ships drew on a global network of recruits, giving them a heterogeneity that was rarely recognized by contemporary Britons.60 In India, though, the Company’s sepoy regiments were an unmistakable and highly visible example of an army composed of “others.” Company officials tried to counter potential unease by creating strict divides between “native” and “European” forces, but this paradoxically set sepoys more obviously apart. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, social anxieties mounted in Britain that the Company had become a vector of alien influence, in which “Oriental” vices of avarice, luxury, or despotism

Matthew McCormack, Embodying the Militia in Georgian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 57 Hannah Smith, “The Army, Provincial Urban Communities, and Loyalist Cultures in England, c. 1714–1750,” Journal of Early Modern History 15, no. 1–2 (2011): 152–57. 58 Linch and McCormack, “Defining Soldiers,” 147. 59 Matthew McCormack, “Citizenship, Nationhood, and Masculinity in the Affair of the Hanoverian Soldier, 1756,” The Historical Journal 49, no. 04 (2006): 971–93. 60 For black military actors in British forces, see Maria Alessandra Bollettino, “‘Of Equal or of More Service’: Black Soldiers and the British Empire in the MidEighteenth-Century Caribbean,” Slavery & Abolition 38, no. 3 (July 3, 2017): 510– 33. For the diverse composition of the British Navy, see Ray Costello, Black Salt: Seafarers of African Descent on British Ships (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012); Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 151–54. 56

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15

would infect British society.61 Burke’s prosecution of Hastings occurred in this context, and, though Burke focused on the Company’s civil head, he also excoriated its officers as “military farmers-general,” funneling illicitly begotten wealth to their civilian counterparts.62 By the 1770s, Company agents who returned to Britain flush with wealth from “shaking the pagoda tree” were condemned as nabobs, an Anglicized distortion of the term “nawab” that spoke to racialized and Orientalized ways in which imperial anxiety was expressed.63 Their ostracization in British society has been well studied as a social phenomenon, as a response to economic change, and as a moment of political transformation, but less attention, though, has been paid to the “nabob” crisis as a part of contemporary debates about the relationship between military service and national honor.64 The Company’s European officers, drawn from an increasingly well-connected cadre of Britons, had considerably more access to these debates than did either rank-and-file Europeans in the Company’s service or their Indian counterparts. Drawing on Parliamentary debates, ministerial papers, and publicly printed pamphlets, I show how officers became an active lobbying force in the late eighteenth century, creating correspondence networks that linked the two political landscapes in which they were embedded. Their elite status in both India and in Britain allowed officers to challenge this contradiction through arguments that would provide the ideological basis for “rule by the sword.”

Soldiers as Subjects

In exploring the militarism of colonial rule, The Company’s Sword is foremost a political history of colonial institutions. However, by approaching the army as a site of contestation, rather than a tool of a monolithic state,

Samuel Foote, The Nabob: A Comedy in Three Acts Written by Samuel Foote and Now Published by Mr. Colman., ed. George Colman (London: Printed by T. Sherlock for T. Cadell., 1778), 13. 62 Burke, The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 2: 475. 63 A pagoda was a high-value coin that circulated predominantly in South India. 64 For the “nabob crisis,” see Bruce Lenman and Philip Lawson, “Robert Clive, the ‘Black Jagir’, and British Politics,” The Historical Journal 26, no. 4 (December 1, 1983): 801–29; Philip Lawson, “‘Our Execrable Banditti’: Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 16, no. 3 (1984): 225–41; Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Dirks, The Scandal of Empire; Christina Smylitopoulos, “Portrait of a Nabob: Graphic Satire, Portraiture, and the Anglo-Indian in the Late Eighteenth Century,” RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne 37, no. 1 (2012): 10–25. 61

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the book highlights the importance of individual agency and ambition in shaping those institutions. Two different groups of actors occupy the foreground of this narrative: the Company’s commissioned European officers and the Indian officers and sepoys they commanded. The status accorded to these two groups within the colonial state was of course fundamentally different, and it is a central argument of this book that their imbalanced relationship is key to understanding European officers’ success in dominating colonial policy. European rank-and-file soldiers, though present in the margins of this study, were much less active in these debates, in part because they were not as directly implicated in that relationship. Making sense of these dynamics thus requires bringing together multiple methodological approaches to tease out the experiences of historical actors with radically different positions within the historical archive. The Company’s commissioned European officers held pride of place within colonial society. A cursory glance at the Company’s military records reveals an archive brimming with endless petitions in which officers complained about apparently minor breaches of rank, seniority, and perquisites. Reading these “along the grain,” as Ann Laura Stoler has urged, reveals not only the access that such officers had within the colonial government but also the state’s preoccupation with redressing even minute questions of status for this elite group.65 “Subaltern” officers – a technical designation for men ranked below captain, not a reflection of their relative agency – frequently claimed penury, but this was necessarily a relative complaint. One ditty from 1787 bemoaned the monthly wages of officers in the Bengal Army – ninety-five rupees – but this “scanty” wage still allowed the officer to maintain a household with servants: I am a younger son of Mars, and spend my time in carving A thousand different ways and means to keep myself from starving; For how with servants’ wages, Sirs, and clothes can I contrive To rent a house, and feed myself on scanty ninety-five.66

Nevertheless, the Company’s European officers regularly clashed with their employers. In both 1776 and 1809, officers in the Madras Presidency launched successful coups against civil governors out of anger at administrators’ proposed reforms, which threatened to reduce their perquisites. In 1796, as discussed in Chapter 5, another mutiny – one that 65 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), chap. 5. 66 W. S. Seton-Karr, ed., Selections from Calcutta Gazettes: Showing the Political and Social Condition of the English in India (Calcutta: Printed at the Military orphan Press by O. T. Cutter, 1864), 197.

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involved garrisons across India – forced Company Directors and British state officials alike to abandon plans to restructure the military establishment in India that had been decades in the making.67 Given these confrontations, the Company’s officers may, at least in some contexts, offer a version of what Elizabeth Kolsky termed “the unruly third face of colonialism,” white actors cognizable neither as the “state” nor as “subjects.” Kolsky focused on “non-official” whites in India, men who owned or operated plantations, who built businesses in Company settlements, or who wandered on the margins of colonial society. These men, Kolsky has argued, played a major role in shaping the terms of the colonial legal system, both as objects to be controlled by the state and as quasi-elite figures who furiously demanded their privileges.68 Commissioned officers could mobilize in similar ways, but benefited also from their liminal identity that allowed them to slip between an unofficial, horizontal community – framed as a “brotherhood” of officers – and as an official corps, providing essential service to the state.69 Highlighting the way that officers positioned themselves as orthogonal to the colonial state highlights the extent to which their demanded “stratocracy” went beyond militarism to assert a dominating influence over the colonial state. Of course, commissioned European officers made up only a tiny portion of the Company’s forces, 1 or 2 percent of the total.70 Sepoys and Indian officers were in contrast decidedly subaltern – this time in the Gramscian, not the technical sense – and their historical experience must be pieced together through a different set of tools. Almost no writing from sepoys themselves survives from the Company era. One exception, the memoir of Sake Dean Mahomet, a subedar from the Bengal Army who immigrated to Ireland and then to Britain in the late eighteenth century, is a fascinating source, but one written for a British audience and consciously shaped to resonate with British views of India at the time.71 Sita Ram Pandey’s From Sepoy to Subedar, which first appeared

These protests are explored in Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reform, 1783–1798. 68 Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 4–11. 69 This liminality is discussed more in Chapters 5 and 6. For claims of brotherhood, see Proceedings of the Committee Chosen December 10, 1787, by a General Meeting of the East India Company’s Military Officers Now in England (London: J. Debrett, 1788), 2. 70 “A Comparative View of the Military Establishment of Bengal and Fort St Gorge in 1774 and 1783,” 466–67, BL IOR/H/84. 71 Dean Mahomet, The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth-Century Journey through India, ed. Michael H. Fisher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), xviii–xix. 67

18

Introduction

in the late nineteenth century, is also sometimes considered an “authentic” sepoy autobiography – also from the Bengal Army – but I argue in the book’s conclusion that its provenance is dubious at best. Sita Ram’s memoirs were widely used in language training in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making them an invaluable source for insight into British expectations about sepoys during the imperial Raj, but less so into sepoys’ worldviews.72 In the absence of firsthand accounts from the Madras Army, I make use of two distinct methodologies to gain insight into sepoys’ historical experience. First, I pay particular attention to individual cases, such as the meteoric career of Yusuf Khan, as extraordinary examples in which the boundaries of what was possible for a subaltern actor were tested and thus made visible. Extraordinary case studies are also useful in revealing the expectations of colonial officials and what happened when those assumptions broke down.73 They pose questions about why the colonial state paid particular attention to an individual sepoy or Indian officer. Second, as in the case of white officers, sepoys’ historical agency can also be seen during mutinies, defined in this book as moments of collective disobedience by military actors against their organizational hierarchy. This follows Ranajit Guha’s insight that revolts – in his case, by Indian peasants – are necessarily entangled in the contours of the colonial archive, places in which the colonial state’s “code of counterinsurgency” solidified and in which its edges can be glimpsed or even peeled away.74 In a military context, one might speak similarly of a “code of countermutiny,” where moments of disobedience too were translated to reflect authorities’ expectations of their sepoys. When regiments protested against lengthy expeditions, for instance, officials construed their discontent as 72 For a full analysis of the problems with Sita Ram’s narrative, see Alison Safadi, “From Sepoy to Subadar/Khvab-o-Khayal and Douglas Craven Phillott,” Annual of Urdu Studies 25 (2010): 42–65. The most widely available version of this work is Sita Ram Pandey, From Sepoy to Subedar: Being the Life and Adventures of Subedar Sita Ram, a Native Officer of the Bengal Army, Written and Related by Himself, ed. James D. Lunt (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1970). 73 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, translated by John A. Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi, New ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), xiii; Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920, Critical Perspectives on Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 6. 74 Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Subaltern Studies II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 1–42. Guha explored these same themes as well as strategies for reading the encoded records “against the grain” in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Reprint (New York: Duke University Press, 1999).

Soldiers as Subjects

19

outgrowths of Indian “superstitions” about traveling over the “kala pani” (dark water).75 In 1812, when John Munro discovered a purported conspiracy toward mutiny at the garrison of Kollam (in modern-day Kerala), he described the sepoys involved as having been “misled by Artful Fakeers,” religious mendicants.76 Rather than complex products of the intersections among belief, professional expectations, social relations, and political ties, the Company’s colonial administrators thus made sense of moments of disorder in ways that retrenched sepoys’ supposed irrationality against the presumed rationality of their European counterparts. Where the colonial archive provides insight into that “code,” placing the Company within the wider context of Indian society provides glimpses into the more complex reality of resistance that its narratives distorted. The code of counter-mutiny would find its most robust articulation in the officers’ claims of “rule by the sword.” The seven chapters of this book explore how that “code” came to be within the constantly shifting military landscape in which the Company’s soldiers, officers, and administrators acted. Chapter 1 begins by situating the Company within expanding English and British global networks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It explores the political and social realities in England that first produced the Company as a private military institution and connects the corporation to a wider imperial context. Everywhere English and British colonists established settlements, their burgeoning need for military labor came almost inevitably into conflict with their desire to retain martial virtue as a privilege of the colonial elite. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Madras Presidency developed sepoy battalions as a way to resolve this conflict, one that would define the Company’s “sword” as distinct from the rest of the empire. Chapter 2 moves from this broader imperial context to situate the expanding Madras Army within South India’s military economy and political networks. This landscape was one characterized by considerable fluidity, for both individual soldiers and their potential patrons. To gain access to these networks, Company officials sought out new

75 After the Second Anglo-Mysore War, Archibald Campbell, governor of Madras, proudly proclaimed, “The prejudices of Cast, and Country, have decreased Daily among the Sepoy-Corps raised in the Carnatic; they will now Voluntarily embark for Bengal, or Bombay.” Narrative of the Second War with Hyder Ally, 193, Archibald Campbell Papers, NRS GD1/6/17. For a discussion of how British ideas about kala pani still influenced imperial policy into the twentieth century, see Kate Imy, Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 88–94. 76 Letter from John Munro to Fort St. George, June 4, 1812, TNSA MS Vol. 1, 231–32.

20

Introduction

kinds of diplomatic relationships with “country” powers. Such alliances were crucial to facilitating the expansion of the Madras Army as a permanent campaigning force. At the same time, the chapter shows that the entry of these soldiers into the Madras Army often had unexpected effects on these diplomatic relationships, as sepoys and Indian officers sought to translate their service with the Company into new claims of status, prestige, or expertise. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, that dynamic resulted in new patterns of mobility, as the growing reputation of the Company as a military employer gave those trained in its regiments added capital in the constantly changing military labor market. Chapter 3 takes up this same thread of military mobility, exploring in turn how European soldiers and officers moved through this same space. The chapter delves into the long history of European mercenaries acting as informal agents for the Company in Indian courts. This system expanded along with the Company’s political ambitions in the eighteenth century. Through the career of Benoit de Boigne, a Savoyard mercenary, the chapter examines how such men served as proxies for the interests of the emerging colonial state and as tools through which alliances were constructed between Company and “country” powers. By the turn of the nineteenth century, though, expansionist Company officials had begun to replace this informal network of negotiated patronage with the more rigid system of political residents and “subsidiary alliance” that restricted the agency of Indian states. Company officers would remain essential to this new vision of colonial diplomacy, but the role of intermediary, once played by marginal figures, became a more prestigious, competitive, and thus exclusive position. Chapters 4 and 5 dive more deeply into the question of competition within the Company’s officer corps. Chapter 4 focuses on a moment when the Company’s rapidly expanding civil and military institutions broke down into violence and conspiracy: the so-called Madras Revolution of 1776, in which a coterie of European officers and civil officials overthrew the governor of Madras, Lord George Pigot. The prominent role that the military leadership played in the coup allowed officers to use the revolt to set new precedents upholding military authority over civilian interference. At the same time, the events in Madras in 1776 scandalized the British public, contributing to the perception that Company officers were greedy rogues and potential rebels. Chapter 5 explores how the social outcry against Company officers contributed to contemporaneous plans by the British state to “consolidate” the Company’s armies, folding them into the British Army proper. Determined to resist these reforms, Company officers developed their own political lobby, which galvanized

Soldiers as Subjects

21

officers’ conceit that they were a horizontal community of “brothers” fighting alongside their royal counterparts to preserve the empire. Chapter 6 identifies the first decade of the nineteenth century as another transformative moment for the Company. At this point, the colonial state developed functional dominance over South India’s military landscape, leading to renewed calls among civilian officials to reduce the army. Those changes would spark anger among both Indian and European forces. In July 1806, sepoys at the garrison of Vellore rose up in a brief, bloody revolt that would be violently suppressed. The origins of the mutiny were complex and reflected sepoys’ loss of agency in an increasingly colonized military economy, but the Company’s European officers moved quickly to frame the revolt as the inevitable outgrowth of civilian reforms that had interfered with the army. As one officer wrote, the mutiny occurred because “[t]he Sepoy was now taught that his Officer was not the important Man he had hitherto considered him … that if the Officer ordered, the Sepoy had no rights [sic, requirements] to obey, unless what the Officer ordered was proper.”77 Only a year later, the Company’s European officers burst into a mutiny of their own, abandoning their posts, seizing control of forts and garrisons, and even fighting a pitched battle against royal dragoons and auxiliary cavalry troopers from Mysore. When the civilian governor, George Hilaro Barlow, sought to quell the mutiny by appealing to sepoys directly, the officers decried the strategy as an attack on the stability of empire. According to Lieutenant-Colonel John Malcolm, the prospect of mobilizing sepoys against their officers threatened the entirety of British authority in India: It is the firm allegiance and continued obedience of the natives of which the strength of those armies is composed, which forms by far the most important principle in our government of this great Empire. This can never be denied; and it is as true that in that almost religious respect with which the sepoy of India has hitherto regarded his European officer, consisted what has been always deemed the chief link of this great chain of duty and obedience. The dignity of the local Government of Fort St. George has been saved from an imputation of weakness, by a measure which threatens the most serious danger to the future safety of our whole empire in India.78

The 1809 mutiny represented a culmination of the central tenets of the officers’ view of empire, the maturation of “rule by the sword” as a 77 Letter from J. Haslewood to Hall Plumer, October 13, 1806, 385, Dundas Papers, NRS GD51/3/432. 78 John Malcolm, Observations on the Disturbances in the Madras Army in 1809: In Two Parts (London: William Miller and John Murray, 1812), 102.

22

Introduction

governing ideology, and it proved persuasive. Barlow was recalled, and the officers of the Madras Army expanded their influence in the Company’s government, circulating a version of stratocracy across all three presidencies.79 The final chapter traces the continued spread of those ideas throughout the last decades of Company rule, culminating in the rebellions of 1857. That conflict is often taken as prelude, inaugurating a new phase of direct imperial rule and anticipating a budding nationalist movement. The ­Company’s Sword inverts that chronology. It places the rebellions within a continuum of military maneuver and resistance, driven by European and Indian soldiers alike, who sought to define the social and political meaning of their service in the context of an ever-changing colonial state. Their claims-making shaped the Company from its inception, and tracing out the way they navigated its structures reveals a network of often subversive negotiation that administrators were unable to control. With the end of Company rule, the position of these actors was radically changed, but the potential for agency was not lost. As the Crown Raj sought to build a militarized empire of its own, its sepoys, soldiers, and officers made clear that “rule by the sword” was never a passive construction.

79 For more on the 1809 mutiny, see Alexander G. Cardew, The White Mutiny, a Forgotten Episode in the History of the Indian Army (Bungay, Suffolk: Richard Clay and Sons, 1929).

1

Forging the Sword

In 1774, painter William Hodges traveled to India to explore and to put to canvas the East India Company’s expanding territories.1 At the end of his trip nine years later, when at Madras (modern-day Chennai), he painted The Marmalong Bridge (Figure 1). Like many of Hodges’s paintings, it belonged to an emerging artistic subgenre – the colonial picturesque – in which artists adapted elements of a pastoral style to depict Britain’s expanding empire as exotic, but unthreateningly so.2 The titular bridge runs flat and sturdy over a bow in the Adyar River, swollen and languid near its mouth into the Bay of Bengal. At the foreground of the quiet landscape is a small group, including a sepoy dressed in the Company’s scarlet uniform, hand relaxed on his musket. Beside him stands his companion water carrier, probably his wife, equally calm.3 1 Hodges was a peripatetic artist who had previously made a name for himself in the South Seas. L. H. Cust and Lindsey Macfarlane, “Hodges, William (1744–1797),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Online Edition, May 21, 2009, https:// doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/13425. His work in India was later published in William Hodges, Select Views in India: Drawn on the Spot in the Years 1780, 1781, 1782 and 1783, and Executed in Aqua Tinta (London: J. Edwards, 1786). 2 The painting is now at the Yale Center for British Art. For the colonial picturesque, see Romita Ray, Under the Banyan Tree: Relocating the Picturesque in British India (New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2013). 3 The other figures in Hodges’s painting are less immediately identifiable. The seated figure on the far right may be a fakir, a religious mendicant. It is also possible that the group is all connected to the sepoy’s family. In Madras, unlike in the Company’s other presidencies, sepoys’ families were often accommodated in or near their garrisons and might even travel with them on (local) campaigns. Sepoys’ wives and children regularly filled support roles in the army. For one example, see H. A. M. Cosby, “Orders and Journal of the Army under the Command of Brig. Gen. Jos. Smith on the Expedition against the Great & Little Marawa,” 87–88, Colonel Cosby’s Indian Campaigns, 1767–78, BL Add MS 29898. The idiosyncrasy became a selling point for the service in the nineteenth century, as shown by Carina Montgomery, “The Sepoy Army and Colonial Madras, c. 1806–57” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 54–87. It also became a site for contestation: When sepoys were ordered on lengthy or expedited campaigns that required them to leave their families behind, the troops often demanded maintenance stipends (family certificates). Officials described such grants as paternalist “indulgences,” but it shows a complex negotiation over the benefits of service. See Archibald Campbell, “Narrative of the Second War with Hyder Ali,” 193, NLS GD1/6/17.

23

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Forging the Sword

Figure 1  William Hodges, The Marmalong Bridge, 1783. Yale Center for British Art.

By including this couple as a part of this tranquil scene, Hodges hinted at one of the persistent conundrums of the British Empire while simultaneously offering a potential resolution for it. The sepoy in Hodges’s painting is a direct reminder that the British Empire, though composed of a complex and heterogeneous set of networks and institutions, relied everywhere on force or on the possibility of force. Demonstrations of power ranged widely from open conquests to the less spectacular and more common use of guards and escorts for trade. At almost every point on that spectrum, the use of power was shaped by the shared reality that Britain could not by itself supply sufficient manpower to fulfill this spiraling demand. Around the world, British adventurers and colonists relied heavily upon diverse military labor networks to meet martial needs. The sepoy in Hodges’s landscape had parallels in almost every corner of the empire – from the Mohawk allies who supported the British in the American Revolution to free black and enslaved militiamen in the Caribbean to the Irish soldiers and other European mercenaries recruited to serve in almost all of the British Army’s campaigns. At times, especially in moments of triumph like the

Forging the Sword

25

Seven Years War, the breadth of Britain’s military institutions fueled a growing sense of imperial pride at home.4 Yet within those celebrations was a potential paradox for many Britons: The global reach of empire in which Britishness was taking shape was – at a very immediate level – secured and extended by soldiers who stood outside of that identity on national, religious, and, increasingly, racial lines. Scholars have often resolved this evident contradiction with reference to the exigencies of warfare. In 1759, General Amherst reportedly condemned would-be recruits from the Mohican of Stockbridge as “lazy rum-drinking scoundrels”: Historian John Grenier explained that Amherst “felt compelled to” rely on them in the campaign for Quebec against the French only because of a lack of alternatives.5 Company officials’ willingness to employ Indians in Asia has been described in similar terms: “manpower demands in wartime could overcome peacetime prejudices very rapidly.”6 Though white colonists in America, in theory, objected to arming black men, the black labor pool – slave and free alike – was “a manpower potential too badly needed and too readily available to be ignored” in times of crisis.7 That same desperate need is said to have led Company officials to turn “a blind eye” to Irish Catholic recruits, officially prohibited from serving in the ranks.8 In framing such practices as driven by necessity, scholars have thus depicted the use of non-British soldiers as a practice that inadvertently blurred the lines of difference being drawn across the empire. Yet recent scholarship has emphasized that the categories of difference evidently breached by these heterogeneous forces were themselves being constructed in this period, given new stability and rigidity through colonial institutions. The transatlantic slave trade – rather than an outgrowth of existing, rigid social divides – accelerated the solidification of race as a concept as a framework through which that system of slavery could be understood, legitimated, and legislated.9 As abovementioned anxiety H. V. Bowen, “British Conceptions of Global Empire, 1756–83,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26, no. 3 (1998): 1–27. 5 John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 124. 6 Robert Johnson, “‘True to Their Salt’: Mechanisms for Recruiting and Managing Military Labour in the Army of the East India Company during the Carnatic Wars in India,” in Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour 1500–2000, ed. Erik-Jan Zürcher (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 270. 7 Benjamin Quarles, “The Colonial Militia and Negro Manpower,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 45, no. 4 (1959): 643–52. 8 Bartlett, “The Irish Soldier in India, 1750–1947,” 13. 9 For instance, see Jerome S. Handler, “Custom and Law: The Status of Enslaved Africans in Seventeenth-Century Barbados,” Slavery & Abolition 37, no. 2 (June 2016): 233–55. 4

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Forging the Sword

over the specter of “armed slaves” suggests, Britons’ reliance on diverse forms of military labor did not always perfectly conform to those emerging frameworks. Nevertheless, describing the use of non-British military labor as incidents in which conventional understandings of difference became blurry or ambiguous misses a key dynamic in the early British Empire. British efforts to mobilize military labor were directly involved with how issues of identity and otherness were defined, and its military institutions were spaces in which difference was created. Nowhere in the British Empire would this phenomenon prove more significant than in India. The sheer scale of the Company’s reliance on local military labor was one of the most visible aspects of the emerging colonial state. By the time Hodges painted The Marmalong Bridge, the Madras Presidency alone employed more than thirty thousand men as sepoys, along with countless other Indians in auxiliary roles.10 Hodges’s decision to include examples of these recruits – the sepoy and his water carrier – in the foreground of his picturesque landscape suggests that they would be read by his audience as a shorthand of the exotic and of the Company’s control over that unfamiliar space. This chapter seeks to understand how that shorthand came to be, examining the emergence of the Company’s sepoy army within the wider set of military labor practices that prevailed in the early British Empire. The analysis pushes beyond questions of logistical necessity to consider military service as a site in which imperial identities and exclusions were framed. By the time Hodges set his brush to canvas, the Company’s military institutions had begun to diverge visibly from those elsewhere in the empire. Sometimes a source of unease, and sometimes of reassurance that the colonial world could be held at a distance from Britain, this divide nourished Britons’ growing perception that military power and authority held unique importance in Indian society. 1.1

Military Force in Early Colonial Charters

In 1615, Sir Thomas Roe set out for the Mughal court of Jahangir as a quasi-royal ambassador and quasi-corporate negotiator, lobbying for the East India Company. It was the first such embassy since the formation of the Company in 1600, and Roe’s journal provides important insights into how he sought to present himself as its representative both in India and to the eager investors reading his reports. Notably, the journal helps

A Comparative View of the Military Establishment of Bengal and Fort St Gorge in 1774 and 1783, Military Papers, 467, BL IOR/H/84. 10

1.1 Military Force in Early Colonial Charters

27

to dispel the persistent assumption that the early Company was a nonviolent entity, its claims that it was a body of “mere traders” notwithstanding.11 Roe was primed to levy the threat of force as a tactic in his negotiations for privileges. One revealing example occurred early in his journey, when he disembarked at Surat and his men were asked to submit to a customs search. Roe responded furiously to the perceived slight: I turnd my horse, and with all speed rode backe to them, I confess too angry. When I came vp, I layd my hand on my swoord … I asked what they entended by soe base treachery: I was free landed, and I would die soe … I called for a case of Pistolls, and, hanging them at my saddle, I replyed those were my Friends … It were much vanety to say in what a feare the best of them were, beeing so many; but the truth is not ashamed.12

The response offers a literal embodiment of a later maxim of the Company’s council in Bengal: Operations in India required “a sword in one hand & money in the other.”13 Yet, at the same time, the resulting image is almost absurd: Roe – alone on horseback – wielding a blade against a befuddled set of customs officials. That the functionaries gave way presumably had less to do with Roe’s bravado than with the customs officials’ quick calculations that the search for contraband on the paltry crew was not worth the fuss. Several decades later, when Company factors acted more ambitiously to seize control of Mughal trade and shipping networks during the so-called and ill-fated Sir Josiah Child’s War, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb checked their ambitions swiftly, as if the Company was, in the words of one historian, “a flea on the back of his imperial elephant.”14 Roe’s lengthy description of his derring-do is thus probably better understood as an exhibition, setting the tone of the embassy. Such militarism was often literally written into the charters of the corporations that dominated England’s overseas entanglements in this period. 11 The quote is taken from H. V. Bowen, “‘No Longer Mere Traders’: Continuities and Change in the Metropolitan Development of the East India Company, 1600–1834,” in The Worlds of the East India Company, ed. H. V. Bowen et al. (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2015), 27. The implied chronology of the quote – suggesting a transformation from trade to empire – is called into question effectively in Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 12 Thomas Roe, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615–1619, as Narrated in His Journal and Correspondence, ed. William Foster, vol. 1 (London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1899), 50. 13 Quoted in Stern, The Company-State, 198. 14 Bruce Lenman, “The East India Company and the Emperor Aurangzeb,” History Today 37, no. 2 (February 1987): 29. For more on this conflict, see Margaret R. Hunt and Philip J. Stern, eds., The English East India Company at the Height of Mughal Expansion: A Soldier’s Diary of the 1689 Siege of Bombay, The Bedford Series in History and Culture (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2015).

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Forging the Sword

The East India Company’s first charter, for instance, obliged investors to divert armed ships from their trading fleets to supplement the state’s navy in times of war.15 Later charters went further, acknowledging the Company’s “full Power to make and declare Peace and War, with any the Heathen Nations, that are or shall be Natives of any Countries within the said Territories, in the said Parts of Asia, Africa, and America.”16 The granting of such privileges served as an important mechanism through which the English state – stretched and disrupted by the political tumult and civil wars of the seventeenth century – sought to extend its global reach beyond what its own resources could manage, effectively privatizing its diplomacy.17 In waving his sword at the customs officials of Surat, then, Roe was claiming power as an individual, as a representative of the Company, and as an ambassador for an ambitious state. Joint-stock companies, though, were hard pressed to recruit the military manpower needed to pursue those aspirations. In England, soldiering was an unpopular prospect in the early modern period, characterized by low pay, harsh discipline, and usually lengthy terms of service.18 The English government thus worked assiduously to prevent private corporations from “poaching” men from their flagging recruiting pool.19 Service with joint-stock companies was perhaps most likely to appeal to those with reason to leave England – and to do so quickly. The tumult of civil war at home in the seventeenth century provided ample opportunity for this: In 1649/50, for instance, Company factors at Madras reluctantly agreed to employ James Martin, who had “bin in armes on the late Kings [Charles I’s] side.”20 Company agents complained that their recruits constituted men who were “outcasts of their native country.”21 This went beyond politics into questions of recruits’ perceived strength,

15 John Shaw, Charters Relating to the East India Company from 1600 to 1761 (Madras: R. Hill at the Government Press, 1887), 11. 16 Ibid., 71. 17 Mancke, “Chartered Enterprises and the Evolution of the British Atlantic World,” 238–40. 18 J. A. Houlding, Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army, 1715–1795 (New York: Clarendon Press, 1981); Stephen Conway, “The Eighteenth-Century British Army as a European Institution,” in Britain’s Soldiers Rethinking War and Society, 1715–1815, ed. Kevin Linch and Matthew McCormack (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 25–29. 19 Extracts of Acts relating to the Recruiting Service, March 18, 1780, in Military Papers, 685–86, BL IOR/H/84. 20 Henry Davison Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1640–1800, vol. 1 (London: J. Murray, 1913), 21. 21 Anon, “Original Papers Elucidatory of the Claims Preferred by the Officers of the Honourable Company’s Army in India. Published by Their Authority” (Draft, 1795), 22, BL IOR/L/MIL/17/2/464.

1.1 Military Force in Early Colonial Charters

29

health, and ability. Even as late as 1790, long after careers with the Company had become more attractive for Britain’s middle-class, rank-and-file soldiers remained of dubious quality: The head surgeon of the Madras Army described a set of new recruits arriving in India as “Ruptured, Epileptic, short sighted, and deaf” or “disabled from Casual accidents such as the lower orders of Handicrafts-men are exposed to,” who had enlisted only in the hopes of receiving an “invalid” pension.22 The solution to these persistent problems lay necessarily beyond England. Chartered companies, seeking to fulfill their military ambitions and obligations, looked to diverse sources, privileging above all European mercenaries who could be hired from the continent’s dynamic military labor market. German, Swiss, and even French mercenaries had an established reputation, though English employers were anxious to ensure that they only contracted Protestant companies.23 Scottish soldiers were also active in Europe’s military labor networks in the early modern period and quickly became a mainstay in the colonial landscape.24 Irish soldiers would ultimately come to play a similar role, though they were not recruited into the Company’s service in substantial numbers until the second half of the eighteenth century.25 Even this expansive recruiting network, though, could not alleviate the corporation’s struggles for manpower. Company officials faced stiff competition in these markets from European states as well as other colonial ventures, and, indeed, over the course of the eighteenth century, Britain restricted recruitment from Scotland and Ireland as well.26 Nor were the headaches limited to enlistment itself. European soldiers were expensive to transport to India 22 Letter from F. Gahagan to Fort St. George, January 6, 1790, TNSA MDCB Vol. 133A, 163–64. 23 For fears of Catholic mercenaries, see Letter from Fort St. George to Stringer Lawrence, December 11, 1752, Madras Military Department, Diary and Consultation Book, 1752, vol. 1 (Madras: Superintendent of the Government Press, 1910), 84. For German mercenaries, see Tzoref-Ashkenazi, German Soldiers in Colonial India (Brookfield, VT: Pickering & Chatto, 2014). For French and Swiss forces, see Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, A Very Ingenious Man, Claude Martin in Early Colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 17–25. 24 Andrew Mackillop, “Fashioning a ‘British’ Empire: Sir Archibald Campbell of Invernill & Madras, 1785–9,” in Military Governors and Imperial Frontiers, c. 1600–1800: A Study of Scotland and Empires, ed. Steve Murdoch and Andrew Mackillop (Boston: Brill, 2003), 206–31. 25 Harman Murtagh, “Irish Soldiers Abroad, 1600–1800,” in A Military History of Ireland, ed. Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffrey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 294–314; Bartlett, “The Irish Soldier in India, 1750–1947.” 26 By the end of the eighteenth century, Irish soldiers were disproportionately represented in the British Army. See Alan J. Guy, “The Irish Military Establishment, 1660–1776” in A Military History of Ireland, ed. Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffrey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 211–230.

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Forging the Sword

and, once there, suffered from unfamiliar diseases, unhealthy diet, and poor conditions, resulting in a much higher mortality rate for garrisons in India than in Britain.27 Far more cost-effective and readily available, then, were local sources of military labor. Soon after arriving at Surat, Roe “hyred such guard as by councell of all your factors, and such other necessary men as was requisite,” and he later elaborated for future travelers how much to pay such guards as well as how they could be used as spies, scouts, and escorts.28 Significantly, the men he employed were not called sepoys – that AngloIndian word was of later germination – but instead were classed as peons, a word taken from Portuguese usage to designate self-equipped, selftrained, and temporary military labor.29 Their presence in the Company’s earliest settlements reveals that the corporation’s militarism was from the start inextricably dependent on local actors. Alongside the European mercenaries, colonial settlers and agents, and the straggling “outcasts” that could be recruited from England, chartered companies mobilized local military labor in a dizzying variety of contexts, creating an often contradictory patchwork of duties, privileges, and relationships. In India, the word peon served as something of a catch-all term for hired labor. Company records in the seventeenth century speak of peons deployed as escorts, sentries, policemen, and even as tax collectors, as well as in nonmilitary capacities as messengers or as personal servants.30 In moments of crisis, when Company officials faced an external threat or hoped to mount one of their own, these ranks could be rapidly inflated with forces drawn from India’s own mercenary networks. Particularly valuable were combatants designated as “Rashboot peons,” drawn from the quasi-professional, quasi-ethnic Rajput bands that operated across the subcontinent.31 Such peons were in turn complemented by a wide range of other troops that reflected the cosmopolitanism of seventeenthcentury India: Afghani and Arab cavalrymen; telingas, Telugu speakers Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 16; Erica M. Charters, Disease, War, and the Imperial State: The Welfare of the British Armed Forces during the Seven Years’ War (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), chap. 5. 28 Roe, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1:86. 29 Henry Yule, “Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive,” Dictionary, 1903, 696, http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/hobsonjobson/. 30 I am grateful to my research assistant, Georgina Tierney, for her work in combing through the diaries of the seventeenth-century Madras Presidency for evidence of these roles. 31 Minutes from March 20, 1701, Madras Presidency, Diary and Consultation Book, 1701–1703 (Madras: Superintendent of the Government Press, 1922), 26. The use of Rajput networks is discussed further in Chapter 2. 27

1.1 Military Force in Early Colonial Charters

31

from the south; topasses, recruits of Portuguese descent; and even coffrees (an Anglicized distortion of kafir or nonbeliever), designating African slaves purchased in the Indian Ocean slave trade.32 Such levies regularly numbered in the thousands, inflating the Company’s military strength far beyond its European garrisons. Local military labor was equally important for English colonists outside of India, though they rarely had access to labor pools on the scale of that found in India. In British North America, colonial governments formed complex diplomatic arrangements with American Indian Nations that included promises of mutual aid in warfare, most prominently in the Covenant Chain formed between English colonists and Haudenosaunee Nations.33 Such agreements involved only a few hundred or even a few dozen soldiers, but they were nevertheless vital in supplementing colonists’ military abilities and in demonstrating their ambitions.34 Disease, violence, and destruction caused by colonial encounters had decimated the Caribbean, but even there, in times of invasion, planter governments negotiated alliances with emerging Maroon societies, formed by displaced indigenous and free black populations.35 Planters also looked to enslaved men as a source of military labor. Barbados and Jamaica alike from the seventeenth century onward regularly mobilized enslaved men as pioneers, sentries, support staff, and even as combatants in local militias.36 Colonists’ varied efforts to secure military labor played a major role in shaping England’s emerging imperial relationships. Mechanisms of recruitment defined and drove their engagement with broader economic and diplomatic networks and became the site of key moments of intercultural exchange. The sepoy whom Hodges depicted in his 1783 More work needs to be done on these soldiers and their status in the Company, but see Wickremesekera, Best Black Troops in the World, 91–92. 33 Daniel K. Richter and James Hart Merrell, eds., Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987). Famously, the French were much more effective in making such alliances, a reflection of the different ideological motivations that French traders and English settlers brought to North America. See Christian Ayne Crouch, Nobility Lost: French and Canadian Martial Cultures, Indians, and the End of New France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). 34 Jon Parmenter says that the 443 Haudenosaunee warriors who joined the British in Queen Anne’s War represented a third of the league’s total combatants. Jon Parmenter, “After the Mourning Wars: The Iroquois as Allies in Colonial North American Campaigns, 1676–1760,” The William and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2007): 53. 35 Tyson Reeder, “Liberty with the Sword: Jamaican Maroons, Haitian Revolutionaries, and American Liberty,” Journal of the Early Republic 37, no. 1 (February 23, 2017): 81–82. 36 Jerome S. Handler, “Freedmen and Slaves in the Barbados Militia,” Journal of Caribbean History 19, no. 1 (May 1984): 1–25; Quarles, “The Colonial Militia and Negro Manpower.” 32

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Figure 2  Charles D’Agar, attr., Sir Streynsham Master, 1714. National Portrait Gallery (London), NPG 6107.

landscape, then, had predecessors in a diverse and dynamic system of military employment that reflected both the friability of the early English empire and its versatility. However, the peons, American Indian allies, and enslaved militiamen who provided English colonies with various forms of military labor would never come to stand in as symbols of imperial power as would Company sepoys. Both visually and institutionally, colonists kept such troops at arm’s length. Military power was conceived, as in the case of Roe’s adventure in sword-waving at Surat, in terms that invoked contemporary tropes of conquistadors and crusading knights – single men who asserted their will unassisted on horseback. As late as 1714, Streynsham Master, a civilian governor of Madras, tapped into that model in a formal portrait that depicted him in full plate armor, sitting in front of and embodying the military power of Fort St. George (Figure 2).37 There Charles D’Agar, Sir Streynsham Master, 1714, oil on canvas, 48 5/8 in × 39 3/4 in, 1714, NPG 6107, National Portrait Gallery (London), www.npg.org.uk/collections/ search/portrait/mw08214/Sir-Streynsham-Master. 37

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is no hint of a peon or topass here, though: Instead, the only Indian presence in the portrait is that of a nonspecific, but decidedly unarmed Indian official, who appears blurrily in the background above Master’s left hand. The inclusion of this figure seems a reference to Master’s success in diplomatic negotiations. The next sections explore what this distance reveals about how martial power was conceived by early modern English society. 1.2

A Moor to Defend the Empire?

In 1692, English writer Thomas Rhymer offered as commentary on Shakespeare’s Othello his astonishment that the government of Venice “will set a negro to be their general, or trust a Moor to defend them,” noting that in English forces “a blackamoor might rise to be a trumpeter,” but never an officer.38 His incredulity is instructive. Though questions of race, identity, and martial prestige abound in Shakespeare’s original play, Rhymer’s discomfort with the text suggests that these issues had grown more divisive since its initial production. Not only did Rhymer consider Othello unfit to command: He deemed him unfit even to fight, relegated instead to the auxiliary role of musician.39 The expansion of English colonial ventures in the seventeenth century had created new settings for military action and authority that men such as Thomas Roe and Streynsham Master were eager to translate into social capital at home. That process, though, was never smooth, beset by anxieties about who could access this source of prestige and who would be excluded. The resulting debates brought the growing hodgepodge of colonial military labor into the era’s conversations about identity and difference. Already, we have seen colonies’ unwillingness to employ Catholic soldiers, especially among their mercenary ranks. Indeed, despite the East India Company’s constant demand for manpower, when the proCatholic James II/VII decreed that the corporation could recruit Irish soldiers, the Directors hesitated.40 In contrast, Scottish soldiers came to play a disproportionate role both in the British Army proper and in the private and local militaries of early colonies. Their proliferation in these

38 Thomas Rymer quoted in Jerry Brotton, The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2017), 275. 39 In fact, black recruits were often used as trumpeters or drummers in British regiments. I am grateful to Eamonn O’Keeffe for bringing this phenomenon to my attention. See J. D. Ellis, “Drummers for the Devil: The Black Soldiers of the 29th (Worcestershire) Regiment of Foot, 1759–1843,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 80 (2002): 191–93. Ellis also makes the important point (pp. 195–97) that black soldiers’ roles as musicians did not insulate them from combat. 40 Bartlett, “The Irish Soldier in India, 1750–1947,” 13–14.

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institutions in the eighteenth century was an important vector through which the British state sought to incorporate Scotland into a broader conception of Britain, in which participation in formal military structures became a proxy for national belonging.41 It follows that, if military service could include, it could also be defined to exclude. The difference between Shakespeare’s Othello and Rhymer’s commentary a century later suggests that the sharpening divide mobilized in England’s growing slave economies was transfused into martial contexts. It hints at a growing anxiety around the prospect of nonwhite actors as military authorities and the potential status that it might bring. Yet, the travelers who established England’s earliest colonial ventures did not bring with them a ready-made or static understanding of difference or of their own identities. Categories of “otherness” were manifold, overlapping, and at times unexpectedly fluid.42 Rhymer’s commentary on Othello, for instance, configured the character’s alterity in two registers – the realm of religion (“Moor”) and of race (“negro”), brought together with the ambiguous term “blackamoor.” The meaning of those categories, as well as their relative significance, in turn would be heavily renegotiated within the colonial setting. At the most superficial level, such expansion created new opportunities for English travelers to encounter different peoples. More significantly, beyond moments of encounter, the development of those networks created new contexts in which categories of difference had to be theorized, often in a more concrete capacity than had been previously imagined. The results of this process were often highly localized. As discussed below, even systemically similar settlements, such as the enslaving plantations of Virginia and in the Caribbean, developed strikingly different practices to instrumentalize the military labor of enslaved men and black freemen. Yet, despite these idiosyncrasies, such systems did not develop in isolation. On the contrary, individual settlements were part of a broader, globalizing colonial

41 Colley, Britons, 293–95. But, for a less sanguine view, see Andrew Mackillop, More Fruitful than the Soil: Army, Empire and the Scottish Highlands, 1715–1815 (East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell Press, 2000). 42 The role that racial and religious identities played in the early English empire remains the subject of considerable scholarly debate. A recent work making the case for a relatively early solidification of race as a dominant axis of difference is Jonathan Burton and Ania Loomba, eds., Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Other scholars have instead posited that ideas about race remained fluid until the eighteenth century or later. See for instance Carl H. Nightingale, “Before Race Mattered: Geographies of the Color Line in Early Colonial Madras and New York,” The American Historical Review 113, no. 1 (2008): 48–71; Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in EighteenthCentury British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).

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network, in which political ideas, institutional frameworks, and social anxieties circulated widely. Alison Games’s The Web of Empire makes clear how interconnected England’s early modern colonies were to each other. Rather than isolated settlements, tenuously held together by a remote metropole, England’s overseas outposts interacted with each other in dynamic ways. Individual colonists or merchants moved frequently and peripatetically across this space, forming a small population of what Games called “globetrotters.” Families with colonial interests might create even more extensive networks as its members linked different strands of the “web” through correspondence and affective ties.43 One example of such a wanderer is Richard Keigwin, whose role leading a mutiny in Bombay in 1683 is discussed in Chapter 4. He began his career as an officer in the royal navy and led the expedition to capture St. Helena from the Dutch in 1673, where he was appointed governor. He arrived in India a few years later in 1676, apparently to try his hand as a “free planter.” After the defeat of his mutiny, he would return to the navy and ultimately died in combat in the West Indies.44 Such travelers helped facilitate the circulation of ideas across England’s empire. The most infamous and important example of this is, of course, the institution of chattel slavery in the Americas as both a legal and a societal construction. Enslavers looked both to other English colonies and to the Iberian empires not just for the logistics of how to establish a plantation but also for the ideologies that would justify enslavement and the laws that would maintain it.45 In fact, plantation colonies’ military infrastructure could be a key site in which that system was instantiated. The Virginia colony, which had its start in a stuttering series of hardship, famine, and war against the Powhatan people, emphasized military service and ability as key markers of masculinity and strength.46 When a local militia was formalized in 1639, participation was conceived as a key aspect of civic belonging, but access to that claim was in turn policed: “[a]ll persons except negroes to be provided with arms and ammunition or to be fined at pleasure of the Governor and Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), Introduction. For more on families’ colonial networks, see Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 44 R. O. Strachey, Keigwin’s Rebellion (1683–4): An Episode in the History of Bombay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916), 29 and 157. 45 Handler, “Custom and Law.” 46 John Gilbert McCurdy, “Gentlemen and Soldiers: Competing Visions of Manhood in Early Jamestown,” in New Men: Manliness in Early America, ed. Thomas Foster, Mary Beth Norton, and Toby L. Ditz, Project Muse eBook (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 9–30. 43

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Council.”47 It was the first law in the colony to refer explicitly to its growing black population. As a practical category, the term “negro” remained ambiguous. Race was a concept in flux in English society in this period: Though perceptions of physical difference had begun to solidify, ideas about the causes of difference were open to debate. Some contemporary writers explained race as a function of climate or of cultural practice – both of which at least implicitly allowed for fluctuation – while others constructed theological explanations. The 1639 militia law, though, ignored that ambiguity to describe “negro” as a definite legal category excluded from military service. The regulation set a precedent and colonial governments across North America followed suit in subsequent decades, banning both black and American Indian men from their militias.48 Those prohibitions could bend when necessary, and colonies frequently mobilized both free and enslaved black men to supplement their European forces. That the regulations were so frequently circumvented suggests that they functioned less as practical measures than as legal tools distinguishing between military actors. Where participation in local militias allowed English colonists to assert civic virtue, the exclusion of black men, American Indians, and other marginalized groups rendered their military service aberrant, anomalous, or at best auxiliary. Even where officials did not seek outright prohibitions, military systems were conceived to assert such a distinction. In the Caribbean, relatively small white populations rendered militia restrictions in the style of Virginia unworkable, but enslaved combatants and black freemen were nevertheless restricted in the roles they could play. Enslaved militiamen, for instance, were largely prevented from using firearms and were instead limited to swords, lances, or even clubs – all of which marked their military participation out as distinct from and subordinate to that of English colonists.49 Though the use of nonwhite military labor was a central part of Britain’s early colonial engagements, this construction allowed colonists to imagine it as a rare phenomenon, driven only by necessity, emergency, and desperation.50

Ashton Wesley Welch, “Law and the Making of Slavery in Colonial Virginia,” Ethnic Studies Review; Bellingham 27, no. 1 (April 30, 2004): 3, emp. added. 48 Quarles, “The Colonial Militia and Negro Manpower,” 647–48. 49 Handler, “Freedmen and Slaves in the Barbados Militia.” 50 Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaugnessy, “Arming Slaves in the American Revolution,” in Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age, ed. Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 180–208; Peter Way, “The Cutting Edge of Culture: British Soldiers Encounter Native Americans in the French and Indian War,” in Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850, ed. Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 123–43. 47

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Just as the patchwork military systems of the early empire reflected a diversity of local conditions, so too did the process of “abnormalizing” certain forms of military labor vary. North American colonies supplemented their militias with complex diplomatic arrangements with American Indian Nations that included promises of mutual aid in warfare.51 The warriors who fulfilled these agreements, though, remained explicitly outside colonial military structures. Much has been made of the process through which such alliances drew British officials into Indian Nations’ ceremonies and systems of patronage. Though administrators often proved incompetent in navigating those networks, some scholars have even seen this as evidence of a willingness of early English colonial actors to move cross-culturally.52 It is worth speculating whether this process may also have served to preserve the distinctions created between the colonists’ military forces and American Indians. The ceremonies defined their support as diplomatic, thus outside of the colonies’ military structures and martial prestige. In India, Company administrators would establish their own set of exclusions, defined and shaped by idiosyncratic local preoccupations. As we have seen, military labor in early Company settlements was a mishmash of categories and expectations, in which European troops were employed alongside the ranks of peons, coffrees, topasses, telingas, and others. As Company officials sought to mobilize these forces, they too were eager to connect the Indian Ocean’s varied military economy to governing structures and understandings emerging elsewhere in the empire. One piece of evidence from somewhat later in the Company’s history – in 1753 – provides an intriguing hint at how officials imported ideas from other English colonies. Faced with fears of a mutiny among coffrees, enslaved African soldiers, then on expedition in Pegu (Myanmar), the military council at Fort St. George advised their officer to draw on the models used by colonists in the Caribbean: The Regulation observ’d in the West India Colonies in regard to Slaves is the properest for your Government [i.e., discipline] for though the Law of Nature may give them a right to use any means to recover their Liberty yet if there was not some Law or Custom to prevent it Slaves would soon be Masters.53

51 Richard L. Haan, “Covenant and Consensus: Iroquois and English, 1676–1760,” in Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800, ed. Daniel K. Richter and James Hart Merrell, 1st ed. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 42–56. 52 Timothy J. Shannon, “Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrick, William Johnson, and the Indian Fashion,” in American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500–1850, ed. Peter C. Mancall and James H. Merrell (New York: Routledge, 2000), 354–56. 53 Madras Military Department, Diary and Consultation Book, 1753, 185.

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The councilors did not include with this letter any hint as to what those regulations were. This may have been carelessness, but may suggest that they expected the officer in question to be sufficiently familiar with British colonial policies in the West Indies as to need no further explanation. The robust networks of exchange that connected different nodes of England’s – and later Britain’s – early empire may thus provide insight into how and why race, principally though never exclusively defined through a black/white divide, became an increasingly visible category across those colonies. Solidifying assumptions of physiological difference and especially of English whiteness could be translated into a variety of imperial settings – from Ireland to Barbados to India – to create lines of exclusion. Carl H. Nightingale has pointed to the late seventeenth century as a turning point in Madras, when Company officials reconfigured the European quarters of the city – once called “Christian Town” – as “White Town” (with a corresponding “Black Town”). The shift may have reflected officials’ desire to impose new restrictions on mixed-race Armenian and Portuguese inhabitants, whose position in the white/black dichotomy was much less clear than their religious identity.54 The change posited by Nightingale, though, did not emerge from a vacuum: The terms “white” and “black” were already well-established in the Company’s military records. Portuguese topasses were regularly described as “black,” illuminating one of the limits of their ambiguous identity as a mixed-race population.55 The process of categorization allowed a hierarchy of relative efficacy – and thus the relative prestige – of forces to be articulated. As one traveler to Madras in 1674 put it: There is a garrison of three or four companies of English and black Portuguese, with some lascarins, in all hardly 200 men, of which only 60 are English. The last are the only ones who would offer any resistance, as all the others, especially the Portuguese, are mere peace-time soldiers, who engage a military career only to get the wherewithal to lead a wretched, low, and cowardly life.56

The suggestion that nonwhite recruits in the Company’s service were less capable or more “cowardly” than their European counterparts can also be found in officials’ engagement with the Company’s militia. Throughout the Company’s existence, its directors tightly restricted flows of would-be settlers to its outposts, limiting the expansion of the European population in its cities in sharp contrast to the burgeoning growth seen in Atlantic 54 Nightingale, “Before Race Mattered,” 63. 55 For instance, see Diary and Consultation Book, 1678–1679, 8. 56 Abbé Carré, The Travels of the Abbe Carre in India and the Near East, 1672 to 1674, ed. Charles Fawcett and Marion Edith Fry Fawcett, vol. 2 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1947), 548, emp. added.

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colonies. Nevertheless, as Philip Stern has argued, the development of militias in its main ports proved central to Company efforts to promote their interests both in India and in Britain, a demonstration of a civic virtue exported from Europe that could in turn be used in political negotiations with Indian officials.57 Throughout the Company’s factories, then, militia service was an obligation for elite European and Indian inhabitants alike. Yet, in contrast to the proverbially well-regulated militias celebrated in North America, Company officials dismissed the service of Indian militiamen. John Burnell, for instance, described the Bombay militia in 1710 disdainfully; “They are usually called up once a month to their exercise which they do with as much grace as a cow might make a curtsy.”58 The snub made a mockery of the possibility that such a force might contribute to the defense of the city. Comments about Indian recruits’ unreliability or cowardice reveal that discourse about military participation in colonial settings did not just help to solidify categories of difference: It informed how that difference would be imagined. The prohibitions and calls to restrict enslaved or free Africans’ military participation often employed a rhetoric of potential danger. One colonist in Barbados wrote in 1657 that the enslaved population on the island was prevented from “commit[ting] some horrid massacre upon the Christians” in part because “[t]hey are not suffered to touch or handle any weapons.” This lack of access, coupled with “seeing the mustering of our men, and hearing their Gun-shot,” was meant to demoralize.59 Such language played into and solidified English anxieties about slave revolt and the perception of African men as rebellious and in need of harsh discipline. In contrast, Company officials in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries described Indian militiamen, topasses, or peons as “cowardly” and unreliable, not because of their potential for rebellion but rather for their tendency to desert.60 Philip Stern, “Soldier and Citizen in the Seventeenth-Century English East India Company,” Journal of Early Modern History 15, no. 1–2 (2011): 98–100. 58 Quoted in Sue Pyatt Peeler, “Land Forces of the English East India Company in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of Indian History: Golden Jubilee Volume, September 20, 1973, 553. 59 Richard Ligon, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados Illustrated with a Mapp of the Island, as Also the Principall Trees and Plants There, Set Forth in Their Due Proportions and Shapes, Drawne out by Their Severall and Respective Scales: Together with the Ingenio that Makes the Sugar, with the Plots of the Severall Houses, Roomes, and Other Places that Are Used in the Whole Processe of Sugar-Making (London: Printed for Humphrey Mosley, 1657), 46. 60 In 1753, Captain Joseph Smith condemned the mixed-race character of the Company’s forces, writing: “[t]he cowardly Behaviour of our Europeans and Topasses at Pitchunda confirms in me the opinion I have often wrote you, what a Medley they are.” Letter from Smith to Fort St. George, January 18, 1753, TNSA MDCB Vol. 12A, 142–43. 57

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Similar language was also used to depict American Indian allies in North America as unruly and unreliable. A New York official wrote of Haudenosaunee allies during Queen Anne’s War, “Some are very hearty and willing others it goes against the grain and drop off daily to their Country. They are generally their own Masters and will neither hearkin [sic] to their Sachims or anybody else except it be agreeable to their own wills.”61 If officials and colonists across the early English empire thus increasingly drew on the shared categories of black and white to create “normal” and “abnormal” sources of military labor, the dichotomy was further complicated by solidifying understandings of the characters of different groups. As we will see, these assumptions proved adaptable, such that by the early nineteenth century, the archetype of the “cowardly” sepoy was joined by that of the sepoy as a would-be rebel, who, like the enslaved men in Barbados, was only waiting for a chance to mutiny. Elite English travelers like Thomas Roe engaged colonial networks with the persistent assumption that the display of force was central both to national expansion and to the enhancement of their own status. Their ambitions involved two contradictory pressures: the need to establish widely available manpower to compose this force and the desire to limit those who could access the resulting social prestige. Restrictions reflecting the latter preoccupation reveal much about the layers of difference against which elite Englishmen defined themselves in this period, but their heavy reliance on colonial subjects as a source of labor gave conceptions of race unusual prominence in this discourse. The regulation of military institutions became one of the first spaces in which racial categories were formalized, framed in a context that rendered nonwhite military labor “irregular” and often invisible. This is reflected in contemporary depictions of martial power in the colonial setting: Streynsham Master’s portrait presented the governor himself as an embodiment of force, backed by the walls of an English fort, but disconnected from the local military labor on which that fort relied. Less than a century later, though, paintings such as Hodges’s landscape challenged that convention, instead drawing Indian soldiers into view. The next section explores the pressures that prompted this shift and its consequences for British military infrastructure across its empire. 1.3

Military Service and Colonial Belonging

Though the seventeenth century had been a tumultuous period for England and its nascent colonies, the eighteenth century brought with it a new set of pressures that would disrupt established military relationships. 61 Quoted in Parmenter, “After the Mourning Wars,” 54.

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Most importantly, Britain’s rivalry with France sparked conflict after conflict that would be fought out in imperial networks across the globe. Indeed, the Seven Years War (1756–1763) saw action in Europe, North America, India, the Caribbean, and off the coast of Africa. These expansive wars transformed Britain – newly consolidated with the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707 – both as a state and as a society. To pursue expanding military objectives, the new British government sought an increasingly sophisticated governing apparatus that would spread from the metropole into the empire, intensifying and reshaping connections between Britain, local colonial governments, and individual subjects.62 The state’s strategic ambitions quickly outstripped the hodgepodge system of irregular labor that had come into being the century before. The result would be a formalization of nonwhite military labor that met the growing appetite of Britain’s wars, but created new uncertainties about the place of these soldiers in colonial societies. The invisible, informal, and irregular nature of colonial military recruitment that proliferated in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had much to recommend it to colonial governments. It provided a flexibility and fluidity through which colonists could ramp up their military presence, while simultaneously helping to instantiate a rigid separation between English soldiers and those deemed outsiders. However, the appeal of that balancing act placed limits on the strategic efficacy of these forces. Most significantly, in the case of hired peons and American Indian allies, the irregularity of the recruits placed them outside the bounds of military regulation: These were not subject to British martial law. As campaigns grew lengthier and more exhausting, such troops’ mobility and fluidity frustrated British officers. Nor was the relative mobility of such troops the only barrier. In the Caribbean, the British Army’s efforts to make use of the enslaved troops attached to local militias were stymied by slave owners, who were unwilling to allow their “property” to be sent away on regional campaigns.63 Expanded operations by the British Army and Navy’s presence in the Caribbean helped to catalyze a new approach to nonwhite military labor. As early as the War of Jenkin’s Ear, part of the broader War of Austrian Succession, officers in the British Navy began to recruit black soldiers as pioneers, intelligence operatives, and even as combatants. The wellknown hardships of naval service in the eighteenth century meant that few free black men were eager to enlist. Instead, many of the “recruits” in these companies were enslaved men purchased by the British Navy Brewer, The Sinews of Power, 29–63. 63 Bollettino, “‘Of Equal or of More Service,’” 522–23. 62

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itself from planters across the Caribbean.64 Their service in the wars of the mid-century served as precedent, leading to the much larger establishment of the West India Regiments at the end of the century, black regiments composed in part by African captives “liberated” from enslaving ships.65 The act of purchase or “liberation” brought these troops into the British military infrastructure far more formally than had the prevailing arrangements of the previous century. This was in turn reflected in their institutional position: Rather than auxiliaries or irregulars, the West India Regiments were incorporated into the army, subject to martial law and positioned at least theoretically within the same hierarchies in regiments of white soldiers. Black regiments were also raised in North America. Several ­British officers during the American Revolution recruited enslaved people who escaped colonial masters: Most famously, in 1775, Lord Dunmore issued a proclamation encouraging such flights.66 Men who sought to take advantage of such proclamations were again placed in formal corps, the  so-called Ethiopian Regiments.67 Alongside such black battalions, British imperial officers also mobilized American Indian allies in conflicts, but Native warriors never seem to have been incorporated into regular regiments. Instead, the British Army’s access to American Indian military labor continued to be mediated through diplomatic channels. Nevertheless, here too we can see a process of formalization, especially of increasingly centralized alliances. William Johnson’s tenure as head of the Indian Department in the 1740s saw the negotiation of a new “Covenant Chain” between Haudenosaunee Nations and British officials that sought to expand beyond limited agreements with individual colonies to create an empire-wide system.68 American Indian combatants would play a highly visible role in Britain’s wars in the region until after the War of 1812.69

Ibid. 65 Roger Norman Buckley, The British Army in the West Indies: Society and the Military in the Revolutionary Age (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998); Morgan and O’Shaugnessy, “Arming Slaves in the American Revolution.” 66 Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 48–51. 67 Gary Sellick, “‘Undistinguished Destruction’: The Effects of Smallpox on British Emancipation Policy in the Revolutionary War,” Journal of American Studies 51, no. 3 (August 2017): 865–85; Benjamin Quarles, Tate Thad W., and Nash, Gary. The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 68 Robert S. Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies: British Indian Policy in the Defence of Canada, 1774–1815 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1992), 33–36; Haan, “Covenant and Consensus,” 56. 69 Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 150–65; Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 330–32. 64

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Figure 3  Print after Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, by William Woollett (1776). Yale Center for British Art, B1977.14.14483.

Perhaps nowhere is the heterogeneous nature of Britain’s colonial forces in the late eighteenth century more clearly or more triumphantly depicted than in Benjamin West’s famous 1770 painting, The Death of General Wolfe (Figure 3). Wolfe’s death at the Battle of Quebec in 1759 made him an instant martyr for the British Empire, and in imagining the scene, West configured the military power he was meant to embody in a way that is strikingly different from the solitary portrait of Streynsham Master. Wolfe is surrounded by soldiers and officers: In the foreground – certainly not invisible – is an American Indian man, his military role confirmed by the musket resting across his lap. At the close of the Seven Years War, as the British Empire reached new levels of global prominence, the eclectic nature of its armed forces had become more regularized, something that could be more comfortably depicted as a source of strength.70

70 For the significance of West’s painting, see Colley, Britons, 178–79.

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After 1759, Wolfe’s death became a shorthand for national honor, sacrifice, and victory. It was reimagined ad infinitum in texts, prints, paintings, and even souvenirs for an eager British public. Yet the American Indian warrior who occupied the foreground of West’s celebrated depiction of the scene proved considerably less popular. According to art historian Stephanie Pratt, only one other painting of the Battle of Quebec included such a figure: James Barry’s version features an American Indian body, apparently a corpse, at the far edge of the tableau. More generally, American Indian allies rarely graced depictions of British North America and were far outnumbered by images of warriors as perpetrators of violence against British colonists.71 This stands in striking contrast to artistic conventions of British India, where, as suggested by Hodges’s landscape, sepoys were prevalent features of the colonial setting. Across the empire, the renegotiation of military labor in the mid-eighteenth century had re-awoken anxieties about the connections among military service, prestige, and social status. The resulting, unequal dialogue between colonists, imperial administrators, and the combatants themselves would reshape the relationships between military and civilian actors, setting the stage for the unique role that the Company’s sepoy army would play in its later articulations of authority and autonomy. The military expansion of the mid-eighteenth century disrupted earlier systems excluding nonwhite, non-British military labor by drawing such combatants into formal military hierarchies in new, more permanent, and thus more regularized corps. Recruits in turn were quick to recognize and to capitalize on this, using many of the same methods of petition, protest, and appeals to paternalism that white soldiers mobilized to claim rewards or relief after combat.72 Black and American Indian Loyalists who had fought for the British during the American Revolution, for instance, worked for years in the wake of the war to translate their service into political and financial support from the state. A number of black Loyalists garnered the resources to found Sierra Leone, though the colony ultimately floundered with lack of continued support.73 Black soldiers in the West Indian Regiments similarly drew upon their status

71 Stephanie Pratt, American Indians in British Art, 1700–1840 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), 70–89; Vivien Green Fryd, “Rereading the Indian in Benjamin West’s ‘Death of General Wolfe,’” American Art 9, no. 1 (1995): 73–85. 72 For military actors’ appeals to the British state, see Charters, Disease, War, and the Imperial State, 1–3; Margaret R. Hunt, “Women and the Fiscal-Imperial State in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29–47. 73 Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 279–312.

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to navigate the planter societies they confronted, working to carve out professional and economic privileges.74 As the next chapters will show, some sepoys used their commissions in the Company’s service for leverage in both colonial and extra-colonial contexts. Faced with these maneuvers, colonists and imperial administrators sought mechanisms through which such claims could be checked or at least managed. In the Atlantic world, where the formalization of military labor had often occurred through the British Army and Navy proper, that renegotiation contributed to growing disputes between local colonial governments and the imperial metropole. In British North America, debates about the relationship between the empire and its allied combatants formed one of the manifold grievances that led to rebellion in 1776, and, even after the United States acquired independence, it would continue to shape relations between the two, now sovereign states. In particular, the Proclamation of 1763 carved out the Ohio River Valley as off-limits to colonial settlers, as the British state sought to secure its access to American Indian allies. Colonists, eager to expand westward, furiously rejected these terms: Though the disputes focused on access to land, they reflected a more general disagreement about the status that Native Nations held in the empire through their alliances.75 Come the revolution, the British Empire’s use of military labor continued to be a source of grievance in the colonies. Dunmore’s Proclamation encouraging enslaved people to escape and to join British forces in 1775 scandalized colonists, and, by 1781, General Cornwallis was even compelled to reverse the policy, turning away potential black recruits in his efforts to retain the support of white Loyalists.76 Even after independence, the southern states continued to perceive the existence of the black soldiers in the West India Regiments as a diplomatic threat.77 Though the revolution stopped at the coast of the mainland, the anger expressed by colonists at these military reforms found echoes in the Caribbean. The practice of employing black soldiers as regular combatants was quickly becoming the norm for the British Army in the area – one commander insisted that they were “of equal or of more service” than were white troops – but the planter elite remained fiercely opposed 74 Roger Norman Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795–1815 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 70–81. 75 Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 96–99. 76 Sellick, “‘Undistinguished Destruction,’” 880–83. 77 Rosalyn Narayan, “‘Creating Insurrections in the Heart of Our Country:’ Fear of the British West India Regiments in the Southern US Press, 1839–1860,” Slavery & Abolition 39, no. 3 (2018): 497–517.

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to such measures.78 Colonial governments objected to proposals to station West India Regiments on their islands, and many demanded that black soldiers be placed under the jurisdiction of colonial police, a process that would have eroded their formal position within the British Army.79 Commanders’ insistence that the black regiments could be relied upon in battle not only stoked ever-present anxieties about slave revolt: They challenged racial attitudes that cast Africans as “barbarous and uncivilized” and thus unable to act as disciplined soldiers.80 These confrontations over military labor had a radical effect on the colonies’ development. British imperial officers continued to insist that military service should allow soldiers a level of social mobility, leading historian Roger Norman Buckley to suggest that, “the army was an agent of reform: It created in the very midst of a society of enslaved blacks a small but highly visible community, a military caste of free blacks enjoying equal rights and privileges with its white members.”81 That reform, though, faced backlash, as colonial elites worked to mitigate the implications of these soldiers for the broader enslaving societies of the Caribbean. Throughout the West Indies, colonial governments rejected the idea that black soldiers’ service granted them status as freemen, a policy that neatly divorced military participation from civic belonging.82 Indeed, by the end of the eighteenth century, at the very time that militarism in British society was reaching its fever pitch in the Napoleonic Wars, militias in the Caribbean were mocked in political cartoons as useless and dishonorable – no longer as an embodiment of masculinity.83 In Barbados, where the militia had previously played an unusually prominent role in society, the late eighteenth century saw such local defense systems replaced by formal garrisons from the British Army.84 Instead,

78 Quoted in Bollettino, “‘Of Equal or of More Service,’” 518. 79 Gary Sellick, “Black Skin, Red Coats: The Carolina Corps and Nationalism in the Revolutionary British Caribbean,” Slavery & Abolition 39, no. 3 (July 3, 2018): 463. 80 Quoted in David Lambert, “‘[A] Mere Cloak for Their Proud Contempt and Antipathy towards the African Race’: Imagining Britain’s West India Regiments in the Caribbean, 1795–1838,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 46, no. 4 (July 4, 2018): 633. 81 Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats, 142. But see Sellick, “Black Skin, Red Coats,” 465, for evidence that support from the British military for social claims was not always so secure. 82 Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats, 20. 83 Buckley, The British Army in the West Indies, 55. 84 Andrew Jackson O’Shaugnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 47–50; Handler, “Freedmen and Slaves in the Barbados Militia,” 10. It is also notable that, despite the long-standing practice of employing enslaved and free black men in these militias, Barbados established its first formal laws limiting black militia participation

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civilian structures took primacy in colonial government and civic society, with black soldiers firmly isolated in military institutions.85 Debates about the role of nonwhite soldiers and particularly elites’ preoccupation with preventing their access to social capital thus served to transform what military service meant in the Caribbean and ultimately to decouple militarism from colonial government’s self-fashioning. 1.4

Spectacular Sepoys

The emergence of the East India Company’s army of sepoys as its dominant military force was a part of the shift toward formalization seen across the empire, but its effect on Britain’s nascent colonial society in India proved quite distinct. As we have seen, the term sepoy itself was not used by Company officials in the seventeenth century. Taken from the Mughal Persian word for soldier or trooper – sipāh – the word began to appear regularly in records from Madras in the 1740s, initially spelled as “seapoy.” At first, the term seems to have been limited to a small detachment of Indian soldiers sent from Bombay.86 Quickly, though, the category expanded beyond those reinforcements. By 1749, the Company’s military rolls distinguished between peons and seapoys, the latter of whom numbered a few hundred.87 By 1766, the Madras Army’s sepoy establishment had swelled to ten thousand, organized into ten formal companies, and, a decade later, it had doubled again to more than twenty thousand troops in full regiments. Sepoy armies would also develop in the Bengal and Bombay presidencies at similarly astonishing speeds.88 This dizzying growth would be paralleled by new mythologies through which sepoys were presented as the ideal Indian soldiers: effective, steady, and, most importantly, controllable. At the most basic, peons and sepoys differed in that the latter were at least nominally trained, drilled, and disciplined according to the norms of eighteenth-century European infantries. This was a possibility that British Company agents took from their French rivals: The French East India Company, headquartered at Pondicherry (Puducherry), began to instruct Indian soldiers, whom they dubbed “cypayes,” in Europeanstyle maneuvers in the 1730s. It was not until the next decade, though,

85 86 87 88

at the turn of the century. In 1805, for instance, the island passed legislation preventing black men from carrying guns. Handler, 15. Buckley, The British Army in the West Indies, 173–202. Wickremesekera, Best Black Troops in the World, 2002, 92–93. Factory Records of Fort St David, January 1748/9: BL IOR/G/18/10, fos. 171v–177r. Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reform, 1783–1798, 6.

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when the hostilities of the War of Austrian Succession spilled into the Indian Ocean, that these forces were used in the field. Their début came in 1746, just after the French launched a successful assault on Fort St. George itself, forcing the British Company agents to flee the settlement for Fort St. David, a hundred miles to the south in Cuddalore. The dislocated Madras Government appealed desperately to Anwar ud-Din Khan, then the nawab of Arcot, to intercede. Furious at the French Company’s apparent disrespect for his claims of suzerainty over the region, Anwar ud-Din sent a force of cavalry under the command of his eldest son, Mahfuz Khan, to challenge the French at Madras. On the outskirts of the city, along the River Adyar, the troopers encountered a company of cypayes, commanded by Louis Paradis, a Swiss captain. Despite being heavily outnumbered, Paradis’s men routed Mahfuz Khan’s cavalry, securing the French hold on the city.89 Subsequent British accounts of the Battle of Adyar describe the encounter in almost supernatural terms. Among the most influential is Robert Orme’s History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Hindostan. Published in 1763, it was the first substantial military history of the Company’s campaigns, and the French victory at Adyar featured prominently: It was now more than a century since any of the European nations had gained a decisive advantage in war against the officers of the Great Mogul. The experience of former unsuccessful enterprizes, and the scantiness of military abilities which prevailed in all the colonies, from a long disuse of arms, had persuaded the Europeans established in Indostan, that the Moors were a brave and formidable enemy; when the French at once broke through the charm of this timorous opinion.90

A century later, the skirmish at Adyar formed the opening chapter of G. B. Malleson’s The Decisive Battles of India. Like Orme, Malleson insisted that the battle had a “magic power” that “inaugurated a new era … a  fresh order of things,” in which Europeans dislodged Indian forces from their position of apparent superiority.91 According to both historians, it was the efficacy of the cypayes’ European-style training that secured this monumental triumph. Mahfuz 89 The events of this battle have been well-documented. For a classic account, see H. H. Dodwell, Dupleix and Clive: The Beginning of Empire (London: Methuen, 1920), chaps. 1–2. More recently, Bryant, The Emergence of British Power in India, chap. 1. 90 Robert Orme, A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan: From the Year MDCCXLV. To Which Is Prefixed a Dissertation on the Establishments Made by Mahomedan Conquerors in Indostan (Printed for J. Nourse, 1763), 77–78. 91 G. B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India: From 1746 to 1849 Inclusive (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2007), 16–17.

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Khan’s cavalry retreated in the face of the French forces’ quick volleys: Regular, synchronized firing was considered the hallmark of European infantry drill in the period. This dynamic led scholar Geoffrey Parker to identify the Battle of Adyar as a milestone marking the importation of the European “military revolution” into the Indian military landscape.92 Despite this enduring interpretation, though, it is striking that, in the immediate aftermath of the encounter, it was not heralded as a tactical revolution. Ananda Ranga Pillai, who maintained extensive diaries while a merchant and dubash for the French at Pondicherry, reported that the French governor, Dupleix, was frustrated by news of the skirmish, criticizing Paradis for not driving the victory home: “Want of promptitude on his part spoiled the undertaking.” Pillai spent the next “two Indian hours” trying to reassure Dupleix, insisting, “Our victory, as it stands, is a sufficient one. What has never before befallen the Muhammadans, has now overtaken them.” Pillai focused mostly on the fact that only two of Paradis’s men had been wounded in the skirmish: not that they had pioneered a new form of fighting.93 Yet another framing for the conflict is offered in the Tuzuk-e-Wālājāhi (“The Wallajah Chronicle”), written in the 1780s by Burhan ibn Hasan at the behest of Anwar ud-Din’s son and heir, Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah. The text described the defeat at Adyar merely as “shabkhūn,” literally a “night-blood” or a dishonorable ambush, in which Mahfuz Khan’s forces were thrown “from the brink of dreams into combat and from that cause were idle and helpless.”94 No doubt, Wallajah’s court historians were eager to excuse the disgrace, but it is significant that the account made no mention of new tactics despite Wallajah’s interest, at the same time that this chronicle was being written, in adopting European-style drill for his own forces. Instead, Burhan ibn Hasan stressed the suddenness of the counterattack. Significantly, this was not the first time that a nawab of Arcot had marched on Madras: In 1701, Daud Khan Panni had encamped outside the city in part of a campaign to establish his legitimacy. English forces, hurriedly inflated with ad hoc recruits, skirmished with his troops in nearby villages, but, after a few tense weeks of negotiations punctuated by such encounters, the two sides came to a mutually beneficial truce, each recognizing the titles,

Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 133–34. 93 Ananda Ranga Pillai and Henry Dodwell, The Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai, vol. 3 (Madras: Printed by the Superintendent, Government Press, 1900), 95–97. 94 “az khiyāl razm bar konār, va az asbāb pīkār šabk sār” Burhan ibn Hasan, Tūzuk-iWāllājāhi (Madras: Government Press, 1957), 122. 92

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privileges, and claims of the other.95 It is possible that Mahfuz Khan had come to Madras expecting another such diplomatic maneuver, only to be surprised by Paradis’s more decisive sally. The vaunted position that the Battle of Adyar found in Britain’s imperial pantheon is even more surprising when one considers that it was a celebration of Britain’s greatest rival. Orme’s 1763 history, which waxed so lyrical about Paradis’s success, was in fact first published in the wake of the Seven Years War. Orme, struggling with a stalled career as one of the Company’s civil agents, was hoping to capitalize on the wave of British nationalism that followed the conflict.96 That he would heap such praise on the French victory at Adyar provides some evidence into how men like Orme were seeking to make sense of the Company’s ongoing, dizzying military expansion. Desperate to respond to the French seizure of Fort St. George, the relocated councilors ensconced in Fort St. David frantically threw together a campaigning force, which included the first detachments specifically labeled as sepoys in Madras. As in the French case, these troops were meant to be distinguished from other combatants on the basis that they were trained in European-style drill. In fact, there is little evidence that early sepoys in the Company’s service had such training. W. J. Wilson, in his classic History of the Madras Army, spoke dismissively of the recruits: The first sepoy levies had no discipline, nor any idea that discipline was required. They were armed with matchlocks, bows and arrows, spears, swords, bucklers, daggers, or any other weapons they could get.97

The comment should be read skeptically: Wilson was generally contemptuous of Indian soldiers, and his history reflects the wave of hostility among British imperial officials toward such men in the wake of the 1857 rebellions.98 However, Wilson is correct that not until 1759 was any formal organization established for the army – more than a decade after Adyar.99 Both the term sepoy and the supposedly legendary effect of these troops on the battlefield thus seem to have raced far ahead of the

95 Madras Presidency, Diary and Consultation Book, 1701–1703, 58–70. 96 Asoka SinhaRaja Tammita-Delgoda, “Nabob, Historian, and Orientalist: The Life and Writings of Robert Orme (1728–1801)” (PhD Dissertation, Kings College London, 1991), 71–73. 97 W. J. Wilson, History of the Madras Army, vol. 1 (Madras: Govt. Press, 1882), 8. 98 See Chapter 7. 99 Wickremesekera, Best Black Troops in the World, 2002, 87; Stringer Lawrence, Charles Bourchier and John Pybus to the Madras Military Board, September 19, 1759, Madras Military and Secret Proceedings, BL IOR/P/D/42, 519.

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innovation that the label was intended to denote. This anomaly may reflect some of the same pressures that characterized the expansion of British military forces elsewhere in the empire. Though the Company had a long ­history of military action, campaigns prior to the mid-­eighteenth ­century had usually been constrained – a siege; a show of force against a local official; or simply a display, like the governor’s bodyguards. Even Sir Josiah Child’s War, arguably the most ambitious of the Company’s seventeenth-century military ventures, lasted less than two years and remained relatively confined in geographic scope.100 The war with the French that began in 1746 continued largely without interruption until 1761 and thus required a different set of logistics. In turn, the broadening scope of the Company’s operations required troops that could be mobilized for far-flung expeditions: The first sepoys forces to serve in Bengal, for instance, were sent more than a thousand miles from Madras.101 The sepoy establishment that came to prominence in the Madras Army was an institutional change, an attempt to create a more formal and permanent infantry force increasingly subject to the Company’s regulations. In the Caribbean, West India Regiments were organized along the same lines as other detachments in the British Army – with privates, a set of noncommissioned officers including sergeants and corporals and a graded hierarchy of (white) commissioned officers. This nominally equitable hierarchy was one cause of the conflicts stoked with colonial elites unwilling to grant nonwhite soldiers and officers the prestige that such positions usually entailed. In India, in contrast, the adoption of the “sepoy” model mitigated these worries in two ways. First was simply through terminology: Sepoys belonged to an entirely separate infrastructure than did white soldiers. This was no accident. When in 1754 officials debated promoting one Indian officer, they vacillated on language: “Commander in Chief of all the Companys Seapoys … Perhaps may not be a proper Title,” ultimately selecting “native commandant” as a rank that had no equivalent in the Madras Army’s European hierarchies.102 Indian officers were emphatically barred from any position of

100 Lenman, “The East India Company and the Emperor Aurangzeb,” February 1987; Hunt and Stern, The English East India Company at the Height of Mughal Expansion. 101 These sepoys were known as telingas, that is to say southerly Telugu-speakers. Philip Mason, A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers and Men (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), 97. 102 Fort St. George to Lawrence, March 25, 1754, Diary and Consultation Book, 1754, 78. It is interesting evidence of the growing importance of race as a category of difference in colonial settings that no such concerns prevented administrators from commissioning both French and low-class soldiers as regular officers in the Madras Army.

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strategic command.103 More abstractly, the terminology suggested a difference between Indian and European troops: The discipline and drill that the two supposedly shared produced distinct kinds of combatants. Returning to the Orme’s celebration of Adyar, the creation of the sepoy army also served to assuage worries about the relative ability of Indian troops in war. The emphasis on drill and discipline as transformative thus transmuted the military service of sepoys into a source of prestige not for the troops themselves, but for their commanders. Stringer Lawrence, first commander of the Madras Army, made this clear in 1759, writing: “The Good Order and Discipline of the Troops is owing intirely [sic] to the care the Officers take; The Seapoy Officers are very remiss naturally, It is therefore recommended to the European officers, who will have the care of this body, to infuse as much as possible the Spirit of Command amongst them.”104 Rapidly, this conceit became one of the most persistent parts of the Company’s military ideologies. Half a century later, John Malcolm, who would become the most vociferous advocate of the tenets of “rule by the sword,” consciously echoed Lawrence in his own assertion that sepoys “possessed an incalculable superiority over other natives of India” only because they were “armed, disciplined, and directed by the art, intelligence, and spirit of their European leaders.”105 The expansion of the British Empire’s military infrastructure and ambitions in the eighteenth century sparked new tensions about the relationship between military service, social capital, and colonial ideology. Though English colonies had always drawn upon diverse sources of military labor, early colonists’ efforts to control access to military prestige created sharp divides in those networks, contributing to the ways that difference was imagined across the empire. When those divides were challenged, colonial officials sought new mechanisms through which they could be recreated. In the Atlantic world, the prominence of the British Army and Navy in constructing the new military relationships created new disconnects, as colonists defined themselves against those institutions. The East India Company’s isolation from central British military forces in this period meant that these same pressures played 103 In contrast, white officers in the Madras Government fought determinedly to ensure that the European commander kept a seat in Council, even going so far as to mutiny in 1776 and in 1809 when this was challenged. See Chapters 4 and 6. 104 Stringer Lawrence, Charles Bourchier, and John Pybus to the Madras Military Board, September 19, 1759, Madras Military and Secret Proceedings, BL IOR/ P/D/42, 519, emp. added. 105 John Malcolm, “Memorandum upon the State of the Native Army of Madras,” 3r-3v, emp. added, NLS MP MS 11653.

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out internally instead, creating a new set of institutions. None would be more visible than the burgeoning sepoy army, which for William Hodges symbolized both the “exotic” nature of the Company’s rule in India and the stability of its power. The Company’s most famous British officers from this period – men like Stringer Lawrence, Robert Clive, and Eyre Coote – embodied a very different kind of martial masculinity than did their early modern predecessors. For Thomas Roe, the display of power had come literally from his own hand, waving his sword at Surat. His reliance on local military labor was relegated to the margins of his narrative, never a central part of the scene. Through the empire, though, officials’ ever-growing reliance on military labor drawn from outside colonial society created an uneasy paradox between martial ideals and realities. The ideological assumptions and institutional logic that developed within the East India Company’s sepoy armies provided one of the most radical resolutions to the contradiction, in which the use of Indian soldiers served to enhance, not to erode, European officers’ claims of military strength. The model would ultimately prove portable beyond the Company’s territories: One much later, but striking, example can be found in Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 poem, “The Pharaoh and the Sergeant,” which celebrated British noncommissioned officers in Egypt as an “everlasting miracle” who had “drilled the black man white.”106 The use of these claims within the expansion of the Company’s sepoy army in the eighteenth century would have a lasting impact on the role that the Company’s European officers played in the expansion of empire. Hodges’s landscape of The Marmalong Bridge bears out some of these ideas, and this is no coincidence. The languid river that churned along in the background was none other than the Adyar itself. A French victory at a moment of crisis for the Company, the Battle of Adyar had paradoxically become a symbol of British martial superiority in India. As imperial historian G. B. Malleson put it a century later, “the magic power which the France of the Bourbons won in November 1746 … she subsequently transferred, not willingly, to England.”107 Inextricable from that claim to superiority was the figure of the sepoy – depicted as a simultaneously effective and nonthreatening tool of empire. What this chapter has argued, though, is that the origins of that abstract figure should not be looked for in the banks of the Adyar or in the volleys fired by Paradis’s men. Instead, the establishment of sepoy forces in the Madras Army is

106



107

Rudyard Kipling, “Pharaoh and the Sergeant (1897),” The Kipling Society, accessed November 19, 2019, www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_pharaoh.htm. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India, 17.

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better understood as part of a broader process through which the relationships among colonial authority, imperial power, and military labor were renegotiated. Company administrators, agents, and writers were engaged in a set of debates and anxieties that could be traced across the empire and looked to sepoy battalions and their allegedly distinctive rhetoric, aesthetic, and discipline to assuage emerging uncertainties about difference. As we will see in the next chapter, their efforts to create an insulated force would only produce new entanglements, as sepoys looked to the emerging Madras Army as a source of new claims and identities.

2

The Sepoy’s Oath

In 1766, when the ranks of the Madras Army swelled to some ten thousand combatants, the military department in Fort St. George published its first printed set of regulations.1 Somewhat undercutting the document’s pretensions to sophistication, surviving copies of the orders are badly typeset and mispaginated. Its contents, which run sixty-two pages, span a wide range of subjects from the duties of surgeons to establish hospitals for troops to the extra allowances granted to commissioned officers for “a Peon and Oil.” Substantial space is carved out to discuss the recruitment of sepoys, including specifications for a choreographed ceremony through which a newly enlisted Indian soldier was to be incorporated into the army: The Company in which he is to serve, is to be under Arms, the Officers at the Head of it, and the Colours advanced six Paces in the Center of the Front, the Recruit standing about two Paces in the Front of the Colours, and with him the Person of his Religion or Cast, who is to administer the Oath, which the recruit with an audible Voice is to repeat after him.

Finally, “the Colours [were] to be waved three times over his [the recruit’s] Head, after which his Arms and Accoutrements [were] to be delivered to him, and he [was] to join the Company.” The bestowal of the Company’s distinctive uniforms and weaponry marked the new sepoy’s entry into a new kind of identity.2 Contemporary and subsequent scholarly debates about the efficacy of Company sepoys, the maintenance of discipline, and, of course, the use of drills and “European-style” maneuvers all focused on what happened after this ceremonial transformation.3 Historian G.  J. Bryant captured these priorities in his article on sepoys as mercenaries, “The dilemma, Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reform, 1783–1798, 6. 2 Madras Military Department, Orders, Rules, and Regulations to Be Observed Respecting the Troops on the Coast of Choromandel (Vepery, India: East India Company Press, 1766), 25 (ceremony), 9 (allowances), and 65–67 (hospitals). 3 See Wickremesekera, Best Black Troops in the World; Sabyasachi Dasgupta and Kaushik Roy, “Discipline and Disobedience in the Bengal and Madras Armies, 1807–1856,” 1

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then, which many of the Company’s men believe they faced  … was whether and how the considerable numbers of Indians in their armies could be brought to emulate the more effective European levels of discipline and styles of fighting … but then for them not to turn on their ambitious British paymasters in peace.”4 By the early nineteenth century, this fear that sepoys might rebel against the Company would solidify into a central tenet in European officers’ demand for influence in the colonial government. Early in the growth of the Madras Army’s sepoy corps, anxieties about unrest and disorder were less pronounced and less focused on the prospect of rebellion. Yet these preoccupations skip over the less-studied question of how and why the men who made up these armies chose to enlist in the first place. In exploring this issue, this chapter argues that the realities of recruitment in South India acted as a catalyst, creating new points of entanglement between the Company and the political, social, and economic networks that surrounded it. The Company’s first official historian, Robert Orme, approached recruitment of sepoys simply as a financial question, noting that the Company offered steady pay, whereas “it is a maxim with every prince in India, let his wealth be never so great, to keep his army in long arrears, for fear they should desert.”5 Officials jealously cultivated their reputation as “reliable paymasters,” and this monetary relationship was even enshrined in the sepoy’s enlistment oath.6 In the recruitment ceremony described above, the would-be sepoy vowed “to serve the Honourable Company faithfully and truly against all their Enemies, while [he] continue[d] to receive their Pay, and eat their Salt.”7 Though data on military employment in South India in this period are spotty, it does seem that the Madras Army in the mid-eighteenth century offered relatively high wages to its newly established sepoy corps.8 At the same time, in War and Society in Colonial India, 1807–1945, ed. Kaushik Roy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 55–76; Manas Dutta, “Disciplining the Madras Army during the Early Years of the English East India Company’s Dominance in South India,” Societal Studies 4, no. 3 (2012): 887–99; Sabyasachi Dasgupta, In Defence of Honour and Justice: Sepoy Rebellions in the Nineteenth Century (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2015). 4 G. J. Bryant, “Indigenous Mercenaries in the Service of European Imperialists: The Case of the Sepoys in the Early British Indian Army, 1750–1800,” War in History 7, no. 1 (2000): 8–9. 5 Orme, A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, 299. 6 P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c.1750–1783 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 68. 7 Madras Military Department, Orders, Rules, and Regulations, 25–26. 8 Cf. Madras Military Department, 21; Ravi Ahuja, “Labour Relations in an Early Colonial Context: Madras, c. 1750–1800,” Modern Asian Studies 36, no. 4 (2002): 816. For delays in pay, see Minutes of the Fort St. George Council, July 20, 1752, Madras Military Department, Diary and Consultation Book, 1752, 25–26.

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there is evidence that even this competitive pay was not sufficient to support the Madras Army’s growth. In 1752, Robert Clive, who would become the most famous of the Company’s officers, reported that he “found great Difficulty” in enlisting cavalrymen “as Money would not do it.”9 Indeed, Company officials struggled to raise cavalry regiments throughout the eighteenth century: Agents’ limited success breeding horses in India meant that they were highly reliant on Indian troopers who could access mounts from the regional horse trade, which stretched from India to Central Asia.10 Questions about what would induce men to enlist with the Company have thus sometimes led writers to present the growth of the Company’s sepoy army as a paradox. John Seeley, in his imperially minded lectures, The Expansion of England, mused on the apparent “contradiction” that “England” had seized a region so much more populous than itself. He concluded, “India can hardly be said to have been conquered at all by foreigners; she has rather conquered herself,” a state of affairs that to Seeley pointed to the paucity of national identity in India at the time.11 As we will see, military service in India was, in fact, intricately connected to political identity in the eighteenth century. Recruits who enlisted in the Madras Army transformed the meaning of the Company’s commissions and patronage to fit into that landscape, fashioning them into new sources of power in networks across the subcontinent. Though the Company’s expansion would disrupt and eventually eliminate much of this dynamism, in the eighteenth century, officials had to navigate those entanglements, creating new relationships and potential identities across the military landscape. 2.1

Military Economies: North and South

In 1794, Charles Cornwallis, governor general of Bengal, described India’s military labor markets as bursting, especially in the north: “[A]n almost unlimited number of men of the best quality for Native Soldiers, may at any time be raised in a very short time for Bengal troops, from the populous Provinces in that quarter of the Company’s Dominions.”12 9 Letter from Robert Clive to Fort St. George, February 24, 1752, Madras Military Department, Diary and Consultation Book, 1752, 4. 10 Jos Gommans, “The Horse Trade in Eighteenth-Century South Asia,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 37, no. 3 (1994): 246–48. 11 John R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1905), 229, 234. 12 Charles Cornwallis, Lord Cornwallis’s Plan for Military Arrangements, 1794, Military Papers, 524, BL IOR/H/85.

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This was nothing new: Company agents in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had been able to avoid the expense of large standing armies precisely because they were able to raise substantial levies of irregular forces rapidly when need arose. By the end of the eighteenth century, these sporadic levies could no longer meet the Company’s demands: Sustained campaigns required more permanent field forces. In Madras, the Carnatic Wars, which had started with the French seizure of Fort St. George in 1746, continued virtually without a pause until 1761. In Bengal, Company forces were in the field from 1756 until 1764 and were heavily involved in southerly campaigns after this point. Even in the Bombay Presidency, troops were increasingly mobilized on new, extended expeditions.13 The scale and duration of these campaigns required Company officials to engage with their surrounding military economies in new ways. The landmark study of those economies remains D. H. A. Kolff ’s Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy (1990), which explored employment patterns in the “military labor market” of North India. Kolff argued that since the fifteenth century, military service in the region had been characterized by considerable fluidity, especially the phenomenon of “seasonal” soldiering by peasants as a way to supplement agrarian subsistence. For would-be rulers or martial actors, maintaining access to this vast labor pool and the resources needed to rapidly mobilize potential recruits was often more important than creating a permanent force.14 Seema Alavi, in her study of the Bengal Army, The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India 1770–1830 (1995), has called into question some of Kolff ’s analyses, including, persuasively, his argument about the origins of the peasant-soldier labor pool. In fact, such part-time agrarian recruits played a much less important role in the armies of the Mughal Empire, at its peak in North India in the seventeenth century, than did cavalrymen and their (usually urban) attendants, who were granted the most military influence and prestige and in turn composed the Empire’s martial elite. Only in the first half of the eighteenth century, when the Mughal Empire’s centralizing authority in the region began to decline, would those patterns shift. The nawābi of Awadh, an increasingly auto­ nomous province of the Mughal Empire, cultivated military support The first sepoys in the Madras Army were, after all, troops sent on expedition from Bombay. Wickremesekera, Best Black Troops in the World, 92–93. The campaigns in which Madras and Bengal were involved in this period are described in more detail in Sections 2.2 and 4.1, respectively. 14 D. H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3–10, 75–77. 13

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among agrarian workers precisely because they were an untapped source of labor that might compete with that established elite, thus buttressing the nawabs’ efforts to distance themselves from Delhi.15 This political maneuver proved a substantial boon for the Bengal Army, which by the last quarter of the eighteenth century would be the largest, if not the most active, of the Company forces. As the Company established a more and more dominant influence over Awadh, its massive labor pool of peasant-soldiers would quickly become the Company’s primary source of recruitment and would remain so until the Company’s ultimate dissolution after 1857. As Alavi argued, administrators carefully cultivated this space, awarding thannahs (land grants) as pensions to encourage sepoys to return to agrarian lives in new villages.16 One intriguing source that provides some glimpse into the way that Company agents and officers engaged with this labor market is The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth-Century Journey through India, the only known firsthand account of a sepoy’s career from the eighteenth century. Dean Mahomet joined the Bengal Army as a young child, and, after a lengthy career, he traveled to Europe, settling first in Ireland and then in Britain, where he established a coffeehouse and shampooing parlor. His memoirs, written in English, were funded by subscriptions from Company agents and other Britons who had returned from India and thus must be read with this audience in mind. Nevertheless, the text offers an extraordinary glimpse into the military networks in which the Company was expanding in the late eighteenth century.17 Dean Mahomet began his memoir describing what he knew of his family, who, he claimed, had been connected to the nawabs of Bengal, one of the richest Mughal successor states. In 1756, though, the death of Aliverdi Khan, who had administered the region since 1740, would trigger a series of radical transformations in Bengal’s political landscape and the military networks of which Dean Mahomet’s father was a part. Aliverdi’s heir apparent was his grandson Siraj ud-Daula, but his succession was contested by several other claimants. As these would-be nawabs jostled for power, they sought support across the region. The British East India Company, centered at Calcutta, ultimately backed one of Siraj Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company, 11–26. A similar critique that Kolff underestimated the continued dynamism of the Mughal successor states can be found in J. F. Richards, “Warriors and the State in Early Modern India,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 47, no. 3 (2004): 398–400. 16 Alavi, chap. 3. 17 Michael Fisher’s critical edition of the memoirs provides an excellent discussion of the utility and limits of the source, as well as a careful biography of Dean Mahomet’s life outside of the text. Mahomet, The Travels of Dean Mahomet. 15

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ud-Daula’s rivals and, even after Siraj had consolidated his hold on the province, Company agents equivocated in recognizing his authority.18 In June, Siraj ud-Daula responded to the repeated slights by marching against Calcutta, which his forces captured easily. When news of the crisis reached Madras, officials there immediately and almost without discussion diverted a considerable portion of their army northward to “rescue” the Company’s most profitable trading settlement. The expedition was placed under the command of their most promising British officer, Robert Clive, who wrote enthusiastically to his father that it would prove “by far the grandest of my undertakings.”19 Clive’s expedition retook Calcutta quickly in February 1757, but, in keeping with his capacious ambitions, this was only the start of his political maneuvers. In the months that followed, Clive played a leading role organizing a coup against Siraj ud-Daula, which came to fruition on June 23, 1757, when the nawab clashed with the Company forces at the Battle of Plassey. As Maya Jasanoff described it, the battle was “a setup, not a set piece”; the greater part of the nawab’s supporters abandoned him on the field.20 In the aftermath, Clive named a handpicked successor – Mir Jafar – to be nawab, over whom the Company sought an ever-growing political influence. The coup is often said to mark the start of the Company’s territorial empire in India.21 It was in this context that Dean Mahomet’s father had apparently transferred from the nawab’s armies into one of the Company’s early sepoy regiments, but he died early in Dean Mahomet’s childhood. The young boy’s connection with the Company did not come until he was around eleven, when a Company regiment camped near his home. He was enthralled by the spectacle and immediately determined to join up: I was highly pleased with the appearance of the military Gentleman, among whom I first beheld Mr. Baker [his patron] …. Nothing could exceed my ambition of leading a soldier’s life: the notion of carrying arms, and living in a camp, could not be easily removed …. I grew anxious for the moment that would bring the military Officers by our door.22 18 Sushil Chaudhury, The Prelude to Empire: Plassey Revolution of 1757 (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers & Distributors, 2000), 41–45. 19 Letter from Colonel Clive to his father, Fort St. George, October 5, 1756, Samuel Charles Hill, Bengal in 1756–1757: A Selection of Public and Private Papers Dealing with the Affairs of the British in Bengal during the Reign of Siraj ud-Daula, vol. 1 (London: J. Murray, 1905), 227. 20 Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 30. 21 For more on the Company in Bengal in this period, see Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead. 22 Mahomet, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, 38.

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A few days later, he joined the army as Colonel Baker’s servant, but would rise over the course of a long career to the rank of subedar. In his breathless narrative, we see both how the Bengal Army appropriated networks of the Indian states it displaced – drawing officers like Dean Mahomet’s father from suborned Mughal elite hierarchies – and how it used military spectacle and prestige to draw new groups into its ranks. Dean Mahomet’s experience, though, differed from what a recruit to the Madras Army might have encountered in this same period, and it was in the south in which the Company’s military expansion developed most visibly within a context of political claims-making. Like the north, much of southern India was characterized by what Mesrob Vartavarian has described as an “open military economy,” with low barriers to entry and an expectation of fluidity.23 Rather than large recruiting pools of peasant-soldiers that could be engaged directly, military labor in the south tended to be organized into smaller bands and detachments, often under the suzerainty of small-scale rulers and military chiefs, like the palaiyakkarars (poligars or “little kings”) in Madurai and Tirunelveli, in the far south.24 Such rulers amassed forces of peons, pike-men, and musketeers as a crucial demonstration of their legitimacy and reach: The smallest chiefs might field a few hundred (or even a few dozen) such men, while the Rajah of Travancore in 1789 could reportedly mobilize “near a Hundred thousand Men.”25 Amassing an army on anything like that scale in the south required military employers to engage in complex patronage calculus, in which a chief might lend the military labor of his followers to a more powerful political authority in return for that authority’s recognition of the chief ’s legitimacy. The Madras Government was involved in these negotiations long before the Madras Army appeared as a formal body. In 1701, for instance, councilors at Fort St. George debated what to do after the death of “Timapa Naigue,” a local chief in the environs of Madras. For years, he had served as the watchman for the Madras settlement, providing, among other things, a proto-police force for the town. After some

Mesrob Vartavarian, “An Open Military Economy: The British Conquest of South India Reconsidered, 1780–1799,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 57, no. 4 (September 26, 2014): 486–510. 24 Dirks, The Hollow Crown, 8. 25 Copy of Letters from Captain Bannerman to the Government of Madras, dated May 12 and 14, 1789; – and also such Parts of the Correspondence between Mr. Powney, Resident at Travencore, and the Governments of Bengal and Madras, from May 14 to December 30, 1789, as relate to the Purchase of the Forts of Cranganore and Jaycottah from the Dutch, and to the Hostile Intentions of Tippoo Sultan, 157v, Chatham Papers, TNA PRO 30/8/359. 23

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discussion, the Council at Fort St. George decided to appoint his infant son to that same post as a watchman, to be assisted by his uncle until his majority. In making this offer, Company officials were clearly less concerned with the practicalities of policing than they were with its political implications. In extending the appointment, officials simultaneously recognized the young boy as the legitimate heir to Timapa’s position as nayak (Naigue). In return for this support, the Madras Government increased their demands on the watchman, translating their political alliance into increased military labor: “[t]hat whereas formerly you kept but fifty Peons, now you must keep One hundred good peons to watch this city and ye: liberties thereof, for prevention of robberies and other disorders.”26 The proliferation of these small-scale military arrangements in the south has sometimes been attributed to geographical realities. Both the swampy deltas of the Coromandel Coast and imposing hills of the Lower Ghats frustrated the progress of mass infantries or cavalries.27 Such obstacles, though, were probably less influential in shaping the “open military economy” of South India in the eighteenth century than were the region’s political intricacies. Where North India was dominated by large, de facto independent states carved out of the Mughal Empire’s established provinces, Mughal power in the south had arrived late and remained shallow. Mughal officials remained important political players in the region: The nizams of Hyderabad were the most powerful figures in the Deccan, and the nawabs of Arcot would be the Madras Government’s longest running allies. Their claims to power existed within a complex system of layered sovereignty, in which gaining support from small-scale chiefs and other local elites was essential. It was in this system that the Company’s first sepoy armies would come into being and through which the first sepoys would make sense of what it meant to “eat their salt” from the Company’s stores. 2.2

The Carnatic Wars

In 1766, in the same regulations that laid out the sepoy’s recruitment ceremony, the Madras Government instructed that “Sepoys are to be chosen, if possible out of the following Casts, viz. Rachepout, Musselmen[,] Comavar, Rachevar, Elmevar and Buckserry.”28 Significantly, the 26 Madras Presidency, Diary and Consultation Book, 1701–1703, 109. 27 Stewart Gordon, Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation in Eighteenth-Century India (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 200. 28 Madras Military Department, Orders, Rules, and Regulations, 25, emphasis in original.

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document offered no insight into how such men might be identified or why they were preferred to other potential recruits. In later decades, Company officials would become preoccupied with sepoys’ cultural and ethnic identities. In Bengal, by the turn of the nineteenth century, highcaste Brahmin peasants were widely agreed to make the best sepoys.29 After the rebellions of 1857, officials, disillusioned with that earlier ideal, instead developed a theory of “martial races” that identified Sikhs, Gurkhas, and Pathans as uniquely suited for combat.30 Though the 1766 regulations certainly anticipate these later concerns, there is another way to read this list: not as a marker of discrete demographic groups, but as a glimpse into the political and professional networks Company officials were able to access in South India’s military economy. Key to this interpretation is the recognition that caste as a category was a nebulous concept in eighteenth-century India, especially when it came to the constitution of “martial” castes. Of the four groups identified as particularly desirable, “Musselmen” was the most capacious, encompassing Muslims broadly, but, as we will see, many of the recruits who fit this category came more narrowly from among the adherents of the Wallajah dynasty in Arcot. “Rachepout” and “Buckserry” were also large categories, but perhaps better seen at the time as quasi-professional identities more than cultural markers. “Buckserries” (baksariyas) was the term used for musketeers from Buxar, including the same peasantsoldiers of Awadh that came to dominate the Bengal Army. “Rachepout” (Rajput) soldiers had their origins as a political and cultural elite in western India (Rajputana) that had been conquered and incorporated into the Mughal Empire by the seventeenth century. Highly mobile bands of Rajput soldiers spread throughout Mughal networks as a prestigious source of military manpower, reaching Madras as early as 1664.31 In this process of proliferation, the political identity of Rajputs became what Stewart Gordon called “an attributional and relational term,” signifying professional and cultural patronage, rather than an impermeable identity.32 The remaining categories of “preferred” castes (“Comavar,” “Rachevar,” and “Elmevar”) designated Telugu-speaking adherents of “little kings” in the south, where, again, political, cultural, and

29 Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company, 5–6. 30 This is discussed in more detail in the conclusion. 31 Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy, 177. 32 Gordon, Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation in Eighteenth-Century India, 183; Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy, 118–21; M. Kasturi, Embattled Identities: Rajput Lineages and the Colonial State in Nineteenth-Century North India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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professional identities were entangled. In short, the six listed categories allow us to see the way that Company officials maneuvered – or at least, hoped to maneuver – within the fluid military networks and layered claims of sovereignty in South India. That the Company’s engagement with that political landscape was complex is no surprise. If the Madras Army’s sepoy establishment first began to take shape during the War of Austrian Succession, the clash between the French and British companies was never isolated from regional politics. Already we have seen that Anwar ud-Din, as nawab of Arcot, interpreted the French attack on Madras as a challenge to his sovereignty, prompting his son’s disastrous encounter with Paradis along the River Adyar. After that setback, Anwar ud-Din had allied with the British Company, as its officials rushed to piece together a counterattack against Pondicherry. Anwar ud-Din’s willingness to coordinate on this expedition shows that his anger at the French attack was not that its agents had breached any putative state monopoly on violence, but rather that they had not negotiated with him for approval before the assault.33 In response to this alliance, the French threw in their lot with two of Anwar ud-Din’s political opponents. The first was Muzaffar Jung, the would-be Nizam of Hyderabad, the most powerful Mughal state in South India to which Anwar ud-Din nominally owed his fealty. The second, Chanda Sahib, was a rival claimant for the musnud (seat) at Arcot with ties not to Mughal networks, but rather to other local elites in the Carnatic, especially navayats, Muslim families who had been in the region long before the Mughals.34 Before either Company could make headway against the other, two dramatic political developments would radically change the nature of the conflict in the south. First, in 1748, the War of Austrian Succession ended. During peace negotiations in Europe, the French traded Madras back to the British in return for Louisbourg in Cape Breton, which British forces in North America had captured.35 Next, in 1749, Anwar udDin was killed in battle against Muzaffar Jung. The disaster fractured Anwar ud-Din’s support and left his intended heir, his son Muhammad Ali Khan, almost bereft of resources or manpower through which to 33 Anwar ud-Din had sent a letter to the French after the attack in which he chastised, “You transgress all bounds; this is improper.” Ananda Ranga Pillai, The Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai, 2:291. 34 Letter from Wallajah to Fort St. George, January 11, 1755, Madras Military Department, Country Correspondence, 1755 (Madras: Superintendant of the Government Press, 1914), 10. 35 J. W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army: First Part – To the Close of the Seven Years’ War, vol. II (New York: Macmillan & Co., Ltd, 1910), 266.

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reclaim his father’s title.36 The British Company took up the cause, fearful that their privileges and status would be curtailed by Chanda Sahib, should the French-backed candidate consolidate his power. The subsequent conflicts, collectively known as the Carnatic Wars, are often treated simply as proxy wars for Anglo-French rivalry, in which Chanda Sahib and Muhammad Ali were mere “puppets” for the two companies.37 Thomas Saunders, governor of Madras in 1753, made use of this pretense when he reminded one of his mediators: “the English have not at any time during the Troubles and do not act as Principals but as Allies to the Circar [the Arcot state].”38 This pretext that the Company was a mere auxiliary helped to avoid a diplomatic crisis in Europe, where news of open warfare between French and British forces in India might have shattered the fragile peace. Yet, reducing the fight for Arcot to a puppet show oversimplifies both the politics of succession in Arcot and the Company’s position within those networks. The Company’s relationship with both Anwar ud-Din and Muhammad Ali Khan, later known by his title Wallajah or simply, in English, as “the Nawab,” was not one sided. Instead, the nawabs and the Company created a multifaceted alliance, one that would shape the expansion of the Madras Army at both practical and structural levels. Wallajah played a significant role in facilitating the Madras Government’s access to military networks in the region. Many of the Company’s early sepoy recruits seem to have entered the Madras Army through Wallajah’s circle of supporters. The earliest surviving records in the Madras Military Department record numerous disputes with officials from Wallajah’s government not just over promised funds but over the question of who was responsible for paying specific detachments of troops. In June 1753, for instance, the Council at Madras received a report that a sepoy company, commanded by one of the Company’s European officers, was in an uproar because they had received no pay for ten months. They “plainly say they expect to be paid by the Company and not the Nabob, that they will serve nobody but the English.” The Madras Government promptly sent twenty thousand rupees to their commander in response.39 There are few details about how or why this dispute had emerged, but such crises suggest that movement of troops between Wallajah’s armies

Orme, A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, 130–33. See, for example, Mason, A Matter of Honour, 34–35; Bryant, “Indigenous Mercenaries in the Service of European Imperialists,” 21; Pradeep Barua, The State at War in South Asia (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 61. 38 Madras Military Department, Country Correspondence, 1753, 231. 39 Madras Military Department, Diary and Consultation Book, 1753, 106, 111. 36 37

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and those of the Company was a frequent enough occurrence that the sepoys’ status was uncertain or that such uncertainty was credible grounds for a protest. None of the sepoys recruited in the Madras Army in the eighteenth century left behind an autobiography like Dean Mahomet’s, and thus, we have no direct insight into the motivations that propelled men in the south to enlist. However, the career of one of the most celebrated Indian officers in this army – Muhammad Yusuf Khan – offers some hint into how individuals might have navigated this complex landscape of political and professional negotiation. Yusuf Khan was born to a Vellalar family near Pondicherry.40 In sharp contrast to Dean Mahomet, who joined the Bengal Army as a very young, awestruck boy, Yusuf Khan had plied his trade as a soldier already for several years before he approached the Company. Though subsequent biographies have suggested a wide array of potential career paths, there is strong evidence that prior to his enlistment in the Madras Army, he was employed by the killedar (commander) of Nellore, one of Wallajah’s brothers.41 Certainly, Wallajah considered – or at least claimed – Yusuf Khan as one of his “servants,” owing obeisance to Arcot. The Anwarnamah, an epic poem composed in the 1770s to celebrate Wallajah’s military victories, for instance, depicts Wallajah as giving orders to Yusuf Khan during the siege of Madras in 1759.42 Yusuf Khan, though, clearly did not share that sense of loyalty, and it is in his effort to carve out an alternative identity that we find one of the most dramatic examples of the Madras Army as an engine of political invention. 2.3

The Miserable Musket-Bearer

A hint of how Yusuf Khan sought to maneuver within these networks can be found in his very name. Given that he was from a Hindu Vellalar family, it is improbable that Muhammad Yusuf was the name he was given at birth. Changing one’s name was a fairly common method in early modern India to mark a shift into a new political network and

40 Reported in Hill, Yusuf Khan, 1. For more on the Vellalar caste, see Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 139–43. 41 Samuel Charles Hill, Yusuf Khan: The Rebel Commandant (New York: Longmans, Green, 1914), 278. 42 Mir Muhammad Samail Khan Abjadi Mulk-ul-Shara, Anwarnamah, ed. Muhamamd Hussain Mahavi (Madras: Madras Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, 1944), 339.

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did not necessarily entail a religious conversion in a theological sense.43 According to one tradition, Yusuf Khan’s decision to become a soldier was made out of desperation. As a young man, he is said to have run afoul of French officials for “some wrong-doing,” and his ears were cut, marking him as a criminal.44 Changing names may have facilitated his access to new professional networks, including the military networks connected to Wallajah’s court. Without a doubt, Anwar udDin’s death and the collapse of his political factions rendered his sons particularly eager for new sources of military support. Yet, if discontinuities in the region’s political and military landscapes gave Yusuf Khan new opportunities, he found that the highest ranks of Wallajah’s armies were still open only to those with the political capital to boost or to legitimate the nawab’s reign. Yusuf Khan had no such pedigree: As Wallajah’s official court chronicler, Burhan ibn Hasan, put it, he was a “miserable musket-bearer,” a gun-for-hire, with no claim to social status.45 Yusuf Khan may have seen the Madras Army as an alternate military hierarchy through which the limits of Arcot’s hierarchies could be circumvented. As we have seen, the infrastructure of the Madras Army was in no way designed to encourage upward mobility among its sepoy recruits. However, its emerging Indian officer corps was at the very least a system apart from Wallajah’s patronage networks. He made this leap in 1752, when he approached a body of Company forces encamped near the fort of Nellore in hopes of enlisting. He had persuaded some one hundred additional recruits to follow him into the Madras Army, for which he was rewarded with a commission as subedar, then the highest rank available to Indian officers.46 He quickly made a name for himself in what had become a sprawling theater at Tiruchirappalli (Trichinopoly), the most important strategic stronghold in the south. In 1752, Wallajah and his Company allies had secured an important victory: Chanda Sahib was captured and executed, eliminating the most prominent rival in the

43 Cynthia Talbot, “Becoming Turk the Rajput Way: Conversion and Identity in an Indian Warrior Narrative,” in Expanding Frontiers in South Asian and World History, ed. Richard Maxwell Eaton et al., 200–31. 44 The punishment was for “quelque méfait.” Marchand, Précis Historique des deux Sieges de la Ville de Maduré, Capitale du Royaume de ce nom, dans l’Inde, faits par les Anglois avec toutes leurs forces réunies & celles de Mahamet-Alikan, des côtes de Coromandel & d’Orixa, en 1763 & 1764 (Paris: Chez le Jay, 1771), 9. Burhān ibn Ḥ asan called Yusuf Khan “slave of the pierced ear” (mamlūk-e softeh-gūsh). Tūzuk-i-Wāllājāhi (Madras: Government Press, 1957), 393. 45 “meflūk-e bandūq bedūsh” Burhān ibn Ḥ asan, Tūzuk-i-Wāllājāhi, 394. 46 Orme, A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, 1:346.

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fight over Arcot.47 However, before Wallajah could enjoy this newfound stability, fighting resumed at Tiruchirappalli, this time as Wallajah’s erstwhile allies fought to take control of it.48 Thrust into this tumult, Yusuf Khan excelled, leading detachments to protect the Company’s supply lines and to disrupt those of its enemies. Stringer Lawrence, commander of the Madras Army, was particularly impressed. In 1754, he wrote to Madras a letter full of effusive, if patronizing, praise, urging that Yusuf Khan be further promoted: I beg leave to recommend another Person to you Gentlemen for your Notice. Tis our Commander of Sea Poyes [sic] by Name Mahomed Ysof [sic]; Besides his Intelligence, & Capacity, I cannot too much praise his Zeal & Alacrity for the Service. He always prevents my asking by offering himself for every thing; & Executes what he goes about as well & as briskly as he attempts it some part of your Regard by a Letter, & Some little Present would keep up that usefull Spirit, besides rewarding Merit.49

As subedar, Yusuf Khan was already at the top of the Madras Army’s nascent Indian officer corps. Administrators struggled to strike a balance between the prestige they sought to give Yusuf Khan and their determination to keep that corps separate and decidedly inferior to the corps of European field officers. Ultimately, they decided on the term “commandant,” breaking with the practice of importing ranks from local military traditions (e.g., subedar or jemedar, drawn from Mughal Persian political and military hierarchies), and instead granted to Yusuf Khan a title legible in a European context, but still outside of its formal ranks.50 Yusuf Khan’s opportunity to realize his broader aspirations came in 1756 when he was appointed to command an expedition to Madurai and Tirunelveli, territories some three hundred miles to the south of Madras. The regions were nominally under the Nawab Wallajah’s control, but, despite their reputed abundance, he had never been able to tax them effectively. Fighting over Tiruchirappalli had made this dearth particularly urgent. By 1754, according to Robert Orme, “[t]he plain of Tritchanopoly having been so long the seat of war, scarce a tree was left standing for several miles round the city; and the English detachments

47 Madras Military Department, Diary and Consultation Book, 1752, 19. 48 For more on the fight for Tiruchirappalli, see K. Prasanna Venkatachalam, “Siege of Trichinopoly, 1751–52: An Analysis” (PhD Dissertation, University of Mysore, 1993), Andhra Pradesh State Archives. 49 Letter from Lawrence to Fort St. George, March 8, 1754, Madras Military Department, Diary and Consultation Book, 1754, 69. 50 Letter from Fort St. George to Lawrence, March 25, 1754. Ibid., 78.

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were obliged to march five or six miles to get firewood.”51 Determined to secure resources for Wallajah’s ongoing conflicts – and thus money for their own treasuries – Company officials committed troops to missions to “pacify” surrounding regions, but those to Madurai and Tirunelveli had all failed.52 That Yusuf Khan was assigned this task speaks to his growing importance in the Company: There are few other examples of Indian officers being granted such a mission, in part, as we will see, as a result of the subsequent clash between Yusuf Khan and the Madras Government. However, the expedition also neatly illustrated his persistently subordinate position therein. The revenue grab was auxiliary to the Company’s strategic priorities, which remained centered on battles with the French in Pondicherry.53 Soon after Yusuf Khan departed, his expedition would be even further overshadowed by Robert Clive’s mission to Bengal, by far the highest-profile operation undertaken by the Madras Army in this period, and accordingly commanded by a British officer. Officials hoped that Yusuf Khan could drum up funds to support those operations but retained their most valued troops – their European soldiers – for more central objectives. Accordingly, Yusuf Khan’s force included no Europeans, consisting instead of one thousand sepoys, two field cannon (probably manned by topasses), and a detachment of African coffrees.54 Nevertheless, despite those limits, the expedition would allow Yusuf Khan to use his unique rank as commandant to translate his military success into real political power. 2.4

The Commandant King

Through a mix of alliances, diplomatic maneuvers, conquest, and coercion – Yusuf Khan was particularly infamous for cutting off his rivals’ noses – the commandant quickly amassed considerable authority over the region’s established elite, realizing an unprecedented flow of revenue

51 Orme, A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, 345. 52 An earlier expedition commanded by one of Wallajah’s other brothers, Mahfuz Khan, had ended in disaster when his brother rebelled against him. Letter from the governor of Madras to Wallajah, September 7, 1756, Madras Military Department, Country Correspondence, 1756, 135–36. 53 When Yusuf Khan’s expedition began, there were also talks of sending a force to the Nizam of Hyderabad. Before this could be realized, though, the Company’s attentions were refocused on Bengal. See Madras Military Department, Diary and Consultation Book, vol. 5, 241–42. 54 Affairs of Madura and Tinnevelly, 1756, in Coromandel History, on Madura and Tinnevelly, 31. Orme Collection. European Manuscripts. BL MSS Eur Orme OV 51.

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for his employers.55 In return, the Madras Government further elevated his status, declaring him amuldar, or district manager, of Madurai. Theoretically, the title placed him under the auspices of Arcot, as part of the state’s civil administration, but Yusuf Khan had no interest in that position or the patronage network that it at least nominally opened to him. Instead, he continued to operate as the Commandant or as the Kammandan Sahib, a transliteration of that rank, leading the Nawab Wallajah to protest bitterly: [A]s he is a Military Man, and not acquainted with the nature of the management of affairs the Country People [likely ahl; local inhabitants] are complaining of his hardships and he allows extravagant Pay to the People [likely jama’yat, in this sense a military group] out of the Revenues collected in the Country, so that, the Circars Money is spent in vain.56

Wallajah’s badly translated complaint pointed out that Yusuf Khan’s continued self-identification as a “Military Man” in the Company’s service meant that his expedition buttressed the Madras Government’s reputation as a military patron and employer in the region, but not Arcot’s. According to Susan Bayly, Yusuf Khan’s failure to support Wallajah constituted “a classic exercise in ‘fitna,’” an often stylized form of revolt against a centralized ruler through which an official claimed autonomy or increased power.57 That model, though, may obscure how Yusuf Khan understood his own actions: Rather than a rebel against Arcot, he insisted in his letters that he remained part of the Company’s patronage networks. As he put it, “I am by the means of the Company's bread which I eat taking great care & pains and using my utmost endeavours & in short nothing shall be wanting on my side in the Company's affairs.”58 The comment is particularly interesting in that it substitutes that quintessential European foodstuff – “bread” – in place of the Indian idiom (“to eat one’s salt”) that the Madras Government had enshrined in its 55 Letter from the Rajah of Maleavar [Travancore] to Fort St. George, February 25, 1763, Military Country Correspondence, vol. 11, 147. TNSA. For a discussion of the practice of cutting off noses, see Caleb Simmons, “The ‘Hunt for Noses’: Contextualizing the Woḍ eyar Predilection for Nose-Cutting,” Studies in History 32, no. 2 (2016): 162–85. 56 Letter to Fort St. George from the Nawab Wallajah, Rec’d January 29, 1758, Country Correspondence, 1758, 14. 57 Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses, and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 196. For more on fitna, see André Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society and Politics under the Eighteenth-Century Maratha Svarājya (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 25–34. 58 Yusuf Khan to Ft St. George, rec’d February 15, 1758, Madras Military Department, Country Correspondence, 1758, 21.

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official oath. It emphasized that Yusuf Khan, as the Company’s officer, belonged to a patronage network outside those of Arcot. More than mere rhetoric, the Commandant Sahib followed up such letters with material support for Madras. He sent revenue directly to Fort St. George, bypassing Arcot in the process, and even recruited new soldiers – mostly pike-men from his network of palaiyakkarars – to serve in expeditions against the French and their allies during the Seven Years War.59 In the face of such support, Company officials initially dismissed Wallajah’s complaints, writing as late as October 1761 that “Usoff Cawn hath ever proved himself a faithful Servant to the Company … such a Person the Board [i.e. the Council at Fort St. George] would wish to hold the management of those Countries.”60 Even as Company officials were asserting their continued support for Yusuf Khan, though, his activities clearly diverged from the expectations that they had of their Indian officers. By 1761, Yusuf Khan had begun to construct a network of new forts and roads facilitating his control of Madurai.61 His available military manpower swelled to an astonishing twenty-seven thousand regular troops, supported by as many as two hundred thousand pike-men.62 Burhan ibn Hasan, in his chronicle written for Wallajah’s court, would summarize Yusuf Khan’s actions simply: He “counted the state as his own and sent to oblivion what had passed before.”63 Eschewing Arcot’s sovereignty, though, Yusuf Khan seems instead to have been seeking a new kind of political relationship with Madras. As the Kammandan Sahib, Yusuf Khan asserted authority in Madurai and Tirunelveli by embodying the prestige of the Company. In turn, he continued to express his loyalty to the Madras Government and to fulfill his obligations as their military and political client. As late as 1763, he assured Lord George Pigot, then governor of Madras, “werever [sic] I may be I shall remain your own Servant.”64 The expedition to Madurai gave Yusuf Khan the opportunity to translate his status in the Company into a degree of political authority and power far beyond what he might have exercised as a “miserable musket-bearer.”

Hill, Yusuf Khan, 88–89, 107–09. Consultations of the Fort St. George Council, October 8, 1761: Madras Military Consultations, BL APAC, IOR/P251/47, 665. 61 Letter from Fort St. George to Yusuf Khan, November 20, 1760, and Letter from Matthew Horne to Joseph Smith, December 8, 1760, TNSA MDCB 13B, 1062 and 1152. 62 Bayly, Saints, Goddesses, and Kings, 197; Burhān ibn Ḥ asan, Tūzuk-i-Wāllājāhi, 396. 63 “mulk az ān khod shomard o be nesiān eh.vāl sabq” Burhān ibn Ḥ asan, Tūzuk-i-Wāllājāhi, 395. 64 Yusuf Khan to Fort St. George, January 21, 1763, TNSA MCC Vol. 11, 28. 59

60

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In 1762, though, the Madras Government – so long supportive of Yusuf Khan’s actions against Wallajah’s complaints – suddenly reversed course, rejecting those professions of loyalty. The abrupt about-face reveals the sharp limits on Indian officers’ room for maneuver in the Company’s political entanglements. The immediate trigger for the break came when Yusuf Khan invaded Travancore on India’s southwestern coast, where he hoped to acquire resources – including more manpower  – to move against Arcot. As one ruler in Travancore anxiously wrote to the Madras Government: The said Commandant[,] being a Company Servant[,] sent to acquaint me that the Nabobs forces were marching against him, and that I should join my troops to his assistance … as I did not know the reason of it, it made me suppose that if there happened any such thing certainly the Company would have wrote to me.65

The letter suggests that Yusuf Khan was still representing himself as “the commandant,” an extension of the Company’s authority. However, the campaign itself departed radically from the Madras Government’s existing diplomatic arrangements. Upon receiving the news, George Pigot, the governor of Madras, sent the commandant a furious tirade: “by whose authority is it that you do this? are you a Sovereign that you take upon you to make war upon independent States? You are I fear grown giddy with power … I advise you to read this letter with attention and then recollect who you are, and what you are.”66 The language offered no ambiguity about “who” and “what” Yusuf Khan was in the eyes of the Madras Government: a commandant with a set of military obligations, but no political power. When Yusuf Khan did not immediately retract his actions, Pigot mobilized for war. In February 1763, the Madras Army joined with Wallajah’s own forces to launch an expedition against Madurai. As testament to his efficacy as a commander, Yusuf Khan weathered two sieges by the armies, but, finally, in October 1764, the fort at Madurai was breached. Yusuf Khan was immediately hanged on Wallajah’s authority, and Company officials noted in their next letter to the Nawab that they were “well pleased at the Manner of your executing the Rebel, which no Doubt will deter others from being guilty of his Crimes.”67 In this curt dismissal of the commandant who had so long won praise within the Company,

Ram Rauze, Rajah of Malabar, to Fort St. George, November 14, 1762, TNSA MCC Vol. 10, 313. 66 Fort St. George to Yusuf Khan, November 24, 1762. Ibid., 300. 67 Fort St. George to Wallajah, October 22, 1764, TNSA MCC Vol. 12B, 353. 65

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Yusuf Khan was shorn of his connections to the Company and recast as a “rebel” against Arcot. He was not even tried under the Company’s martial law. In Madurai, Yusuf Khan had demonstrated the radical ways in which the Madras Army’s emerging military infrastructure could be deployed as a set of political claims through which the patronage networks of the region were reshaped. In so doing, though, Yusuf Khan had subverted one of the driving intentions behind those structures: limiting the agency of Indian actors drawn into the Company’s orbit.68 2.5

A New Military Economy

As the most dramatic example of Indian officers using their position in the Company as a source of political authority, Yusuf Khan’s career also marks the premature peak of that claims-making. No other officer would rise again to the heights of the Commandant Sahib. Instead, administrators strove to ensure that no other Indian officer in the Madras Army would, as Pigot had put it, “grow giddy with power.” Most urgently, the Madras Government established new barriers between its ever-growing pool of Indian military labor and political authority. Already excluded from the Company’s internal government, in 1767, Indian officers were also barred from gaining a foothold in Indian political networks. As the Madras Government promised their employers in London: You may be assured we shall be careful never to appoint subadars of sepoys to be renters of countries [amuldars]. It was troublesome times and a country to be reduced that made it appear expedient to put that confidence in Yusuf Khan of which he gave us sufficient cause to repent.69

Nevertheless, despite the restrictions, sepoys and Indian officers continued to maneuver creatively between the Company’s service and the wider landscape, seeking to enhance their value as soldiers. To do so, they would establish often illicit networks that not only challenged the Madras Government’s understanding of its military service but also reshaped the flows of military labor across the region. When the first sepoy forces were established in Madras, Indian soldiers in the Company’s army had enjoyed considerably more freedom of movement than had their European counterparts. Where the latter were enlisted in fixed terms – usually for three years – sepoys were expected only to “give a Month’s Notice” “whenever [they] have an Inclination 68 For more, see Christina Welsch, “Military Mobility, Authority and Negotiation in Early Colonial India,” Past & Present 249, no. 1 (November 1, 2020): 53–84. 69 Quoted in Hill, Yusuf Khan, 241.

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to quit the Service.”70 In part, that leniency reflected the relatively fluid nature of military service in South India: A more restrictive set of expectations might have pushed early recruits away from the Madras Army. Given the prevalence of rhetoric celebrating the Company’s sepoys as fundamentally superior to other forces in India, one might expect officials to have fretted about losing control over the new-modelled forces, but, on the contrary, they insisted that such movement would have only a limited impact. In 1766, the Court of Directors proclaimed that “their superiority [i.e., of Company sepoys] over Sepoys in the Country Service consists only in their discipline, which (wanting European Officers) they soon lose under the Country Government.”71 In keeping with the “open military economy” of the region, sepoys and Indian officers thus regularly moved between the Madras Army and other services. This can be difficult to trace, as such movement tautologically brought sepoys outside of the aegis of colonial records, but one example of this pattern can be seen in the petition of “Jaggar Naullnow,” who sought to re-enlist the Madras Army in 1780. According to the report of the military board that heard his appeal, “He says he served the Company at the 1st seige [sic] of Pondicherry in 1760 & for 3 years after the French war as a Jemidar [and] that then he went into the Nabob’s Service [Wallajah’s armies] … when he was promoted to Subidar.”72 For Jaggar Naullnow, service in the Madras Army had been a position from which he was able to gain further opportunities, including further promotions in other armies. Though there was no suggestion that Jaggar Naullnow’s departure from the Madras Army had been illicit, the board denied his petition, saying that he had “staid so long from his Colours.”73 The board’s disapproval points to an important change taking place in the Madras Army at the end of the eighteenth century, as officials became increasingly determined to restrict the mobility of their troops. In 1770, the Council at Fort St. George complained of “the late Spirit of Desertion” that had taken hold in the army and for the first time made the crime a capital punishment for sepoys. The first executions under this punitive policy occurred only a fortnight later.74 Madras Military Department, Orders, Rules, and Regulations, 25. Letter from the Court of Directors to Fort St. George, February 19, 1766, Despatches to Madras, January 1765 to December 1767, 336, BL IOR/E/4/863. 72 Claim of Jaggar Naullnow, Military Board at Tiruchirappalli, TNSA MS Vol. 69, 63. 73 Claim of Jaggar Naullnow, 63. It is worth noting here that he was probably seeking re-enlistment with the Madras Army at this point because Wallajah, increasingly dependent on the Company, was forced in 1780 to dismantle most of his infantry. 74 Minutes of the Fort St. George Council, March 12 and 26, 1770, TNSA MDCB, Vol. 36, 54–55 and 77. 70 71

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A subsequent spate of convictions of desertion suggests that sepoys eager to depart the Company’s service could no longer easily attain a formal discharge on short notice and were instead willing to risk increasingly harsh penalties to flee. Again, this is a difficult phenomenon to explore, but, as with Jaggar Naullnow, many sepoys who deserted from the Madras Army seem to have remained within the military labor market, often seeking to capitalize on their service in the Company forces to secure promotions or higher pay in other armies. The circuits of this illicit form of movement, visible in the margins of the Company’s records, reveal both the changing nature of South India’s military economy and the role that the Company’s sepoys played in facilitating those shifts. Company officials were particularly preoccupied with the prospect of sepoys deserting to Mysore, which by the 1770s had become the Madras Government’s principal rival in the south. The Carnatic Wars, ongoing since 1746, had finally come to a stuttering close in 1762 when the Company seized Pondicherry and expelled their French rivals from the subcontinent entirely. Some French adventurers and mercenaries remained: A few even found their way into Yusuf Khan’s employ after the Company denounced him, but the official French presence was at least temporarily nullified.75 In southern India’s military landscape, at least, though, the Company remained far from any degree of dominance. Conflict with the French soon gave way to wars with Indian powers, including many new or newly expansionist states seeking to carve out sovereignty in the region. The most prominent of these was the state of Mysore, which, in the 1760s, came under the control of Haider Ali, a military officer who had seized power from its rajah. The Madras Government’s efforts to extend the borders of Wallajah’s state – and thus to expand the revenue base that the Company had access to – soon clashed with Haider Ali’s own ambitions, leading to the outbreak in 1767 of the First AngloMysore War. The conflict ended in 1769 in ignominious defeat for the Company, in which Haider “dictated a peace to us [the British] at the gates of Madras.”76 It was the start of an enmity that would continue until the turn of the century. Military historians Kaushik Roy and Pradeep Barua have identified the Anglo-Mysore wars and the Company’s clashes with the Maratha Confederacy, the other major military power in the south, as key moments

Marchand, Précis Historique des deux Sieges de la Ville de Maduré, 17–19. The Annual Register, or a View of the History, Politics, and Literature, for the Year 1769, 4th ed. (London: printed for J. Dodsley, in Pall-Mall, 1786), 83. 75 76

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of tactical and strategic innovation.77 The sepoy battalions employed by European corporations had gained prominence in the region’s military economy throughout the Carnatic Wars. European-style uniforms and parade drills made sepoys spectacularly distinctive in South India’s military labor market, and many rulers were eager to employ such forces as a way to demonstrate their ability to tap into multiple military networks. Significantly, troops clad in European-style jackets were centrally featured in murals commissioned both by Tipu Sultan – Haider Ali’s son and successor – and the Nizam of Hyderabad celebrating their martial prestige.78 Roy argued that each side was working to produce a “military synthesis” in which European and Indian models of warfare could be brought together efficiently. This suggestion goes beyond Geoffrey Parker’s theory of a “military revolution” exported from Europe to India by emphasizing the dialectical nature of the exchange, in which Indian military developments played a significant role.79 Roy’s approach, though, remains top-heavy, focused on rulers and administrators as drivers of the state, who sought with varying degrees of success to negotiate a balance between two concrete “models” of warfare – European and Indian.80 Given the sheer heterogeneity of warfare both in India and in the broader British Empire, the framework positing two coherent bodies of military knowledge obscures more than it elucidates. Instead, it is more fruitful to ask how knowledge about warfare circulated, not just between Europe and India, but between the many armies and military actors that composed the latter’s military economy. The Company’s restrictions on desertion reflect officials’ growing fears that sepoys and Indian officers might become vectors for precisely this kind of exchange. After the First Anglo-Mysore War, rumors flew that Haider’s agents were infiltrating the Madras Army to entice sepoys away.81 When the Second Anglo-Mysore War erupted in 1779, some troops used those anxieties as a source of leverage. In 1780, when the

Pradeep Barua, “Military Developments in India, 1750–1850,” The Journal of Military History 58, no. 4 (1994): 599–616; Roy, “Military Synthesis in South Asia.” 78 For Tipu, see Janaki Nair, “Tipu Sultan, History Painting, and the Battle for ‘Perspective,’” Studies in History 22, no. 1 (2006): 109–13. Similar murals depicting the armies of the Nizam of Hyderabad are held in the Salar Jung Museum (Hyderabad). 79 Parker, The Military Revolution, chap. 4. 80 Roy concludes that Indian states were only able to produce “defective” syntheses, in contrast to the “balanced” version developed by the Company’s forces. Roy, “Military Synthesis in South Asia,” 660, 682. 81 Letter from William Keating to Fort St. George, March 5, 1780, TNSA MM, Vol. 3A, 156. 77

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Company used the war as a pretext to take control of Arcot’s forces, one hundred sepoys, demobilized during the transfer, demanded to be taken on in the Madras Army, “threatening to go off to Hyder if the Company would not employ them.”82 The gambit worked, and the men were signed on at a considerably higher rate of pay than that allowed to most sepoys.83 Despite these preoccupations, though, Mysore never seems to have been the foremost destination for deserters from the Company’s armies. Though Haider Ali famously employed tens of thousands of cavalrymen recruited from the Company’s territories, most of these troopers were drawn from the plethora of men demobilized from “country” forces like Arcot.84 Veterans of the Madras Army found in Mysore’s ranks were mostly sepoys and Indian officers who had been captured on the battlefield and had chosen to fight rather than remain imprisoned.85 Officials, though, were not wrong to see sepoys as a potential vehicle for military knowledge and prestige: They were just focused on the wrong destination. Significantly, the new systems of drill and discipline required the support of a complex infrastructure, and, unsurprisingly, those states with the most resources to pour into military development were thus the best suited to produce these new military institutions. At the top of this list were Mysore, the Maratha Confederacy, and the Madras Government itself. In contrast, rulers with fewer resources were accordingly less well positioned to realize the transformation. That imbalance would in turn create new opportunities for combatants who could move between forces. Deserters from the armies of Madras, Mysore, or the Marathas offered more modest military employers a shortcut – a labor force that was already trained in the most prestigious standards of drill. The result was a new flow of military labor, which inverted existing practices of patronage and obligation. As we have seen, the negotiated systems of power that characterized political authority in South India had usually

Letter from Thomas Palk to the Fort St. George Military Department, October 13, 1780, TNSA MDCB Vol. 72A, 1941. 83 Nixon agreed to pay the sepoys two pagodas a month, plus one pagoda as an enlistment bounty. The standard rate of pay for sepoys was one pagoda and twenty-four fanams per month. Letter from Thomas Palk to the Fort St. George Military Department, October 13, 1780, TNSA MDCB Vol. 72A, 1941 and John Dalling, “Proposal for a New Arrangement of the Army and the Native Cavalry,” TNSA MDCB Vol. 108B, 2059. 84 Mesrob Vartavarian, “Warriors and States: Military Labour in Southern India, circa 1750–1800,” Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 2 (2019): 319. 85 The most famous of these defectors was Syed Goffer, who rose to become one of Tipu Sultan’s most important officers during the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War. See Alexander Beatson, View of the Origin and Conduct of the War with Tipoo Sultan, 1800, 70. 82

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directed military labor up the scale, from “little kings” to regional rulers. Now, those smaller forces offered premiums to troops willing to defect from the dominant armies of the region into more local forces. In 1800, upon encountering the forces of the Rajah of Gumsur, one of the Company’s Indian officers reported that “he personally knows the two Subedars and two Jemedars attached to these Companies, the former to have been Havildars and the latter Sepoys, in the late 18th Battalion.”86 The unnamed defectors had mobilized their experience in the Company’s army into promotions and prestige that was increasingly denied to them in Madras. In the 1790s, no army seems to have been more attractive to potential deserters from the Madras Army than was that of the Nizam of Hyderabad, the most powerful Mughal successor state in the south. After a series of military defeats against the Marathas, Nizam ul-Mulk Asaf Jah II had undertaken a major push to reorganize his armies, significantly including a new sepoy-style infantry under the command of a French adventurer known only as Monsieur Raymond. In 1792, the force had constituted a single battalion, but only three years later, it would contain some fourteen thousand troops trained in contemporary drill.87 To achieve such a rapid expansion, the Nizam filled his officer corps with veterans from other armies, paying them some 20 percent higher than the Company’s wages.88 The Nizam and his officers reportedly maintained an active recruiting presence among sepoys stationed in the Northern Circars, from which the journey to Hyderabad was comparably short.89 However, the offer proved attractive to ambitious men across the south: Two of the infantry’s commanders, Asad Ali and Malik Esau, had both made their reputations in the armies of Mysore.90 As we will see in the next chapter, the flow of deserters toward Hyderabad was sufficient to spark a diplomatic crisis in the 1790s, which would ultimately result in the Company coercively imposing a “subsidiary Letter from Robert Strange to John Munro, August 1, 1800, TNSA MM Vol. 68, 760. William Kirkpatrick, Copy of the Answers to certain Queries proposed by Lord Mornington to Major Kirkpatrick relative to the French Forces in the Service of the Nizam, January 31, 1798, 2–3, Papers of William Kirkpatrick, BL MSS Eur F228/27. 88 Letter from William Kirkpatrick to Joshua Uhthoff, June 14, 1795, Letters from William Kirkpatrick, Resident at Hyderabad, 298, BL IOR/H/446. 89 Indeed, in April 1795, one Company officer reported that two sepoy deserters had been captured during their flight by the naig of Nelgonda, but that “They were Rescued from him by a large party of the Nizams Sepoys.” Letter from Thomas Halcott to Lt. Col Wynch, April 25, 1795, in Letters from William Kirkpatrick when Resident at Hyderabad, 381, BL IOR/H/446. 90 Notes Relative to the Affairs of Nizam Ally Cawn, Soubadar of the Deccan, 1784–1798, 50, BL IOR/H/563. 86 87

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alliance” on the Nizam, an arrangement that rendered the state virtually dependent in external affairs. This incident provides a unique opportunity to gain insight into how the individuals involved in this practice of desertion made sense of their movements. In 1798, troops belonging to the Company’s resident (ambassador) in Hyderabad seized an alleged deserter from the Nizam’s forces, a sepoy named Rusul Khan. In a lengthy deposition, preserved because it became a part of subsequent diplomatic negotiations, Rusul Khan confessed to having fled his garrison at Ongole with most of his battalion in 1797. Facing potential execution and desperate to secure a pardon, Rusul Khan unsurprisingly presented himself as the most reluctant of deserters, absconding only under coercion from his superior officer, Madar Khan. In Hyderabad, Rusul Khan reported that they found “between four and five hundred Deserters in the Company’s Service, the Majority of whom were promoted to Naiks and Havildars [non-commissioned ranks].”91 Madar Khan, the officer who had instigated Rusul Khan’s flight, quickly rose to a level of importance in the Nizam’s army that would not have been possible in the Madras Army, where the Indian officer corps was increasingly emptied of real power.92 As prospects for advancement within the Company’s service declined, desertion was thus an alternative mechanism to access social and professional mobility. As with Yusuf Khan, this illicit movement required sepoys and Indian officers to mobilize the Company’s reputation in new contexts and outside of its institutional control. Yet, where the Kammanadan Sahib had mobilized his commission to make a new claim about political authority, deserters instead based their claims on their putative military knowledge and their ability to tap into a prestigious labor pool. The same elements that gave the Company military prestige in the region paradoxically helped to shape new networks in which administrators’ clams of control could be challenged. 2.6

The Spirit of Desertion

In the late 1798, after Rusul Khan’s capture, Madar Khan would be executed for his role as an illicit recruiter of absconders.93 Though

Translation of a Deposition of Russool Khan, Sepoy, deserter from the 1/7, June 24, 1798, TNSA MDCB Vol. 240A, 4264–65. 92 Letter from James Achilles Kirkpatrick to the Fort St. George Council, July 12, 1798, TNSA MDCB Vol. 240B, 4636. 93 Letter from James Achilles Kirkpatick to Richard Wellesley, July 13, TNSA MDCB Vol. 240B, 4640. 91

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desertion might offer increased pay or prospects, it was also a capital crime. Material gain was thus rarely the only reason that drove men to risk that chance. Around the world, flight has long served as a crucial “weapon of the weak” through which subaltern actors could assert agency.94 That tool was all the more important in the early modern period, as labor freedoms came under new pressure in the face of expanding European empires and states. Around the world, enslaved, indentured, and free workers turned to risky, uncertain, and increasingly criminalized forms of mobility to challenge or to escape those systems.95 Prasannan Parthasarathi’s work on the South Indian economy, for instance, has revealed that weavers employed by the Company regularly fled its networks in response to demands that they saw as unreasonable.96 The growth of the Madras Army as a formal institution in the eighteenth century was fueled in part by administrators’ efforts to gain more control over military manpower. However, that assertion of control also created a new site in which protest could take place, giving desertion added weight as an illicit action through which sepoys pushed back against the Company’s expectations. Rusul Khan’s deposition again gives insight into this dynamic. According to his statement, Madar Khan had organized the flight as part of a larger plan to free a pirzadah named Ali Sahib, then imprisoned in the fort at Ongole for some unknown crime. Pirzadahs were holy figures, the descendants of a Sufi saint, who had long played vital roles providing spiritual support to soldiers across South India, and Madar Khan was apparently particularly indebted to Ali Sahib “in consequence of a cure performed on the Subadar’s Wife by the said Peerzadah.”97 The willingness of the sepoys at Ongole to defect as part of this plan suggests that the demands sepoys made on the Company were not just about their lives as soldiers. They saw their employment as part of a broader network

James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 29–32, 274–78. 95 For the global phenomenon, see Leo Lucassen and Lex Heerma van Voss, “Introduction: Flight as Fight,” in A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism 1600–1850, ed. Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty, and Matthias van Rossum (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019), 1–15. 96 Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 119–20. 97 Translation of a Deposition of Russool Khan, June 24, 1798, TNSA MDCB Vol. 240A, 4262–63. For pirzadahs’ connections with military actors, see Nile Green, “Geography, Empire and Sainthood in the Eighteenth-Century Muslim Deccan,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 67, no. 2 (June 2004): 207–25. 94

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of overlapping social, political, and religious systems and looked to the Company’s patronage as a way to strengthen their status in those contexts. When the Company failed to do so, illicit mobility provided a way to challenge its authority. Though Rusul Khan’s deposition is the longest account we have of a deserter from this period, it is not the only example of desertion as a form of protest against the Company’s military service. In May 1780, for instance, John Walker, commanding an expedition in Gujarat, announced a drastic reduction in the family allowance provided to the sepoys’ wives and children who stayed behind in Madras during the mission. The next day, the officer reported, “I was a good deal surprised to find this morning that no less than nine Sepoys had gone off,” apparently in response to the change.98 Less than six months later, a body of sepoy grenadiers stationed in Visakhapatnam, a port in the Northern Circars, deserted in a far more violent encounter. Though they claimed that they had been enlisted “for local service only,” they were ordered to travel to the Carnatic to aid in the desperate Second Anglo-Mysore War.99 In response, they “refused to march & immediately began to fire on their Officers & all the Europeans they could see.” They then seized the contents of the port’s treasury and fled as a body, evidently hoping to gain employment in Hyderabad.100 Company officials often attributed sepoys’ reluctance to undertake far-flung expeditions to various “caste prejudices” against travel, but the incidents in Gujarat and at Visakhapatnam show that these moments of protest intersected with perceived injustices.101 The European officers who commanded such discontented regiments usually responded unsympathetically to any such complaints. However, it was also not unusual for such an incident to be followed in short order by the distribution of special pay or allowances to the troops that remained: At Visakhapatnam in 1780, for instance, the surviving officer in command – Captain Lane – distributed an extra month’s pay to the sepoys who had not joined the mutiny.102 This suggests that, at least

98 Letter from John Walker in Gujarat Country, May 21, 1780, TNSA MM Vol. 3A, 340–42. 99 W. J. Wilson, History of the Madras Army, vol. 2 (Madras: Government Press, 1882), 19. 100 Letter from Masulipatam to Fort St. George, no date, and from Vizagapatam, October 9, 1780, TNSA MDCB Vol. 71C, 1726–29 and 1758–59. 101 Archibald Campbell, Narrative of the Second War with Hyder Ally, n.d., 192, NRS GD1/6/17. 102 Letter from Vizagapatam to Fort St. George, October 9, 1780, TNSA MDCB Vol. 71C, 1759.

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when it came to material grievances, desertion as protest could produce real results. More systemically, as opportunities for Indian officers to advance within the Madras Army declined, the Madras Government offered sepoys an expanding infrastructure of pensions and family allowances. Such perquisites played an important role throughout the nineteenth century in drawing sepoys into the Madras Army, and any change to their terms could lead to heated protests.103 The Madras Government, though, took care to obscure any suggestion that these pensions were a part of a negotiated relationship. They were framed as “indulgences” rather than the Company’s obligations to its sepoys or as their just rewards for service.104 Pensions were also a decidedly passive form of military honor, one that spoke of past service and denied the kind of present political leadership that Yusuf Khan had claimed with his repurposed title. Illicit movement by sepoys from Britain’s imperial forces into other armies would in fact continue into the twentieth century, when Pathan deserters could reportedly earn “a fabulous price” for their military training and equipment from Mohmands and Afridis beyond the empire’s northern frontiers.105 Frontiers, though, were constantly shifting, and, by the end of the eighteenth century, they had begun to grow more distant and less permeable in South India. By the turn of the nineteenth century, sepoys in the Madras Army no longer had ready access to alternate military employers. That did not mean that they would relinquish their aspirations or their eagerness to create meaning out of their military service. Instead, it would push them to new kinds of protests, new demands, and new ways of articulating their expectations. Their aspirations and colonial officials’ continued efforts to control and to dampen them would become one of the defining tensions of the Company’s rule. The quintessential tool of colonial authority, the colonial army is often associated with closure, with loss of mobility, and with a sharp reduction in India’s political dynamism. Most scholarship on the growth and recruitment of the Company forces has accordingly focused on the mechanisms through which that control was established. Henry Dodwell’s Sepoy Recruitment in the Old Madras Army (1922), the most comprehensive study of this topic in the south, focused principally on the

Montgomery, “The Sepoy Army and Colonial Madras, c.1806–57,” 86–87. 104 Campbell, Narrative of the Second War with Hyder Ally, 193, NRS GD1/6/17. 105 Kaushik Roy, “Spare the Rod, Spoil the Soldier? Crime and Punishment in the Army of India, 1860–1913,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 84, no. 337 (2006): 14–15. 103

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question of “composition,” which for Dodwell meant the relative balance of Hindu and Muslim sepoys within the ranks.106 A civil servant and archivist in the imperial Raj, Dodwell reflected the preoccupations of an imperial state increasingly focused on “managing” a communal divide that its administrators perceived as ancient and unbridgeable. Seema Alavi’s excellent study of the Bengal Army reflects an equal, though, opposite interest in the structures of colonial rule, arguing that sepoy regiments were themselves crucibles in which imperial perceptions of those communal identities were reified. No similar study exists of the Madras Army, but scholars have paid considerable attention to the way that discipline was asserted within its ranks and through them to broader colonial society.107 In exploring the expansion of the Madras Army in the late eighteenth century, this chapter has sought to move away from the imposition of colonial authority to explore how sepoys themselves maneuvered between its structures and the political landscape of South India. Ubiquitous in the Company’s increasingly voluminous military records, they are also curiously absent as agents, rarely individualized or captured in anything except a fragmentary record. Those who challenge this trend are necessarily extraordinary cases, as a commandant turned king turned rebel or as a deserter who sparked a diplomatic crisis. Placing Yusuf Khan and Rusul Khan within the wider networks in which they operated allows their dramatic experiences – while unusual – to reflect broader patterns and relationships. Sepoys and Indian officers, though, were not the only individuals connected to the Company forces who nurtured such wide-ranging ambitions. In Chapter 3, we will see that European soldiers and officers attached to the Company were equally eager to engage with India’s fluid military economy. From the seventeenth century onward, such men constituted a class of “adventurers,” mercenaries who took up service in various “country” armies often trading on their reputation or experience with European forces to secure their posts. Where for sepoys and Indian officers seeking such employment necessarily meant abandoning the Madras Army, or, in the case of Yusuf Khan, being denounced in turn by that body, European “adventurers,” especially elite commissioned officers, were often able to



106

107

Henry Dodwell, Sepoy Recruitment in the Old Madras Army (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1922), chap. 6. Bryant, “Indigenous Mercenaries in the Service of European Imperialists”; Dasgupta and Roy, “Discipline and Disobedience in the Bengal and Madras Armies, 1807–1856”; Dutta, “Disciplining the Madras Army during the Early Years of the English East India Company’s Dominance in South India.”

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negotiate more complex relationships with the Company. In the late eighteenth century, as administrators in Bengal, Madras, and Bombay sought increasingly formal relationships (and control) over India’s political landscape, these networks gave European officers a unique position at the vanguard of the Company’s diplomatic line.

3

Mercenaries, Diplomats, and Deserters

In the late 1770s, a peripatetic mercenary from Savoy, Benoit de Boigne, made his way to India. He was already an accomplished soldier, having fought in both Russia and the Ottoman Empire. While in Constantinople, he became acquainted with agents of the East India Company, who helped facilitate his entry as an ensign in the Madras Army. His rise within the Company, though, faltered when he was accused of “taking undue liberties with the wife of a brother officer.”1 In 1782, he resigned his post and sought permission to travel through the interior of India, intending, as he wrote, “to re-enter the Russian Service in which I have friends and prospects.”2 On his way northward, de Boigne’s plans would change again, and he would take up employment instead with Mahadji Sindhia, then one of the most militarily powerful of the Maratha chiefs. By 1793, de Boigne held command over Sindhia’s infantry, a force of some thirty thousand men grandly termed “The Army of Hindustan.”3 As payment, Sindhia granted de Boigne a large territory, where the ­once-disgraced mercenary established himself as a quasi-ruler, complete with a formal durbar (court) where he granted audience to local inhabitants and travelers, especially those from the Company.4 De Boigne’s colorful career has long fascinated both nineteenth-century writers, who spun his life as a tale of adventure from “an heroic age” of imperial expansion, and more recent scholars who have turned a more critical eye to such travelers.5 Most recently, Maya Jasanoff examined de Boigne as a kind of cultural intermediary, moving fluidly between European and

1 Quoted in Desmond Young, Fountain of the Elephants (New York: Harper, 1959), 42. Young’s book is also the most detailed biography of de Boigne. 2 Letter from Benoit de Boigne to the Fort St. George Council, April 9, 1782, TNSA MDCB Vol. 79B, 965–66. 3 Herbert Compton, A Particular Account of the European Military Adventurers of Hindustan from 1784 to 1803 (London, 1893), 66. 4 Young, Fountain of the Elephants, 166–67. 5 Compton, A Particular Account of the European Military Adventurers of Hindustan from 1784 to 1803, 7.

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Indian political, social, and professional networks. This liminality, Jasanoff argued, was only possible because of de Boigne’s position at “the edge of empire,” both literally in his movement beyond the Company’s settlements into the interior and figuratively in his social status – a Savoyard, an outsider, and a disgraced officer – at the margins of elite colonial society. As with other, similarly situated figures, like Antoine Polier and Claud Martin, who moved from employment in the Company to the court of Awadh, de Boigne’s border-crossing went beyond his professional employment. Such adventurers adapted and adopted elements of the Indian societies in which they moved, frequently marrying (or living with) Indian women, conducting correspondence in Indian languages, and, as in the case of de Boigne’s durbar, appropriating Indian symbols of prestige and power. This form of border-crossing proved ephemeral, as the Company’s continued expansion would result in the nineteenth century in a more closed and rigid form of colonial rule with little use for such fluidity.6 The apparent cosmopolitanism of these actors is thus often held up as a contrast with this later, more restrictive colonial state. In fact, this chapter shows that such adventurers played a key role in bringing that state about. Figures such as de Boigne, even as they skirted around the expectations and norms of colonial society, were crucial in the process of expansion that would eliminate such fluidity. Despite de Boigne’s rise as Sindhia’s commander, his ambitions remained rooted in European society. After Sindhia’s death, de Boigne made his way to Britain, eager to translate his meteoric military rise into an entry into elite circles, only to suffer bitter disappointment at the limits of his success.7 Perhaps even more significant than de Boigne’s aspirations were the ways in which his career depended on his continued connections with the Company, even after he resigned from the Madras Army. His initial employment in Sindhia’s service was facilitated by Warren Hastings, then governor general in Bengal, who gave de Boigne a recommendation.8 Sindhia employed de Boigne not just because of his military knowledge but also precisely because of his status as an intermediary through which the Maratha leader could engage diplomatically with an increasingly

6 Jasanoff, Edge of Empire, 90–100. See also Llewellyn-Jones, A Very Ingenious Man, Claude Martin in Early Colonial India; Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi, eds., A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: The Iʻjāz-i Arsalānī (Persian Letters 1773– 1779) of Antoine-Louis Henri Polier (New Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, ed., Man of the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century India: The Letters of Claude Martin, 1766–1800 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003). 7 Jasanoff, Edge of Empire, 90–100. 8 Young, Fountain of the Elephants, 65.

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substantial political power in the region. The link went both ways: ­Company officials were equally interested in making use of de Boigne to mediate their relationship with Sindhia. Though de Boigne was perhaps the most successful mercenary to move from the Company’s service into “country” armies, he was not unique. Where Company administrators in the last decades of the eighteenth century increasingly sought to police and to restrict the m ­ ovement of sepoys and Indian officers, similar mobility by European military actors – especially elite, commissioned officers – was tolerated and even encouraged. Their employment in “country” armies gave the Company a vector to expand its influence beyond its formal reach. Such interactions placed these adventuring officers at the forefront of the Company’s diplomatic activities, giving them a level of influence and importance to colonial affairs that went beyond that of regular commissioned officers. For men like de Boigne, Polier, and Martin – marginal within the Company as non-Britons and as incorrigible social climbers – lack of access in official frameworks could thus be turned into a different kind of ­opportunity. As Jasanoff has noted, though, the “edge of empire” that facilitated this framework was a tautologically unstable phenomenon, giving way to more authoritative forms of empire. For many adventurers, a final challenge would be ensuring that military officers would retain their political influence as diplomatic agents of a more expansive colonial state. 3.1

European Mercenaries in India’s Military Economy

In seeking out employment with Mahadji Sindhia, de Boigne was following a well-worn path. The capacious military labor markets of India had for centuries drawn on wide-ranging global networks for manpower, for materiel, and for expertise. Since at least the early sixteenth century, those circuits had included soldiers from Europe. Artillerymen from Venice, Genoa, and other city-states had come to the Indian Ocean along medieval trading routes.9 With the expansion of maritime trading routes in the sixteenth century and as European actors gained footholds along the Indian coasts, the number of adventurers only increased. Some such soldiers, like the Albanian Khoja Safar Salmani, who fought for Gujarat and the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, transformed their identities as they sought out this employment, shifting not simply

Richard M. Eaton and Phillip B. Wagoner, Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300–1600 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 250. 9

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into a new labor market, but into a new cultural context.10 (Such reinventions can be compared to Muhammad Yusuf Khan’s decision to drop his unknown birthname for a Muslim one when he began a career as a soldier along the Coromandel Coast.) Others, though, maintained their European identity, using that status to position themselves as potential intermediaries among multiple networks. This liminality opened up new opportunities for ambitious adventurers and enhanced their value beyond their status as military actors, turning them into important agents in political and diplomatic negotiations. Indian rulers’ desire to employ these mercenaries has usually been explained as the result of Europeans’ perceived expertise, especially in terms of artillery.11 Certainly, such adventurers were crucial intermediaries in the circulation of military knowledge in the Indian Ocean, but, as with demand for Company-trained sepoys in the economy of desertion, interest in these mercenaries was not limited to their perceived technical prowess. Rulers also looked to such men to demonstrate their reach and their ability to attract adherents from far distances, part of a broader competition for elite “service peoples” through which courts across India demonstrated their prestige.12 Mir Husain Ali Khan Kirmani, in his Persian history of Haider Ali, celebrated the ruler of Mysore in just these terms: The noise of his victories, and the destruction of his enemies, resounding through all parts of the world, troops of brave men, well equipped and mounted, flocked to him, not only from Hind and the Dukhun [the Deccan], but even from Iraun and Tooraun [Central Asia]; and, giving them high pay, he retained them in his service.13

The visibility of European mercenaries, especially those who brought particular expertise in artillery exercises or in parade maneuvers, made them particularly obvious embodiments of a ruler’s cosmopolitan reach. In contrast to such boasts, in the seventeenth century, early Company officials often downplayed the value and ability of those men who took to adventuring. In 1676, the Council at Fort St. George rejected one

G. V. Scammell, “European Exiles, Renegades and Outlaws and the Maritime Economy of Asia c.1500–1750,” Modern Asian Studies 26, no. 4 (1992): 641. For more on such cultural transformations by European soldiers and sailors, see Colley, Captives, chap. 4. 11 Scammell, “European Exiles, Renegades and Outlaws and the Maritime Economy of Asia c.1500–1750,” 645. 12 Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, 7–10. 13 Mir Hussain Ali Khan Kirmani, The History of Hydur Naik, Otherwise Styled Shums Ul Moolk, Ameer Ud Dowla, Nawaub Hydur Ali Khan Bahadoor, Hydur Jung; Nawaub of the Karnatic Balaghaut, trans. W. Miles (London: Printed for the Oriental Translation Fund, 1842), 243. 10

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official’s plan to repatriate English soldiers serving in “country” armies with the biting comment that such men were “severall, but generally dissolute, hard to reclaym & less worth it.”14 Subsequent scholarship has been scarcely kinder: One historian spoke derisively of the “drunken English sailors transmuted into artillerymen” who served in Jahangir’s armies.15 However, even in this period, Company factors could not ignore the possibility that such adventurers could help give them access to Indian rulers. In 1673, agents at Surat reached out to Thomas Roach, then employed in Aurangzeb’s armies, supposedly as the emperor’s “chief gunner.”16 The council at Surat hoped that Roach would agree to lobby Aurangzeb on the Company’s behalf, noting that he could thus “by yo. Long Residence in (or neere) the Mogulls Court to serve yo. Nation wth. Greater honour and fidelity, than can be expected from any of ye. Nations.”17 It was the second such attempt to persuade Roach to take up this role, and it does not seem to have been successful. Perhaps the gunner had little motivation to take up the cause of a body that deemed him “dissolute” and “hard to reclaym.” Figures like Roach, evidently uninterested in fulfilling any role as intermediaries with the Company, continued to make their way through India’s military networks throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries. At approximately the same period when de Boigne submitted his resignation to officials in Madras, another adventurer, George Thomas, was hewing a different career path. In contrast to de Boigne’s careful efforts to gain approval and support for his travels into the Indian interior, Thomas was a deserter, having fled from his post as a seaman in the British Navy. Thomas found employment first among the palaiyakkarars along the Coromandel Coast and then in the armies of Begum Samru, the ruler of Sardhana in northern India who was herself the widow of another European mercenary.18 Thomas used his growing

Query to the Agent and Council of FSG on Feb 29, 1675/6, Madras Presidency, Diary and Consultation Book, 1672/8, 89. 15 Scammell, “European Exiles, Renegades and Outlaws and the Maritime Economy of Asia c.1500–1750,” 646. 16 There is good reason to be skeptical of such a title. European adventurers often inflated their relative importance in non-European armies. Marchand, for instance, an obscure French mercenary who fought for Muhammad Yusuf Khan in the Commandant’s battles with the Company, described himself as Yusuf Khan’s chief adviser, but contemporary records about the campaigns for Madurai do not support this self-proclaimed importance. Marchand, Précis Historique des deux Sieges de la Ville de Maduré, 18. 17 Letter from Matthew Gray and the Council at Surat to Thomas Roach, November 24, 1673, East India Company Original Correspondence, 240, BL IOR/E/3/34. 18 Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company, 221–25. 14

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prestige as a military actor to establish his own state. Sometime after 1797, at Hansi, near Delhi, he proclaimed, “I established my capital, rebuilt the walls of the city long since fallen into decay, and repaired the fortifications … I selected between five and six thousand persons, to whom I allowed every lawful indulgence … I established a mint, and coined my own rupees, which I made current in my army and country.” It was an ephemeral claim to power. By 1802, the state, pressed by Sindhia to the south and by the Sikh empire to the north, collapsed, and Thomas himself died soon after as he fled toward Bengal.19 By the time Thomas and de Boigne entered India’s “adventuring” military economy, such men might have had an added inducement to seek employment beyond the Company’s remit. The Company’s own ranks were becoming more exclusive and less open to those who lacked a clear claim to “Britishness” and to the metropole’s elite patronage networks. In keeping with its hodge-podge approach to military labor, the Company had drawn from a wide range of European mercenaries to fill its ranks into the mid-eighteenth century. Detachments of Swiss adventurers were especially prominent during the early Carnatic Wars, and officials both enticed and then employed deserters from the French lines. By 1761, this latter category had grown sufficiently large that the deserters were amalgamated into a single company, later termed the Foreign Legion.20 Even as this corps expanded, though, administrators grew increasingly uneasy about the presence of non-British officers, especially those who they suspected of being Catholic. As early as 1752, the Madras Government and the Directors in London exchanged anxious letters about the loyalties and religious convictions of their hired Swiss companies.21 By 1770, the Foreign Legion was dissolved as “very troublesome,” and Company officials only lamented that they had been dismissed without being embarked back to Europe since “[w]e should have been glad of the opportunity of getting them out of the Country.”22 As officials sought to make their officer corps more homogeneously British, de Boigne as a Savoyard was only one of a number of non-British Europeans who found their chances for mobility improved by looking outside

19 Thomas’s biography is detailed in William Francklin, Military Memoirs of Mr. George Thomas Who, by Extraordinary Talents and Enterprize Rose, from an Obscure Situation to the Rank of a General in the Service of the Native Powers in the North West of India (Calcutta: Printed for the Author at the Hurkaru Press, 1803) quote on page 93. See also Colley, Captives, 324–28. 20 Madras Military Consultations, IOR/P/251/47, 369. 21 Madras Military Department, Diary and Consultation Book, 1752–1756, vol. 1, 84. 22 Minutes of the Board, February 12, 1770, TNSA MDCB Vol. 36, 25.

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of the Company. Awadh hosted a number of these men, including the aforementioned Polier, who was Swiss, and Martin, who was French.23 Though Thomas was not foreign, he faced another, perhaps still more insurmountable obstacle to securing an elite career in the Company’s service. Thomas was a deserter from the British Navy with nothing in the way of a “respectable” social background. De Boigne too struggled similarly with class: Despite his success in gaining patrons, his origins were dubious at best. Even the participle attached to his name was a sham: He had been born in Savoy as Benoit Lebourgne.24 During the rapid expansion of the Madras Army in the mid-century, exploding demand for commissioned officers had created opportunities for social advancement, but, at the same time that anxieties about non-Britons began to sharpen, so too did disdain for lower-class officers. In 1760, Eyre Coote advised against granting commissions to any private soldier, “as there is so little dependence on these kind [sic] of Men’s behaviour, who are raised from Serjeants to rank with Gentlemen.”25 The relatively fluid military economy beyond the Company’s service, where European social hierarchies held a less rigid grip, was thus particularly attractive to figures like de Boigne and Thomas. Here, again, we can make a comparison with Yusuf Khan, for whom the Madras Army with its novel, alternate ranks represented a way to circumvent the elite hierarchies of Arcot, in which Yusuf Khan was merely “a miserable musket-bearer.”26 By the time Thomas was carving out his short-lived kingdom in Hansi, though, even these external opportunities were growing scarcer. Indeed, the most well-circulated account of Thomas’s life was that published by one of his fellow officers, William Francklin, only a year after Thomas’s death. Francklin published the text in Calcutta and dedicated much of the conclusion to presenting Thomas “a loyal subject to his King, as a real and sincere well wisher to the prosperity and permanence of the British Empire in the East.”27 The work suggests that Francklin, having lost his military patron, was seeking to reframe his own past fighting with Thomas in ways that might facilitate his entry back into colonial society. A market for European mercenaries would persist in India well

23 Significantly, de Boigne in his letter resigning from the Madras Army assured officials that he did not have “a view to serve with the French as some bad intentioned Men may suppose,” insisting that “I am not of that Nation nor inclined to them.” Letter from de Boigne to Fort St. George, April 9, 1782, TNSA MDCB Vol. 79B, 965–66. 24 Young, The Fountain of Elephants, 20. 25 Letter from Coote to Fort St. George, July 17, 1760, TNSA MDCB Vol. 13A, 659. 26 For more on Yusuf Khan’s status, see Chapter 2. 27 Francklin, Military Memoirs of Mr. George Thomas, 248.

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into the nineteenth century, especially for those willing to fight against the ever-expanding forces of the Company. Ranjit Singh, ruler of the Sikh Empire from 1801 to 1839, for instance, employed a number of white officers and soldiers, including French and American mercenaries.28 However, the apathy displayed by the gunner Thomas Roach in 1673, simply ignoring the Company’s appeals, was no longer possible: European mercenaries’ status as allies or rivals of the Company was central to their ability to navigate the rapidly changing military market. 3.2

Hat-Men in the Service of the Circar

The role of mercenary officers as diplomatic mediators of such relationships belongs to a much broader global phenomenon in which the representatives of early European empires relied heavily on brokers who moved, often informally, between states, creating what Sanjay Subrahmanyam called “bridges between cultures.”29 Studies of such ­intermediaries tend to concentrate on those who acted in economic spheres, like the coureurs de bois who moved between French settlements and American Indian networks in Canada; merchants and go-betweens such as Ananda Ranga Pillai at Pondicherry who shaped European corporations’ activities in Indian ports; and individual European travelers, whose writings did much to solidify European perceptions of the Indian Ocean world.30 Women formed an equally important, though less celebrated, part of these exchanges, most visibly in sexual relationships of varying degrees of formality and permanence, but also as interpreters, as

Priya Atwal, Royals and Rebels: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 122. For more on the white mercenaries in Ranjit Singh’s army, see Henry Montgomery Lawrence, Adventures of an Officer in the Punjaub, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (London: H. Colburn, 1846), 42–47; Alexander Haughton Campbell Gardner, Soldier and Traveller: Memoirs of Alexander Gardner, Colonel of Artillery in the Service of Maharaja Ranjit Singh (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1898), 297–353. 29 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 30. 30 For general discussion of European travelers in the early modern Indian Ocean, see Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660. For intermediaries connecting European networks to those of American Indians, see Saliha Belmessous, “Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and ­ Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy,” American Historical Review 110, no. 2 (2005): 322–49; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lake Region, 1650–1815, Cambridge Studies in North American Indian History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 68–70. For Ananda Ranga Pillai, David Washbrook, “Envisioning the Social Order in a Southern Port City: The Tamil Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai,” South Asian History and Culture 6, no. 1 (2015): 172–85. 28

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traders, and as travelers in their own right.31 The movement of military actors was a crucial extension of these networks, but scholarship on such adventurers has tended to be fragmented, focused less on the overarching phenomenon of mobile military labor than on the lives of particularly peripatetic examples. The most famous of these is no doubt John Smith, whose command at Jamestown and much-mythologized encounter with Pocahontas followed an earlier series of military adventures in the Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire.32 Mercenary-adventurers who were well connected to the Company offered several kinds of advantages to its administrators. Most straightforwardly, officials looked to mercenaries to protect their military i­nterests, to stave off potential conflicts with Indian states, and to shape the military policies of country powers in ways that fit within the Company’s own objectives. In 1794, for instance, when the Maratha Confederacy clashed with the Nizam of Hyderabad, then nominally the Company’s ally, de Boigne is said to have refused orders to join the campaign.33 Lord Hobart, Governor of Madras from 1794 to 1798, was a major opponent of permitting or supporting mercenaries like de Boigne, but even he had to admit that “[s]ome benefits may, perhaps, have arisen from the Officers serving under Du Boigne [sic], having been chiefly English.”34 Mercenaries’ value, though, was not limited to their potential influence on their employers’ strategies. Just as in the case of the Madras Presidency’s alliance with Arcot, in which Nawab Wallajah had facilitated Company access to South India’s military labor market, the exchange of military actors both drove and could demonstrate the strengthening of diplomatic alliances. Again, this pattern had deep roots. In 1659, for instance, Company agents at Rajapur agreed to send an English artilleryman along with a mortar and shells to a local ruler in return for reduction in the duties on saltpeter.35 In 1677, though, the Council at Madras refused a similar

31 The best study of this in the Indian context is Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For a general discussion of similar exchanges in a North American context, see Ann M. Little, “Gender and Sexuality in the North American Borderlands, 1492–1848,” History Compass 7, no. 6 (2009): 1606–15. 32 Gwenda Morgan, “Smith, John (bap. 1580, d. 1631), soldier and colonial governor,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, September 23, 2004), accessed: February 29, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/25835. 33 Young, Fountain of the Elephants, 161–62. 34 Letter from Hobart to William Kirkpatrick, July 24, 1795, BL IOR/P/253/45, 2218–19. 35 William Foster, The English Factories in India, 1655–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), 251–52.

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appeal from the Maratha leader Shivaji, who had written “desiring us to supply him wth. Ingeniers.” Significantly, this was not a rejection of such an exchange in theory, but rather a more pointed unwillingness to take a side in Shivaji’s spiraling wars with the Mughal Empire. Officials in Madras deemed that it was “wholly unfit for us to medle [sic] in it, there being many dangers consequent thereon, as well as of encreasing his power, as of rendering both Golconda and the Moghull our Enemys.”36 In such cases, mercenaries were not just proxies for the Company’s diplomacy, but embodied symbols of a potential alliance. This dynamic meant that the Company’s attempts to gain further access to India’s military labor market in the eighteenth century was a bilateral process. Just as Company officials looked to their allies to meet their ever-expanding demand for sepoy recruits, so too did those allies in turn look to the Company as a potential source for European soldiers and officers. This exchange became particularly pronounced in the case of the Madras Government’s longest running alliance in the south: Arcot. As discussed in the previous chapter, Anwar ud-Din, the nawab of Arcot, had first begun to collaborate with the Company militarily during the War of Austrian Succession. By the end of the 1760s, Anwar ud-Din’s son and heir, the Nawab Wallajah, began to employ European officers directly in both his infantry and his cavalry, initially privileging those who helped him to deepen his alliance with Madras. In December 1773, Wallajah granted a captain’s commission to the son of Alexander Wynch, then governor of Madras.37 Wallajah drew many of his officers from the Madras Army’s own ranks, and officials permitted some of those who took up that service to keep their commissions in the Company’s regiments, meaning that they were able to earn a salary and promotions from both Wallajah and Madras.38 One captain in the Company’s service even had his position as a joint officer confirmed by the Court of Directors “with a positive injunction that no servant of the Companies [sic] should be appointed to a command in that Line to my Prejudice.”39 Preserving seniority and the possibility of promotion for adventuring officers who were, technically, absent from their posts reveals the value that these officers had to the Company in their outside employment. Consultations of October 3, 1677, Madras Presidency, Diary and Consultation Book, 1672/8, 123. 37 Entry for December 7, 1773, Ruznāmah of the Nawab of Arcot, Persian Bundle 66, n.p. TNSA. 38 Return of the Officers in England & in the Nabob’s Service, TNSA MCC Vol. 26, 73–74. 39 Letter from J. Col. Tonyn, August, 25, 1780, TNSA MM Vol. 3A, 427. 36

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The quasi-diplomatic power of these mercenary adventurers also helped to enhance the prestige of European military hierarchies, a fact beautifully illustrated by the formal commission presented by Wallajah in 1779 to one such soldier, George Buck (Figure 4). The document, now held at the British Library, is gilt-edged, heavily embellished, and painstakingly decorated with delicate flowers across its borders. The text of the commission itself is printed first in Mughal Persian and then in English, suggesting that the grant of military status from Wallajah to Buck was meant to be legible both to the court of Arcot and the British. Intriguingly, in both versions, Buck is named a colonel: The term is transliterated in Persian, rather than replaced with a Mughal rank such as “bakhshi.” As we have seen, the Company chose its military titles and ranks with care, using them to situate military actors in distinct hierarchies and to mediate their access to colonial prestige and elite status. Here, Wallajah was engaged in a similar process, incorporating an English language military rank into his armies as a way to highlight his alliance with the Company and his own status as a cosmopolitan military employer. In comparison to other intermediaries, the Company’s use of military actors in this role was unique in one crucial way. Emphatically, the role of mercenaries as go-betweens was once largely limited to European actors. The Madras Army’s military hierarchy was carefully designed to exclude sepoys and Indian officers from claims of political access within the Company as well as to alienate them from outside political networks. Officials were equally unwilling to consider sepoys as potential political proxies who could act on or represent the Company’s behalf. Before the 1770s, when the Company’s regiments had remained porous, administrators maintained that sepoys who left the Madras Army quickly lost any ties to the service. As discussed in Chapter 2, Directors in 1766 reassured themselves that “their [sepoys’] superiority over Sepoys in the Country Service consists only in their discipline, which (wanting European Officers) they soon lose under the Country Government.”40 Even after 1770, when desertion became increasingly perceived as a threat, the possibility of sepoys serving as a vector of exchange was minimized. In 1785, Warren Hastings wrote: “I will venture hardily to affirm from my knowledge of the propensities of the Natives of India, that one able French Officer will convey more useful Instruction to our Enemies in the Artillery practise than Ten Battalions of Golandaz [Indian artillerymen]

Letter from the Directors to Madras, February 19, 1766, Despatches to Madras, January 1765 to December 1767, 337, BL IOR E/4/863. 40

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Figure 4  Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah, Commission of George Buck, June 3, 1779, BL IO Islamic 4791.

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Deserters.”41 Company officials simply did not consider their Indian military actors as potential diplomatic agents, something that Yusuf Khan discovered all too clearly when his attempt to gain political power as the Kammandan Sahib was violently repudiated. The dichotomy between European mercenary-adventurers and sepoy deserters is complicated by the status of a growing mixed-race population, termed Eurasians or Anglo-Indians, born to Indian mothers and European fathers.42 This latter term was more specific and thus often less accurate when it was applied, for instance, to the children of French mercenaries, but helps to highlight the distinction made between this burgeoning population and the mixed-race communities of Portuguese descendants in Madras and Bombay.43 In the eighteenth century, this latter group held a marginal status in colonial society, to be employed neither as sepoys nor as European soldiers, but as topasses or as drummers and fifers. (Of course, such prohibitions were always more nominal than practical: Records are full of examples in which mixed-race recruits were accepted and reclassed as European or as Indian.)44 The wide divergence in colonial attitudes to this group and “first-generation” Eurasians echoes the complexity that Ann Laura Stoler has traced in the way that “métissage” functioned in French Indochina, in which the ability of an individual to embody the privileges of whiteness rested on an unstable combination of concepts of heredity, parents’ affective ties, and the individual’s own performance of identity.45 In contrast to the ambiguously categorized “Portuguese,” children born to Company officials and other Europeans in India in the eighteenth century were – by dint of that parentage – better connected to colonial society and thus better situated to act as its intermediaries. “Adventuring” was a popular prospect for many of the young men in this growing

Letter from Warren Hastings to the Court of Directors, August 15, 1785, Military Establishments in India, 247, BL IOR/H/361. 42 Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India, 136; Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 54–57; Deborah Cohen, Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), chap. 1. 43 For more on the tension between Anglo-Indian and Eurasian, see Brent Howitt Otto, “Which Eurasians May Speak? Elite Politics, the Lower Classes and Contested Eurasian Identity,” in Anglo-Indian Identity: Past and Present, in India and the Diaspora, ed. Robyn Andrews and Merin Simi Raj (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2021), 37–61. 44 Valerie Anderson, “The Eurasian Problem in Nineteenth Century India” (PhD Thesis, London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), 2011), 203, http:// eprints.soas.ac.uk/13525. 45 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 79–87. 41

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population. De Boigne wrote to one of his friends, a fellow mercenary, in 1797 to recommend that he aid members of this group looking for positions in Indian armies: I have already sent you many of these young men, sons of European Officers which can’t prevent me from observing how few father’s [sic] can leave any thing to their Children at their Death, they are hu[ndr]eds here at Calcutta who wish’s [sic] [to en]ter into the Service, but some [have] no friends to recommend them and others no means to go up.46

Here, too, though, de Boigne was pointing to an evaporating set of opportunities. Charles Cornwallis, who was made governor general in 1786, banned mixed-race men from the Company’s employ.47 Unlike many of Cornwallis’s other plans for reform, this prohibition at least nominally went into effect, though some men of mixed-race descent, like James Skinner, found continued opportunities on the outskirts of Company authority.48 By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the social status of mixed-race children – who were acknowledged as such – plummeted precipitously, at least in official contexts. This hardening of boundaries reveals a colonial state that had already in the last decades of the eighteenth century grown uncomfortable with the liminality of its intermediaries. This same discomfort would also cloud even symbolic versions of this ambiguity, as encapsulated in George Buck’s richly ornamented commission. In the case of the latter, Wallajah’s bilingual grant of an officer’s position professed two central conceits: that Wallajah was a powerful military patron in his own right and that he could claim further military prestige from his alliance with the Company. The number of E ­ uropean officers eager to serve in Arcot’s forces was a matter of pride for the nawab. When frustrated by the Madras Government’s pressures on his state, he pointed to his success as a military patron as proof of his continued autonomy: “I have heard that your hat-men” – here, he employed the ubiquitous slang for European, kallāh-pūsh – “very much want to come from your service into the Circar’s [sarkar or state, i.e. Arcot].”49 Buried within the boast was a question. What would happen if the

Letter from Benoit de Boigne to Robert Sutherland, January 8, 1797, Robert Sutherland Papers, 35v, BL MSS Eur D547. 47 Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India, 8. 48 Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company, 238–49. 49 “shenīde-am kallāh-pūsh ke khod shomā ast bar z. āmendar-e shomā be naukari-ye sarkār āmadan besyār mikhwāhand.” Entry for May 17, 1773, Ruznāmah of the Nawab of Arcot, Persian Bundle 65, 35, TNSA. 46

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demands that the “Circar” made on its hat-men came into conflict with those of the Madras Government? If mercenaries and adventurers created opportunities for informal diplomacy, they also created a space for unofficial competition, in which the relative prestige and authority of two different military employers could be tested. 3.3

Between the Circar and the Company

Since the earliest days of his reign, Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah had been determined to position himself as a martial sovereign, one who ruled with “a blood-shedding sword … a storm on every battle-field.”50 In part, this reflected his dynastic roots: His father had claimed authority in Arcot on the basis of his family’s history as officers in the armies of the Mughal Empire, and much of Anwar ud-Din Khan’s political support had come from among those factions in Arcot.51 Wallajah’s need to assert military might would have been further strengthened by the precarity of his own claim to power: After his father’s death in battle in 1749, Wallajah had spent years fighting to secure his position as nawab. Wallajah’s alliance with the Company, which predated that conflict, had been essential to securing his rise. At the same time, though, the growth of the Madras Government as a military power stood as an alternative and perhaps as a potential rival to his own sovereignty. Already by the 1760s, Wallajah complained that the Company’s demands and the actions of its agents had begun to undermine his authority. Control over military labor markets, including the ability to attract and to make use of European officers, would become a central site in which this competition for power played out. As discussed in Chapter 2, one of the first major sites of disagreement came over the career of Muhammad Yusuf Khan. Wallajah saw the commandant’s rise as a threat to his own political hierarchies, deriding him as a “miserable musket-bearer” who lacked any legitimate claim to the kind of authority he gained through the Company.52 When the Madras Government had finally turned against Yusuf Khan, Wallajah eagerly joined in a joint expedition against the commandant at Madurai, hoping to use the campaign to restore his status as an active military ruler. Burhan ibn Hasan, Wallajah’s court chronicler, dwelt on the personal role that Wallajah had played in the expedition, especially as a patron and benefactor

Quoted in Wibulsilp, “Nawabi Karnatak” 125. 51 Burhan ibn Hasan, Tuzak-I-Walajahi (1934), ix–x. 52 Op. cit. 50

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to his soldiers. The historian celebrated Wallajah’s generosity as spurring the troops on to victory, describing the “grants of gold lakhs and elephants and horses and jagirs and weapons” that “lit a fire for battle under their horseshoes.”53 Eager to translate Yusuf Khan’s defeat into lasting political power in the region, Wallajah urged the Madras Government to extend the expedition into one to “pacify” the palaiyakarrars and other local chiefs in the region, noting, “Since I am arrived in these Parts myself & that the Army I have with me is larger than the oldest Inhabitants thereof ever yet saw, which has a struck a great awe into them [the inhabitants], by the blessing of God therefore trifling Affairs may easily succeed.”54 The Council at Fort St. George, though, had no interest in such a campaign and recalled its troops, forcing Wallajah to retire from the field as well. This disappointment helps to explain one of the reasons why Wallajah was so eager to build up his own army, complete with his own European officer corps, in the next decade. In 1771, Wallajah mobilized those forces against Thanjavur, a small polity – an offshoot of the Maratha Empire – nestled on the Coromandel Coast. Wallajah planned an invasion of the region by a military force commanded in concert by his eldest son, ‘Umdat ul-Umrah, and Joseph Smith, commander of the Madras Army, but whom Wallajah had contracted independently for the expedition. Smith and other Company officers with dual commissions in Arcot’s forces were promised substantial prize money if they took the fort by storm; such breaches were considered particularly impressive displays of military strength. Once they reached Thanjavur, though, Smith proved hesitant to risk that kind of glorious assault. George Paterson, who while acting as secretary to the British naval commander in the Indian Ocean was a frequent visitor to Wallajah’s court, recorded in his diary that Smith had demanded instead the full prize money for acquiring the fort in a treaty. Aghast, ‘Umdat ul-Umrah had “asked the General where he ever heard of such a custom? Was ever Money given to an Army for peace?”55 Dissatisfied, Smith turned from Thanjavur and instead besieged nearby Ramnad, apparently an easier prize and one which did not offer Wallajah the kind of prestige that he sought.56 Frustrated, Wallajah sought to make a second assault on Thanjavur, but, this time, found himself confronting the limits of his alliance with

53 “fauj-e sābq o laheq rā at. ā’-ī zar lak o lak o fīl o asp o jāgīr o asleha va ghīre, na’l dar ātesh shūq jedāl … nemūde” Burhan ibn Hasan, 397. 54 Letter from Wallajah to Fort St. George, TNSA MCC Vol. 12B, 382. 55 GPD BL MSS Eur E379/3, 38. 56 GPD BL MSS Eur E379/3, 188–89.

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the Madras Government. When he proposed a second expedition, William Du Pré, then governor, rejected the plan out of hand with “a shrug.” Wallajah was free to pursue the expedition himself, he continued, “provided you restore to us such officers as we lent you.”57 It is not entirely clear if Du Pré was singling out those officers who held double commissions and were thus still employed by the Company or if he included those officers who had resigned from the Madras Army before entering the Circar’s service. Whichever he meant, the proviso made the campaign effectively impossible. The Circar army was a militarily impressive force even without the Company’s support, numbering seven cavalry regiments and twelve sepoy battalions.58 Yet, because so many European officers had been incorporated into the Circar, their refusal to fight would have left irreducible gaps in his chain of command. The Nawab Wallajah mused privately that “he might for the same reason demand his Sepoys from the Company,” a reference to the several regiments in the Madras Army paid for entirely by his treasury.59 Yet, despite his indignation, he did not push Du Pré, and the expedition was scrapped. The confrontation pushed Wallajah to renegotiate his position with the Madras Government, leading to a major change in how he distributed his military patronage. In June 1773, Wallajah seized on tensions within British imperial networks and asked Paterson, the naval secretary, to help him replace officers and agents sympathetic to the Company in Arcot with “people attached to the [British] king.”60 One of the resulting candidates was a somewhat dubious character, William Randall, formerly of the royal cavalry, who had come out to India in the hopes of rising further in the Madras Army. Randall, though, apparently had neither existing patrons in the Company nor sufficient charisma to acquire them. His first attempt to ingratiate himself with Robert Fletcher, then the commander of the Madras Army, led Fletcher to declare to his friends that Randall must be out of his mind.61 In Arcot, Randall had better luck and quickly became aid-du-camp to Wallajah’s second son and favored heir, Madar ul-Mulk. Randall boasted that his rise was due to his expert

GPD BL MSS Eur E379/3, 80. 58 James Phillips, “The Development of British Authority in Southern India: The Nawab of Arcot, the East India Company, and the British Government, 1775–1785” (PhD Dissertation, Ottawa, Dalhousie University, 1985), 53. 59 Entry for December 12, 1771, GPD BL MSS Eur E379/3, 81. 60 “farmūdand ke talaqāt az t. arf ‘alaqe-ye Kumpani dar tahvīl mardom ‘alaqe-ye pādshāh khahand amad.” Entry for June 27, 1773, Ruznāmah of the Nawab of Arcot, Persian Bundle 65, 91, TNSA. 61 Declaration of Robert Smith Bird, September 21, 1776, “William Randall’s Accusation,” East India Series 38, 427, BL IOR/H/130. 57

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familiarity with “the evolutions of the English cavalry.”62 Given Wallajah’s interests in breaking his military dependence on the Company, though, it seems more likely that Wallajah employed him simply because he was a “hat-man” who could demonstrate that the reach of Arcot’s patronage went further than Madras.63 Wallajah’s efforts to develop a military force that could check the Company’s claims for authority would ultimately catalyze a dramatic coup within the Madras Government, the subject of Chapter 4. In engaging in this kind of maneuver, though, Wallajah was hardly alone. When Sindhia hired de Boigne on a recommendation from Hastings’s agents, he was both asserting his friendship with the Company and employing an actor who could help to negotiate that relationship. After Sindhia’s death, his successor – Daulat Rao – was less eager to tie himself in an alliance that seemed increasingly imbalanced. When de Boigne retired, Daulat Rao pointedly replaced him with a French mercenary, Perron (né Pierre Cullier). Rumors spread in the Company that Perron was a “Democrat” bent on spreading the aims of the French Revolution.64 British officials attributed Perron’s success to “intrigue,” assuming that he had tricked Daulat Rao into supporting him through personal machinations. Daulat Rao’s rejection of adventurers sympathetic to the Company, though, seems instead a more strategic decision through which he sought symbolically and functionally to reshape his diplomatic standing. If the fluidity of mercenary networks in South Asia had long facilitated the Company’s diplomatic ventures, by the end of the eighteenth century, they would also provide a space through which Indian rulers could challenge those interests. In Hyderabad, the infantry regiments commanded by the French mercenary Raymond were yet another example of an army developed in explicit rejection of the Company on a diplomatic level. Asaf Jah II, the Nizam of Hyderabad, followed Daulat Rao’s example in 1798 when Raymond retired and named a replacement still more likely to prove

William Randall, A Letter to the Honourable the Court of Directors of the East India Company and the Proprietors of India Stock by William Randall, Late a Captain in the Service of the Nabob Mahomed Alli Cawn; and Aid-de-Camp to His Son, the Amier Ul Omrah Behader, Commanding the Armies of the Said Nabob (London: North Street, 1777), 5. 63 Randall’s success proved short-lived. In a bizarre epilogue, in 1776, Wallajah would sue him for libel after Randall claimed that Madar ul-Mulk had plotted to assassinate George Pigot with a tiger attack. William Randall, Affidavit sent to George Stratton by Edward Hughes, September 15, 1776, TNSA MC Vol. 56B, 1079. 64 “Notes Relative to the Affairs of Nizam Ally Cawn, Soubadar of the Decan [sic], 1784–98,” 581, BL IOR/H/563. 62

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objectionable to the Company – another French mercenary who, confusingly enough, also used “Perron” (sometimes spelled Piron) as his nomme de guerre. The Hyderabadi Perron was said to be “an outrageous Jacobin” who had sent his counterpart in Sindhia’s army “a silver Tree and a Cap of Liberty” in celebration of his promotion.65 Such rumors fueled British anxieties of an imminent French invasion of India.66 Company administrators like Richard Wellesley and other British officials involved in Indian affairs eagerly stoked these fears to increase popular perceptions of the political importance of India and to gain popular support for further expansion. The Fourth Anglo-Mysore War in 1799, which resulted in Tipu’s death and the dissolution of his state, was in fact little more than a land grab vindicated with the specter of a Franco-Mysore conspiracy.67 In fact, in the closing years of the eighteenth century, the French government had few resources or opportunities to gain a real foothold in India.68 The fact that Indian rulers sought to employ individual French mercenaries even without strong central support from France suggests that such states were eager to look even to symbolic opportunities to challenge the Company’s dominance over military prestige. Since the seventeenth century, both Company officials and Indian rulers had engaged savvily with European freebooters as part of a broader diplomatic calculus. By the end of the eighteenth century, when the Company sought to expand its control over its allies, adventurers from Madras, Bombay, or Bengal proved less attractive to many rulers than mercenaries outside the Company’s patronage. The loss of influence prompted Company officials increasingly to condemn the practice of

William Kirkpatrick, “Copy of the Answers to Certain Queries Proposed by Lord Mornington to Major Kirkpatrick Relative to the French Forces in the Service of the Nizam,” 11, BL MSS Eur F228/27. 66 In 1784, before Raymond’s rise, Richard Johnson had dismissed the idea: “In his opinion, the Nizam was the least likely among the Princes of the Decan [sic] to suit the French as an Ally; having no Sea Port, and being a declining power.” “Notes Relative to the Affairs of Nizam Ally Cawn, Soubadar of the Decan [sic], 1784–98,” 17–8, BL IOR/H/563. 67 For more on Wellesley’s policies, see C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, The New Cambridge History of India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 89–95. For Dundas and broader geopolitical concerns about the French, see Edward Ingram, In Defence of British India: Great Britain and the Middle East, 1775–1842 (London: Frank Cass and Co., Ltd., 1984), 27. 68 For Tipu’s efforts to court French support, see Jasanoff, Edge of Empire, 151–61; Meredith Martin, “Tipu Sultan’s Ambassadors at Saint-Cloud: Indomania and Anglophobia in Pre-Revolutionary Paris,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 21, no. 1 (2014): 37–68. For French policies toward India, see François-Joseph Ruggiu, “India and the Reshaping of the French Colonial Policy (1759–1789),” Itinerario 35, no. 02 (2011): 25–43. 65

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adventuring. In 1795, Hobart warned against expanding or encouraging the use of such adventurers. Even when attached to the Company, Hobart emphasized that such men were tautologically beyond their control, and the advantages the British had realized from de Boigne’s command of the Army of Hindustan were “too precarious to be depended upon.”69 In place of a network of adventurers, Company officials instead pushed to build increasingly formal mechanisms of diplomatic control. The shift would have radical implications for the military landscape in India, devastating the erstwhile fluidity enjoyed by both would-be European adventurers and their Indian counterparts. At the same time, it would also create new opportunities for the former group – exclusively – to reassert their influence in new ways within an expanding colonial state. 3.4

The Rise of the Residents

The turn against European mercenaries among Company officials was a gradual, uneven process. One of the first officials in the eighteenth century to decry the practice of adventurer-diplomacy was Charles Cornwallis, who already in 1786 – at the beginning of his tenure as governor general – wrote emphatically: “I must own that I have always hitherto been very averse to the practise of suffering British Officers to enter into the Service of the Native powers, and have thought it the Source of greatest Evils.”70 Such disavowal of Company officers in “country” armies, though, was the exception in this period. On the contrary, the decade that followed Cornwallis’s proclamation was one of the most active for such figures, including the apex of de Boigne’s career. Nevertheless, Cornwallis’s early condemnation is significant both as a bellwether and because of the alternative that he offered. Writing to the commander of a detachment at Farrukhabad (in modern-day Uttar Pradesh), Cornwallis warned the officer that Muzaffar Jung, the local nawab, “is either a Madman or an Idiot” and instructed him that “the troops are ordered to act, not under the orders of Mozuffer Jung, but of the Resident.”71 This latter figure, the resident, the official representative of the Company in

69 Letter from Hobart to William Kirkpatrick, July 24, 1795, BL IOR/P/253/45, 2218–19. 70 Charles Cornwallis to Lieut Gen Sloper, October 28, 1786, Letters to Various Officers and Officials on Indian Affairs, 5v, TNA PRO 30/11/188. 71 Letter from Cornwallis to Col. Christian Kneedson, January 26, 1787, Letters to Various Officers and Officials on Indian Affairs, 16r, TNA PRO/30/11/188. (Note that, despite the similar name, this is not the Hyderabadi Muzaffar Jung who fought Anwar ud-Din in 1749.)

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an Indian court, would by the end of the century become a keystone of a new, transformative, diplomatic approach. A decade after Cornwallis’s letter, the dynamic that he anticipated would find a more formal instantiation in Hyderabad. As discussed in the previous chapter, Asaf Jah II at the end of the eighteenth century had amassed a considerable army in part by courting sepoys and Indian officers to abscond from the armies of Mysore and of Madras. This flow of deserters had become a diplomatic sore point between the Company and Hyderabad in the 1790s. When Asaf Jah II sought to deny the pattern, William Kirkpatrick, the Company resident to his court, wrote angrily in 1796, “How many [oxen?] and how many soldiers, despite injunctions and decrees issued for their surrender remain even now under the aegis of Monsieur Raymond’s protection?”72 In 1798, when appointed as governor general, Richard Wellesley made the dissolution of the French-led infantry in Hyderabad one of his top priorities even before he reached India.73 In 1795, Kirkpatrick had suggested that Hobart should check Raymond’s influence by sending “some disengaged half pay officers or other unsuccessful adventurers at Madras and Calcutta” toward Hyderabad to supplant the French.74 Hobart, no enthusiast for such a­ dventurers, flatly rejected the scheme. In 1798, Kirkpatrick was on his way home – his health failing – and he had been succeeded as resident of Hyderabad by his brother, James Achilles Kirkpatrick, but in a last memorandum on the subject to Wellesley, he once again advocated for an establishment of mercenaries friendly to the Company cause. He urged Wellesley to consider “introducing with every possible previous attention to their characters and principles, British subjects (or other Europeans being the subjects of friendly Powers) into the service of his Highness with a view, in the first instance, to balancing the French Corps, and of, ultimately, completely supplanting it.”75

“che gūrha[?] o che sepāhyān be vojūd taqyīd o sedūr-e-ehkām dar bāb sepor-dan ānha zel-e hemāyat musi raymūn ta hāl mibāshand.” Letter from William Kirkpatrick to the Nizam of Hyderabad, January 6, 1796, Yusuf Husain Khan, ed., Diplomatic Correspondence between Mir Nizam Ali Khan and the East India Company, 1780–1798 (Hyderabad Deccan, Central Records Office, Govt of Andhra Pradesh, 1958), Appendix B, page 2. 73 Henry George Briggs, The Nizam, His History and Relations with the British Government, vol. 2 (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1861), 9. 74 Letter from William Kirkpatrick to Hobart, July 4, 1795, BL IOR/P/253, 2208. 75 William Kirkpatrick, “Copy of the Answers to certain Queries proposed by Lord Mornington to Major Kirkpatrick relative to the French Forces in the Service of the Nizam,” January 31, 1798, 26, BL MSS Eur F228/27. 72

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Like Hobart, Wellesley rejected the proposal. Instead, he advocated a measure that Kirkpatrick had dismissed as politically untenable: sending the Company’s own regiments to Hyderabad to manage its defense and protection, with the proviso that in return the Nizam eliminated his French-led army.76 The plan was an example of so-called subsidiary alliance, an imbalanced arrangement through which the Company chipped away at the external autonomy of a state while propping up its internal infrastructure. After the Treaty of Allahabad in 1765, similar restrictions were imposed on Awadh, and, in 1776 and 1784, respectively, the states of Thanjavur and Arcot were compelled to demobilize the majority of their armed forces and instead to pay for protection provided by the Company.77 As Kavita Datla argued, subsidiary alliance was nothing short of an innovation in imperial power dynamics, constituting “a novel system of interstate politics … essential to the forging of a new global order,” in which the legitimacy of Indian states as sovereign powers was gradually eroded.78 Wide-ranging in principle, such alliances sought to foreclose the dependent state’s management of its external affairs.79 That exclusion was perhaps most demonstrably visible as a new military order in which the Company’s structures, its exclusions, and its categories gained pride of place over the “country” power they were meant to support. In each case, subsidiary alliance was the product of coercion: Rulers drawn under its aegis had few options but to agree. The treaty framed with Hyderabad in 1798 was no different: The simmering issue of desertion from Madras to Hyderabad became a pretext for the Company to make new demands on the state. One of the reasons why the ­extraordinary testimony of Rusul Khan, explored in Chapter 2, has survived in the colonial archive is because it became a part of these negotiations. Determined to prove that the Nizam was illicitly – as the Company ­considered it – employing sepoys from the Company’s service, J. A. Kirkpatrick

Briggs, The Nizam, His History and Relations with the British Government, 1: 214. 77 C. U. Aitchison, A Collection of Treaties, Engagements, and Sunnuds, Relating to India and Neighbouring Countries, vol. 5 (Calcutta: J. L. Kingham, Foreign Department Press, 1864), 370–71; Wilson, History of the Madras Army, 1882, 2:149. 78 Kavita Saraswathi Datla, “The Origins of Indirect Rule in India: Hyderabad and the British Imperial Order,” Law and History Review 33, no. 2 (May 2015): 324. 79 Michael Herbert Fisher, Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System, 1764– 1858 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 123–24. This goal was never fully achieved. The nizams of Hyderabad, for instance, continued to engage in external networks, especially as part of the broader Islamic ecumene, throughout the colonial era. See, for instance, Nile Green, “Forgotten Futures: Indian Muslims in the ­Trans-Islamic Turn to Japan,” The Journal of Asian Studies 72, no. 3 (August 2013): 611–31.

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had sent out his sepoys to identify such a deserter. Rusul Khan’s arrest and subsequent interrogation was used as proof in subsequent negotiations to legitimate the Company’s intervention.80 The treaty imposed on Hyderabad in 1798 included language requiring that “sepoy deserters” had to be “seized without delay and delivered up.”81 The same document also required the Nizam to agree that “no Frenchman whatever shall ever hereafter be entertained in his own service … nor shall any Europeans whatever be admitted into the service of this State.”82 According to these terms, in October 1798, Asaf Jah II demobilized his vast, French-led infantry. The mercenary Perron and the other European officers attached to the force were instructed to leave the nizam’s territories as soon as possible. The demand sparked a furious protest and open mutiny among the soldiers and sepoys in those regiments. Given that many of the Indian officers in the regiments were suspected of having deserted from the Madras Army, their protest may have been motivated by self-preservation – or perhaps simply from anxiety about the prospect of unemployment. The last stand, though, proved short-lived: Colonel Roberts, who had arrived as commander of the new Hyderabad Subsidiary Force, surrounded the men and pressed them into “unconditional surrender.”83 Once the rebellion was quelled and the French marched out of the region, “a great Number” of the now unemployed sepoys asked to enlist in Roberts’s regiments, which suggests that, whatever had caused the mutiny, it was not a deep ideological enmity against the Company.84 Company officials, though, rejected their appeal, evidently unwilling to re-engage men who had already deserted. Instead, the Hyderabad Subsidiary Force would draw its recruits from outside Hyderabad, especially the Northern Circars and Awadh: This new stream of soldiers into Hyderabad was no longer evidence of the state’s potential for advancement, but of the Company’s expanded influence.85 The imposition of subsidiary alliance abruptly removed one of the south Indian military economy’s most significant patrons. Asaf Jah II continued to maintain a personal bodyguard, composed largely of

80 Extract of a Letter from Kirkpatrick to the Governor General, June 29, 1798, TNSA MDCB Vol. 240A, 4272–73. 81 Aitchison, A Collection of Treaties, Engagements, and Sunnuds, 5:52. 82 Aitchison, 5:51–52. 83 Reginald George Burton, A History of the Hyderabad Contingent (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printers, 1905), 12. 84 Letter from Roberts to J. A. Kirkpatrick, Nov 4, 1798, TNSA MC Vol. 245A, 7095. 85 Burton, A History of the Hyderabad Contingent, 10–12, 31, 351.

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Hadhrami Arab soldiers, an idiosyncrasy that points to the creative efforts of the court at Hyderabad to retain links to the Islamic world even as the tenets of subsidiary alliance closed off other diplomatic networks.86 He was also obliged to pay the Company over twenty-four lakhs of rupees per year, in return for which the Madras Government would station the Hyderabad Subsidiary Force within the Nizam’s borders to provide for the state’s defense.87 In and of itself, the cost of these troops drastically reduced the ability of the Hyderabad state to maintain forces outside of the Company’s expeditionary regiments. Yet, despite the vast sums that the Nizam was compelled to pay to maintain those borrowed forces, Asaf Jah II would have no authority to command their operations. Cornwallis’s instructions to the detachment sent to Farrukhabad in 1787, which characterized Muzaffar Jung as “a Madman or an Idiot,” highlights administrators’ presumptions that Indian rulers could not be relied upon to make effective use of a subsidiary detachment. Indeed, one of the reasons that Hobart had rejected William Kirkpatrick’s plan to send mercenaries to Hyderabad was his purported anxieties that freebooters supplied by the Company might be used in operations “injurious” to the Company’s reputation and “destructive of all Discipline in the men.” In particular, he worried that they might be deployed for revenue collection or for “petty Warfares with the Poligars and Zemindars of the Country.”88 The 1798 treaty echoed those anxieties, demanding that the Hyderabad Subsidiary Force was “not to be employed on trifling occasions, nor, like Sebundy [local police], to be stationed in the country to collect revenues thereof.”89 Such claims were prima facie disingenuous. Only two years later the Madras Army would be enmeshed in the so-called “poligar wars,” campaigns to displace, disempower, and demilitarize “little kings” who held territory across southern India – precisely the kind of operations that Hobart had decried.90 The contradiction highlights that the restrictions placed on the use of subsidiary troops had less to do with issues of discipline and

Hadhrami Arabs were part of a diaspora from the Hadhramaut region of modern-day Yemen. Hadhramis traced their lineage as sayyids back to Muhammad, giving the community increased religious prestige. The Nizam’s continued employment of this group is discussed in Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean, The California World History Library 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 257–58. 87 For the cost, see Aitchison, A Collection of Treaties, Engagements, and Sunnuds, 5:50. 88 Letter from Hobart to W. Kirkpatrick, July 24, 1795, BL IOR/P/253/45, 2214–15. 89 Aitchison, A Collection of Treaties, Engagements, and Sunnuds, 5:51. 90 For a history of the so-called “poligar wars,” see K. Rajayyan, South Indian Rebellion: The First War of Independence, 1800–1801 (Mysore: Rao and Raghavan, 1971). 86

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efficacy  and  more about who had the power to decide when military force was legitimate, appropriate, or honorable. Restrictions on how Indian rulers could make use of subsidiary forces had the effect of imbuing the Company resident on the spot with newfound authority. Such agents could be drawn from either the Company’s military or its civil line, but significantly, throughout the late eighteenth century and indeed through most of the Company’s history, residents with military backgrounds predominated.91 This was no coincidence. Though, as Callie Wilkinson has noted, residents’ efforts “to co-opt Indian political elites” were “messy, varied, and experimental,” one of the most important mechanisms they employed was by appropriating an Indian ruler’s claims to martial authority.92 As the proverbial “man on the spot,” it was the resident – not the Indian ruler – who had the ultimate authority to approve and to manage operations by the Company’s subsidiary forces that the dependent states paid for at such exorbitant rates. When Cornwallis dismissed the nawab of Farrukhabad as a military authority, he was empowering J. Willes, then the local Company resident. In the same way, when Asaf Jah II in 1798 was forced to demobilize his French-led infantry, it was James Achilles Kirkpatrick – who had succeeded his brother as resident – who gained prominence. This shift in military authority is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in the fate of Madar Khan, the subedar who convinced Rusul Khan to desert with his battalion in 1798. The treaty between the Company and Hyderabad in 1798 required Asaf Jah II to “deliver up” any deserters found in his borders. In fact, this was a fairly standard provision for European treaties in this period. Both in Europe and in European states’ expanding overseas empires, armies everywhere faced problems with rouleurs, deserters who moved from army to army in search of better conditions or new signing bonuses.93 Treaties thus regularly included mutual guarantees about returning deserters to their allies. In 1791, Spanish colonial officials in Venezuela agreed to return enslaved runaways to Dutch colonies as long as they would not be penalized for their

91 Michael H. Fisher, “Indirect Rule in the British Empire: The Foundations of the Residency System in India (1764–1858),” Modern Asian Studies 18, no. 3 (1984): 407. 92 Callie Wilkinson, “Weak Ties in a Tangled Web? Relationships between the Political Residents of the English East India Company and Their Munshis, 1798–1818,” Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 05 (September 2019): 1577. 93 Hanna Sonkajärvi, “Aperçu Sur l’économie de La Désertion Dans Les Pays-Bas Autrichiens Au XVIIIe Siècle,” Histoire, Économie et Société 30, no. 3 (September 2011): 49–57; André Corvisier, Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494–1789, trans. Abigail T. Siddall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 71.

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flight.94 Similar provisions were imported to the Company’s diplomatic negotiations with Indian powers by the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1761, for instance, the ruler of Kadathanadu (Cartinaad) had agreed to extradite “[a]ny person or persons who may desert the Honourable Company’s service, whether with arms or without” with the caveat that “on his application for pardon it is granted.”95 In 1798, it was this last provision – the question of a pardon – that proved a sticking point. Asaf Jah II agreed to hand over Madar Khan and another subedar, Imam Khan, as officers whom the Company had deemed particularly egregious for their role in convincing others to desert, but he demanded that “as these Men are Musselmans … and have moreover numerous Families to support, the Minister [Mir Alam] trusts that their lives at least will be spared.”96 Even Kirkpatrick acknowledged that the request was in keeping with Hyderabad’s own military laws. As he put it in a letter to Madras, “Military Executions in general (however just and necessary) are by no means relished, and but very rarely practised by this Government” and would thus “be extremely offensive” both to the court and to the Nizam’s troops.97 Nevertheless, Kirkpatrick insisted that execution was necessary precisely because it would show the limits of Asaf Jah’s power, offering “a powerful determent to others” and “an example … that his Highness’s Service affords no secure refuge from the punishment awaiting Military Crimes of such a Nature.”98 Officials at Fort St. George agreed, conceding only that the subedars’ trials and their subsequent punishment would take place outside of Hyderabad’s borders, a sop to Asaf Jah’s pride that offered cold comfort to either Madar Khan or Imam Khan.99 It was a striking departure both from the fluidity that had characterized India’s military landscape in the previous decade and from the ­pattern of European mercenary-adventurers, whose status had stemmed

Linda M. Rupert, “‘Seeking the Water of Baptism’: Fugitive Slaves and Imperial Jurisdiction in the Early Modern Caribbean,” in Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500– 1850, ed. Lauren Benton and Richard J. Ross (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 217. 95 “Articles of Agreement made with the King of Cartinaad on the 30th December 1761,” in Aitchison, A Collection of Treaties, Engagements, and Sunnuds, 5:356. 96 “Translate of a Report by Munshi Aziz Ullah, conversation with Mir Allum,” July 9, 1798, TNSA MC Vol. 240B, 4635–36. 97 Letter from J. A. Kirkpatrick to the Madras Government, October 7, 1798, TNSA MC Vol. 243B, 6234. 98 Letter from J. A. Kirkpatrick to R. Wellesley, July 13, 1798, TNSA MC Vol. 240B, 4640. 99 Letter from J. A. Kirkpatrick to the Madras Government, October 7, 1798, TNSA MC Vol. 243B, 6235. 94

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at least  in  part from their success in negotiating between Indian and European norms. Now, Kirkpatrick gained importance precisely by denying such fluidity, diminishing Asaf Jah’s prestige, and restricting the lives and livelihoods of Company sepoys in a visceral way. The refusal of a pardon bears out Datla’s argument that subsidiary alliance was a new diplomatic order, one defined by the primacy of the Company’s authority and the rejection of Indian sovereignty. That newfound assertion, defined at the diplomatic level, was felt most painfully by individual sepoys and Indian officers like Madar Khan and Imam Khan. As European officers worked to entrench their own importance within the Company’s solidifying infrastructure, sepoys and Indian officers faced a colonial system that demonstrated its power through control of their own movements. In the decades that followed, those restrictions would lead to new kinds of protests, as sepoys’ conflicts with the colonial state took on added significance for all parties involved. *** If Madar Khan – more than any other figure – embodied the losses of the 1798 treaty, J. A. Kirkpatrick embodied the gains. Almost immediately, he set about constructing a massive new residency meant to reflect his increased importance. A monumental neoclassical edifice with little  – at least on the outside – to connect it to its Indian surroundings, the building stands as a striking metaphor.100 Where George Buck’s commission in the armies of Nawab Wallajah had allowed the ruler to navigate creatively between distinct military cultures, the residency system eliminated such fluidity in favor of a formal expansion of the Company’s military and political structures, at the center of which sat residents like J. A. Kirkpatrick. These political figures and the military officers who commanded the subsidiary regiments represented a new kind of colonial power, one that elided erstwhile opportunities for maneuver in favor of a martial hierarchy defined by sharp racial, cultural, and social boundaries. The men who would fill these new roles were part of a markedly different group than the peripatetic adventurers who had acted as “bridges

100

Inside, the Residency was more complex than its face would suggest and revealed some of Kirkpatrick’s interpersonal entanglements. Most famously, he constructed private quarters for his wife, Khair un-Nissa, along the model of Mughal-style zenanas, though intriguingly the quarters’ gardens included a small-scale model of the main residency, so that even here the neoclassical colonial architecture was echoed. See Preeti Chopra, “South and South East Asia,” in Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series, ed. G. A. Bremner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 289–90. Kirkpatrick’s residency and his marriage with Khair un Nissa is also explored in William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in the Eighteenth-Century India (New York: Viking, 2003).

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between cultures” in previous decades. Adventurers like de Boigne had entered the wider Indian military economy precisely because their marginal status within the British Empire had limited their ambitions. Though de Boigne had enough connections to secure a recommendation from Warren Hastings – a fact that substantially increased his value to his future employer, Mahadji Sindhia – he had no clear path to command or to a lucrative staff post within the Company itself. The formal system of residents, though, privileged precisely those men who were best situated within the patronage networks of Britain’s burgeoning imperial elite, effectively eliminating someone like de Boigne, doubly precarious as a Savoyard of dubious social “quality,” from the most significant positions.101 As the system of subsidiary alliance and political residents further diminished opportunities outside of the Company’s infrastructure, being able to secure patronage and prestige within the colonial state became ever more important for ambitious officers. In 1776, as we will see in Chapter 4, frustration among such men at perceived barriers to those aspirations would boil into a coup that toppled the civilian governor of Madras.

101 Fisher, Indirect Rule in India, 133.

4

The Other Revolution of 1776

On August 23, 1776, Colonel James Stuart – a royal officer recently arrived in India, who had just been (somewhat dubiously) named commander of the Madras Army – persuaded Lord George Pigot, governor of the presidency, to accompany him on a ride outside Fort St. George. Only a few hundred meters from the fort, Stuart had arranged for their carriage to be stopped by a large detachment of soldiers and sepoys, who promptly placed Pigot under arrest.1 The ambush marked the start of a coup, in which Stuart colluded with a slim majority on the Fort St. George Council, headed by George Stratton, to oust Pigot from power. The governor was imprisoned in nearby St. Thomas Mount, where he continued to harangue his guards, appealing to them in urgent tones that “[y]ou are my Soldiers, You are four hundred brave fellows, and I will march at your Head against all the Forces on the [Coromandel] Coast.” He condemned the conspirators as “Damned Rascals,” and Pigot promised that “I will hang every one.”2 The tirades had no effect. Pigot would remain imprisoned until, eight months later, he died unexpectedly. The death was attributed variously to nefarious plots, to a “putrid bilious fever,” to the shock of the coup, or even to eating too much turtle soup.3

1 James Stuart, “Report of the manner in which he executed the Order given him in the Minute of Consultation of the 23d August 1776,” TNSA MDCB Vol. 56A, 862–67. 2 James Eidington, “A Narrative of the Particulars that Passed on the Night of the 27th of August 1776, betwixt the Right Honble. Lord Pigot, Late President of the  Council at Fort St. George in the East Indies, & Lieut. Colonel James Eidington, Adjutant General of the Troops on that Establishment,” TNSA MDCB Vol. 56B, 940–41. 3 Various theories of Pigot’s death were debated in a coroner’s inquest that followed, discussed in more detail later. For the fever, see Anonymous, Original Papers with an Authentic State of the Proofs and Proceedings before the Coroner’s Inquest, Which Was Assembled at Madras, upon the Death of Lord Pigot, on the 11th Day of May 1777 (London: T. Cadell, 1778), 66. For the turtle soup, see page 172.

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News of coup reached Britain with unusual speed: Both Pigot’s opponents and his allies sent “express” accounts overland across Persia in the hopes of controlling the narrative.4 Pigot’s administration had already been the subject of discussion in Britain, and his overthrow even managed to distract from the maelstrom of debate then focused on the war in America, contributing to a sense of a p ­ an-imperial crisis. Reports of his removal even borrowed some of the same charged rhetoric then flitting back and forth across the Atlantic. Pigot, his opponents averred, had become a “Tyrant,” whose despotism had threatened “to ruin this happy Country.”5 His supporters declared the coup “the rude shock of a revolution, by which all our possessions on the Coast of Coromandel yet shake from their foundation.”6 Both factions depicted each other as “nabobs.” The term, an anglicization of nawab, had gained currency in Britain in the midst of growing fears that that the Company’s agents in India had been corrupted by “Oriental” traits, turning administrators into despots, officers into warlords, and merchants into greedy caricatures.7 Eyles Irwin, a civil official then in Madras, celebrated Pigot in an ode that reflected the xenophobia at the heart of the concept of nabobery: Thus sinks the Lion in the hunter’s toils, While triumphs Fraud, and Rapine boasts the spoils. Thus in the East Ambition shall prevail, While gold is left to turn the doubtful scale.8

Indeed, the coup against Pigot is inextricable from the corruption and factionalism that had characterized the Company’s settlements in the eighteenth century. Historian Jim Philips deemed the affair “the lowwater mark of political morality among the Company’s servants in southern India.”9 As we will see, such harsh interpretations are not inaccurate. However, confining the analysis of Pigot’s overthrow to what Robert Orme disparagingly called “the money story” risks obfuscating

“Ship News,” London Evening Post, March 18, 1777, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection. Letter from James Stuart to Lt. Gen. Clavering, JSP, MS 8413, 64r, NLS. 6 John Lind, Defence of Lord Pigot (London, 1777), 169. 7 The anti-nabob movement will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. See also Dirks, The Scandal of Empire; Nechtman, Nabobs. 8 Eyles Irwin, An Epistle to the Right Honourable George Lord Pigot, on the Anniversary of the Raising the Siege of Madras. Written during His Lordship’s Confinement at Saint Thomas’s Mount (London: printed for J. Dodsley, in Pall-Mall, 1778), 9. 9 Jim Phillips, “Private Profit and Imperialism in Eighteenth Century Southern India: The Tanjore Revenue Dispute, 1775–1777,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 9, no. 2 (1986): 1. 4 5

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the significance of the coup in the Company’s political development.10 The dueling claims of patronage at the heart of the coup against Pigot represented efforts of two separate states and, I argue, two separate visions of colonial authority. The origins of the conspiracy against Pigot lay in a conflict between Arcot and Thanjavur, the coastal polity that Wallajah tried and failed to capture in 1771. The dispute revealed how rulers’ attempts to gain the Company’s support had shaped the Madras Presidency’s own politics, entrenching a divide between its military officers, who were predominantly connected to Arcot, and its civil agents, more likely to have relationships with Thanjavur. The coup against Pigot, as a clash between these two groups, can thus be seen as an outgrowth of the long-running conflict between the “country” powers. In contrast to the other revolution of 1776, the more famous one in America, the coup in Madras would not lead to imperial dissolution. Instead, it produced a new kind of integration, in which the Company’s officers gained increased access to the corporation’s political infrastructure. Though the coup was widely and rapidly condemned in Britain, its authors were ultimately subject to little in the way of punishment. Four of the councilors – Stratton, George Mackay, Henry Brooke, and Charles Floyer – were found guilty in Britain on a vague charge of having acted unlawfully, but were subject only to a fine of a thousand pounds, which hardly dented their personal fortunes.11 James Stuart, the principal military officer involved in the coup, escaped punishment entirely and even rose again to become commander of the Madras Army. As one contemporary put it, “Madam Justice, like any other whimsical lady, only gave the acting parties in it a gentle tap with her fan, and said—Get you gone, for a pack of naughty boys.”12 The lackluster denouement emptied Directors’ reprobation of any real force. Instead, the coup set a precedent vindicating interference by the Company’s European officers – up to and including violence – in its governance. It was a legacy that officers would return to in coming decades as they sought more and more primacy in the colonial state.

Quoted in Samuel Charles Hill, Catalogue of Manuscripts in European Languages Belonging to the Library of the India Office: The Orme Collection, vol. 2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1916), xxxiv. 11 George Stratton, An Abstract of the Trial of George Stratton, Henry Brooke, Charles Floyer, and George Mackay, Esquires, for Deposing the Rt. Hon. Lord Pigot, Late Governor of Fort St. George, in the East-Indies (London: J. Murray and W. Davis, 1780), 84. 12 Ralph Griffiths, ed., “Art. 27. An Abstract of the Trial of George Stratton, Henry Brooke, Charles Floyer, and George Mackay, Esquires, for Deposing the Right Honourable Lord Pigot, Late Governor of Fort St. George, in the East Indies,” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal, 1752–1825, 62 (June 1780): 489–90. 10

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4.1

The Marginalization of Madras

Scholarship on the Madras Revolution is scant, evidence in part of a broader transformation that had reshaped the landscape of Company operations. In 1773, three years before the coup, the British Parliament finalized its first major intervention into Company operations in India: the Regulating Act. The bill made Bengal the Company’s “Supreme Government” in India, elevating its governor and council to governorgeneral and Supreme Council over the Company’s other settlements. Madras and Bombay, as well as Bencoolen, were reduced to the status of “subordinate” presidencies.13 For those who sought substantial reform over the Company, the act disappointed, but it marked an important intensification of metropolitan interest in Company affairs. In keeping with the newly established structure, the most visible subjects of subsequent debates would be the individuals and institutions that jostled for power within the Supreme Government. Conflicts in Madras and still more so in Bombay thus appeared epiphenomenal or entirely provincial. Such analyses, though, overlook important vectors in which these “subordinate” spaces were shaping colonial rule, an influence that was nowhere more strongly felt than in the Company’s military. The marginalization of Madras in 1773 would have come as a surprise to the officials who oversaw the initial construction of Fort St. George in 1644. Throughout most of the seventeenth century, Madras had played a starring role in the Company’s trade. Nearly half the total exports that Company agents sent back to Europe each year came from Madras, and the settlement’s license to mint coins in the Company’s name was crucial for “country” trade across the subcontinent.14 In the first half of the eighteenth century, the Madras settlement gained further importance in diplomatic affairs thanks to its proximity to Pondicherry, newly established as the center of French operations in India. As discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, the intensification of Anglo-French rivalry on a global scale spread to India during the War of Austrian Succession, sparking a radical transformation of the Company’s military establishment in which the Madras Army emerged as a permanent and formalized field force. From a financial perspective, though, the Madras Presidency’s

Great Britain, The Statutes at Large, from the Tenth Year of the Reign of King George the Third to the Thirteenth Year of the Reign of King George the Third, Inclusive. To Which Is Prefixed, a Table of the Titles of All the Publick and Private Statutes during that Time. With a Copious Index, vol. 11 (London: Charles Eyre and William Strahan, 1774), 816. 14 Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760, 186–88, 290; Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1:90. 13

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prominence had begun to wane in favor of Calcutta, a relatively new settlement founded only in 1686. There, Company trade benefited from the growing prosperity of Bengal as the province became an increasingly autonomous state. Early in the eighteenth century, exports from Bengal decisively and irreversibly overtook trade from Madras.15 The value of the Company’s settlements in Bengal and the perception of the region as a site of almost boundless potential wealth help to explain the speed with which officials in Madras responded in 1756 to news of Calcutta’s capture by the nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daula. Famously, the government at Fort St. George quickly approved of a “rescue” expedition, to be led by Robert Clive, composed of almost half of the Madras Army’s strength. The expeditionary forces would remain in Bengal for years, forming the core of the Bengal Government’s own new-modelled army.16 Clive’s victory over Siraj ud-Daula at the Battle of Plassey and subsequent installation of Mir Jafar as his hand-picked successor are often seen as milestones marking the beginning of the Company’s territorial empire in India. However, the involvement of Company agents in rival political claims was hardly unprecedented. Indeed, Siraj ud-Daula had seized Calcutta in 1756 due to disagreements surrounding his succession.17 In Madras, the Company had been involved in almost continuous campaigns to maintain Wallajah’s claim as nawab of Arcot for almost a decade by the time Plassey took place. Plassey’s status as a dramatic break with the Company’s past political machinations is thus easy to exaggerate. Arguably more decisive was the Company’s response to Mir Jafar’s successor, Mir Qasim, who sought to reestablish some of the autonomy of the Bengal state.18 In 1763, the beleaguered nawab formed an alliance with the nawab of neighboring

Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660– 1760, 509–11. For more on the rise of Bengal as a quasi-independent province of the Mughal Empire, see Barnett, North India between Empires; Marshall, Bengal; and Chaudhury, The Prelude to Empire. 16 Amiya Barat, The Bengal Native Infantry: Its Organisation and Discipline, 1796–1852 (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1962); Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company. 17 Gulam Husayn Khan Tabatai, A Translation of the Sëir Mutaqherin; Or View of Modern Times; Being an History of India, from the Year 1118 to the Year 1194 (This Year Answers to the Christian Year 1781–82) of the Hedjirah; Containing, in General, the Reigns of the Seven Last Emperors of Hindostan, and in Particular, an Account of the English Wars in Bengal, with a Circumstantial Detail of the Rise and Fall of the Families of Seradj-Ed-Dowlah and Shudjah-Ed-Dowlah, the Last Sovereigns of Bengal and Oud, vol. II (Calcutta: R. Cambray & Co. Publishers, 1901), sec. VIII, https://persian.packhum.org/main. 18 Mir Qasim himself had come to power first in 1760 after a dispute between Mir Jafar and the Company led British officials to withdraw support from the former. In 1763, they reversed this decision and tried to remove Mir Qasim from the throne. 15

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Awadh, Shuja ud-Daula, and with the Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II. The tripartite alliance went to war against the Company, but was decisively defeated in December 1764 at the Battle of Buxar (in modernday Bihar). In subsequent negotiations, Company officials demanded that Shah Alam II grant them the diwani (governorship) of Bengal, functionally giving them total control of the province. The scope of the grant – both in territory and in potential wealth – far exceeded any of the ­Company’s other settlements, creating a flurry of new questions about what it meant for the Company and for Britain to rule in India as an expanding colonial state.19 The Regulating Act marked an early effort by the British state to answer – or at least to weigh in on – those issues, and thus, it makes sense that the legislation focused on Bengal. Significantly, the Regulating Act created the positions of governor-general, Supreme Council, and the newly created Supreme Court of Judicature (a royal institution outside of Company control), but left ambiguous the relative powers of each of these bodies. In both Britain and India, the uncertainty fueled bitter clashes between rival factions. Warren Hastings, the first governorgeneral, would even shoot his second-in-command, Philip Francis, in a duel over their relative power.20 Disputes between Francis, Hastings, and ­Elijah Impey, if less bloody, were hardly less bitter.21 The ­sordid details of these conflicts gained prominence throughout the 1780s and 1790s during Edmund Burke’s lengthy but unsuccessful effort to impeach Warren Hastings for maladministration. Scholars moving beyond the dramatic, interpersonal politics of this period have also emphasized the importance of Bengal as the site of key institutional and ideological developments in the expansion of the colonial state. Hastings, when he was not busy dueling his subordinates, worked to develop Hindu and Muslim civil courts within the Company’s aegis and, in so doing, ushered in an early wave of Orientalist study that elevated specific religious and legal treatises into a ­canon on which to build a body of “customary” law. The act of translating these texts was transformative, imposing on them a novel i­nelasticity and transplanting them into English-style legal proceedings. The result was

19 For more on the political machinations of this period, see Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India, chap. 1; James M. Vaughn, The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III: The East India Company and the Crisis and Transformation of Britain’s Imperial State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), chap. 4. 20 Jeremy Bernstein, Dawning of the Raj: The Life and Trials of Warren Hastings (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 113–16. 21 Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India, 185–91.

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a set of legal structures that diverged sharply from Indian and B ­ ritish norms.22 In his classic examination of the Permanent Settlement of 1793, Ranajit Guha argued that the system of revenue c­ ollection, ushered in by Charles Cornwallis, similarly transformed property ownership by imposing a radically new set of concepts and assumptions on land use in B ­ engal.23 Such developments set the stage for the increasingly interventionist colonial state of the next century. Analyses of the Madras Presidency in this period have thus tended to focus on how officials in the south pushed back against developments in Bengal. As competitions for the most influential postings in Bengal increased, the “subordinate” settlements came to form alternative patronage networks, attracting officials and would-be writers or cadets who lacked the social capital needed to enter the Supreme Government. Madras in particular became the center of a parallel patronage network for Scottish elites in contrast to Bengal, where English officials and politicians held social dominance.24 These settlements in turn jealously guarded their own operations against interference from Bengal and often proved reluctant to carry out orders from Calcutta.25 Some of the best studied policy developments from the Madras Presidency are cast as defensive efforts to carve out space outside the centralizing forces of Bengal. By the nineteenth century, such maneuvering would culminate in what Thomas Trautmann termed the Madras School of Orientalism, a set of political and scholarly material that emphasized the distinctiveness of South India and the inapplicability of norms created in Bengal.26 Among the most famous outgrowths of this was the ryotwari system created by Thomas Munro, who served as governor from 1820 to 1827 – an alternative model of revenue collection and property ownership meant to outflank the extension of Cornwallis’s Permanent Settlement to the south.27

22 There is a substantial body of work on this process. See, for instance, Travers, 119– 26, 200–05; Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 105–08; Indrani Chatterjee, “Women, Monastic Commerce, and Coverture in Eastern India circa 1600–1800 CE,” Modern Asian Studies 50, no. 1 (January 2016): 175–216. But for a complicating view, see Kapil Raj, “Refashioning Civilities, Engineering Trust: William Jones, Indian Intermediaries and the Production of Reliable Legal Knowledge in Late EighteenthCentury Bengal,” Studies in History 17, no. 2 (August 1, 2001): 175–209. 23 Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal; an Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement. 24 Mackillop, “Fashioning a ‘British’ Empire: Sir Archibald Campbell of Invernill & Madras, 1785–9.” 25 For instance, TNSA MDCB Vol. 135B, 1417–18, in which the Fort St. George Council pushed back against Fort William over accounting reforms. 26 Trautmann, The Madras School of Orientalism. 27 Stein, Thomas Munro, 203–17. See also Chapter 6.

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Framing policy debates in Madras simply as reactionary obscures the role that officials and officers in the south continued to play in the expansion of the Company as a whole. Even as governor, council, and Supreme Court clashed over the nature of civil authority in Bengal in the 1770s and 1780s, the “Madras Revolution” of 1776 shed light on equally urgent questions about the balance between civil and military power within the Company. Though the Court of Directors sought hastily to consign the legacy of the coup to oblivion, the leading role that the Madras Army had played in Pigot’s overthrow marked a clear and enduring expansion of the military establishment as a political body. Unlike Munro’s ryotwari system, this development would not remain geographically bounded. Instead, the events in Madras and subsequent reforms undertaken by Stuart in the brief reign of the rebel government offered a new rhetoric for the Company’s commissioned European officers to expound on the role they should play in the colonial state. Within a decade of Pigot’s death, those claims would form the basis of a new kind of lobby, one that inserted those officers directly into metropolitan debates about empire. 4.2

The Conquest of Thanjavur

In contrast to the Bengal Presidency, which since the acquisition of the diwani in 1765 had administered its territory directly, the Madras Presidency had only two relatively small territories under its control: the area immediately around Madras itself and a much longer, more distant stretch of coastline, the Northern Circars, which ran from Masulipatam to Ganjam. Much of the rest of the Carnatic and the Coromandel Coast was nominally under Arcot’s jurisdiction, usually referred to ­simply as the Circar (from the Persian sarkār or state). As nawab, Wallajah theoretically administered the area in concert with the Company through a system known as “dual sovereignty.” The Company had also ­experimented with this mode of power-sharing in Bengal after the Battle of Plassey, but it had broken down quickly as both sides had jostled for further control and shattered permanently on the battlefield at Buxar.28 In the south, Wallajah faced many of the same pressures of diminishing authority, but, rather than allying with external rivals, he sought to use the Company’s own institutions to buttress his claims of sovereignty. The alliance between Wallajah and the Fort St. George Council had shown cracks in the 1760s, most obviously in the Company’s support for Yusuf Khan. George Pigot, during his first tenure as governor of 28 Datla, “The Origins of Indirect Rule in India,” 324–28.

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Madras, had been one of the commandant’s strongest advocates, and the relationship between Pigot and Wallajah had remained strained since that time.29 Wallajah had suffered a further setback in his sovereignty in 1771, when he was unable to persuade either the mercenary officers in his army or the Company itself to support his campaign against the polity of Thanjavur. Determined to maintain his authority and prestige as an autonomous ruler, Wallajah thus looked for other ways to gain an advantage in his dealings with Madras. Most infamously, Wallajah accumulated a growing mountain of debt from Company officials and from other Britons in India – the extent and terms of which dominated both contemporary Britons’ view of Arcot and the evaluations of subsequent scholars. At the simplest, the loans allowed Wallajah to perform his duties as a sovereign and to maintain the display of authority needed in his court, but the debt system was not just about extravagance. The debt gave his creditors a vested interest in the persistence of his sovereignty and solvency, without which they could not hope for a return on their investment. Indeed, men “invested” in Wallajah’s court brought almost endless suits against the Company and the British state, lobbying, if not on behalf of Wallajah, at least on behalf of his treasury.30 In 1773, Wallajah strove to turn this system of debt and credit into a more active form of sovereignty. Once again, he turned his sights on Thanjavur, and in July, an expedition composed of both Company and Circar forces set out to conquer the polity. Wallajah had worked determinedly to construct his own army in a way that reduced its reliance on the Company’s official imprimatur, for instance, by employing officers like the ostracized William Randall who were outside of Madras’s patronage networks.31 Wallajah also took careful steps to prevent a repeat of the fiasco in 1771, when Smith had given up the expedition in search of easier prizes. He promised his creditors and other officers who signed on for the campaign that it would be profitable, promising to take no more than ten percent of the total prize money for himself.32 It was rumored that he even made a present of 230,000 pagodas (approximately £80,000)

GPD BL MSS Eur E379/3, 185–87. 30 The most substantive analyses of Wallajah’s debt system are J. D. Gurney, “The Debts of the Nawab of Arcot, 1763–76” (D. Phil., England, University of Oxford (United Kingdom), 1968); Phillips, “The Development of British Authority in Southern India”; Jim Phillips, “A Successor to the Moguls: The Nawab of the Carnatic and the East India Company, 1763–1785,” The International History Review 7, no. 3 (August 1, 1985): 364–89. 31 For Randall, see Chapter 3. Wallajah also employed a few French mercenaries. See Entry for May 13, 1773, Ruznāmah, Persian Bundle 65, TNSA. 32 Entry for June 23, 1773, Ibid. 29

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to Alexander Wynch, governor of Madras at the start of the campaign.33 On September 19, 1773, the gamble paid off: Wallajah received news that his banner was now flying from the ramparts of Thanjavur. Wallajah celebrated the news with lavish celebrations and immediately began to distribute his promised prizes, en’āms to the soldiers and kists – permits to collect revenue in a particular region – to his creditors. Smith, again commanding the Company’s forces, himself received a khil’at (a ceremonial robe), 400 pagodas (about £150), and a fine horse.34 With such largesse, it is no surprise that most histories of the campaign against Thanjavur in 1773 describe it simply as a cash grab taken at the behest of Wallajah’s creditors.35 However, the surviving volumes of the nawab’s ruznāmah (court diary) make it clear that Wallajah did not see his beneficence as a pecuniary obligation, but rather as an opportunity to demonstrate his renewed power as a military sovereign. The diary carefully records the first formal letter he received from the newly conquered Thanjavur, jointly authored by Smith and Wallajah’s son, Madar ul-Mulk, in which the two men promised that no one would touch a pagoda in the fort without the nawab’s instructions.36 Wallajah quickly passed on some of that fortune to one of his favorite poets, with the request that he commemorate the victory. The resulting epic described the seizure of Thanjavur in thunderous terms, showcasing Wallajah’s power as a ruler: “Blades made a dark cloud/Such that the light of day seemed the darkness of night … The sky was full of kargas [a homonym that meant both arrows and vultures].”37 Another small tribute was sent to the Mughal emperor.38 Wallajah’s legitimacy as nawab at least nominally came from Delhi, though he rarely acknowledged that tie. That he did so at this moment of victory highlights the extent to which the nawab used the conquest of Thanjavur to reassert his political authority in ways that pushed beyond his alliance with the Company.

GPD BL MSS Eur E379/5, 251–52. 34 Entry for November 15, 1773, Ruznāmah of the Nawab of Arcot, Persian Bundle 66. TNSA. 35 See, for instance, Gurney, “The Debts of the Nawab of Arcot, 1763–76,” chap. 4. 36 Entry for September 19, 1773, Ruznāmah of the Nawab of Arcot, Persian Bundle 66, TNSA. 37 Extracts from the poem are printed in Kokan, Arabic and Persian in Carnatic, 1710– 1960, 159–60. The quoted section reads “tīghha dar mīān tīra ghabār/rūz rūshan nemude dar shab tār…/kargas āsmān par afgan-dah.” 38 Entry for September 20, 1773, Ruznāmah of the Nawab of Arcot, Persian Bundle 66, TNSA. Notably, only six months later, Wallajah refused a direct order to send Madar ul-Mulk to Delhi, suggesting that this avowed fealty was largely ceremonial. Entry for April 11, 1774, Ruznāmah of the Nawab of Arcot, Persian Bundle 67, TNSA. 33

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It quickly became clear, though, that neither the prestige nor the profits of the conquest of Thanjavur would suffice to secure Wallajah’s claims of sovereignty. On October 17, 1773, not even a month after the victory, Wallajah fought angrily with Alexander Wynch, then governor of Madras, over their relative military authority. The ruznāmah reported Wallajah’s complaint as follows: “You have said several times that the military people under the command of the General Smith are entirely of the Company. This is astonishing. In all, ten thousand people in the army, I caused to arrive. You call them the Company Army. It should be that these ten thousand troops are called the army of the Nawab.”39 Only a few months later, the Court of Directors moved decisively to repudiate not just the conquest itself, but the very idea that Wallajah could engage in his own military agenda. Chastising Wynch, they wrote: We have been uniform in our orders and instructions, prohibiting our servants from extending the possessions of the Company or of the Nabob … We have also particularly directed … that no opportunity should be lost of raising in the King of Tanjore ideas of firm dependence on our friendship … it could not be good policy in the Company to reduce Tanjore.40

Wynch was recalled in disgrace for his role in the expedition, and in his place, the Directors appointed Pigot, who, as we have seen, was already ill-disposed toward Wallajah, with strict orders to “reverse” the conquest and to restore the erstwhile rajah of Thanjavur, Tuljaji. The instructions took for granted that the growing imbalance in the alliance between Arcot and Madras would leave Wallajah with no choice in the matter. It was a dismissal from which Wallajah’s court would never fully recover, but which would have radical effects on how military power, authority, and policy were negotiated within the Company itself. 4.3

“High Time to Correct the System”

In London, the seizure of Thanjavur became a cause célèbre among critics of the Company’s territorial expansion. William Burke, cousin of

39 “shomā bāryār miguyand ke fauj mardom yār ke dar lashkar az sardar ‘General Smith’ hamgi az ‘Company’ ast. In a’jib ettefāq ast ke dar hāme dah hezār mardom yār bar ānjāneb beresānam o shomā ānha fauj ‘Company’ nām hastid. Mibayad ān dah hezār mardom yār fauj ‘Nawab’ nām hashtand.” Entry for October 17, 1773, Ruznāmah of the Nawab of Arcot, Bundle 66, Persian Collection, TNSA. 40 East India Company, Copies of Papers Relative to the Restoration of the King of Tanjore, the Arrest of the Right Hon. George Lord Pigot, and the Removal of His Lordship from the Government of Fort St. George, by Sundry Members of the Council, vol. 1 (London, 1777), 1.

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Edmund Burke, the most inveterate of the Company’s opponents in the period, penned a damning pamphlet, An Enquiry into the Policy of Making Conquests for the Mahometans in India, that played on Islamophobic fears of “Oriental despots” while simultaneously denying Wallajah ­himself any real agency.41 The full letter from the Directors recalling Wynch, though, highlighted that they understood the campaign as Wallajah did: as a bid for autonomy. It was to them a disturbing ­possibility. The ­Directors further criticized Wynch for allowing the nawab to develop any kind of ­military agency: “In 1771 you seemed sufficiently aware of the impropriety of increasing the Nabob’s power … you need not be told by us, that it was much more easy to prevent it, than it can be to control an improper degree of power in the hands of the Nabob of the Carnatic.”42 With Wynch’s recall, the Directors demanded a new approach to governance in Madras, one that prioritized curtailing the prestige and ­ambition of their nominal allies. In appointing Pigot as governor, the Directors stressed that the restoration of Thanjavur to Tuljaji was only to be a starting point: Another object of your early attention must be, to acquire a complete knowledge of those territories which have been granted to the Company on the Coast of Coromandel, and to establish a judicious and permanent system for their future management.

In other words, Pigot was to solidify the Madras Government’s control of the coast, bringing it more in line with the kind of territorial authority that the Bengal Presidency asserted over its domains. Again, the stated reason for these objectives was “the late disposition manifested by the Nabob, and his apparent views to independency.” Over and over again, Directors stressed that Pigot should work to curtail the political independence of all the “country” powers along the Coromandel Coast. In Thanjavur, they ordered Pigot to “insist upon his [Tuljaji’s] admitting a garrison of our troops into the fort of Tanjore … to counteract the views of any European or country power, who may attempt to form connexions or make establishments in Tanjore to our prejudice.” Regarding the

41 [William] [Burke], An Enquiry into the Policy of Making Conquests for the Mahometans in India, by the British Arms, in Answer to a Pamphlet Intituled Considerations on the Conquest of Tanjore, 2nd ed. (London: J. Dodsley, 1779). This pamphlet reflected British bigotry depicting Muslims as aggressively masculine and Hindus as effeminate and in need of protection. See Jeng-Go Chen, “Scottish Discussions of Indian Effeminacy in the Eighteenth Century,” Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies 4, no. 2 (2007): 149–67. 42 East India Company, Copies of Papers Relative to the Restoration of the King of Tanjore, 1:6 emp. added.

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Northern Circars, they called for a formal committee to plan out Company control in the region. It was, as they put it, “high time to correct our system and to disallow the keeping of other troops than our own in the [Northern] Circars; more especially as such troops are not subject to our orders.”43 Once he arrived in India, Pigot threw himself quickly into these efforts. In February 1776, Pigot concluded a formal treaty with Tuljaji that reconfirmed the rajah as ruler of Thanjavur. As part of this restoration, Tuljaji agreed to undertake the kind of demilitarization that came to characterize subsidiary alliance. This included an almost complete dissolution of the rajah’s own, recently defeated armies, and Tuljaji confirmed that “I shall keep a body of men from one hundred to five hundred [as a bodyguard]; and I want not one man, either horse or foot, more than that number.”44 Even as those negotiations were ongoing, Pigot wrote triumphantly back to London about his progress: “We hope therefore very shortly to be able to advise your Honours that there are no troops on the Coromandel Coast but what are paid by your paymaster, and commanded by your Officers.”45 This was, in fact, far from the case. Though the expansion of the Company’s territorial and military power in South India would eventually lead to the fragmentation of the region’s dynamic military economy, the Madras Presidency had nothing like that level of paramountcy in 1776. Indeed, this was arguably one of the most robust periods of the region’s military labor markets.46 Nevertheless, Pigot’s instructions marked a clear aspirational trajectory, pushing the governor to dismantle the complex system of military employment on which the Madras Army had initially depended for its growth. The shift created new grounds for conflict. Robert Fletcher, who at the time of Pigot’s arrival was commander of the Madras Army, assumed that the expansion of the Company’s military authority would bring with it the expansion of his own personal authority. In contrast, Pigot sought to inflate the standing of the governor over both civil and military concerns. The first major flashpoint in this budding crisis came when Pigot announced his intention to travel to Thanjavur in person to oversee the withdrawal of Wallajah’s forces. Given the ties that many officers in the Madras Army had with Wallajah’s court, Pigot worried that  Company  officers

Pigot’s instructions are reprinted in East India Company, 1:19–29, quotes from 21, 25–26. 44 Aitchison, A Collection of Treaties, Engagements, and Sunnuds, 5:267. 45 East India Company, Copies of Papers Relative to the Restoration of the King of Tanjore, 1:59. 46 For more on these markets, see Chapter 2. 43

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in Thanjavur might seek to undermine the “restoration” of Tuljaji. Determined to prevent their interference, Pigot claimed that, as gov­ ernor, he could take command of any of the Company’s garrisons as a natural extension of his commission from the Court of Directors, which named him “Governor and Commander in Chief of our fort and garrison of Fort St. George and town of Madras-patnam.” Robert Fletcher, then commander of the Madras Army, objected angrily, explaining: “I thought in such places as any civil servants of the Company exercised military authority, the military authority of the Governor ought to supersede that of the Chiefs [i.e., civil chief agents]; but that in all other places, where the military authority of the Chiefs could not extend, that of the ­Governor could not exist.”47 Fletcher’s dissent pointed to the instability of the relationship between civil and military actors in the Madras Government. Where Pigot insisted that the governor’s civil authority outweighed the military, Fletcher argued that things were more ambiguous and tended to favor the military. Pigot’s claim better fits the instructions he brought with him from the Directors, who seem to have been eager to check the expansion of military power within the Company. Most substantially, the Directors had called for an end to the practice of allowing the commander of the Madras Army a full vote on the Council at Fort St. George. Though Fletcher was granted a full seat on the basis that he had previously served in that role, they left no doubt that this practice was not to be continued: [I]t is our absolute Order that no successor to that Post [commander of the Madras Army] after Sir Robert Fletcher be admitted to this Priviledge [sic] as we are determined such successor shall only have a seat and Voice as Third in our Council and Committees when Military Affairs are under deliberation, in the same Manner as we have directed with respect to our Commr. in Chief at Bombay.48

Immediately, the instructions sparked debate about what constituted “military affairs.” Even these apparently straightforward orders would do little to check the ambitions of the Company’s European officers, increasingly eager to solidify their political importance. In June 1776, conflict sparked again when James Stuart, arriving in India as Fletcher’s second-in-command, demanded that he be stationed at Thanjavur. Stuart justified the request by explaining that “according to the general practice of [the] course of Military Service, the most responsible Command under [paper torn] Presidency, does, by the

East India Company, Copies of Papers Relative to the Restoration of the King of Tanjore, 1:Pigot’s commission on 17, Fletcher on 97. (Emphasis added.) 48 Orders quoted in FSG MDCB Vol. 57A, 1221, emp. added. 47

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Rank I hold, belong to me.”49 In fact, the kind of subsidiary alliance imposed on Thanjavur would prove an important vehicle through which officers like Stuart gained prominence in the Company’s diplomatic networks. However, Pigot had no interest in facilitating this. Instead, he maintained that subsidiary alliance was a civil agreement and insisted on appointing a civilian agent – Henry Russell – who was, naturally, one of his closest supporters. One of Pigot’s other adherents justified this choice by arguing “That Tanjore is a Place of the utmost importance I readily admit, but its importance is not Military, but Political.”50 Like the Directors’ instructions restricting the role of the commander in council, the argument insisted that officers had only limited roles to play in Company politics beyond the battlefield. Fletcher again protested the logic, deeming it an attack on his own prerogative, and ordered Stuart to embark for Thanjavur. Pigot responded by ordering Fletcher into arrest and elevating Stuart to command. Far from ending the conflict, the move only galvanized Pigot’s opponents – Stuart included – pushing them into open rebellion. By the end of August, a slight majority on the Fort St. George Council, deeming itself the Majority Council, seized power. The coup would bring with it yet another vision for Company power in the south, one that replaced Pigot’s emphasis on civil authority with a military bent. 4.4

Between Civil and Military Despots

With Fletcher arrested, James Stuart was commander of the Madras Army in his stead. Pigot held out some hope that this elevation and Stuart’s lack of established connections with Wallajah might persuade him to join the governor’s faction. That unfounded optimism only served the conspirators’ purpose, as it allowed Stuart to trick Pigot into riding with him beyond the confines of the fort. In fact, despite Pigot’s hopes, support for the coup seems to have been almost universal among the Company’s European officers. After the arrest, Stuart reported to the Majority Council “that all the Military Officers in this Fort [have] declared it to be their Duty & Resolution to Obey all Orders they may receive from Us the present Majority.”51 In contrast, on August 29, a group of thirty-eight civil officials submitted a formal memorial decrying the coup, which they demanded be sent to London with official

49 TNSA MDCB Vol. 56A, 619. 50 Alexander Dalrymple in TNSA MDCB Vol. 56A, 669. 51 TNSA MDCB Vol. 56A, 835.

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correspondence “lest it should be represented to our Honble. Masters that this measure has been effected with the Concurrence of the Civil Servants.”52 Though the separation between civil and military actors was not complete – the Majority Council, after all, was composed almost entirely of civil officials – the divide gives insight into how the relative claims of Arcot and Thanjavur fit within Company politics. Framing the “Madras Revolution” as a dispute between civil and military factions places it in a much longer history of conflict within the Company’s administration. From its earliest charters, the corporation had eagerly sought out martial privileges, and, since at least the reign of Charles II, this had included the formal right to commission officers and captains within India.53 Civil governors and presidents looked frequently to their soldiers as a source of official spectacle. Traveler John Fryer said of William Langhorne, president of Madras in the 1670s: “[h]is Personal Guard consists of 3 or 400 Blacks, besides a Band of 1500 Men ready on Summons. He never goes abroad without Fifes, Drums, Trumpets, and a Flag with two Balls on a Red Field.”54 The very importance of this military spectacle, though, brought with it a potential threat. If officers could add to a president or governor’s authority, they could also undermine or even challenge it. One of the most dramatic examples of such a conflict occurred in 1683, when Richard Keigwin – captain of the forces at Bombay and formerly an officer in the British Army – led a violent mutiny to seize the Company’s settlement “with theire swords drawne and Muskets cockt, some of the Souldiers crying all the way: Damme, Letts fire.”55 Keigwin, who immediately appointed himself as the new governor of the fort, justified his mutiny by accusing John Child, the president of Bombay, of “intollerable Extortions oppressions and injust impositions;” of having rendered “his Majesties laws mercinary [sic];” and even of witchcraft.56 Keigwin’s rebellion has enjoyed a rosy status in conventional histories, largely because of who he was deposing. John Child was widely castigated as a uniquely incompetent administrator, as was his patron, Josiah Child, the governor of the Company as a whole in London, who was in fact

Letter in TNSA MDCB Vol. 56B, 904, emp. in original. 53 Charter granted by Charles II, April 3, 1661, in Shaw, Charters Relating to the East India Company from 1600 to 1761, 45. 54 Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1:283. For more on these displays, see Philip Stern, “Corporate Virtue: The Languages of Empire in Early Modern British Asia,” Renaissance Studies 26, no. 4 (2012): 510–30. 55 Quoted in Strachey, Keigwin’s Rebellion, 80. 56 Strachey, 84, 166. 52

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unrelated to John.57 Their reputation for maladministration stemmed mostly from the role that they played in instigating the Company’s disastrous war with the Mughal Empire from 1686 to 1688.58 From this perspective, Keigwin’s attack on John Child’s government could be seen as an almost heroic effort to save the Company from its worst elements.59 Historian Philip Stern, though, has persuasively challenged this narrative, demonstrating that the Childs’ military ambitions and posturing were hardly exceptional within the seventeenth-century Company – a far more militarized body than early historians acknowledged. Rather than a champion railing against a tyrant, Stern thus argued that Keigwin’s revolt was part of a conflict over the nature of English authority in India. John Child argued that the Company acted, symbolically and functionally, as a proxy for royal authority in India, such that he – as ­president of Bombay – was the sole representative of the English Crown in the region. Keigwin, in contrast, asserted his loyalty directly to the king, refuting the idea that the Company was an embodied extension of monarchical power.60 In this alternative framing, Keigwin sought to take on the mantle of that authority himself, not just as an English subject but as an officer, commissioned doubly by the Company and by the Crown. Ultimately, Keigwin’s interpretation failed. Both king and Company condemned the mutiny. However, Keigwin was able to negotiate full pardons for himself and for his fellow conspirators before giving up control of Bombay Castle. Child complained bitterly about the leniency, writing that Keigwin was “Impudent as hell[,] gloring [sic] in his Rougery … Indeed its ten thousand pittys he should escape the Halter.”61 That the corporation proved reluctant to act decisively against the mutiny – a sharp contrast to even the whiff of conspiracy among Indian troops – was 57 Prior to 1709, when the “old” East India Company merged with the “New Company” to form the “united” Company, the Court of Directors was known as the Court of Proprietors and was headed by a governor. For more on this early leadership, see Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), chap. 4. 58 The most comprehensive study of this conflict is Hunt and Stern, The English East India Company at the Height of Mughal Expansion. See also Lenman, “The East India Company and the Emperor Aurangzeb,” 23–29. 59 R. O. Strachey described Keigwin’s mutiny as “a rebel government that added lustre to the British name.” Strachey, Keigwin’s Rebellion, 151. John Biddulph went so far to assert, “Never had Bombay been so well governed as it was during the eleven months of Keigwin’s rule” in The Pirates of Malabar and an Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1907), 112, https://hdl.handle .net/2027/uc1.$b294539. 60 Stern, The Company-State, 64–68. 61 Quoted in Strachey, Keigwin’s Rebellion, 153.

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no accident.62 It reflected officials’ ambivalence about punishing Europeans in Company settlements. Even when a protest was widely condemned as mutinous and thus requiring a firm response, administrators hesitated to impose spectacular punishments on elite Europeans, seeing such sentences as potentially threatening to the social hierarchy of the colonial context. This question would become all the murkier in the mid-eighteenth century, when racial and military hierarchies became more formalized and when officers’ claims to authority within them became weightier.63 The status of officers in Madras relative to the civilian government continued to be negotiated in subsequent decades and, like the rest of the Madras Army, underwent a notable expansion in the 1740s under Stringer Lawrence’s turn as commander. When Lawrence was first appointed as a major in the Company’s service in 1746, Directors did not intend for his role to be any different than that of his predecessor.64 However, when he arrived in India, he found the presidency scrambling to respond to the French seizure of Fort St. George. In the years that followed, Lawrence solidified his position as the first formal commander of the Madras Army and made more and more demands for influence in the Company’s day-to-day governance. By 1754, this extended to a full seat on the council of Fort St. George, not just as a military adviser but as a voice in the running of the settlement. As Lawrence put it, “however determin’d I have been not to blend the M ­ ilitary & Political Business, I find they are so Intricately mix’d together that it is unavoidable. Therefore all the Lights necessary should be given to assist me.”65 In later decades, the logic of Lawrence’s claim would be resurrected as a way to refute efforts by Directors or civil authorities to confine military actors to their purview. In India, officers would argue, all affairs were military. Lawrence’s career also provides a striking example of how difficult it became for the Company’s civil administrators to rescind privileges once they were extended to military command. In 1748, Lawrence was granted the power of court martial, which had traditionally rested with the Company’s civilian governor. In 1750, after peace between the British and the French at least nominally put an end to the active ­campaigning along the Coromandel Coast, the Directors ordered the power should

For more on this inequity, see Chapter 6. 63 Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, 12. 64 J. Biddulph, Stringer Lawrence, the Father of the Indian Army (London: J. Murray, 1901), 18. 65 Madras Military Department, Diary and Consultation Book, 1754, 88. 62

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revert to the governor. This was part of a broader push by both British and French administrators in Europe to reverse the military expansion of the previous years: As one British official wrote in 1755, “both Parties appear tired of the War, as it has considerably hurt their trade.”66 Lawrence, though, did not share this exhaustion, and indeed, the end of the War of the Austrian Succession barely interrupted the Anglo-French conflicts on the Coromandel Coast. Ultimately, Lawrence made such a furious defense of his court martial privilege that revoking the power was ultimately deemed, as his later biographer John Biddulph diplomatically put it, “impracticable.”67 In 1776, this same stickiness was on display when, in the weeks that followed Pigot’s arrest, Stuart’s temporary appointment as commander of the Madras Army became permanent. Fletcher, though freed from his brief arrest, resigned his position and set sail for the Cape of Good Hope, in a futile bid to restore his failing health. (He died in Mauritius only a few months later.)68 As we have seen, the Court of Directors had sent unambiguous orders that Fletcher’s successor should only participate in the council when military affairs were under discussion. Stuart, though, protested that “under a Government where commerce is secured only by power, scarcely any question can be agitated in Council, on which his Voice and Opinion are not necessary.”69 The claim echoed Lawrence’s words a generation before: India allowed no clear divide among politics, trade, and warfare, thus requiring the commander to be involved in all three. Intriguingly, the rest of the Majority Council went even further, avowing that Stuart had a positive “Right to a Seat in Council.”70 Directors would revive the call to diminish the role of the commander in Fort St. George Council sporadically over the next decades, but their attempts at reform met with increasing hostility among officers. In later debates, the suggestion that this position was a “right” became a central part of officers’ claims. Like the issue of the court martial, efforts to dislodge successive commanders from the government proved impossible. The confirmation of Stuart as a full voting member of the Majority Council set the tone for the rebel government’s policies. Dependent

Quoted in John Adlercron, Journal of an Expedition to the East Indies, 106, NAM 8707–48. 67 Biddulph, Stringer Lawrence, the Father of the Indian Army, 29. 68 His will, written just before his death, can be found in Sir Robert Fletcher Papers, BL MSS Eur G67. 69 James Stuart, “On the Expediency of Continuing to the Commander in Chief of the Forces at Madras a Vote at Large in Council,” August 1776, 7r, NLS JSP MS. 8413. 70 Minute of Francis Jourdan, October 15, 1776, TNSA MDCB Vol. 57A, 1220, emp. added. 66

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on the military for support, the Majority Council was careful to cultivate favor with the European officer corps. Some of these policies were unmistakably meant as bribes. On August 29, for instance, the same day that the group of civilian officials submitted their protest against Pigot’s overthrow, the Majority Council announced the restoration of “halfbatta” across the presidency, a lucrative field bonus meant to defray additional costs an officer might incur on campaign.71 The extra pay, the Council argued, was needed even when officers were in garrison to prevent them from “employing their time & attention, to ways and means, inconsistent with their Character & Station.”72 Beyond the pecuniary bonus, the measure also offered rhetorical recognition of the officers as men of high status and “character,” implying that it was the Company’s duty to support those pretensions. Like the use of rights-based language to vindicate Stuart’s seat on council, these orders turned the material rewards for rebellion into a broader statement about the role that officers should play within the Company’s settlements. With such policies, the Majority Council replaced Pigot’s efforts to diminish military authority with the seeds of a new model of military power and political influence in the empire. 4.5

“A Chain of Cantonments”

Given the dispute that sparked the coup against Pigot, one might have expected the Majority Council, once in power, to have acted decisively to affirm Wallajah’s authority. In his official letters to the council, Wallajah was certainly quick to celebrate Pigot’s overthrow and expressed his “readiness to co-operate to the utmost of my Power & abilities in any measures for the advantage of the Company & the Benefit of the Carnatic.”73 Intriguingly, though, the rebel government once in power paid almost no attention to the nawab. No effort was made to reverse Pigot’s carefully negotiated restoration of Thanjavur or to provide Wallajah with any alternative revenue streams. Indeed, the only sign that councilors had closer ties with Wallajah’s state than with Tuljaji’s was a slight rhetorical discrepancy in two otherwise identical letters that the Majority Council sent to the two rulers after the coup. The council promised to grant Wallajah “every Mark of Attention Respect & Support,” but the

71 TNSA MDCB Vol. 56B, 900–01. 72 General Orders, August 29, 1776, TNSA MDCB Vol. 56B, 901. 73 Letter from Wallajah to George Stratton (as governor), August 29, 1776, TNSA MDCB Vol. 56B, 927.

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rajah was to be accorded only “Attention & Support” – no respect.74 The Majority Council was less interested in returning the south to the status quo ante than it was in establishing a new set of policies and claims that could withstand another such “tyrant” as Pigot. The connection between the Majority Council and Wallajah’s state was one predicated almost exclusively on Company agents’ hopes for personal profit. As we have seen, officers and civil officials alike who opposed Pigot had a vested interest in Wallajah’s claims on Thanjavur. Yet maintaining his authority over the state was not the only way to safeguard those promised profits. As J. D. Gurney argued, one of the reasons why the Majority Council proved so uninterested in relitigating control of Thanjavur was simply because – with Pigot and his faction removed from power – conspirators found it easier to coerce Tuljaji into accepting responsibility for Wallajah’s debts and promised ­profits.75 Indeed, even before the coup, the members that would compose the Majority Council had demanded that Tuljaji support Paul Benfield “in recovering such debts as appear to be justly due to him from the inhabitants.”76 Benfield was Wallajah’s principal private creditor and thus one of the foremost recipients of kists (grants for revenue collecting) in Thanjavur. It is possible that the council’s reluctance to reconfirm Wallajah as ruler of Thanjavur stemmed from its members’ knowledge that the Directors in London were hardly likely to approve of such a move. This argument, though, falters when one considers that the Majority Council was more than willing to violate explicit instructions, from affirming Stuart’s “right” to a seat on council to the fact of the rebellion itself. That they were less willing to take a stand in favor of Wallajah’s political claims thus illustrates that members of the Majority Council, hopes of profit aside, had little interest in supporting the bid for autonomy and sovereignty that the nawab had made with the

74 Letters from the Majority Council to Wallajah and to Tuljaji, both dated August 25, 1776, FSG MDCB Vol. 56A, 855–6. It should be noted that both letters would have been translated (to Persian and to Telugu or Thanjavur Marathi, respectively) before being sent on, so it is possible that this lapse in the English version would not have been so obvious in the versions received. 75 Gurney, “The Debts of the Nawab of Arcot, 1763–76,” 308. 76 Extracts of a Letter proposed by the President [Pigot] to be written by Administration here, Fort St. George, June 22, 1776, printed in Anonymous, Original Papers Relative to Tanjore. Containing All the Letters Which Passed, and the Conferences Which Were Held, between His Highness the Nabob of Arcot and Lord Pigot, on the Subject of the Restoration of Tanjore. Together with the Material Part of Lord Pigot’s Last Dispatch to the East India Company (London: Printed for T. Cadell, 1777), 106.

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conquest of Thanjavur. On the contrary, like Pigot and like the Directors, the rebel government expressed both contempt and anxiety about the possibility that Wallajah might reestablish himself as an independent political actor. In December 1776, Stuart announced to his fellow councilors that he had succeeded in compelling Wallajah into carrying out “the dismission of the above 6000 useless rabble,” referring to the nawab’s Indian cavalry.77 In late 1779, he wrote still more disdainfully to his brother, Andrew, of his desire to abolish the rest of the nawab’s “ragged Cavalry” and mocked Wallajah’s continued efforts to maintain these forces despite Company pressure: “his Moorish head does not see that it is puting [sic] off the Day with double disadvantage to himself.”78 Stuart criticized Wallajah’s forces as both inept and untrustworthy, rhetoric that reflected the same ambition of demilitarizing the region that the Directors had asserted in their 1775 instructions. Even the Company’s British officers, serving with double commissions in Arcot’s armies, were suspect. As he wrote in 1779, “Some Officers who are [less?] a Job allowed to serve him [Wallajah] as nominal Officers of his Cavalry, who neither do Service to the Publick nor to the Company in their present Sinecure Stations, are also in the plot with their Black Master.”79 At least when it came to the state of Arcot, both factions in the Madras Presidency had become increasingly uneasy about the potential for division between the Company’s interests and those of officers acting as intermediaries, especially when granted formal, commissioned positions in the nawab’s court. Instead, in keeping with the Majority Council’s efforts to secure profits for its supporters, the rebel councilors looked to replace officers’ erstwhile reliance on external opportunities and outside commissions for internal posts and perquisites. The restoration of half-batta, complete with the rhetorical support for their high “Character,” suggests a push to increase the value of the Company’s commissions themselves. That policy would outlast the coup, shaping the Madras Government’s assumptions about its army in the years to come. In April 1780, Captain Rumley, a cavalry officer who held double commissions both in Arcot’s forces and in the Madras Army, petitioned the Company that he had been denied off-reckonings, “for a reason that I did no duty

Memorandum by James Stuart on the Reorganization of the Army, December 16, 1776, TNSA MDCB Vol. 57B, 1535. 78 Letter from James Stuart to Andrew Stuart, sent January 09, 1780, Correspondence with Andrew Stuart Regarding Court Martial, 5–6, NLS JSP MS 8418. 79 Ibid., 6, emp. added. 77

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with any of the Company’s corps.”80 Commanders in the Company’s service, as in the British Army, received large lump sums each year from which to equip their men. Off-reckonings constituted any part of that sum that remained after necessary purchases, which could be a considerable amount. After some debate in the Fort St. George Council, Rumley was granted his share because, officials noted, “[p]ay seems to them to form the principal part of the Engagement, between the Officer & his Employers, for as soon as it is withheld the Officer considers himself as free, & ceases to be bound by the Rules, or amenable to the Laws of the Service.”81 In short, Rumley was given his portion not because he had earned it but because the allowance was essential to maintaining his loyalty and to preventing him from seeking his fortune beyond the Company’s networks. Alongside these efforts to increase the status and stability of the Company’s officer corps, Stuart and the other members of the rebel ­government articulated a vision of the Company’s territories that would further augment its military establishment. They advocated establishing a “chain of Cantonments” across the Coromandel Coast, the C ­ arnatic, and the Northern Circars, radically expanding both the number and visibility of Company forces throughout the territories over which it claimed suzerainty.82 The plan represented one of the earliest articulations of the Company’s emerging “garrison state,” the network of forts, outposts, and supply lines through which colonial rule was made manifest. Such a system would answer Stuart’s worries about the potential unreliability of white officers who had gone to serve “Black Master[s].” However, even if forces were entirely under Company control, Stuart was still suspicious that sepoys and Indian officers would ever be fully loyal. In December 1776, in a lengthy report on the nature of the Madras Army, Stuart opined: “I have laid it down as a Maxim, that the more we come to depend upon the Natives for our Armies … We ought to be the more Solicitously anxious to have a full proportion of European Officers in order to watch the beginnings of what might prove fatal to the Settlement.” So untrustworthy did he deem even individual Indian recruits that he proclaimed he would “never permit a black hand to touch a ­Cannon, or even to draw it.”83

Letter from Captain Rumley to Fort St. George, April 22, 1780, TNSA MDCB Vol. 69C, 518. 81 Letter from A. Brodie, May 18, 1780, TNSA MDCB Vol. 70A, 670. 82 TNSA MDCB, Vol. 57A, 1354–55. 83 Memorial by James Stuart on the Reorganization of the Army, TNSA MDCB Vol. 57B, 1495–1536, quotes from 1498 and 1520. 80

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Of course, Company officials had always viewed sepoys with ambivalence, assuming above all that they were inferior to their white counterparts. Stuart’s “Maxim” was thus nothing more than an intensification of this attitude, but one that had significant ramifications for the structure of the Madras Army. To balance the threat of sepoys’ potential for disloyalty – “what might prove fatal to the Settlement” – Stuart proposed a substantial expansion of the Company’s European officer corps. Most importantly, he added lieutenants and ensigns as well as a white sergeant to each company of sepoys. These detachments had previously been commanded by white captains, but otherwise officered by Indian subedars and jemadars. In addition to increasing the number of European officers needed to maintain the Madras Army’s full establishment, the reform radically reduced the relative authority of Indian officers. It entrenched the idea that white officers, regardless of their rank, were superior to their Indian counterparts, such that even the highest-ranking subedars served beneath ensigns.84 Where Pigot had seen the demilitarization of Arcot and Thanjavur as opportunities to reduce the Company’s military expenditure and to increase the authority of the Company’s civil government, Stuart proposed precisely the inverse. Only a massive army could govern the Company’s territories, and only European officers could maintain its reliability. In the context of the dispute between Pigot and the council, in which the European officers of the Madras Army so disproportionately took the latter’s side, the Majority Council had few qualms about supporting the commander’s vision. Stuart’s warnings about potential unrest within the Company’s own garrisons helped to substantiate his suggestion that no part of the Company’s settlements could be deemed solely “political” and thus beyond the reach of the commander’s oversight. In turn, the inflated European officer corps, flush with new allowances and privileges, held a more visible and influential role within their individual stations. These changes and the ideological justifications that accompanied them would prove far more persistent than the coup itself. Indeed, in the decades that followed, rhetoric about officers’ “rights” and their role in maintaining settlements’ stability would spread widely throughout the Company’s networks, forming the basis for a collective political identity among those ranks.

TNSA MDCB, Vol. 57B, 1498–99. Indian officers would not hold command again in the Company’s armies or in the subsequent British Indian army until 1940. Imy, Faithful Fighters, 7. 84

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The Power of Court Martial

When news of the rebellion reached London in March 1777, public opinion solidified quickly against the Majority Council. On Monday, March 31, at a full meeting of the Company’s proprietors, a motion to restore Pigot to his governorship carried 382 for to 140 against.85 Of course, by the time this decision made its way back to India, Pigot was already dead. Though the Majority Council was removed from power – a civilian official who had supported Pigot, John Whitehill, was made governor – the conspirators faced little in the way of punishment. For Pigot’s supporters, who saw the affair as nothing short of treason and murder, no result would have been more disappointing than James Stuart’s court martial, a long-delayed trial that ultimately resulted in his full acquittal and restoration as commander of the Madras Army.86 The outcome sheds light on the Company’s growing inability to assert real authority over its highest-ranking officers, especially when they were perceived to be acting in the interests of their fellow officers. Courts martial are usually understood as sites in which the power and majesty of the state was particularly palpable. For Indian officers and sepoys, as well as for most European privates, this was undeniably true. The Company’s license to enforce martial law dated back at least to its 1669 charter, which gave civil governors in Bombay the power to “use and exercise all such Powers and Authorities, in cases of Rebellion, Mutiny or Sedition, or refusing to serve in Wars, flying to the Enemy, forsaking Colours or Ensigns, or other Offences, against Law, Custom and Discipline Military.”87 As discussed in Section 4.4, Stringer Lawrence was the first commander of the Madras Army to exercise similar powers directly, and, from the 1740s onward, the system of court martial became both increasingly complex and increasingly disconnected from the Company’s civil administration. Trials could be held at the “regimental” or “general” level and, like the rest of the army, were further divided into “European” and “native” categories.88 In the former case, juries were made up of British officers, and Indian officers at least nominally

“News,” General Evening Post, April 1, 1777. 86 For more on the attempt to prosecute the rebels – and their subsequent defenses – see Anonymous, Original Papers with an Authentic State of the Proofs and Proceedings before the Coroner’s Inquest. 87 Grant of the Port and Island of Bombay by Charles III, 1669, Shaw, Charters Relating to the East India Company from 1600 to 1761, 54. 88 The methods by which the Company’s courts martial were carried out are exhaustively detailed in William Hough, The Practice of Courts-Martial, and Other Military Courts with Chapters on Inquest, Courts of Requests, Three Trials (Arson, Larceny, and 85

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served as jurors for “native” trials. However, when serious cases were on the docket – for instance, in the case of an alleged mutiny or conspiracy – white officers generally first conducted a “court of enquiry” in which the case against accused sepoys and Indian officers was laid out.89 The Indian juries who sat for the subsequent trials faced substantial pressure to confirm those earlier findings, and, when jurors failed to convict, they themselves could fall under suspicion.90 The power dynamics of courts martial involving the Company’s white officers, though, were radically different. Rather than sites in which state power was epitomized and enacted, the courts became forums controlled by those officers and in which they could challenge the Company’s civil government. Officials first confronted this possibility in 1766, following a mutiny by European officers in three border stations in Bengal over a reduction in batta. Robert Clive, who was then both commander and governor in Bengal, proved hesitant about subjecting the ringleaders to courts martial, “since a trial by their comrades would have been very ineffectual.”91 Ultimately, only a handful of the officers involved were tried, but, even when found guilty of mutiny, none were sentence to death or imprisonment.92 This included the same Robert Fletcher that Pigot ordered into arrest in 1776. In 1766, he had been commander at Monghyr, where he encouraged the men he commanded to join the mutiny. Found guilty of sedition, he was simply cashiered and was able to gain a second commission in the Company’s army only a few years later.93 After Pigot’s death, Whitehill’s government in Madras proved similarly hesitant to convene a court martial against Stuart, assuming reasonably enough that the officers of the Madras Army were unlikely to find the commander guilty of a mutiny in which they had gladly participated.94

89 90



91



92 93



94

Murder, with Full Evidence), Rules of Evidence, and Other Useful Matter and Tables (London: J. L. Cox and Sons, 1834). Hough, 137. See also Chapter 6. When sepoys mutinied in 1764, the subsequent jury was told, “if proper sentence was not passed, no regard would be paid to the same [the verdict] and proper notice would be taken of them [the jury].” Quoted in Barat, The Bengal Native Infantry, 21. Henry Strachey, Narrative of the Mutiny of the Officers of the Army in Bengal, in the Year 1766 and Lately Given in Evidence to the Secret Committee of the House of Commons (London: Printed for T. Becket, 1773), 15. Strachey, 75–77. Fletcher’s trial was printed in Robert Fletcher, Case of Sir Robert Fletcher, with His Court-Martial (London, 1766). He was granted a new commission in the Company on September 15, 1769. See Court Minutes, BL IOR/B/85, 230. Andrew Stuart, Letters to the Directors of the East-India Company and the Right Honorable Lord Amherst, in the Years 1777, 1778, and 1781, on the Subject of Certain Events in India, and of Gen. Stuart’s Conduct ([London], 1782), 43.

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Unlike his civil co-conspirators, then, Stuart remained in India  –  suspended as commander, but still on the army lists. Stuart, though, was not satisfied with skirting punishment, and he began a determined campaign to demand a court martial as a means to recover his reputation.95 In 1780, Stuart finally succeeded in his bid. As he expected, the jury honorably acquitted him, and, in so doing, the officers voiced their support for the vision of military authority that Stuart had demanded in 1776. Most significantly, Stuart’s defense was that, because he had arrested Pigot seven hundred paces from the walls of Fort St. George, he had done so outside of the governor’s jurisdiction, where he might have overruled Stuart’s orders.96 Unmistakably, the defense recalled one of the first major conflicts between Pigot and Fletcher: In March 1776, the two had fought when Pigot had insisted that his command of Fort St. George was an embodied privilege, one that he could carry with him to Thanjavur or to any other part of the presidency. Fletcher insisted that it was a much more constrained title. In deciding that Pigot’s command did not even extend a few hundred yards from the fort itself, the jury in Stuart’s court took Fletcher’s side in this debate, elevating the Company’s military actors above their civil counterparts except in a narrow, ceremonial sense. Stuart’s lengthy defense at his court marital allowed him to opine on this subject in an official context, and copies of his defense circulated in print.97 Stuart’s acquittal meant that he was able to take up active duty within the Madras Army again, and, in 1783, after the death of Eyre Coote, he once more attained command. Almost immediately, he was embroiled in a yet another bitter conflict with the civil governor, Lord Macartney, refusing to follow the government’s orders. Macartney sought to remove him from command, only to find that Stuart’s subordinates took their commander’s side. Once again, civil authorities struggled to check a collective challenge by their officers, and Macartney was ultimately able to reestablish control only by exploiting the divide between royal and Company officers in Madras, a tension that will be explored in more detail in Chapter 5. Once again, Stuart’s actions would be denounced in

Writing to his brother Andrew, he called his long campaign for a trial “this most unprecedented Struggle for Justice and a fair hearing.” James Stuart, Letter to Andrew Stuart, February 14, 1780, Correspondence betwixt Brigr. Genl. James Stuart and Andrew Stuart, 89, NLS JSP MS. 8419. 96 James Stuart, “The Case of Brigadier General Stuart together with the Defence of that Officer’s Conduct during the Change of Government within the Presidency of Fort St. George in August, 1776,” 2, NLS JSP MS 8421. 97 Anonymous, Original Papers with an Authentic State of the Proofs and Proceedings before the Coroner’s Inquest, 231–49. 95

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Britain.98 However, the military establishment that Stuart had so tumultuously commanded and worked to expand would survive. By the end of the century, the Company’s most elite white officers had turned Stuart’s “maxim” – that they alone could prevent crisis in India – into the conventional wisdom of the colonial state. Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah’s hopes of restoring his autonomy would never recover from the loss of Thanjavur. In the years that ­followed, his armies were dismantled by Company demands, and Wallajah lost both the authority and material income needed to keep his remaining troops content and disciplined. Protests and mutinies within his regiments were seen in turn as further proof by Company officials that the forces were unreliable and should be dissolved.99 Many of his elite Indian officers, especially in the cavalry, reportedly left Arcot’s service to seek out positions in the broader military landscape, most notably in the expanding armies of Mysore.100 European officers, including those already commissioned in the Company, continued to seek positions in his office corps: George Buck’s commission, described in the previous chapter, was not granted until 1779.101 However, as Rumley’s demand for off-reckonings suggests, these officers too espoused mounting resentment that such commissions were no longer the vectors of enrichment that they had once been. The Majority Council’s tenure and the military reforms introduced by Stuart offered those officers new opportunities within the Company itself. Whether as commanders in the “chain of cantonments,” as subaltern officers placed in newly top-heavy sepoy regiments, or even as residents extending the Company’s formal diplomatic reach, European officers were gaining visibility as the face of colonial authority, but, as the condemnation of the coup suggests, this was not always a positive guise to wear. In the last decades of the eighteenth century, the nature of the Company’s empire in India was attracting ever more attention in Britain. Corruption, greed, and violent coups – all of which had been on full display in Madras – painted the Company’s territories as a site of scandal, and officers seemed to have a starring role in that process. One anonymous poet captured the most vicious of this animosity in a lengthy, plodding elegy to

98 For more on Stuart’s second coup, see G. J Bryant, “The East India Company and the British Army: The Crisis at Madras in 1783,” Journal for the Society of Army Historical Research 62, no. 246 (1984): 13–27. 99 See Letter from James Eidingtoun to Fort St. George, October 15, 1780, TNSA MDCB Vol. 72A, 1931–32. 100 Vartavarian, “Warriors and States,” 319. 101 See Chapter 3.

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Pigot,  condemning  Stuart as a “Judas” and his fellow officers as “Hounds … taught and pamper’d for the Hunt/At Tyrants’ Beck.”102 In the years to come, the loss of America exacerbated already growing uncertainties about empire, raising the apparent stakes of such a rebellion. Yet, though grandly described as the “Madras Revolution” of 1776, the coup against Pigot clearly had little in common with the political tumult unfurling on the other side of the British Empire, which would result in independence for the American colonies. Pigot’s overthrow had bordered on treason, but had not challenged the basic framework of loyalty and subjecthood in the empire. Stratton and his fellow councilors had insisted on that point during their trial, assuring the judge that they did not have “intent to withdraw it [the government of Madras] from the Crown of Great Britain.”103 As the British public became increasingly anxious about imperial affairs, Company officers faced charges that they were a set of would-be rebels, intending to break the empire into further pieces. In response, they too would move to perform their fidelity to the Crown, presenting themselves as part of a brotherhood, a horizontal community, that – in language they lifted from the king’s own accession speech – “glor[ied] in the name of Britons.”104 This transformation was due in no small part to the officers’ success in translating the growing political identity they had forged in India into an active trans-imperial lobby that crisscrossed nimbly between the Court of Directors, Parliament, and the Crown’s ministries.

102 Anonymous, An Elegy on the Much-Lamented Death of the Late George, Lord Pigot (London: J. Bew, 1778), 22, 24. 103 Stratton, An Abstract of the Trial of George Stratton, 77. 104 For the claim, see Proceedings of the Committee Chosen December 10, 1787, 3. For its use by George III, see Holger Hoock, Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850 (London: Profile Books, 2010), 24.

5

The Empire Preserved

In 1772, the year before the conquest of Thanjavur set the stage for the Madras Revolution, the prolific pamphleteer and agricultural reformer Arthur Young proclaimed in a bromide against the East India Company that “[t]rade and the sword ought not to be managed by the same people.”1 What Young presented as a self-evident truth was in fact a relatively new idea. From its inception, the East India Company had never been intended simply as a profit-making venture. In imbuing the Company with its own military privileges, the English state sought to limit the demands on its own thinly stretched resources. Company officials in turn were eager to make use of those privileges: As the Bengal Council wrote in 1703, “nothing but a sword in one hand & money in the other will do much with the Moors.”2 Young’s critique of the Company was thus a rejection of the early modern patchwork of privatized force and decentralized power in favor of a new vision of empire, characterized by stronger state control. “Barter and exchange is the business of merchants …,” he went on, “and if they were oppressed, it would, I should apprehend, be as much in the power of the king of Great Britain to revenge their ills, as in that of a company.”3 Young was not alone in calling for imperial reform. Britain’s sprawling wars of the second half of the eighteenth century had placed new pressures upon its decentralized colonial networks, while simultaneously

Material in this chapter previously appeared in Christina Welsch, “Our Brother Officers in India: The Military Lobby in Imperial Politics of the 1780s” in Redcoats to Tommies: The Experience of the British Soldier from the Eighteenth Century, Kevin Linch and Matthew Lord, ed. (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2021), 149–168. I am grateful to the publishers for their permission to incorporate that material here. Arthur Young, Political Essays Concerning the Present State of the British Empire: Particularly Respecting: I. Natural Advantages and Disadvantages, II. Constitution, III. Agriculture, IV. Manufactures, V. The Colonies, and VI. Commerce (W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1772), 518. 2 Quoted in Stern, The Company-State, 198. 3 Young, Political Essays Concerning the Present State of the British Empire, 518. 1

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giving the state new resources with which to extend its reach. The Seven Years War, which brought huge territorial gains in Canada, the Caribbean, and India, galvanized this process, prompting both British Parliament and the Crown to assert new powers over their colonies. Famously, those new demands would lead to revolt in Britain’s North American colonies. They would also transform the relationship between the Company and the British state, but in the opposite direction, bringing the corporation increasingly under governmental oversight.4 The first major attempt at such a reform was introduced in Chapter 4: the Regulating Act of 1773, which established the Bengal Presidency as the Supreme Government in India. Though this bill left much unresolved about colonial policy, it affirmed that Parliament had the authority to intervene in the Company’s internal organization.5 It was not until 1784 under William Pitt the Younger’s first administration that the next substantive intervention came into law: the India Act. That law established a Board of Control that could overrule the Court of Directors in political and strategic concerns.6 Though the legislation left the Company’s chartered authority nominally intact, it was a major blow to its autonomy. Yet, despite this overall reduction of the Company’s independent power, the aspect of the corporation’s existence that had seemed most befuddling to Young – its military – remained strikingly unaffected by these changes. This was a subject of considerable frustration for Henry Dundas, who controlled colonial policy in Pitt’s government. In 1784, Dundas wrote, “I cannot conceive of anything more preposterous than that the East India Company should be holding in their hands a large European Army, exclusive of the Crown, to be recruited from the subjects of this Country.”7 Pitt agreed and sought ways to bring about “consolidation,” the merger of the Company’s army with the British Army proper.8 Charles Cornwallis sought in the 1790s during his time as

4 For more on these divergent developments, see Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires. 5 Vaughn, The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III, 216. 6 The classic history of these debates is Lucy Stuart Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). For how the Company fit into British elite politics, see Vaughn, The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III. For the Company in British society more broadly, see Bowen, The Business of Empire. 7 Letter from Dundas to Lord Sydney, November 2, 1784, India, Letters Relating to …, 155v, TNA PRO 30/8/361. 8 T. C. Hansard, ed., The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, vol. 27, The Parliamentary Debates (London: T. C. Hansard, 1816), 93.

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governor-general to make these reforms a reality.9 His proposals electrified the Company’s white officers, pushing them ultimately into a state of outright mutiny. The protests proved most virulent in Bengal, but radical demonstrations against Cornwallis’s plans occurred across all three presidencies. In the face of the revolt, Cornwallis and the Board of Control balked, compromising instead on a much less robust series of reforms that maintained the Company’s military autonomy and seemed to many officers a vindication of the rebellion. The failure of “consolidation” offers important insights into how the Company’s officers ultimately gained substantial influence over colonial policy. Calls for the dissolution of the Company’s military autonomy in and of themselves reveal mounting social disapproval of its officers, especially in comparison to the British Army proper. At the same time, officers’ efforts to oppose these reforms and other proposals that seemed to tilt in favor of their royal counterparts revealed a political network of startling breadth, through which officers could connect with each other across the Company’s settlements to London and elsewhere in the empire. Via mass petitions, pamphleteering, and full-fledged lobbying committees, officers adopted a collective, but multifarious identity, moving fluidly within their roles as military professionals, as members of a chartered corporation, and as a sort of colonial elite, banded together against a centralizing metropole. These campaigns allowed officers to position themselves as guarantors of national honor, security, and stability. Though they would not entirely silence their critics, the officers’ lobby proved sufficiently successful not just in staving off consolidation but in enhancing their status relative to the British Army.10 Thus, in a period in which many of the Company’s civil authorities saw their power increasingly constrained by the British state, its military officers would emerge newly emboldened in the colonial project. 5.1

“Trouble and Ill-Conveniences Inconceivable”

At the center of the debates over consolidation was the relationship between the armies of the East India Company and those of the British Crown, both of which were undergoing unprecedented growth. Though the Company’s charters had been designed initially to obviate the need for a royal military presence in the Indian Ocean, the two forces had never been entirely isolated from each other. Individual officers might

9 Charles Cornwallis, Plan for Military Arrangements, 1794, 501–579, BL IOR/H/85. 10 See Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reform, 1783–1798, chaps. 5–7.

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move back and forth between the two services during their career: Richard Keigwin, for instance, started out as an officer in the royal navy, only to later transfer into the East India Company’s nascent corps. After his mutiny, discussed in Chapter 4, he joined the navy once again.11 Well into the mid-eighteenth century, many officers looked to the Company for advancement when their careers in the royal army stalled. (Until the late nineteenth century, officers generally purchased each rank in the British Army. There were some important exceptions, as in battlefield promotion, but a lack of capital or patronage frustrated many officers’ careers.)12 Stringer Lawrence, for instance, only took up a Company commission after he found himself stymied in his rise in the British Army proper.13 By the time Lawrence arrived in India, though, the relationship between Company and Crown forces had begun to develop new fissures. With the War of Austrian Succession, a global conflict for the British, the two armies came into contact with each other in more formal ways. Starting in the 1740s, cadres of royal troops – naturally commanded by royal officers – were sent to India to reinforce the Company’s defenses or even to direct its military policies. One of the first of these expeditions comprised several independent companies of Scottish Highlanders, who were sent to the Coromandel Coast in 1748 under the command of Admiral Edward Boscawen.14 It was a dire period for the Madras Presidency, just after the French captured the city of Madras itself. Even in the face of catastrophe, though, Company agents were suspicious of the royal reinforcements. One lieutenant in the expedition, Alexander Campbell, complained bitterly in a letter home about this treatment, especially his exclusion from Company agents’ rampant profiteering. He begged his father to “use your endeavours to get me into a Marching Regiment if possible, for I’d almost as soon live in Hell as in India.”15 Campbell’s despondent letters hint at a growing source of tension in the Company’s settlements. Where did royal officers, who held a commission only in the king’s forces, fit into the hierarchy of command in India? In 1754, the issue became more urgent when the first full royal

Strachey, Keigwin’s Rebellion, 29–30, 153–54. 12 For more on the purchase system, see Hew Strachan, The Politics of the British Army (New York: Clarendon Press, 1997), 20–25. 13 Biddulph, Stringer Lawrence, the Father of the Indian Army, 18. 14 Fortescue, A History of the British Army: First Part—To the Close of the Seven Years’ War, II: 189–90. 15 Alexander Campbell to John Campbell of Barcaldine, October 12, 1748, and October 19, 1748, NRS GD87/1/34. 11

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regiment – the 39th Foot – was sent to India under the command of John Adlercron.16 The Madras Government angrily protested the appointment with a self-fulfilling prophecy that Adlercron’s arrival would bring “Trouble and Ill-conveniences inconceivable.”17 It seems unlikely that even the most gregarious commander could have won over officials in Madras, but Adlercron had no interest in trying. His friends in fact had to advise him later not to publish his inflammatory journal of his expedition as it was likely to open him up to libel suits.18 In one particularly explosive passage, he described an encounter with Company officials that bordered on seditious: [A]s we were speaking of the Objections that the President & Council made at my having Command over their Troops equally with those of His Majesty’s, & as I alledged [sic] that nothing could be plainer than His Majesty’s Orders & Instructions to me … he [Richard Fairfield, a member of the Madras Council] replied with a Sneer, in the hearing of us, That His Majesty had no Authority in the East India Company’s Settlements: We resented this Impertinence no other way than telling him, that this Declaration of his in England might occasion his being Tried for High Treason.19

As Adlercron noted, his orders left no real ambiguity about his status in India. He was, officially, commander of all British forces in India, including those of the Company, and royal officers had further been granted “superiority of rank.” By dint of this royal order, an officer in the British Army outranked all of his Company equivalents: This meant that, while a colonel in the Madras Army stood above a royal lieutenant, he would rank below all royal colonels, regardless of their relative seniority.20 Adlercron used this to his advantage, for instance in 1755, when he

16 The history of this expedition is covered in John Roach, “The 39th Regiment of Foot and the East India Company, 1754–1757,” Bull. John Rylands Libr. Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. 41: 102–38. 17 Quoted in Gerald James Bryant, “The East India Company and Its Army, 1600– 1778” (London: University of London, 1975), 96. 18 The copy of the journal held at the British Library contains a note from John Fitzwilliam, dated 1764, in which he stifles Adlercron’s hopes of publication by noting “it is a story of an old Date, which might embark Gen. Adlercron in a Literary Controversy,” John Adlercron, Journal, ii, BL MSS Eur C348. Given public interest in the Carnatic Wars and other campaigns in India, the comment that the events were out-of-date seems more a pretext to cover concerns about content. 19 John Adlercron, “Journal of an Expedition to the East Indies Commanded by Colonel John Adlercron, Commander in Chief of the Troops of the English East India Company,” 40, NAM 8707–48, emp added. 20 This provision was part of a 1754 law, sent along with Adlercron’s voyage, which extended the Mutiny Act – the legislation that regulated the British Army – to the Company’s forces. See Raymond Callahan, “Cornwallis and the Indian Army, 1786– 1797,” Military Affairs 34, no. 3 (1970): 94.

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sent a captain to take over a detachment that was marching with Nawab Wallajah. When the Company officer complained about being replaced, Adlercron insisted that he had done so “purely from a Desire … to shew the Nabob the Esteem the English Nation bore him.”21 Superiority of rank, though, did not allow Adlercron to exercise total control over the Company’s military. In 1756, Adlercron demanded command over the “rescue” expedition being planned for Bengal, but the Madras Government refused, appointing Robert Clive instead at its head. By way of explanation, officials in Fort St. George cheekily wrote, “[W]e think it can be no derogation to your Character … to remain with us in the Command of the greatest Body of English Troops in India for the Defence of a Town of such vast importance to the English Nation as Madrass.”22 When Adlercron finally left India in 1757, disappointed in his exclusion from Clive’s victory in Bengal, the tensions between Company and royal military authority remained simmering.23 These issues resurged a generation later during the Second AngloMysore War (1779–1784). From 1767 to 1769, the first conflict between the Madras Government and Mysore had ended in disaster for the Company: Haider Ali, the ruler of Mysore, marched his army almost to Fort St. George itself. When hostilities resumed in 1779, Haider with his son and heir, Tipu Sultan, once more advanced quickly, pushing the Madras Government – already weakened by years of corruption and extraction – to the brink of collapse. Reinforcements from Bengal flooded into the presidency; a second front was opened along the Malabar Coast; and a massive expedition of six royal regiments, plus a substantial reinforcement of Hanoverian troops, were sent from Europe to prop up the teetering settlement.24 The meeting of all of these different elements of Britain’s imperial military networks, each eager to secure influence over and renown within the campaign with Mysore, added to what was already a chaotic theater of war. The climax of these disputes came almost farcically in 1783, when Eyre Coote, his health failing fast, resigned as commander of the forces in India. His successor was a familiar, already controversial figure: James

21 Madras Military Department, Diary and Consultation Book, 1755, 129. 22 Adlercron, “Journal of an Expedition,” 240, NAM 8707–48. 23 Samuel Bagshawe, Colonel Samuel Bagshawe and the Army of George II, 1713–1762, ed. Alan J. (Alan James) Guy (London: Bodley Head for the Army Records Society, 1990), 176–77. 24 For the movement of Company troops in this campaign, see Wilson, History of the Madras Army, 1882, vol. 2, chap. 10. For the British Army and its Hanoverian reinforcements, see Bryant, “The East India Company and the British Army: The Crisis at Madras in 1783”; Tzoref-Ashkenazi, German Soldiers in Colonial India.

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Stuart, the same officer who had arrested Pigot in 1776. Like Coote, Stuart held dual commissions from both Crown and Company, but his involvement in the Madras Revolution meant that Lord George Macartney, then governor of Madras, was understandably dubious of Stuart’s respect for his civil authority. When Stuart refused a series of orders from Fort St. George, Macartney rescinded his commission and thus his command over Company officers. Stuart insisted that, because Macartney had no power to vacate his royal commission, he was still commander of the king’s forces in India. By that logic, Macartney’s demotion of Stuart was basically meaningless: Stuart could use the privilege of superiority in rank to place a royal officer in virtually any garrison, circumventing Company officers in the chain of command. Furious, Macartney ordered Stuart’s arrest, treating his maneuver effectively as a coup.25 It was at this point that Macartney realized his vulnerability: Stuart’s second in command was another royal officer, John Burgoyne, who refused to acknowledge Macartney’s authority to arrest Stuart. Beneath Burgoyne were six more royal officers – all ranked as majors general and thus above any of their Company counterparts. Led by Burgoyne, each of these men agreed to support Stuart against Macartney as their legitimate commander.26 Desperate to regain control of the military establishment in the south, Macartney promoted Ross Lang, then the highest-ranking officer without a royal commission, to the rank of lieutenant general, placing him firmly above Burgoyne.27 The dubious gambit paid off: Most of the royal officers were unwilling to push the conflict into open violence and used Lang’s promotion as room to stand down. Stuart was forcibly deported to Britain, where he stewed in resentment for two years until Macartney too returned home. As soon as the governor arrived, the two men fought a duel in which Stuart, who had only one leg, had to stand with “his back to a Tree” for balance so that he could hold his weapon steady.28 In his official capacity, Macartney warned the Court of Directors that his clash with Stuart was only a harbinger of things to come.

For more on this incident, see Bryant, “The East India Company and the British Army: The Crisis at Madras in 1783.” 26 Letter from John Burgoyne to James Stuart, September 20 or 21, 1783, 271, NLS JSP MS 8332. 27 John Burgoyne, Dispatch to His Majesty’s Secretary at War, no date, 21, NLS JSP MS 8333. 28 Quoted in “The Following Authentic Account of the Duel Fought Near Kensington on Thursday Last the 8th Instant,” ff. 41–42. NLS JSP MS 8439. Both men were injured in the duel, but, astonishingly, demanded a rematch. They only gave up the conflict when George III himself intervened. See His Majesty’s Message delivered by Lord Sydney to Maj. Gen. Stuart, June 28, 1786, on page 48 of the same collection. 25

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To prevent future disputes, he recommended that “as long as the Affairs of India are administered by a Company, the Army ought to be entirely a Company’s Army and to all intents and purposes under one and the same regulation.”29 In fact, Macartney’s advice arrived in Britain at a moment when the state was pursuing the opposite path, expanding the royal presence in India at the expense of the Company’s military authority. One of the first acts of the newly created Board of Control was to announce that four new royal regiments would be stationed permanently in India.30 Rumors of such a move had begun to circulate in India as the Second AngloMysore War drew to a close – to the outrage of Company officers. As the crisis between Stuart and Macartney demonstrated, an influx of royal officers, endowed with superiority of rank, would lead to Company officers being excluded from command posts and other valuable positions. In all three presidencies, officers demanded that the British state grant them “equality of rank,” removing “the painful pressure of an ignominious supercession, which wounds our honour and extinguishes emulation.”31 Such appeals, though, required the officers to make their case to a broader British public, one that was increasingly engaged in Indian affairs and increasingly dubious about the Company’s officer corps and whether, in fact, they had any honor to wound. 5.2

“Golden Dreams of Eastern Magnificence”

Nowhere was the controversial position of Company officers with the British public made clearer than in an anonymous print entitled “The Unhappy Contrast,” which circulated through London in 1791 (Figure 5). The image offers a glimpse into how the Company’s British officers were perceived by their harshest critics, juxtaposing one such individual against his counterpart in the British Army proper. The royal officer is emaciated, missing both an arm and a leg, with nothing to show for his service but a “half pay” subsistence and droopy handkerchief labeled “gain.” Nevertheless, he is backed by institutions of patriotic pride: a Blue Ensign with its Union Jack, the King’s Bench, and even a cannon simply labeled “honor.” To his right stands the Company officer, depicted as literally bursting from his uniform, surrounded by a massive Quoted in Bryant, “The East India Company and the British Army: The Crisis at Madras in 1783,” 26. 30 East India Company, Proceeding[s] Relative to the Sending of Four of His Majesty’s Regiments to India, with Appendix (London, 1788), 2–3. 31 East India Company, 11 (appendix). 29

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Figure 5  Anonymous, The Unhappy Contrast, Print, 1791. (C) Trustees of the British Museum.

pile of exotic goods and cash – proof, the cartoonist punned, that the officer was serving a more liquid kind of “Crown.”32 The image belongs to a wave of criticism against the Company that had been building at least since the 1770s. The anonymous creator of the image denounced “equality of rank,” insisting that the greedy men who made up the Company’s officer corps should have no claim to the nation’s formal military honors. The perception of the Company’s officers as uniquely avaricious among Britain’s military forces proved enduring. Alan J. Guy, in his classic 1985 study of British officers in this period, noted that the Company corps differed from the army proper in that it represented “a career rather than a gentlemanly avocation.”33 Hew Strachan challenged this presumed divide by undermining the stereotype of the British royal officer as an aloof and independently wealthy aristocrat: In fact, they

The Unhappy Contrast, 1791, Print, 203 mm × 363 mm, 1791, 1868,0808.6009, British Museum, www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_ details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=90216001&objectId=1462715& partId=1; M. Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, vol. 6 (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1935), 769; Smylitopoulos, “Portrait of a Nabob: Graphic Satire, Portraiture, and the Anglo-Indian in the Late Eighteenth Century,” 17–18. 33 Alan J. Guy, Oeconomy and Discipline: Officership and Administration in the British Army, 1714–63 (Dover, NH: Manchester University Press, 1985), 167. 32

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too were engaged in a career.34 Royal officers saw the promotions they purchased as investments, from which profit could be made both by emoluments within the service and by reselling the commission at the end of an officer’s career. Whether their commissions came from the Crown or the Court of Directors, officers were equally obsessive about maintaining and expanding those allowances.35 In short, in both armies, military service was a financial prospect, calculated in institutional perquisites, rewards, and battlefield prizes. What divided the two in the late eighteenth century and what underpinned the logic of “The Unhappy Contrast” was a sudden and rapid inflation of the perceived value of a Company commission, a subsequent rush on its vacancies, and a budding anxiety that Company agents’ profiteering might disrupt and imbalance the British social fabric. Prior to the eighteenth century, military service in the Company had hardly been seen as a passport to elite British society. In 1655, traveler Edward Terry had quipped that India was a place for “unruly” sons, whose families packed them off “so they might make their own Graves in the Sea, in their passage thither, or els [sic] have Graves made for them on the Indian shore, when they come there.”36 Certainly, Company agents were not shy about seeking their fortunes, and some, such as Elihu Yale and Thomas Pitt, amassed storied wealth during their careers. Their successes, though, came from their mercantile activity: As Company agents, they were granted the unique privilege to pursue “country trade” within the Indian Ocean.37 Some of the Company’s early officers eagerly participated in those same networks, but its military ranks alone were not seen as guarantors of fortune. The Carnatic Wars in the 1750s and, especially, Clive’s expedition to Bengal transformed the British social perception of the Company’s commissions. Though initially celebrated as a part of Britain’s global triumphs during the Seven Years War, the Battle of Plassey stood out sharply with Britain’s other military heroics from this period. Most 34 Strachan, The Politics of the British Army, chap. 1. 35 See, for instance, the debate over off-reckonings in Chapter 4. Compare to Guy, Oeconomy and Discipline, 144–54. 36 Edward Terry, A Voyage to East-India. Wherein Some Things Are Taken Notice of in Our Passage Thither, but Many More in Our Abode There, within that Rich and Most Spacious Empire of the Great Mogol (London: Printed by T.W. for J. Martin, and J. Allestrye, at the Bell in St. Pauls Chutch-Yard [sic], 1655), 176. 37 For some details on the value of this trade, see Søren Mentz, “English Private Trade on the Coromandel Coast, 1660–1690: Diamonds and Country Trade,” The Indian Economic & Social History Review 33, no. 2 (June 1996): 155–73; Romita Ray, “Going Global, Staying Local: Elihu Yale the Art Collector,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, 2012, 34–51.

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significantly, unlike James Wolfe who died a much-illustrated martyr’s death at the Battle of Quebec in 1759, Robert Clive had the temerity to survive. He returned to Britain after the war flush with what seemed an almost uncountable fortune, most of which had been granted as a “gift” by Mir Jafar, whom Clive had installed as nawab of Bengal. When challenged on the morality of his fortunes, Clive is famously said to have proclaimed, “when I recollect entering the Nabob’s treasury at Moorshedabad, with heaps of gold and silver to the right and left, and these crowned with jewels, by God, at this moment, do I stand astonished at my own moderation.”38 In fact, I can find no contemporary account of the speech, but Clive did offer a slightly less dramatic, if similarly arrogant defense of his wealth in front of a Select Committee convened by Parliament in 1773: On that day [after the Battle of Plassey] … being under no kind of restraint, but that of my own conscience, I might have become too rich for a subject … I have been placed in great and eminent stations, surrounded with temptations; the civil and military power were united in me; a circumstance which has never happened to any other man before that time, or since; The Committee will therefore judge whether I have been moderate or immoderate in the pursuit of riches.39

Clive’s “moderation” and the spectacle of wealth that he and other Company agents funneled back from India had two galvanizing effects on the Company’s status in British society. Immediately, the perceived potential value of a posting with the Company skyrocketed. The same year that Clive gave his testimony above, one young man bound for a cadetship in India wrote excitedly to a friend about “all my golden dreams of Eastern magnificence.”40 In fact, only a handful of the Company’s officers would amass a substantial fortune in India. The difficulty of replicating Clive’s tour through the Murshidabad treasury by trade, loot, or bribery was a source of continual disappointment. In Chapter 4, we saw how officers’ expectations of wealth shaped the crisis over Thanjavur. Demands 38 The earliest source I can find for this quote is John Malcolm’s biography of Clive, written in 1836. Malcolm attributed the language to a letter written “a few years ago” “highly respectable gentleman” to Clive’s grandson, in which the writer claimed to have remembered the defense. John Malcolm, The Life of Robert, Lord Clive: Collected from the Family Papers Communicated by the Earl of Powis., vol. 1 (London: J. Murray, 1836), 312–13. 39 Report from the Select Committee Appointed by the House of Commons, Assembled at Westminster in the [Fifth]-Sixth Session of the Thirteenth Parliament of Great Britain, to Enquire into the Nature, State and Condition, of the East India Company, and of the British Affairs in the East-Indies (London: Printed for T. Evans and W. Davis, 1773), 26. 40 [Philip Stanhope], Genuine Memoirs of ASIATICUS in a Series of Letters to a Friend during Five Years Residence in Different Parts of India (London: G. Kearsley, 1784), 1.

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for increased pay were pervasive within the Company’s settlements, and officers frequently complained that their wages forced them to live in ways “inconsistent” with their desired social status.41 Such demands were not just the result of inflated hopes. The rise in the perceived value of Company postings had also made its officer ranks more competitive, making cadetships hotly contested prizes within Britain’s elite patronage networks such that arriving cadets came from higher class backgrounds and brought with them higher expectations.42 Though its commissions would never rise to the level of exclusivity of those of the most prestigious British Army postings, the Company’s officer corps became an aspirational body – not a consolation prize or an exile. Those who were not inspired by Clive’s descriptions of Bengal to seek their own “golden dreams” were unlikely to be reassured by his claims of “moderation.” Men who returned to Britain flush with wealth were pilloried as “nabobs,” an anglicized distortion of nawab that reflected burgeoning xenophobia around the British Empire. Embedded in this jibe was the suggestion that nabobs had not just acted immorally in acquiring their fortunes; they had acted like Indians, coming to embody the vices of despotism, luxury, and avarice with which the Orient was associated in the British imagination. This fear was perhaps nowhere more clearly articulated than in Samuel Foote’s satirical play, The Nabob (1772), in which Lady Oldham, the beleaguered bastion of British upper-class traditions, bemoaned, “With the wealth of the East, we have too imported the worst of its vices.”43 Efforts by returning nabobs to translate their fortunes into social status further sharpened anxieties. Though there were never more than a dozen such figures able to catapult themselves into Parliament or other politically influential positions, opponents of the Company described nabobs as a national contagion.44 The “unhappy contrast” caricature captured these anxieties and framed them in an explicitly military context. By the 1780s, issues of imperial vice took on added stakes with the outbreak of war in the American colonies. Some of the Company’s critics argued that officers were a potential source of rebellion themselves, ready to plunge the other side of the empire into crisis. After all, the coup

41 42 43 44

Minutes of August 29, 1776, TNSA MDCB Vol. 56B, 900–1. Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reform, 1783–1798, 17. Foote, The Nabob, 13. Lawson, “Our Execrable Banditti,” 225. Tillman Nechtman has argued that similar fears of contagion can be traced in an economic context. See “A Jewel in the Crown? Indian Wealth in Domestic Britain in the Late Eighteenth Century,” EighteenthCentury Studies 41, no. 1 (2007): 71–86.

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against Pigot in 1776 had followed the Declaration of Independence by only a matter of weeks. In the wake of defeat in America, many in Britain worried – as one of Dundas’s correspondents put it in 1785 – that “the fall of your eastern Empire will very speedily follow that of America.”45 In practice, the most explicit references to the possibility that Company officers might secede came paradoxically from the Company’s own supporters. By the late 1780s, many British elites blamed the disaster in America on governmental overreach, especially under Lord North’s ministry.46 Opponents of legislative oversight for the Company threatened that such reforms would have the same effect on India. In 1787, for instance, William Fullarton, erstwhile commander of the Madras Army, described the Company’s British officers as “the links of the chain … by which India is bound to Britain” and warned “as we owe an empire to their exertions, so we may lose it by their discontents.”47 That the Company’s officers in particular were identified as a potential source of such unrest reflects the unique position they held in colonial society at the time. In America, revolution was the work of the white colonial elite. In India, the comparable settler population remained low – carefully restricted by Company officials – but the two thousand, socially mobile, commissioned European officers in its armies offered an analogue of a potential political class. In their accelerating campaigns against royal officers’ superiority in rank, Company officers at times flirted with revolutionary rhetoric, but always with plausible deniability. One anonymous contributor to the Calcutta Gazette in 1785 wrote to his fellow officers, “Some clever fellows among you will say … Let us speak like the Americans and the Irish, and with spirit.”48 Another, writing under the name “Anti-Billious,” offered as doggerel: Tho’ then the Bostonians made such a fuss, Their example ought not to be followed by us. But I wish that a band of good Patriot-wallahs … Would stand forth with sagacious discrimination … And rouse all the rage of their rough indignation.49

45 Letter from William Bush to Richard Burke, January 7, 1785, 61v, TNA PRO 30/8/361. 46 Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 5–9. 47 Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 27:106. 48 Seton-Karr, Selections from Calcutta Gazettes, 104. 49 Seton-Karr, 93.

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Each claim thus raised the specter of revolt, while simultaneously assuring the reader that no such sentiments could possibly be entertained among the Company’s officers. The contradiction pointed to the central problem that officers faced in their disputes with royal officers. The conflict itself could be seen to confirm the view that these officers were a sap to national honor and imperial security. To resolve the paradox, some of the most politically active Company officers would situate themselves within that narrative of revolution in a very different way – not as rebels against the empire but as guardians protecting it. 5.3

By the Same Loyalty and in the Same Cause

In 1784, more than one hundred officers in the Madras Army signed a joint petition addressed to the Crown to make their case for “equality of rank.” The use of petitions as a mechanism of appeal is evidence, as we will see, that officers did increasingly consider themselves to be a distinct political body. That distinctiveness did not stop the petitioners from claiming common cause with their royal counterparts: That Your Petitioners are British Subjects, actuated by the same Loyalty towards Your Majesty's Person and Kingdoms, fighting in the same Cause, and Governed by the same Military Laws with your Majesty's Officers in India, in a Service which your Petitioners humbly conceive to have been conducive to the Honor and Success of Your Majesty's Arms, and to the Interests of the Nation at large as well as those of the Company in particular.50

The language turned the Second Anglo-Mysore War into a broader imperial effort. Throughout that war, the Company’s forces had fought alongside the six royal regiments sent to India, at the same time that other regiments were fighting in America. The petition framed the Company’s wars not as quests for plunder – as, for instance, was the prevailing view of the conquest of Thanjavur – but as crucial defenses of national interest. As Company officers expanded on this claim in other contexts, the Second Anglo-Mysore War became key to rehabilitating officers’ public image. The Company was involved in two major conflicts that coincided, roughly, with the American Revolution: the Second Anglo-Mysore War (1779–1784) and the First Anglo-Maratha War (1775–1783). More than a chronological coincidence, officers pushing for equality of rank insisted that these intersections placed these wars as branches of a single Quotes from Petition to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty (1784), 244–45, BL Add MS 22432. 50

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contest over the fate of the British Empire. Indeed, Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan, the rulers of Mysore, had actively courted an alliance with the French: As one of Warren Hastings’s agents in the East India House put it in 1795, “Soon after the French entered into the war, as the allies of America, it was discovered that a Treaty had been made between them and Hyder Ally, which had for its object, the expulsion of the English from Indostan; and to this Treaty, every one of the Country powers had acceded.”51 In practice, Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan were disappointed by the results of the alliance: When a French expedition under Marquis de Bussy finally arrived, it did little to change the course of the war.52 It was also not lost on Company officers that the outcome of the war in India was much more positive for Britain than its decisive defeat in America.53 John Scott, formerly an officer in the Bengal Army who in 1787 held a seat in Parliament, spoke of this only elliptically, noting “[w]e have jointly fought the battles of our country in India; and we have preserved an empire to Great Britain.”54 Left unstated was the comparison: We preserved the empire, where royal officers, at least those in America, had not. Rather than highlighting this point, though, officers’ depictions of the First Anglo-Maratha War and the Second Anglo-Mysore War tended to focus on struggle. Unlike the Company’s earlier battles at Plassey or in Thanjavur that had captured the British public’s imagination as quick victories and quicker paydays, both these conflicts represented serious setbacks to British ambition, nearly leading to the collapse of Company authority in Bombay and Madras, respectively.55 Of the two wars, the conflict with Mysore was the most dramatic and the most symbolically significant. Haider Ali had already bested the Company in 1767, and his forces secured substantial advantages early in the second conflict. Tipu Sultan, Haider’s son and heir, soundly defeated a considerable portion

51 William Woodfall, The Debate at the East India House, on Friday, the 29th of May, 1795. On the Several Motions Brought Forward by Mr. Alderman Lushington (London: printed by the reporter, and sold by J. Debrett; Murray, and Co. B. and J. White, and T. Chapman; R. Faulder; Egerton, 1795), 39. 52 Mohibbul Hasan, “The French in the Second Anglo-Mysore War,” in Confronting Colonialism: Resistance and Modernization under Haidar Ali & Tipu Sultan, ed. Irfan Habib (London: Anthem Press, 2002), 38–44. 53 For an operational overview of the war, see Bryant, The Emergence of British Power in India, chap. 9. 54 Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 27:141. 55 For the First Anglo-Maratha War, see M. R Kantak, The First Anglo-Maratha War, 1774–1783: A Military Study of Major Battles (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1993). For the Second Anglo-Mysore War, see Bryant, The Emergence of British Power in India, chap. 9.

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of the Madras Army at the Battle of Pollilur in 1780, where he took several hundred soldiers, sepoys, and officers as prisoners of war.56 By the end of the century, their captivity would become a cause célèbre. Britons devoured memoirs about imprisonment in Mysore: Stories of privation and mistreatment established Haider and Tipu as the epitomes of cruel, capricious Oriental despots against whom the Company’s expansion could be presented as a clear good. In the 1780s, when the outcome of that conflict remained in doubt, tales of imprisonment were less popular – uncomfortable evidence, as Linda Colley has argued, of Britain’s apparent fragility on the global stage.57 For the Company’s officers, beset by claims of nabobery, this fragility was the point. Although officers were quick to recount feats of heroism during the two conflicts, tales of imprisonment, defeat, and loss were arguably more important, turning warfare in India from profiteering into sacrifice.58 William Fullarton spoke in favor of granting the officers “equality of rank” while emphasizing the corps’ selflessness when facing famine during the war: The junior officers had to sell their wearing apparel, nay, the very buckles out of their shoes, to procure means of subsistence; the land officers, those who had command of sepoy corps, and possessed either money or credit, advanced freely for the relief of their brother officers and starving sepoys … from their own funds, to purchase bullocks, stores, and other articles without which the army could not have moved.59

In fact, the officers themselves, as well as the Company’s civil administrators, bore considerable blame for this privation. Embezzlement, inefficiencies, and corruption plagued the Madras Government’s supply lines, which quickly fell into chaos with the start of the war.60 These realities were studiously ignored by those demanding equality of rank. Instead, the miseries they produced were proof of officers’ fidelity. John Scott made this case most explicitly: “We are the loyal subjects of a gracious Sovereign … Whatever temporary hardships our officers sustained, I am sure it did not depress their ardour for the public service; One estimate suggested that 200–300 European soldiers and officers and 1,000 sepoys and Indian officers were captured in the defeat. Hector Munro, Minute Concerning the Loss of Troops with Colonel Baillie, October 9, 1780, 1695, TNSA MDCB Vol. 71C. 57 Colley, Captives, chap. 9. 58 One of the most detailed celebrations of Company officers’ heroics in the war is the speech given by Major John Scott in Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 27:137–43. 59 Hansard, 27:104–5. 60 G. J. Bryant, “British Logistics and the Conduct of the Carnatic Wars,” War in History 11, no. 3 (July 1, 2004): 298–304. 56

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they looked forward with confidence for that relief which is now about to be afforded them.”61 It is significant that this claim of shared suffering was never extended to the officers’ Indian counterparts – the subedars and jemadars of the commissioned Indian officer corps. Sepoys and camp-followers, unsurprisingly, were far more severely impacted by famine during the war, and they made up the bulk of those taken prisoner by the forces of Mysore. James Stuart even reported in late 1782 that his sepoys were dropping in their ranks from hunger: “the men are so debilitated for want of sufficient nourishment, that it has been reported to me as the chief cause of the very great sickness prevailing among them.”62 Yet, as Fullarton’s speech quoted above suggests, sepoys’ demands for rations, for pay, and for recompense existed at a different level than did those of the Company officers and their royal counterparts. These hardships were described as further impediments against which white officers had struggled. No suggestion was ever made that the Indian officer corps would have any prestige or title relative to the British Army. On the contrary, European officers’ demands for more privileges tended to erode the authority of Indian officers, as more and more of the latter’s powers were transferred to the European officer corps.63 Sepoys and Indian officers, excluded from any foothold into Britain’s elite military hierarchies, instead were described as anomalies on which the Company’s European officers would base their claims for continued autonomy. In a petition sent by officers in Bengal to the Court of Directors in 1783, made in collaboration with the appeal sent from Madras cited above, officers went so far as to claim that they were more effective in India than were their royal counterparts: “[Y]our officers are and must be equal to His Majesty’s officers, and in the field, where we solicit an equality, their superiors.”64 Detailing their supposed advantages, the officers in Bengal explained that effective command in India required knowledge of the region’s idiosyncrasies and, especially, of the difficulties of mobilizing sepoy regiments. Though the British Army was at this point a fully global institution, operating in a host of different theaters and contexts (including India!), Company officers presented the sepoy army as uniquely incomprehensible to any outsider. In their petition to Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 27:141. 62 James Stuart, Minute of the General, December 14, 1782, 19–20, NLS JSP MS.8441. 63 The post of native commandant, for instance, was entirely abolished in Madras in 1785. See John Dalling, Proposal for a New Arrangement of the Army and Native Cavalry, July 25, 1785, TNSA MDCB Vol. 108B, 2058. This is discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. 64 East India Company, Proceedings, 1788, 11, emp added (appendix). 61

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the Crown, officers in Madras wrote: “as the armies of the Company are chiefly composed of natives of various countries and sects essentially differing from each other in religion, language, and manners, the study of these seems at least as necessary to unite the natives in action as the knowledge of military discipline.”65 In March 1788, officers secured their aim: Pitt and Dundas agreed to grant officers equality of rank.66 Pitt in fact saw this concession as a logical step toward consolidation. Surely merging the Company’s forces with the Crown’s could only be made easier by leveling the hierarchies between the two. As early as 1785, Sir George Yonge, secretary at war, had agreed with Dundas that “[i]t is certainly most desirable that all the European force in India should be on the same footing … that the late Jealousies between them may be no longer kept alive, nor ever renewed.”67 In fact, the campaign for equality of rank would prove an obstacle to that consolidation. The effective promotion gave officers an enhanced bargaining position in political debates. More significantly, the campaigns for equality of rank themselves had created mechanisms of protest and political engagement through which the officers could funnel later efforts. By the end of the century, those protests would expand into a trans-imperial lobbying network that established the Company’s officer corps as a political body, distinct both from the Company itself and from their fellow officers in the British Army proper. 5.4

A Brotherhood of Officers

The first collective petition produced by Company officers on the subject of equality of rank seems to have been written in December 1782, by a few dozen Company officers in Calcutta who had formed a committee for that purpose. The resulting petition, addressed to the king, emphasized the lengthy experience that the Company’s corps had acquired and the praise they had won in “this important Crisis,” a reference to the war with Mysore still unfurling to the south.68 The form and address 65 Petition to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty (1784), 244–45, BL Add MS 22432. 66 In fact, the concession was actually a bit more complicated. In a somewhat technical process, Company officers were granted a “local” royal commission – valid only in India – dated from 1783. This meant that any royal officers commissioned or promoted after that date would rank below Company officers, but those already on the muster rolls still ranked above their Company counterparts. Proceedings of the Committee Chosen December 10, 1787, 16–19. 67 Copy of George Younge’s [sic] Observations on Mr. Dundas’s Papers, September 21, 1785, Records of Army Accounts from 1786, 31v-32r, TNA PRO/30/8/360. 68 Copies of Papers Relating to Petitions for the Redress of Grievances of East India Company Army Officers, 6v, Kirkpatrick Papers, BL MSS Eur F229/23.

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that the committee adopted in this “humble petition” placed it within a genre that, as Hannah Weiss Muller has shown, proliferated across the British Empire and beyond. Throughout the eighteenth century, such memorials were crucial tools through which colonial subjects drawn into the British imperial aegis negotiated their political and social status within the empire. Petitions sent directly to the Crown allowed groups to bypass the complexities of localized governance and debates about belonging. Instead, such documents became spaces in which petitioners’ fealty to the Crown could be directly demonstrated – and simultaneously turned into a demand.69 Part of the reason for the popularity of petitions in this period is that the genre was a uniquely flexible one, which allowed new groups to make new kinds of claims on the state. In some cases, petitions acted as a bridge through which populations newly brought into the empire could assert their identities, often through a model of appeal that had ready analogues in other political systems and thus a more accessible mechanism than the idiosyncrasies of English common law. French Catholics in Canada and the Caribbean, who found themselves abruptly under British rule after the Seven Years War, had long penned requêtes to the French king.70 In India, political elites like Nawab Wallajah found in petitions an echo of the ‘arzdashtan and ‘arzi that were widely used in Persianate courts. In these cases, memorials thus allowed existing political identities to be transplanted to a British context.71 In other circumstances, petitions were equally important as tools through which new identities could be constructed. Throughout colonial India, for instance, communities of mixed-race Eurasians submitted memorials both to the Court of Directors and to the Crown to assert belonging within a colonial elite increasingly segregated on racial lines.72 The officers’ 1782 petition was likewise a claim of collective identity: Its authors styled the memorial as a consensus sent by “the Military Officers in the Service of the united Company of Merchants trading to the East Indies.”73 No mere rhetorical flourish, the committee in fact

Muller, Subjects and Sovereign. 70 Hannah Weiss Muller, “From Requête to Petition: Petitioning the Monarch between Empires,” The Historical Journal 60, no. 3 (2017): 659–86. 71 Robert Travers, “Indian Petitioning and Colonial State-Formation in EighteenthCentury Bengal,” Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (January 2019): 89–122. 72 Durba Ghosh, “Who Counts as ‘Native?’: Gender, Race, and Subjectivity in Colonial India,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 6, no. 3 (2005). 73 Copies of Papers Relating to the Petitions for the Redress of Grievances …, BL MSS Eur F228/23, 5r, emphasis added. 69

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circulated copies of the document to garrisons across Bengal and corresponded with their counterparts in Madras before submitting it to the king.74 Copies also circulated and collected signatures among officers in Bombay, but there seems to have been less back-and-forth between Bengal and Bombay on the subject.75 This reflects the broader relationship between the presidencies: Bengal, established as the Company’s central hub in 1773, held pride of place in political affairs, but Madras, especially in the midst of the Second Anglo-Mysore War, remained an active site for the Company’s military development in this period. By early 1784, officers had convened their own committees in all three presidencies, using the 1782 petition as a template to produce their own demands for equality of rank. The existence of these documents thus made two claims: First, that officers could bypass their chain of command to appeal directly to the Directors and to the Crown and, second, that they could do so as a collective corps of – as the committee in Calcutta put it – “brother officers.”76 The memorials represented the first step in a process of politicization. Along with the petitions sent in 1783 and 1784, the committee urged officers “to solicit individually your Friends in Europe to second a measure” allowing for equality of rank, thus joining the act of petitioning to a lobbying campaign.77 To coordinate these efforts, the committee in India urged officers then on leave or retired in Britain to form a committee of their own. In December 1787, Andrew Wilson Hearsey did exactly that, convening the meeting to select this new body. A captain in the Bengal Army, Hearsey had access to the Company’s most prestigious patronage networks, but he had served extensively on expedition in Madras during his career. He could thus claim direct involvement in the Second AngloMysore War.78 His fellow committee members were drawn from all three presidencies, though Bengal again dominated.79 On December 12, 1787, the committee made its first appeal to the Court of Directors, asking why Copies of Papers …, 15–18 (for garrisons in Bengal), 42 (for Madras). 75 Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reform, 1783–1798, 133–37. 76 Copies of Papers Relating to the Petitions for the Redress of Grievances …, BL MSS Eur F228/23, 13r. 77 Copies of Papers …, 15v. 78 Andrew Wilson Hearsey, Memorial of Captain Andrew Wilson Hearsey, a Captain of Infantry upon the Bengal Establishment ([London?], 1789). See also H. W. Pearse, The Hearseys: Five Generations of an Anglo-Indian Family (Edingburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1905), 1–38. 79 H. A. M. Cosby of the Madras Army was the head of the committee, followed by F. J. Christie of Bombay and William Popham, James Browne, John Scott, M. Symes, and Hearsey himself, all from Bengal. Proceedings of the Committee Chosen December 10, 1787, 4. 74

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the body had not responded to the earlier petitions. They found a ready welcome at both the East India House and from the Board of Control, and their claims to represent the Company officer corps seem to have been widely accepted.80 The committee’s ability to negotiate within multiple political contexts reveals its fluidity as a body. Insofar as the “brotherhood” of officers that the committee claimed to represent was a coherent, collective body, its identity was necessarily bound up in the Company’s institutional structures. Without its commissions, the claim of community made little sense. The committee, though, had no compunction about acting autonomously as a lobbying force outside of the Company’s governing structures. In March 1788, the committee actually bypassed the ­Directors to make a compromise with Pitt and Dundas. The Court of Directors had already voiced financial opposition to the Board of Control’s plan to send four new regiments to India: The Company would have to pay for the upkeep of the new detachments.81 Officers, though, agreed to support the proposal if Pitt’s ministry would grant them equality of rank. The Company’s officers had developed an unofficial, but highly organized infrastructure of protest, correspondence, and active political lobbying as “military men” that put them at sword’s length from the Company as a whole.82 5.5

A Military Public and an “Unmilitary” Protest

From the start, officers’ campaign for equality of rank stood outside military norms. The committee formed in Calcutta in 1782 realized this, and one of the first steps its members took as a body was to send a letter to Eyre Coote, to request that their actions not be interpreted as “disingenuity, irregularity, or disrespect.”83 The a priori defense shows the officers’ realization that their committee subverted the military chain of command. As a horizontal community of “brother Officers,” the committee was disconnected from formal hierarchies, and the petitions it produced outflanked the Company’s chain of command to appeal directly to the Crown. The success of the campaign for equality of rank only made officers more eager to expand this unofficial network: One member of Hearsey’s committee lobbied in India for “the establishment

80 81 82 83

Proceedings of the Committee Chosen December 10, 1787, 11. Proceedings of the Committee Chosen December 10, 1787, 19–25. More on this political lobby can be found in Welsch, “Our Brother Officers.” “Copies of Papers Relating to Petitions for the Redress of Grievances,” BL MSS Eur F228/23, 1.

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of a Committee of officers in London, (such should be invested with discretionary powers and full authority) to watch over the interests, advance the claims, and remonstrate against innovations injurious to the rights of their brother officers abroad.”84 In 1788, Charles Cornwallis condemned the plan and prohibited officers from signing collective petitions or organizing future lobbying committees.85 Cornwallis, though, was too late: The officers’ sense of themselves as a political community would only grow more contentious in the next decade. Officers’ protests reached their climax in the mid-1790s, when Cornwallis introduced a series of military reforms to consolidate the Company’s European officer corps within the British Army as whole. The governor-general, a close ally of Dundas and Pitt, had come to India with this transformation in mind, but it was only in 1794 that he felt he had the political capital to proceed with the plan.86 His confidence stemmed from his victory in the Third Anglo-Mysore War (1789–1792), in which Cornwallis had personally led an expedition against Tipu’s capital at Srirangapatna. There, he negotiated the terms of peace from a position of considerable advantage and compelled Tipu to hand over two of his sons as hostages for good behavior: Abdul Khaliq, aged ten, and Muiz udDin, aged eight.87 This formalized kidnapping was widely celebrated in Britain as a literal extension of imperial paternal benevolence, and images of Cornwallis taking custody of the young boys proliferated in every medium. It was almost too perfect as a symbol of imperial resilience: Cornwallis, infamous as the man who had surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown in 1781, now stood victorious on another imperial battlefield.88 In this new role, Cornwallis was rarely alone: Most paintings and prints depicted him flanked by a host of other officers, sporting an array of uniforms from the Company and Crown’s armies. Cornwallis was eager to turn this visual metaphor into an institutional reality.

Authentic Copies of the Proceedings and Resolutions of the Officers in the East-India Company’s Service in Bengal, Madras, and Bombay; on Taking into Consideration the Arrangement of Their Rank with His Majesty’s Officers, Which Was Settled in the Month of April, 1788 (London: J. Debrett, 1789), 18. 85 Authentic Copies of the Proceedings and Resolutions of the Officers, 35–36. 86 Charles Cornwallis, “Establishment of the Army in India,” April 1788, ff. 63–66, TNA PRO 30/8/360 and Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reform, 1783–98, chap. 5. 87 For more on the hostage-taking, see Sean Willcock, “A Neutered Beast? Representations of the Sons of Tipu Sultan – ‘The Tiger of Mysore’ – as Hostages in the 1790s,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 36, no. 1 (March 1, 2013): 121–47. 88 P. J Marshall, “Cornwallis Triumphant: War in India and the British Public in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Trade and Conquest: Studies on the Rise of British Dominance in India (Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1993), 57–74. 84

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Company officers, jealous of their own systems of patronage and perquisite, remained hotly opposed to any consolidation, certain that it would lead to a loss of opportunity in competition with better-resourced royal officers. As soon as Cornwallis’s plan was made public, officers in London revived their old lobbying committee.89 In India, officers made use of the growing number of English-language printing presses to circulate their discontent. In Calcutta, officers found an ally in William Duane, a radical printer who had first come to India as a low-ranking officer in the Bengal Army. His weekly paper, The World, published several angry letters supporting the corps against Cornwallis.90 In Madras, Samuel August Humphreys, editor of an unlicensed paper called The Indian Herald, similarly printed what was later denounced as “democratical opinions” meant to fan unrest among white soldiers and officers.91 The prominence of papers supporting officers’ protests may have been less motivated by politics than economics. The relatively small Anglophone communities in the Company’s settlements meant that these newspapers were competing for a tiny audience: Duane’s World at its peak had some three hundred subscribers.92 The two thousand officers then on the Company’s rolls were perhaps too large a potential readership to ignore. These papers were supplemented by a trickle of pamphlets published by the officers themselves. In Calcutta, officers in the Bengal Army acquired a printing press of their own, through which they produced several tracts submitted by officers’ committees both in local garrisons and from Madras.93 The most significant of these pamphlets was an elaborately printed manifesto entitled The Queries Answered, written as a response to a series of questions Cornwallis had posed about his reforms.

H. A. M. Cosby and et. al., Proceedings of the Representative Committee Elected by the Officers of the Establishments of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay, for the Purpose of Obtaining a REDRESS of the GRIEVANCES Peculiar to the Military Service of the East India Company (London, 1794), BL IOR/L/Mil/17/2/462. 90 Nigel Little, Transoceanic Radical: William Duane: National Identity and Empire, 1760– 1835 (Routledge, 2015), 85–90; John Shore, The Private Record of an Indian GovernorGeneralship: The Correspondence of Sir John Shore, Governor-General, with Henry Dundas, President of the Board of Control, 1793–1798, ed. Holden Furber (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), 63. 91 Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reform, 1783–1798, 159. Callahan misidentifies the paper as The Madras News. For more on Humphreys, see the Case of Samuel August Humphreys, Editor of the India Herald (1794–1795), ff. 53–157, Restrictions on the Press in India, BL IOR/H/539. 92 Little, Transoceanic Radical, 51. 93 Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reform, 1783–1798, 133–34; Letter from J. Stuart to Dundas, July 25, 1794, 594v, Dundas Papers, NRS GD51/3/343. 89

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Cornwallis had intended that his questions would form part of an internal dialogue within the military establishment and its chain of command. The printing press allowed officers in Calcutta to spread their grievances more widely and even to send them to Britain to win public support. The Queries Answered began by trumpeting the officer corps as a political body with a distinct set of rights – rights that Cornwallis had threatened both by his proposal for consolidation and by his earlier prohibitions against collective petitions: That members of a community, individually or collectively, cannot be denied the right, not only to petition for the concession of just claims and protest against apprehended injury, but to appeal to their fellow subjects for countenance and support, the immutable dictates of natural equity loudly proclaim, and the existing Laws of our Country expressly declare.94

Where Cornwallis approached the army as a rigid, professional hierarchy, the Company officers increasingly acted as a distinct community of colonial elites, deserving of its own rights and obligations. In her study of the nineteenth-century colonial society in India, Elizabeth Kolsky complicated the traditional binary of colonizer and colonized subject by exploring the “third face of colonialism:” that belonging to nonofficial Europeans who shaped the empire in India without a formal place in the Company’s hierarchies, such as planters, overseers, and merchants. Throughout its existence, the Company worked determinedly to limit this population, seeing white settlers and sojourners as potentially “unruly” subjects. Such figures could challenge colonial categories and exclusions, as cross-cultural adventurers like those discussed in Chapter 3, as agents of nonstate violence, or even merely as vagabonds, whose poverty itself was seen to destabilize perceptions of white superiority.95 The Company’s white officers would seem far removed from this category of the untrammeled nonofficial European: In many stations and settlements, after all, such officers were the closest thing the colonial state had to a face. The push for consolidation threatened the platform officers had carved for themselves within Britain’s imperial hierarchies, and the subsequent protests revealed clearly that officers did not always act in ways that their official identity required. Instead, they turned their

Anon. The Queries Answered; or Observations upon “The Points, Submitted by a Personage of High Rank for the Consideration of Certain Officers of the Honorable Company’s Service Now in India” (Calcutta, 1794), 1. 95 Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, 4–8. See also the discussion of paupers in the Dutch East Indies in Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, chap. 5. 94

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official identities into a para-official public sphere – one defined and dependent on their commissions, but outside any formal control. Though officials in India and in Britain alike had enthusiastically supported officers in their campaign for equality of rank in 1787–88, the scope and intensity of officers’ protests against Cornwallis’s plans prompted considerable alarm. Cornwallis himself departed India in 1794, hoping to maneuver his reforms through Parliament and through the Court of Directors. His somewhat reluctant successor, John Shore, was left to confront the boiling wave of protest. Learning of the pamphlet The Queries Answered, Shore condemned its “Intemperance” and proclaimed that the officers “have forgotten that they hold Commissions from his Majesty at their own Sollicitation [sic], and do not sufficiently consider themselves Servants of the state.”96 Contrasted against the pamphlet’s rhetoric about the rights of “members of a community,” Shore’s disavowal of the pamphlet illuminates the widening disjuncture between how officials thought of the Company’s European officers and how those officers perceived themselves. In both Bengal and Madras, civil administrators worked to dismantle or otherwise to diminish some of the infrastructure that had emerged around the “brother officers.” Shore and his counterpart in Madras, Lord Hobart, enacted new powers of censorship over the English-language press and deported both Duane and Humphreys, the editors of the radical papers quoted above.97 When the officers’ London-based lobbying committee sought an audience with Dundas, he refused to recognize them, deeming the body “dangerous and unmilitary.”98 In 1796, officers’ discontent had reached what Shore described as “a very violent not to say treasonable nature.”99 In two up-country garrisons in the Bengal Presidency – Kanpur (Cawnpore) and Fatehgarh (Futtyghur) – officers were said to have voted in favor of “[a] Resolution to throw off all Allegiance to Government in March … and the Seizure of the Governor General and Commander in Chief, and to compell by force of arms all to join them.”100 Correspondence found within the garrison suggest that the would-be mutineers conceived the officers and the Company’s government as entirely separate bodies: They formed a “plan of a general Association of the Army,” including an “Executive Committee” of thirteen officers that would act as “the Organ of 96 97 98 99 100

Shore, The Private Record of an Indian Governor-Generalship, 53, 58. Quoted in Shore, 63. Cosby and et. al., Proceedings of the Representative Committee, 17. Shore, The Private Record of an Indian Governor-Generalship, 90. Shore, 91–92.

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Communication between the Army and the Government.”101 No similar plans were uncovered in garrisons in Madras, but officials at Fort St. George were nevertheless convinced that their officers would support the mutineers. In both presidencies, Hobart and Shore desperately strategized for how they could check such a threat.102 When news of the budding violence reached Britain, both the Board of Control and the Court of Directors initially moved to meet the mutiny with force. Cornwallis was asked to take up the mantle of governor-general again, and Directors held a special meeting intending “to invest that noble Lord [Cornwallis] with a power to coerce the army.”103 Both in India and in Britain, though, administrators balked. Shore refused to mobilize troops against the officers and instead granted two of their demands, increasing their monthly allowances and abolishing promotion by regimental rise, a system that had disadvantaged Company officers relative to their royal counterparts.104 It was not a total victory for the corps. The influx of royal regiments that had amassed in India since the start of the Second Anglo-Mysore War was never reversed, and these detachments played a far more central part in operations and in strategic planning than Adlercron’s disappointing expedition had ever been allowed to do. Royal officers – like Cornwallis himself – had acquired dominance in positions of command, and Company officers would only rarely reach the upper echelons of the Company’s command structure after this point. However, no consolidation took place. Instead, a heavily watered-down set of reforms were sent to India, finally solidified in 1798 under the grand title, “the Company’s Military Charter.”105 At first glance, the name seems absurdly grandiose. Contextualized as a repudiation of consolidation, the minimal reforms in this “charter” reflect the Company’s European officers’ success in establishing themselves as a political lobbying force. Since the 1770s, influential actors in Britain’s imperial networks had sought to chip away at the Company’s military autonomy. Yet, though the British state had gained some oversight over the corporation, its armies survived intact – and its martial elite was further emboldened.

Shore, 152. 102 Shore, 119–20, 129; Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reform, 1783–1798, 172–76. 103 William Woodfall, Company’s Army in India: The Debate at the East India House, at a General Court, Held on Friday, the Fifth of May, 1797; For the Purpose of Considering the Instructions Proposed to Be Sent Out to India with the Marquis CORNWALLIS Respecting the Company’s ARMY (London: J. Debrett, J. Murray, E. Highley, and T. Chapman, 1797), 12. 104 Shore, The Private Record of an Indian Governor-Generalship, 100. 105 Shore, 352. 101

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With the possibilities of reforms foreclosed, Cornwallis did not return to India. Instead, he went to Ireland, where he confronted yet another rebellion: that of the United Irishmen. Though Cornwallis’s policies toward that revolt are considered noteworthy by some scholars for their relative “clemency,” the contrast between the concessions granted to the Company officers in India and the often bloody repression of rebellion in Ireland is sharp.106 In 1933, Shore’s biographer, Holden Furber, suggested that Shore had been unable to punish the mutineers in India harshly because of the precarity of the Company’s empire: India was in this age the happy hunting-ground of military adventurers of all European nationalities … had British government broken down, an intrepid European officer with a few thousand loyal sepoys at his back could have, for a brief space of time, wielded paramount authority over a considerable portion of the country.107

This explanation echoed some of the rhetoric found in officers’ petitions in the 1780s, in which they had called for increased importance on the basis that they alone could navigate the idiosyncratic nature of warfare in India.108 Such grace was not extended to the Company’s white soldiers and still less to sepoys: The efficacy of officers’ lobbying could not be separated from the elite, protected status they already occupied in British society. Raymond Callahan described the failure of Cornwallis’s reforms as a triumph of atavism, entrenching in the Company’s armies practices of corruption, un-professionalism, and inadequate command that “helped make the Mutiny [sic, the rebellions of 1857] and its own destruction possible.”109 Indeed, as we will see in the next chapters, there is indeed a legacy to be traced between the claims of “brotherhood” and influence demanded by officers first articulated in these debates and those later rebellions. However, interpreting these developments as atavistic misses the full significance of the officers’ campaigns. Preventing consolidation

106 Michael Durey, “Marquess Cornwallis and the Fate of Irish Rebel Prisoners in the Aftermath of the 1798 Rebellion,” in Revolution, Counter-Revolution, and Union : Ireland in the 1790s, ed. Jim Smyth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 128–45; Guy Beiner, “Severed Heads and Floggings: The Undermining of Oblivion in Ulster in the Aftermath of 1798,” in The Body in Pain in Irish Literature and Culture, ed. Fionnuala Dillane, Naomi McAreavey, and Emilie Pine (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016), 77–97. 107 Holden Furber, “Introduction,” in The Private Record of an Indian GovernorGeneralship: The Correspondence of Sir John Shore, Governor-General, with Henry Dundas, President of the Board of Control, 1793–1798, ed. John Shore (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), 16. 108 See above. 109 Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reform, 1783–1798, 211.

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was not simply a triumph of a status quo ante. It had required officers to create a new set of networks and a new rhetoric of belonging to rehabilitate their reputation in Britain and to establish their influence in imperial policymaking in Madras, Calcutta, and London. The success of these efforts is perhaps nowhere better seen than in the debate at the East India House about Cornwallis’s potential return as governor-general. When one Director called for Cornwallis to be explicitly empowered to use force against the mutineers, one proprietor arose amidst “[a] violent clamour” to deliver an impassioned speech: Good God, Sir! Is such to be the promised satisfaction to the army! … [to men] to whose bravery, good conduct, enterprize, and success, you owe your present exalted situation, those imperial monuments of valour, your extensive kingdoms in Asia, and those princely revenues so necessary to your very existence … In fact, to whom you owe the acquisition of a second world!110

The image of the nabob had been replaced – or at the very least joined – by a vision of officers who, as one pamphlet from the consolidation protests put it, “must ever be considered the palladium of our defence in India, and the key-stone by which our sovereignty is maintained.”111 In the latter half of the eighteenth century, the rapidly growing British state sought more centralized control in an empire previously characterized by devolved and privatized ventures. At the same time, the Company’s territories in India were coming into sharper focus for British imperial administrators and the British public alike – no longer simply as a source of trade, but as a site of expanding, often ambiguous dominion. John Adlercron’s journal of his frustrating expedition, full of angry disputes with Company officials and cryptic accusations of sedition, both reflected and fueled the state’s anxieties that the Company’s growing authority was putting it beyond state control. Within a much broader project of imperial reform – one felt in India and America alike – the Company’s military autonomy took on particular importance, rendered newly objectionable to men like Arthur Young, who maintained that “Trade and the Sword ought not be managed by the same people.”112 In subsequent decades, the Company would indeed lose many of its erstwhile privileges. After 1784, for instance, it was the Board of Control that set the strategic priorities for the Company’s territories.113 These changes were only part of drastic reforms meant to bring the Company’s 110 Woodfall, Company’s Army in India, 37. 111 Anon, “Original Papers Elucidatory of the Claims Preferred by the Officers of the Honourable Company’s Army in India. Published by Their Authority,” 21v. 112 Op Cit. 113 Bowen, The Business of Empire, 73.

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operations in line with broader British geopolitical goals. Yet, despite all of these reductions in the Company’s effective independence, its military forces – that very thing that Dundas in 1784 had deemed most “preposterous” – remained emphatically, institutionally distinct.114 That survival reflected a simultaneous set of developments, in which the Company’s European officers emerged as an independent body, one connected through horizontal claims of “brotherhood,” rather than the structural hierarchies of the Company. The officers who claimed this identity moved between their formal and informal capacities, embodying what might be called a para-official collective identity, to lobby and to influence Company policy – whether through representative committees and private newspapers or as the official arm of Company authority in its far-flung garrisons. To vindicate the demands of this community, officers’ claims ranged widely, but centered on the insistence the Company’s wars and thus their military service undeniably formed a part of national honor in Britain. The experience of defeat in the 1780s, followed by victory in the 1790s, helped to shift the British public’s perception of Company officers away from earlier fears of corruption and greed toward one more in keeping with contemporary ideas of martial virtue. Within a decade, though, those claims had to contend with a military landscape that was once again undergoing drastic change. Key rivalries and “threats” on which officers had built their claims of national honor faded, were defeated, or were otherwise transformed. Once again, imperial administrators looked for opportunities to scale back the influence officers had seized for themselves. Once again, though, their efforts would fail as officers honed their understanding of their authority to fit a new context, redefining their privilege, perquisites, and power not as recompense for battlefield endurance, but as necessities to maintain order in the day-to-day operations of the Company’s solidifying colonial state.

114 Op Cit.

6 Stratocracy

Thanks in large part to Shore’s concessions to his officers in 1796–97, the burgeoning mutiny among officers in Bengal petered out without violence. A decade later, the Company’s white officers – this time, those in Madras – would embark on yet another revolt, which would not end so peacefully. In the summer of 1809, more than 90 percent of the thirteen hundred European officers in the Madras Army jointly refused to sign an oath, pejoratively referred to as “the Test,” confirming their loyalty to the government at Fort St. George.1 Instead, they launched into a rebellion. Some officers simply walked away from their garrisons, leaving chaos in their wake. Others were more active – arresting their superiors, seizing control of forts and treasuries, and even taking up arms against the government. One civil official described the revolt as nothing short of a “desperate experiment of forcing Government, of substituting in effect a Stratocracy (the worst of all Governments).”2 Suppressing the mutiny fell to George Hilaro Barlow, a civilian governor whose policies, tending to diminish the privileges of his officers, had served as the proximate cause for the mutiny. Unlike Shore, Barlow had no intention of conciliation and instead sought for more decisive tools that would allow him to force the officers back into line. The most obvious solution was straightforward: If the Company’s European officers were in a state of mutiny, the mass of sepoys and Indian officers below them offered a potential tool to restore order. In early August 1809, Barlow called on sepoys and European privates alike to stand against their officers in support of the government. Because the mutinying officers were hardly likely to pass this message on to their

House of Commons, Papers Relating to East India Affairs: Viz. Copy of a LETTER from the Governor General to the SECRET COMMITTEE (London, 1810), 2; Memorandum Book of Papers on the Difference between Government and the Army of Fort St. George, 242–45, NLS Acc. 8954. 2 Stranger, “Extract of the Hon Sir Thomas Stranger’s Address to the Grand Jury,” 250, NLS Acc. 8954. 1

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men, Barlow’s government even took steps to deliver the orders through more unofficial networks. The proclamation was translated into several “country languages,” and Barlow hired messengers to smuggle the information into garrisons across the presidency.3 Such steps were not unprecedented. In 1766, when officers in several Bengal outposts had threatened mass resignation, Robert Clive had mobilized sepoy regiments to march against the mutineers, who surrendered almost immediately.4 The same thing happened in 1809: Within two weeks of Barlow’s orders to the sepoys and private soldiers, support for the mutiny began to collapse, and officers in rebel garrisons across the presidency abruptly reaffirmed their loyalty to the Madras Government.5 The Court of Directors, learning of the crisis, responded initially with enthusiasm for Barlow’s response, praising him for his “firmness, energy, and wisdom.”6 Less than three years later, though, Barlow would be recalled in ignominy.7 His opponents, who had acquired a majority in the Court of Directors, reframed the revolt not as a bid for revolutionary “stratocracy” but as “the natural fruit of a harsh and bitter policy.”8 Everything from Barlow’s interference in “country” powers to the invitations that his wife sent out for a ball attracted criticism, but none more so than his appeal to sepoys during the mutiny.9 One Director, John Bannerman, expanded on this theme:

3 Letter from Barry Close to the Fort St. George Council, Further Enclosures in the General Letter of 10th September 1809, from the Governor in Council at Fort St. George, to the Secret Committee of the Court of Directors, vol. 2F, Papers Relating to East India Affairs (London, 1810), 10, Letter from Lt Col Davis to the Fort St. George Council, Further Enclosures, 2D, 24. There is little information about who these messengers were, but one Indian officer at Masulipatam reported that an unknown “Brahmin” had infiltrated the cavalry lines and was warning sepoys against taking part in the mutiny. See Major Russell, “Circumstances Communicated to Me by Secunder Khan Regarding the Emissaries of Coll. Munro,” Coast Army, Misc. Papers, 63v, NLS MP MS11667. 4 Strachey, Narrative of the Mutiny of the Officers of the Army in Bengal, 27, 32. 5 Address from the Officers of Hyderabad to Minto, August 11, 1809, Further Enclosures in the General Letter of 10th September 1809, 1810, 2F:1–3. 6 General Letter from the Court of Directors, February 9, 1810, Copies of Letters from the Court of Directors to the Governor in Council at Fort St. George, in the MILITARY DEPARTMENT Dated the 15th and 29th September 1809, and 7th February and 1st March, Papers Relating to East India Affairs, 1810, 17. 7 Letter from William Barlow to George Barlow, December 15, 1812, Letters from His Brother, ff. 103–4, Papers of Sir George Barlow, BL MSS Eur F176/8. 8 The Protests of the Honourable W. F. Elphinstone, James Pattison, Esq., James Daniell, Esq., Robert Thornton, Esq., John Huddlestone, Esq., J. A. Bannerman, Esq., Directors of the East India Company against the Continuance of Sir George Barlow in the Government of Madras (London: Printed by William Thorne, 1812), 3. 9 William Petrie, A Statement of Facts Delivered to the Right Honourable Lord Minto, Governor-General of India, Etc. on His Late Arrival at Madras: With an Appendix of

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The appeal to the Native Troops will be admitted by the most strenuous advocate of Sir George Barlow, to be an experiment perilous in the extreme, by unfolding to that body their own power and importance, and by striking at the very root of all discipline, in teaching these troops to reason on the connections and relations of the authorities which are placed over them … no extremity could justify so vague, so dangerous, and so loose a proceeding.10

As the tide of British public opinion began to turn against Barlow in 1811, one of his strongest supporters, Robert Grant, defended the governor in the pages of the Quarterly Review, noting that it was “not very easy to discover, why the chance of some future revolt of our Sepoys, without these officers, was more to be deprecated, than the certainty of their immediate revolt under the superintendence of British skill and enterprize.” He pointed to the precedent that Clive had set in 1766, drawing on Clive’s position within the Company’s pantheon of heroes to comment sardonically: It would seem to follow, then, either that Lord Clive was deficient in wisdom and statesmanship, which is impossible;--or that these accusers of Sir George Barlow are but indifferent judges of what may be wise and statesmanlike; which, perhaps, is not impossible.11

Grant’s put-upon air of befuddlement, though, was wildly out of step with public opinion in Britain, for whom “stratocracy” was not “the worst of all Governments” after all. That title belonged to an India lost to British control, and disrupting the relationship between sepoys and their white commanders was seen as a sure way to produce an apocalyptic scenario. Preventing sepoy revolt had always been a concern for Company officials, but, prior to the nineteenth century, such unrest had rarely been described as an existential threat. In 1766, Clive and his supporters warned that the officers’ mutiny had left Company garrisons vulnerable if “the enemy should attempt to enter these provinces,” meaning Maratha forces.12 Similarly, throughout the late eighteenth century,

Official Minutes (London: Printed by J. J. Stockdale, 1810), 16–18 (appendix); Anon, A Letter from a Gentleman High in Office at Madras upon the Late Discontents in that Presidency Containing Comments on the Principal Transactions of Sir George Barlow’s Government (London: Black, Parry, and Kingsbury, 1810), 8. 10 John Alexander Bannerman in “Copies of PROTESTS, Entered by the Directors of the East India Company, against Mr. PETRIE’s Being Displaced from a Seat in the Council If Madras;–with the REPLY Thereto, by Other Directors,” in Papers Relating to East India Affairs (Madras), vol. VII, 201 (Chadwyck Parliamentary Papers Online, 1810), 23. 11 [Robert] [Grant], “India–Disturbances at Madras,” The Quarterly Review V (1811): 177–78. 12 Strachey, Narrative of the Mutiny of the Officers of the Army in Bengal, 44.

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officials in Madras pointed to external threats, especially the French or Mysore, as the most pressing danger.13 Though fears of revolt, especially among sepoys, would become an obsession in the late Victorian British Empire, such anxieties have usually been linked to the events of 1857.14 The recriminations that followed the 1809 mutiny suggest that fears of sepoy disorder had become engrossing much earlier, providing new insight both into the nature of the colonial state and into its failure in 1857. At the turn of the nineteenth century, South India’s dynamic, multifaceted economy of military employment and prestige was quickly evaporating, giving way to a more homogeneous system dominated by the Company. For officials like Barlow, who disliked the scale of the Company’s army, this change seemed an opportunity for reform, especially in reining in military expenses across the presidency. Such attempts, as in previous decades, stoked protests, but sepoys, soldiers, and officers discovered at the same time that existing methods of protest had become less effective. Among sepoys, these twin pressures would ultimately result in the Vellore Mutiny of 1806, the bloodiest episode of military revolt in the Madras Army. In a single night, sepoys killed more than one hundred Europeans, and British dragoons, responding to the uprising, slaughtered more than six hundred Indians as they fought to regain control of the fort.15 The event, like the better-known rebellions half a century later, shocked officials and challenged their understanding of the nature of their empire. In 1809, when the Company’s white officers raised a mutiny of their own, the legacy of Vellore provided a framework through which these men could translate their roles as diplomatic intermediaries and experts on Indian battlefields into a new claim of importance, centered on the maintenance of order within the colonial state. The success of these arguments, best demonstrated by Barlow’s recall, marks the full maturation of the Company’s stratocracy and the tenets of “rule by the sword,” creating a set of political relationships that would persist until the Company itself dissolved. Pigot’s opponents in 1776 used the remote possibility of a French invasion to argue for Stuart’s appointment as commander at Thanjavur. See Minutes of the Council, July 9, 1766, TNSA MDCB Vol. 56A, 673. Similar claims that Tuljaji “was forming [alliances] with the French, the Dutch, the Danes, Hyder Aly Cawn, and others” were used to vindicate the initial conquest of Thanjavur. See Anonymous, Original Papers Relative to Tanjore, 40. 14 See, for instance, Herbert, War of No Pity; Kim A. Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010). 15 James W. Hoover, Men without Hats: Dialogue, Discipline and Discontent in the Madras Army, 1806–1807 (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2007), 60, 119. 13

6.1 When Mars Lost His Sword

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When Mars Lost His Sword

Mutiny in both 1806 and 1809 came on the heels of apparently trivial developments within the Madras Army. The flashpoint at Vellore was the introduction of a new set of uniform regulations, including a new turban design that, sepoys complained, looked like “the cap of the Portugueze Drummers” (see Figure 6).16 Three years later, the proximate cause of the white officers’ mutiny was the transfer of the so-called “tent contract,” which gave officers funds to equip their troops, to civilian suppliers.17 In both cases, British observers would later express astonishment that such superficially minor changes could provoke violence. In the preface of his insightful study of the 1806 revolt, James Hoover explained that he came first to the topic convinced “that the Vellore Mutiny must have been linked to political disturbances caused by the recent conquest of south India … by the rayatwari settlement and missionary activity. By anything, in fact, except the Army’s newly issued turban.” Ultimately, Hoover had to conclude that the turban had real importance: Vellore, as he put it, “was primarily a military protest in a military culture.”18 It has been a central argument of this book, though, that the Company’s military culture or, rather, cultures were themselves politicized and freighted with complex social relationships. More significantly, these cultures were in a state of flux, in which violent mutiny became an increasingly viable response to grievance. Under the administration of Richard Wellesley (1796–1805), the Company embarked on an unprecedented period of expansionism.19 Most dramatically, in 1799, British forces invaded Mysore and seized Srirangapatna: Tipu Sultan was killed in the final confrontation for his capital. Wellesley also pursued more domineering forms of subsidiary alliance with Hyderabad, Travancore, and other “country powers,” all of which further marginalized the increasingly dependent rulers as actors in the region’s military economy. Throughout this period, operations against local political rulers – palaiyakkarars, “petty rajahs,” and “little kings” – almost invariably categorized as pacification campaigns against

16 Minute by Rollo Gillespie, July 15, 1806, TNSA SS (VS) Vol. 1B, 254–55. 17 Cardew, The White Mutiny, chap. 8. 18 Hoover, Men without Hats, 10. The ryotwari settlement that Hoover points to as one potential factor was in fact not formally introduced until 1820, under the administration of Thomas Munro. However, Munro had already begun to develop and to introduce elements of the system in the Northern Circars in the 1790s. See Stein, Thomas Munro, 61. 19 Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, 89–95.

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Figure 6  Anonymous, Sepoy Drums and Fifes, c. 1800.

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rebels, further disrupted patterns of military employment in the region.20 One poet in the court of Arcot in the wake of Tipu’s death penned an elegy that captures some sense of the scope of the transformation: “from grief and mourning/the planet Mars in heaven would say he lost his Sword.”21 Only two years later, Arcot too would be counted among the eclipsed states. Claiming that ‘Umdat ul-Umara, who had succeeded his father as nawab in 1795, had conspired with Tipu, Company officials forced his heir, Azim ud-Daula, to cede what little remained of Arcot’s autonomy to the Madras Presidency.22 In North India, where the Bengal Presidency established a similar monopsony on military labor in Awadh and the Central Provinces, would-be soldiers complained in the 1830s that “there is no work in the Company’s dominion.”23 In South India, at least, such a claim would have been an exaggeration. However, the diminution or outright eradication of the Company’s most prominent rivals had profound effects on the Madras Army. For decades, sepoys and European soldiers alike had used the prospect of mobility and desertion to negotiate with their employers. Though disaffected sepoys and European soldiers alike continued to find employment beyond the Company’s institutions well into the mid-nineteenth century, the Company’s growing dominance made these possibilities less accessible and thus less effective as a bargaining tool.24 These constraints affected European officers too, further closing off opportunities for the kind of adventuring or dual commissions for which the Company had been a springboard. Most significantly, in 1803, at the start of the Second Anglo-Maratha War, Richard Wellesley issued a proclamation demanding that “all British Subjects holding employment in the Military Service of Dowlut Rao Scindiah, or of the Rajah of Berar, or of any Marhatta Chief, or of other Power, or State, 20 Rajayyan, South Indian Rebellion: The First War of Independence, 1800–1801; Lorenzo M. Crowell, “The Madras Army in the Northern Circars, 1832–1833: Pacification and Professionalism” (PhD Dissertation, Durham, NC, Duke University, 1982); Margaret Frenz, From Contact to Conquest: Transition to British Rule in Malabar, 1790– 1805 (New Delhi: Oxford University, 2003). 21 “be hozn o mātam / merrīkh falak begoft gom shod shamshīr.” Muhammad Karim Khair-ul-Din Hasan, Savānih · āt-i Mumtāz : Mushtamil Bar Vaqāʼiʻ-i Zandagānī-i Navvāb ʻUmdat̲ ʼal-ʼUmarāʼ Bahādur va ʼah · vāl-i Khānavādah-i ʼanvarī, ed. Habib Khan Saroush Umari, Madras Government Oriental Manuscript Series 177 (Madras: Government Press, 1961), 147. 22 For more on the supposed conspiracy, see Anonymous, The Carnatic Question Stated (London: Printed for J. Stockdale, 1808), 60–63. 23 “Company ke amal men kuchh rozgar nahin hai.” Quoted and translated by Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy, 1990, 187. 24 Deserters flocked northward, for instance, to Ranjit Singh’s armies. Roy, War, Culture, and Society in Early Modern South Asia, 1740–1849, 141.

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confederated with Dowlut Rao Scindiah” resign their positions and return to the Company’s territories.25 Though the proclamation itself was clearly a strategic gambit meant to disrupt the Maratha Confederacy’s chain of command, Company officials refused to reverse course even after the war.26 Yet, if, as the Arcot poet put it, Mars had lost his sword, Wellesley’s expansionism created a crucial space in which Company officers could pick theirs up. Wellesley and his brother Arthur, the future Duke of Wellington, who first gained renown as a strategist during the Second AngloMaratha War (1803–1805), pursued a highly militarized version of empire, both in terms of its ideological justification and in the infrastructure they developed for its governance.27 Arthur summarized his view simply: “In this part of the world there is no power excepting that of the sword.”28 His ideas proved highly influential among a network of rising Company agents, especially those who took the field during these wars. The most famous among them would be Charles Metcalfe, Thomas Munro, John Malcolm, John Adam, and Mountstuart Elphinstone, all of whom would go on to hold positions in the highest ranks of the Company’s Indian administration. In the immediate wake of the Mysore and Maratha campaigns, though, as Metcalfe complained, “Lord Wellesley’s system was abandoned at an unfortunate period, when its success was nearly completed.”29 Indeed, its apparent success sowed the seeds of its own collapse. The Company’s militarism had historically been rooted in the need to protect against external enemies. Under Wellesley, the Company’s most high-profile rivals had been defeated. For many Company administrators, the string of victories at the turn of the nineteenth century, far from vindicating a “stratocracy,” provided an opportunity to reverse course and to reduce the Company’s military establishment. In Madras, two successive governors – William Bentinck (1803–1807) and George Hilaro Barlow (1808–1813) – spearheaded campaigns to reduce the power of the Madras Army, reining in 25 Quoted in Randolf G. S. Cooper, The Anglo-Maratha Campaigns and the Contest for India: The Struggle for Control of the South Asian Military Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 319–21. A second declaration extended the same offer to sepoys and Indian officers formerly in the Company’s service. 26 Cooper, 211. 27 Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, 81–89. 28 Arthur Wellesley, The Dispatches of Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington: During His Various Campaigns in India, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, the Low Countries, and France, ed. John Gurwood (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 781. 29 Charles Metcalfe and John William Kaye, Selections from the Papers of Lord Metcalfe: Late Governor-General of India, Governor of Jamaica, and Governor-General of Canada, electronic resource (London: Smith, Elder and Co, 1855), 11.

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its expenses and looking for ways to limit officers’ influence in colonial governance. It is no coincidence that, beginning in 1806, civil residents began to outnumber their military counterparts across the Company’s settlements. Military officers would not regain a majority of residents’ positions until 1822, a result that stemmed from the long-term consequences explored in this chapter.30 John Cradock, commander of the Madras Army during Bentinck’s tenure, complained bitterly of the governor’s preference for civil agents: “in the place of the old and experienced officer, to whom they [Indian subjects] have long looked up with respect, they see his power and ascendancy passed away, and the youthful inexperienced judge, or Boyish Collector, occupy all, and more than his former place.”31 Barlow’s reforms met with even further ire. A civilian who had come up through the Company’s administration in Bengal, Barlow had carved out an impressive reputation as a bureaucrat and counted Cornwallis and Shore among his patrons.32 Such champions, though, were unlikely to win Barlow friends among the European officers in Madras, nor was his long-standing disdain for those who pursued military careers.33 Where Bentinck had also been a stranger to Madras when he was appointed governor, he could at least call upon his commission as a colonel in the royal army and the metropolitan prestige it offered. Barlow lacked access to these sources of authority and was almost immediately mired in disputes over the relative position of the officers he nominally commanded. Charles Metcalfe spoke disdainfully of Barlow as a penny-pinching clerk, for whom “deductions of pence and farthings are considered more important than the fate of empires.”34 Barlow’s most explosive conflict, though, would emerge in his interactions with Hay Macdowall, who replaced Cradock as Madras’s commander in 1808. Returning to an old point of conflict, Barlow sought to deny Macdowall a full seat on council, arguing that he should only

30 Fisher, “Indirect Rule in the British Empire,” 407. 31 J. F. Cradock, A Narrative of Transactions Relative to the Late Unhappy Events at Vellore, Accompanied by Official Documents (Madras, 1807), 28. 32 In a letter to Barlow’s brother, William Wilberforce in 1812 recalled, “I once heard from the lips of the late Lord Cornwallis, one of the Highest Commendations of your Brother, which any Man ever received.” Letter from Wilberforce to Sir Robert Barlow, August 22, 1812, Papers of George Hilario Barlow, BL MSS Eur F176/30. 33 It took years for Barlow’s son, George Ulric, to convince his father that it was possible that “a Good Officer may be a good Man.” Letter from George Ulric Barlow to George Barlow, February 29, 1808, Papers of Captain George Ulric Barlow, 36v, BL MSS Eur F176/54. 34 Metcalfe and Kaye, Selections from the Papers of Lord Metcalfe, 8.

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have  a  voice in military affairs.35 As discussed in Chapter 4, Directors had first called for this restriction in 1773, when they appointed Pigot for his second, catastrophic turn as governor.36 The rebel councilors who overthrew Pigot had ignored those orders, instead elevating Stuart as commander with a full vote in the council. As the Madras Government’s political position in the south grew securer at the turn of the nineteenth century, revoking those powers again became a priority within the Company.37 From sepoys hemmed in within a tightening labor market to European commanders, denied privileges they had long considered their rights, the terms of service within the Madras Army grew distinctly less attractive as the first decade of the nineteenth century drew to a close. For both groups, this realization prompted crisis, as sepoys, soldiers, and officers alike sought to regain their crumbling footholds in the colonial state. 6.2

The Mutiny at Vellore

In 1805, William Bentinck and John Cradock together announced a set of reforms to sepoy regiments intended “to introduce a few circumstances of discipline or interior oeconomy of the later practice in England.”38 (Unlike Bentinck’s efforts to empower district collectors over military officers, Cradock fully approved of these reforms.) These included a new prohibition against sepoys wearing “caste marks” (paint, dye, or ash) on their faces when on parade as well as the introduction of the new, aforementioned turban. The anger that bubbled up around these changes, far from an incomprehensible overreaction, reflected sepoys’ clear understanding that the reforms were part of a broader set of transformations. Uniforms were not neutral objects: They were part of the way that soldiers’ identities were constructed. In 1798 at St. Thomas Mount, part of the Madras European Regiment had mutinied violently when officials issued the men straw hats. In response, the men groused, “We don’t like White Hats, they make us look like Barbers.”39 35 Letter from Hay Macdowall to Barlow, January 15, 1809, in Copies of the Letters from the Governor in Council at Fort St. George, to the Court of Directors of the East India Company; in the Military Department; Dated 29th and 31st January, and 3rd and 28th February, 1809–With Their Several Enclosures, Papers Relating to East India Affairs, 1810, 8. 36 Orders quoted in TNSA MDCB Vol. 57A, 1221. 37 W. J. Wilson, History of the Madras Army, vol. 3 (Madras: Govt. Press, 1883), 251. 38 William Cavendish Bentinck, Memorial Addressed to the Court of Directors, Containing an Account of the Mutiny at Vellore, with the Consequences of that Event, February 1809 (London: John Booth, 1810), 7. 39 Deposition of John Sinclair, January 30, 1798, Proceedings of the Board of Officers Appointed by Government on the January 19, 1798, to Enquire into the Late Mutiny on the January 15 and 16, 1798, at the Mount, TNSA MS Vol. 93, 132.

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The complaint made clear that the issue was not just an aesthetic one: The hat undermined the soldiers’ social and professional status. The turban that looked like a hat threatened an even more radical transformation: Taken along with the ban on caste marks, it eliminated sepoys’ religious signifiers. This was particularly disconcerting given that Bentinck was also pursuing policies to expand missionary work in India.40 In short, many sepoys seem to have worried that the Madras Army, once a steady source of employment with opportunities for both internal and external advancement, had transformed into the vanguard of a new plot to convert the Company’s colonial subjects. In the past, sepoys and Indian officers who became dissatisfied with the Company’s terms of service had often looked to the region’s economy of desertion either as an alternative or as a bargaining chip in negotiations with military authorities, but, by 1806, this was no longer an option. Testimony from sepoys in the courts of inquiry that followed the mutiny at Vellore reveals this sense of entrapment. One sepoy grenadier, Ramroo, recalled a hasty exchange in which another sepoy – Shaikh Ramsawmy – had urged him to join the revolt. Ramroo refused, saying, “I was formerly in the French Service and now that I am in the English Service I must wear what they desire me else what will become of my Wife and Children.”41 For Ramroo, at least according to his testimony, questions about identity and professional status paled in the face of economic realities: Those, he hastened to assure colonial officials, were strong inducements to obedience. For others, though, the closure of alternatives seems to have paved the way for a more violent kind of revolt, in which absconding was no longer a possibility. Throughout the first half of 1806, sepoys’ anger at the reforms mounted. Officers in garrisons across the presidency reported widespread protests, especially targeting the new turban. At Wallajahbad, sepoys had reportedly taken to mocking their peers who wore the new turban as members of “the 1st Topee Native Infantry:” The Hindustani word topee (“hat”) was associated both with Europeans generally (topee-wallahs, hat-wearers) and with the socially marginalized Portuguese descendants in the south, also called topasses.42 Already by May 1806, Vellore had become a hot spot for this unrest, prompting a lengthy court of enquiry into the refusal of several sepoys and Indian officers to wear the new

Penelope Carson, The East India Company and Religion, 1698–1858, 2012, chap. 5. 41 Evidence of Ramroo (Sepoy Grenadiers), July 21, 1806, TNSA SS (VS) Vol. 1B, 382. 42 Letter from John Cradock to William Bentinck, July 1, 1806, TNSA SS (VS) Vol. 1A, 2. For topee, see Yule, “Hobson-Jobson,” 935. 40

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turban.43 In the subsequent courts martial, two sepoys – Sheik Abdul Ryman and Anateram – were found guilty of “Contempt of Authority and disobedience of orders,” for which they were sentenced to 900 lashes and expelled from the service.44 As late as the first week of July, though, the Madras Government remained committed to the reforms, advising garrison commanders that “yeilding [sic] to the clamor arising from an unfounded prejudice should if possible be avoided.”45 After the mutiny, many British officials and Company officers would criticize this intransigence as evidence of Bentinck’s incompetence and of the need to allow officers on the spot to manage their own affairs. At the time, though, white officers across the Madras Presidency voiced no objections. The crisis reached its apex in the early hours of July 10, 1806. Sepoys and Indian officers stationed at Vellore, numbering around two thousand altogether, launched a violent attack on the Europeans in the garrison, killing more than one hundred. Before the mutineers could consolidate their hold on the fort, though, a detachment of dragoons under command of Rollo Gillespie arrived at Vellore after a mad dash from Arcot. They suppressed the revolt quickly and viciously: As Gillespie wrote on the morning of July 10, “I have made a most severe example of every Sepoy found in Arms.”46 Almost before the smoke from this battle could clear the field, Gillespie and his fellow officers launched an immediate set of inquiries to identify the supposed ringleaders of the revolt, a process that would extend for months and lead to the execution of dozens of other sepoys and Indian civilians and the deportation of several hundred more.47 The records of these trials, as well as the debates about the turban that had preceded the mutiny, constitute the single largest collection of documents in the Madras Military Department, stretching over eleven volumes – each subdivided into two parts – in the “Secret Sundries” series at the Tamil Nadu State Archives. In contrast, for comparison, the officers’ mutiny of 1809 resulted only in five volumes despite being a much longer, widespread, and correspondence-heavy conflict.48 43 Proceedings of a Court of Enquiry Held at Vellore, May 17, 1806, TNSA SS (VS) Vol. 1A, 11–60. 44 Proceedings of a General Court Martial, June 11, 1806, TNSA SS (VS) Vol. 1A, 79. 45 Letter from the Fort St. George Council to John Cradock, [date torn] July, 1806, TNSA SS (VS) Vol. 1A, 88–89. 46 Letter from Rollo Gillespie to Fort St. George, July 10, 1806, TNSA SS (VS) Vol. 1A, 94. 47 “Particulars relative to the Execution that took place at Vellore on the 23rd September 1806 on the Principal Ring-leaders of the late Mutiny at that place on the 9th July 1806,” n.p., Copies of Letters on Vellore, NLS GD214/677/17. 48 J. Talboys Wheeler, Handbook to the Madras Records (Madras: Superintendant of the Government Press, 1907), 18–19.

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One reason for these voluminous proceedings was the ferocity of debate among Company officials over why the revolt had occurred and who was to blame. Bentinck was recalled in disgrace, but he furiously defended his actions leading up to the revolt by insisting that “[t]he wildest dreamer in politics” could not have anticipated the crisis.49 John Malcolm, a Madras Army officer who would later become one of Bentinck’s fiercest opponents, agreed at least implicitly, writing that “Vellore … came like a shock to dispel the charm of half a century.”50 In fact, the mutiny was nowhere near as unprecedented as these two officials suggested. Protest and revolt had been a reality within the Company from the moment it began to recruit military actors. The Second Anglo-Mysore War alone – a conflict later memorialized as a sort of golden age in which sepoys had been willing to suffer any hardship alongside their white officers – had seen revolts at Thalassery (1780), Visakhapatnam (1780), Tiruchirappalli (1782 and 1784), Madurai (1782), Thanjavur (1782), the Northern Circars (1782), and Arnee (1784).51 Though the Vellore Mutiny was larger and bloodier than these, the sense that it was unforeseeable and extraordinary cannot be explained simply as a matter of scale. It pointed to a shift in what a sepoy rebellion meant for colonial governance, in which what had once been a routine danger now appeared as something unimaginable. British accounts of the Vellore Mutiny show this sense of crisis. In comparison to the flood of “mutiny” literature that followed the 1857 rebellions, there were relatively few accounts of Vellore: Pamphlets numbered in the dozens rather than the hundreds and thousands.52 Already, though, this trickle of accounts had begun to anticipate tropes that would dominate half a century later. Like the captivity narratives produced by officers imprisoned in Mysore, accounts of eyewitnesses at Vellore played both on British anxiety and British fortitude, but in a way that focused on a more vulnerable population. Where tales of imprisonment had featured elite officers, the most striking accounts of Vellore featured civilians and, more particularly, on white women and children, whose presence in the mutiny brought the conflict into a domestic, even

Bentinck, Memorial Addressed to the Court of Directors, 11. 50 John Malcolm, “Review of An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Native Infantry by the Late Captain Williams,” Quarterly Review 18, no. 36 (1818): 391. 51 For the Second Anglo-Mysore War as a golden age of sepoy loyalty, see Malcolm, 390; Crowell, “The Madras Army in the Northern Circars, 1832–1833,” 290. 52 See Chapter 7, as well as Herbert, War of No Pity. 49

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intimate, context.53 One of the most oft-repeated details about the revolt was the death of Lieutenant Ely, “who was flying with his son in his arms, from his head quarters,” only to be “slaughtered with the infant, in a manner too shocking to be described.”54 Some publications further stressed that the horrific incident had occurred in front of his wife, who survived.55 Still more dramatic was the story of Amelia Fancourt, whose husband, a colonel, was killed in the revolt. As she described it, she had survived thanks to her children’s ayah and some well-disposed sepoys, who hid her in a chicken coop. Fancourt described crouching in the dirt and hiding her children underneath her skirts as mutineers hunted for her nearby. Interestingly, Fancourt’s narrative does not seem to have been included in any of the official reports or public accounts of the revolt. It circulated widely, though, within the Company’s private networks as well as that of the Board of Control: One copy made its way to Henry Dundas’s papers in the National Archives of Scotland.56 A hefty pension was quickly bestowed on Fancourt, one that went beyond that normally allowed to officers’ widows, and Rollo Gillespie, who led the counterattack against the mutineers, pointed to “the deliverance” of Fancourt and her children as the most satisfying part of his expedition.57 Such details helped to situate the revolt at Vellore as something unprecedented, which threatened the stability of the Company’s empire in a new way. Gillespie had no doubt who was to blame: He was certain that the mutiny was the work of Tipu Sultan’s sons, Muiz ud-Din and Abdul Khaliq, who as boys had been taken hostage by Cornwallis. In 1806, both were imprisoned within the fort. In one of his first letters on the subject to the Madras Government, Gillespie noted: “I have myself seen one of the Princes and Colonel Marriott, who is safe, tells me they are all innocent, but I sadly fear they are not altogether free from blame.”58 (Marriott was, in fact, not entirely persuaded either; in his own letter, he admitted that he had “very strong reasons to think that Moiz ud Deen was particularly active in planning as well as enforcing this Murderous 53 This would become a dominant motif in accounts of the 1857 rebellions. See Jane Robinson, Angels of Albion: Women of the Indian Mutiny (New York: Viking, 1996). 54 “India,” Scots Magazine 69, no. January (1807): 65–66. 55 “Madras, July 23,” The Times, January 9, 1807, The Times Digital Archive. 56 Narrative by Amelia Fancourt of the Vellore Mutiny, July 24, 1806, n.p., NRS GD214/677/11. 57 William Thorn, A Memoir of Major-General Sir R. R. Gillespie, Knight Commander of the Most Honorable Order of the Bath, &c. (London: T. Egerton, 1816), 104, https:// catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008638590. 58 Letter from Rollo Gillespie to the Fort St. George Council, July 10, 1806, TNSA SS (VS) Vol. 1A, 94, emp. added.

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attempt.”)59 The presence of Tipu’s sons at Vellore has made this connection enduringly attractive, and subsequent scholars too have sought to prove that the revolt was part of a conspiracy to resurrect the fallen dynasty.60 Even in 1806, British administrators ultimately conceded that there was no proof of the princes’ involvement, though the men were nevertheless exiled to Bengal to prevent them from serving as beacons for further unrest.61 Surviving records from the Vellore Mutiny, exclusively composed of the Company’s own inquiries and interrogations, make it difficult to approach the conflict from any perspective except for that of the colonial state. Nevertheless, it is significant that the testimony we do have linking the mutinying sepoys with Abdul Khaliq and Muiz ud-Din almost always depicted the former approaching the latter. One witness, a sepoy named Mooniapah, was hauled before the court on the morning of July 10. It must have been terrifying: Bodies from the night before would have still littered the fort, and Mooniapah may well have responded to his interrogators with whatever he thought they wanted to hear. When asked about the princes, he reported having seen one sepoy grenadier call out to them “Sir, Come out Sir, we have 300 Men ready for you,” only for Muiz ud-Din himself to yell out, “Go Go you fools there is not enough as you think I will accompany such a party as that.”62 Taken at face value, the exchange suggests that Muiz ud-Din was seeking to distance himself from the crisis and that sepoys were the active agents in the plot. Company officials never seem to have taken this possibility seriously. Instead, when no evidence could be found to support the assumption that Tipu’s sons had acted as instigators, officials maintained that the sepoys must have been led to the revolt by some outside force. For months, officials chased down obscure rumors of mysterious, unnamed fakirs said to have infiltrated the lines.63 The wild inquiries have all the hallmarks of what C. A. Bayly termed “information panics,” that creeping “feeling of the fledgling colonial administration that it knew nothing of local society and that the locals were combining to deny it information.”64 Though they trafficked in this brand of the shadowy unknown,

59 Letter from Col. Marriott to the Fort St. George Council, July 10, 1806, TNSA SS (VS) Vol. 1A, 92. 60 See, for instance, Perumal Chinnian, The Vellore Mutiny, 1806: The First Uprising against the British (Madras: P. Chinnian, 1982). 61 Hoover, Men without Hats, 133–34. 62 Evidence of Mooniapah, Court of Inquiry, July 10, 1806, TNSA SS (VS) Vol. 1B, 245. 63 Hoover, Men without Hats, chap. 7. 64 Bayly, Empire and Information, 174.

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theories about the mutiny were not simply expressions of anxiety about perceived ignorance. On the contrary, they reflected and stemmed from two “certainties” around which any explanation about Vellore needed to fit. First was the assumption that the redesign of the turban could not alone have sparked the mutiny. Second was the insistence that any wider plot to which the mutiny had contributed must have originated outside of the sepoys’ ranks. 6.3

Syed Ibrahim’s Tomb

This last conviction was spelled out by John Malcolm, one of the most prolific and ultimately successful officers in the Madras Army, rising by the end of his career to become governor of Bombay. In 1808, in the wake of the mutiny at Vellore, he was a lieutenant colonel, eager to translate his military knowledge into political and diplomatic appointments. Hoping to win a new patron, Malcolm wrote a lengthy memorandum about the Madras Army to Gilbert Elliot, Lord Minto, who had been appointed governor-general. In it, he dismissed any possibility that the sepoys themselves might have planned the mutiny at Vellore: They [sepoys] appear hardly to consider themselves as full Moral Agents and blindly resign their Judgement in almost all cases to the Law of usage[,] the dictates of the Priests[,] or the influence of their superior in Cast [sic] or Station and it is from these causes that we observe them in an instant change their mild inoffensive and indolent character for that of the most savage obstinacy and active ferocity.65

Depicting sepoys as entirely passive figures, Malcolm thus presented them as tools, to be honed and mobilized by others. The challenge for Minto and for the Company more broadly was how to ensure that British officials alone had access to that power. Malcolm’s description of sepoys as empty agents marked a distinct shift from British attitudes toward these troops only half a century earlier. Though European soldiers had always been seen as more active than their Indian counterparts, officers in the eighteenth century had celebrated the transformative nature of European drill and discipline as a process that differentiated sepoys from other forms of Indian labor.66 Sepoys’ energy in battle was a prime example of this. Recounting a skirmish at Tiruchirappalli in 1753, for instance, Orme described a detachment of

65 John Malcolm, “Memorandum upon the State of the Native Army of Madras,” Calcutta, 1808, 35v, NLS MP MS 11653. 66 Wickremesekera, Best Black Troops in the World, 2002, 81–84.

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sepoys, who retreated ahead of a charge by Maratha troopers. “[S]eeing three platoons of Europeans advancing to their support, [they] behaved with spirit, and recovering their ground, kept up a smart fire, which after a severe slaughter repulsed the cavalry.”67 Yusuf Khan, the Indian officer whose rise and fall was discussed in Chapter 2, was in some ways the pinnacle of this early ideal: a talented soldier turned able commander in the context of European discipline. As Orme put it, he was “an excellent partizan … a brave and resolute man, but cool and wary in action, and capable of stratagem.”68 Yusuf Khan’s fall from grace led officials to move rapidly away from such attitudes, and, by the end of the 1760s, Company officials had begun to restrict the opportunities available to ambitious sepoys. In part, this was a result of demands from the Company’s European officers: The proportion of European officers to Indian officers tilted increasingly in favor of the former. In 1776, for instance, Stuart, ensconced as ersatz commander of the Madras Army in the coup against Pigot, increased the number of European officers and noncommissioned officers attached to each company of sepoys.69 In 1785, John Dalling, taking up the reins as commander of the army, built on this change by eliminating the position of native commandant and reducing the relative power of the ranks of subedar and jemadar. To justify this move, Dalling cast doubt on the basic idea that sepoys could be effective officers: It has long been the Opinion of several of the best [white] officers, that a Native Commandant is an unnecessary Appointment. There are but few instances where they have been of much Service, but frequent ones where they have done mischief … When they are clever men, their influence on the Native Officers & Sepoys becomes dangerous, & when they are not so, they can be of no use.70

Dalling laid out a dichotomy for Indian officers that reimagined what the ideal officer looked like to Company officials. “[C]lever” officers were no longer “excellent partizan[s]” like Yusuf Khan. Instead, they were inherently untrustworthy and unreliable. By the end of the eighteenth century, the paramount virtue for the ideal sepoy was simply loyalty, a willingness to follow European command. The apotheosis of this new model was found in the case of Syed Ibrahim, a subedar who became famous

67 Orme, A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, 288. 68 Orme, 349. 69 Memorial by James Stuart on the Reorganization of the Army, TNSA MDCB Vol. 57B, 1495–1536. 70 John Dalling, Proposal for a New Arrangement of the Army and the Native Cavalry, TNSA MDCB Vol. 108B, 2058.

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literally for having done nothing at all. The subedar had been captured in 1781, early in the Second Anglo-Mysore War. For more than a decade, Syed Ibrahim was urged repeatedly by his jailers to take up arms against the Company, but refused each exhortation until his death in the 1790s. After Tipu Sultan’s death in 1799, Syed Ibrahim would be feted by Company officials with a zeal that outstripped praise given to any other Indian officer involved in those conflicts. Edward Clive, Governor of Madras, issued orders describing the subedar as “laying down his life as a sacrifice to the duties of fidelity and honour.” In May 1800, the Council at Fort St. George took the unprecedented step of paying for a tomb to be built near Srirangapatna, complete with lanterns and a caretaker.71 Malcolm’s career in the Madras Army had dovetailed with this ideological shift. He had first secured a commission in 1781 – the same year Syed Ibrahim was captured – at the unusually early age of twelve. In what would become a favorite anecdote of Malcolm’s Victorian-era biographers, one Director is said to have expressed skepticism that such a young boy should be made a cadet: “Why, my little man, what would you do if you were to meet Hyder Ali?” Malcolm proudly retorted, “I would out with my sword and cut off his head.”72 Though Malcolm never had the chance to perform such heroics, he did have substantial opportunity to embody the kind of personal authority he trumpeted in his brazen interview. Barely a teenager, Malcolm was given independent command of sepoy detachments, outranking subedars who had held commissions for decades – a result of the marginalization of Indian officers described above.73 At the turn of the nineteenth century, Malcolm became part of the Wellesleys’ patronage networks, where his experiences of personalized militarism found resonance with the Wellesleys’s expansionism. Malcolm would espouse these ideas for the rest of his career and arguably did more than any other single writer to define and to defend a vision of empire that required not just “rule by the sword,” but more specifically rule by officers.74 The emphasis on sepoys as, at best, bastions of passive loyalty would play a significant role in that ideology. As Malcolm wrote in his 1808

71 The Asiatic Annual Register, or, a View of the History of Hindustan, and of the Politics, Commerce and Literature of Asia, for the Year 1801, vol. 3 (London: J. Debrett, Picadilly, and T. Cadell, Jun., & W. Davies, Strand, 1802) Chronicle section, page 4. 72 John William Kaye, The Life and Correspondence of Major-General Sir John Malcolm, G. C. B., Late Envoy to Persia, and Governor of Bombay, vol. 1 (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1856), 8. 73 Kaye, 1:10–11. 74 For an excellent study of Malcolm’s life and ideas, see Jack Harrington, Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

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memorandum to Minto, sepoys were effective and reliable when “directed by the art, intelligence, and spirit of their European leaders.”75 The outbreak of revolt in 1806 could only have occurred, it followed, if European officers’ ability to command had been challenged. Malcolm ultimately concluded that this breakdown had less to do with the new turban itself than with reforms that, he claimed, had thrown the long-established relationships between officers and their sepoys out-ofbalance. His memorandum pointed to a wide variety of such changes, including “a spirit of emulation” that led Company commanders, arrived from Europe, to copy the practices of the Prussian army without concern for how this might translate to an Indian military context.76 Of these “many severe shocks,” though, Malcolm argued that there was “perhaps none greater than that given by the extension of the Judicial system & with it the comparatively mild authority over a Country so long habituated to Military rule.”77 In short, he argued that Bentinck’s civil reforms were a source of disorder and near disaster. The argument would set the stage for the charges that would amass around Barlow after 1809, that any interference by the civil government with military officers created an opening for mutiny. 6.4

The Rights of Military Men

Despite the warning that Bentinck’s recall offered, George Hilaro Barlow does not seem to have put much stock in the explanations provided by Cradock and other military officers that placed blame for the mutiny on the governor’s interventions. On the contrary, Barlow arrived in the Madras Presidency eager to undertake a slate of reforms of his own. He had begun his career working for Cornwallis and John Shore and looked to succeed where his patrons had failed, in tackling sources of corruption in the army and in reducing its influence in Company affairs.78 The most significant of Barlow’s planned reforms was, as already discussed, the removal of the commander from the Fort St. George Council. Anger on this issue merged with protests over another of Barlow’s changes: the abolition of the tent contract. Before Barlow’s arrival, European

75 John Malcolm, “Memorandum upon the State of the Native Army of Madras,” 3v. 76 Malcolm, 15r-16v. 77 Malcolm, 34r. Malcolm was not alone in making this argument. Cradock, seeking to shift blame for the mutiny onto Bentinck, echoed the sentiments in A Narrative of Transactions Relative to the Late Unhappy Events at Vellore, Accompanied by Official Documents, 11–16, 28. 78 Cardew, The White Mutiny, 27–28.

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officers had been granted a set amount of money each year with which to purchase equipment for their sepoy regiments. Officers were able to keep anything left over as profit, an arrangement that Barlow and his staff quickly identified as ripe for corruption, as it incentivized underequipping the troops.79 This possibility was discussed in a report written by John Munro, an army officer on Barlow’s staff. When the report was released, Hay Macdowall ordered Munro’s arrest on the basis that his suggestion of corruption was collective libel against the officer corps. Barlow immediately intervened to free Munro, but this only exacerbated things. Macdowall deemed the interference “a blow at the root of military authority, which cannot be sufficiently reprobated.”80 Stymied by Barlow, Macdowall almost immediately decided to return to Britain to present his case directly to Directors. Before he left, he issued an angry set of general orders that ensured protests would continue among officers in his absence. Some of his proclamations would have been familiar to the officers’ lobbies of the previous century. He pointed to the military successes of the Madras Army in preserving and expanding empire, insisting that the officers’ “Brilliant exploits … have secured its own glory, & added to the British Empire extensive & fertile Regions of incalculable value.” Quickly, though, Macdowall moved away from this assertion of service and loyalty to claim that he had a positive “Right” to a seat on council as the “Representative of the Army.”81 Only a few days after Macdowall’s departure, officers stationed at Fort St. George submitted a memorial in which they described the tent contract as part of “our unalienable [sic] rights.”82 In March, a still more inflammatory memorial appeared, in which officers declared themselves “free children … not the abject slaves of a country enthralled by despotism” who could thus “respectfully assert a claim to certain Rights and Privileges.”83 By July, when Barlow called on the officer corps to reaffirm

John Munro and Francis Capper, Lieutenant Colonel Munro’s Plan for Abolishing the Contract of the Madras Army, with Colonel Capper’s Remarks, Now Published for the First Time (London: J. Ridgway, 1812), 24–29. (Interestingly, this is the same John Munro whose memorandum was quoted in the opening pages of this book.) 80 Letter from Hay Macdowall to John Munro, January 23, 1809, Copies of the Letters... Dated 29th and 31st Jan, and 3rd and 28th Feb, 15. 81 General Orders by Hay Madowall, January 28, 1809, Memorandum Book, 2–4, NLS Acc 8954. 82 Memorial by the officers of the Madras Army to the Court of Directors, January 1809, Copies of the Letters...Dated 29th and 31st Jan, and 3rd and 28th Feb, 26. 83 Memorial to Lord Minto by the Officers of the Madras Army in Copies of Letters from the Governor in Council at Fort St. George, to the Secret Committee of the Court of Directors; Dated the 13th May, and 6th September 1809:–Together with Sundry Enclosures in the Said Letters, Papers Relating to East India Affairs, 1810, 14. 79

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their loyalty to the government, officers across the presidency refused, insisting that the required oath was “a breach of faith toward our suffering brother officers.”84 Though the officers in Madras were the only ones that would take up arms against the Company’s civil government, they had sympathizers in Bengal and Bombay. As in previous decades, the well-established lines of communication between each presidency allowed officers’ claims of “brotherhood” to extend across the Company’s territories. John Malcolm, whose ambiguous position during the mutiny will be discussed below, warned the Madras Government that “the combination against authority is every moment maturing, and spreading wider … they [the mutineers] appear certain that no human power will lead the Bengal troops to act against them.”85 Some time in late July, rebelling officers in Madras echoed that certainty, writing in an anonymous circular intended to persuade royal officers to join the cause: “The officers of the Bengal and Bombay Armies have sympathized in our sufferings, they have adopted the cause of justice and loyalty, and promised the most active assistance.”86 Minto, who arrived in Madras in September 1809, was quick to dismiss such sentiments, insisting that “the faithful Armies of Bengal and Bombay” remained loyal to government and that rumors to the contrary were a “falsehood, so long and industriously circulated” by mutineers to make their cause appear stronger than it was.87 However, not everyone agreed. In February 1810, Henry Dundas’s son Robert, who had taken his father’s post as president of the Board of Control, concluded, “I am afraid that the system of cabal & insubordination is not [of a] very recent date, & that none of the Company’s Troops of late years have been wholly free from it.”88 Dundas arranged for an extra royal regiment to be sent from the Cape Colony to India, clearly uncertain to what extent the Company’s own officers could be trusted. The veracity of the supposed underground alliance is unclear. Many of the purported declarations of support moved through the officers’ private correspondence networks and were purposefully obscured from official Address from the Officers of Nundydroog (Nandidurg), August 5, 1809 in House of Commons, Further Enclosures in the General Letter of 10th September 1809, 2D:19. 85 Letter from Malcolm to Fort St. George, July 5, 1809, Further Enclosures in the General Letter of 10th September 1809, 2B:34. 86 Anonymous Circular, no date, Further Enclosures in the General Letter of 10th September 1809, 2E:8. 87 House of Commons, Copy of a LETTER from the Governor General to the SECRET COMMITTEE; Dated Fort St. George, October 12, 1809:–With Its Enclosures, Papers Relating to East India Affairs, 1810, 3. 88 Letter from Robert Dundas to Gen. Abercromby, February 7, 1810, 658v-659r, Dundas Papers, NRS GD51/3/470/2. 84

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records. However, among the papers that survived, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Robert Dundas’s anxieties were not unfounded. Officers in the Bombay Army, who had been relatively quiet during the consolidation debates of the 1790s, enthusiastically cheered on the mutiny. An open letter was published in the Calcutta Gazette, purportedly from “the officers of the Bombay Army” to “the officers of the Madras Army,” which “announce[d] our readiness to join you in any manner which may be requisite to ensure your success and resist the tyrannical and oppressive conduct of the Governor of Madras and his Advisers.”89 When Minto appointed an officer from Bengal to command a cavalry regiment in Bombay, he received a furious memorial from that corps in response, threatening that the move would push them into open violence: Recollect! My Lord the consequences of Sir George Barlows Administration [are] now on the Tappis [tappal, postal service]. We are on the frontier of India, with what Confidence shall we march, when our recompence, for Victory over our Enemies, is disgrace[,] Insult[,] and dishonor from our Government.90

Interestingly, officers from the Bengal Army seem to have been less active in their support. Malcolm, in warning about the pervasiveness of disaffection among officers, noted that “several private Letters have been received from Bengal, and an Address from that Army to the same effect as that of Bombay, is expected,” but no such missives have survived.91 Instead, the Bengal Government received a number of memorials from officers in the northeast professing their loyalty to the civilian administration.92 The Bengal Army officers’ apparent rejection of the mutiny in Madras may reflect real differences in the two presidencies: One of the major demands of the officers in Madras was that they be paid at the same rate of their Bengal counterparts, who in turn jealously defended their higher rate of pay as a necessity in a more expensive region.93 This letter was printed in Hugh David Sandeman, ed., Selections from Calcutta Gazettes of the Years 1806 to 1815 Inclusive: Showing the Political and Social Condition of the English in India Upwards of Fifty Years Ago, vol. IV (Office of Superintendent Government Printing, 1868), 487–88. 90 Anonymous Memorialist of the Bombay Army to Minto, July 15, 1809, The Mutiny of the Madras Army (1809), f. 32, Minto Papers, NLS MS 11666. 91 Letter from Malcolm to Fort St. George, July 5, 1809, Further Enclosures in the General Letter of 10th September 1809, 2B:34. 92 E. Samuel, The Asiatic Annual Register or a View of the History of Hindustan and of the Politics, Commerce and Literature of Asia, vol. XI (T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1811), 72–74. 93 Letter from the Court of Directors, Papers Relating to East India Affairs, viz. Copies of Letters form the Court of Directors to the Governor in Council at Fort St. George, in the Military Department, Dated the 15th and 29th September 1809, and 7th February and 1st May 1810, 9–10. 89

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At the same time, though, it is clear that many officers stationed in Bengal strongly sympathized with the mutineers. When a handful of officers who had been discharged from the Madras Army early in the conflict arrived in Calcutta, officers from both the Company’s forces and a royal regiment threw a banquet with the disgraced officers as guests of honor.94 The Calcutta Gazette, a newspaper that had provided a vehicle for officers’ complaints during the consolidation debates, published an editorial condemning the rebellion, but described the officers as honorable men who had been pushed to “deplorable extremity” by their collective grievances.95 From the surviving evidence, then, it seems officers in the Bengal Army, though they shied from joining the active mutiny, were equally clear that they had no enthusiasm for Barlow. This ambivalence similarly characterized the attitudes of some of the highestranking officers in Madras, including John Malcolm, and would play a significant role in how the mutiny would be rehabilitated for the British imperial public. The mutiny reached its climax on August 11 in front of Srirangapatna, Tipu’s erstwhile stronghold, which had been under the control of mutinying officers since July. Determined to seize the strategically and symbolically significant stronghold, Barlow mobilized a company of dragoons and auxiliary cavalry sent from the dependent state of Mysore. As the detachment approached the fort, the officers within opened fire. Lieutenant Colonel John Bell, later tried as the commander of the mutineers in Srirangapatna, maintained that the volleys “could have effected no mischief.”96 One dragoon, though, had his horse shot out from under him, and at least two of the troopers from Mysore were killed, which suggests that Bell either lied or fundamentally misunderstood the concept of a warning shot.97 Further bloodshed occurred when the cavalry encountered a regiment of sepoys, led by a mutinying officer from Chitradurga (Chittledroog) to reinforce the garrison at Srirangapatna. In the resulting skirmish, between one hundred and two hundred sepoys were killed, a mortality rate of up to 20 percent.98 Across India, news of the “effusion

94 Letter from G. Dunley to W. Wilkinson, July 29, 1809, Further Enclosures in the General Letter of 10th September 1809, 2D:48. 95 Sandeman, Selections from Calcutta Gazettes of the Years 1806 to 1815 Inclusive, IV:226. 96 Proceedings of a General Court Martial, Held at Bangalore, on the Trial of Lieut.-Col. John Bell, of the Madras Artillery with a Sketch of the State of Affairs in British India from 1780 to 1809; and an Appendix Consisting of Letters and Documents Connected with the Above (London: T. C. Savill, 1835), 199. 97 Letter from T. James Steele to George Hilaro Barlow, December 9, 1817, Miscellaneous Letters, 41v, BL MSS Eur F176/25. 98 Proceedings of a General Court Martial...of Lieut.-Col. John Bell, 217–20.

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of blood” seemed a sign that “civil war” between the Company’s civil administrators and their white officers was now inevitable.99 The revolt reveals the persistence and even the further retrenchment of the Company’s European officers’ sense of identity as a horizontal community, a brotherhood with ties that went beyond chain of command. Mutiny became a demonstration of loyalty to that fraternity, and it made demands for power and perquisites both a defense of collective honor (the tent contract) and a “right” based on a claimed political identity (Macdowall’s seat on council, construed as representation). Clearly, these ideas had substantial power and fueled revolt among the white officers across India as a whole. At the same time, though, the claims were not ones that resonated with those outside of the corps. Indeed, when news of the revolt reached London, the Court of Directors harshly condemned the language of rights as “altogether novel and extraordinary.”100 In response to the memorial sent initially to Minto in March 1809, quoted above, the Directors railed: The doctrines and designs which these Papers avow are subversive of the foundation of all legitimate Government; the rights they claim for the Army are such rights as till now have never been arrogated or mentioned in our Military service; such as no Army ever can possess with safety to the state to which it belongs … which would constitute an independent Military power.101

For Macdowall, none of this mattered: His ship sank on its way home, and he was never seen again. For the broader officer corps, it was clear that a different framing was needed if the call for stratocracy was to be made palatable in British society. 6.5

“Not Long Before All White Men Gone”

Paradoxically, the “effusion of blood” at Srirangapatna on August 11, seen almost universally as a sure start to civil war, in fact proved the apogee of the mutiny. Within days, officers in garrisons across the presidency abruptly reversed course and belatedly swore fealty to Barlow’s oath. The capitulation does not seem to have been a direct response to the battle: The first detachment to surrender was the Hyderabad

99 Letter from Lt. Col Davis to Col Forbes, August 16, 1809, Further Enclosures in the General Letter of 10th September 1809, 2F:36. 100 General Letter from the Court of Directors to the Bengal Presidency, September 15, 1809, Copies of the Letters from the Court of Directors, 12. 101 General Letter form the Court of Directors to the Military Department, September 29, 1809. Ibid., 14.

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Subsidiary Force on August 11, long before news of the confrontation could have reached them.102 Subsequent narratives of the conflict attributed the end of hostilities to the intervention of Minto, who had set off from Bengal in early July to mediate the conflict. The timing, though, does not quite align. Minto’s voyage south was beset by unusual delays, and he did not reach Fort St. George until September, at which point “the rebellion … [was] already a matter of history.”103 Instead, the collapse of the officers’ resistance seems to correlate more directly with Barlow’s decision to appeal to sepoys. Officers’ unwillingness to risk a contest over sepoys’ loyalty revealed the fragility of their position. It would also lay the basis for later critiques of Barlow’s actions as having violated the most vulnerable and essential infrastructure of the colonial state. The best evidence we have that Barlow’s outreach to sepoys was an effective tactic comes from Hyderabad. Prior to August 11, the subsidiary force had been particularly active in encouraging mutiny. Barlow had sent Colonel Barry Close, one of the most senior officers in the Madras Army who had remained loyal, to quell their anger. Upon his arrival, he found that the rebelling officers had drawn their men up in formation with their weapons trained at him. In a lengthy letter to Barlow, Close described begging the sepoys to follow him instead: “I called upon them to look up to me alone, and to obey my orders … one Native officer in particular I took by the shoulder, and begged he would acquaint me why the men were falling in, and priming and loading; but I could not prevail upon him to make any answer.” The sepoys’ silence unnerved their European officers as much as it did Close, and neither party dared to put the troops’ obedience to the test. Close did not demand the sepoys demobilize nor did the rebelling officers on the spot order them to arrest or to fire on the colonel.104 Letters that flitted through the presidency during the mutiny, collected and submitted to Parliament in subsequent inquiries, reveal that both civil officials and the rebel officers were preoccupied with trying to determine what part sepoys would take in the conflict. Some, like Ross Lang, another senior officer still loyal to Barlow, apparently had more confidence in these troops than in European officers or privates. When Lang heard of mutiny spreading among officers, he “deprived

102

103 104

Address from the Officers of Hyderabad to Minto, August 11, 1809, Further Enclosures in the General Letter of 10th September 1809, 2F:1–3. [Grant], “India–Disturbances at Madras,” 200. Letter from Barry Close to Gen. Gowdie, August 3, 1809, Further Enclosures in the General Letter of 10th September 1809, 2D:56–59 quotes from page 58.

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them [his officers] all of military functions,” giving the duties instead to Indian officers.105 Samuel Gibbs, near Srirangapatna, in contrast wrote “that the Subadars and Jemadars of the 5th regiment of Native Cavalry have declared … that they will not act against the Subadars and Jemadars (their expression) of other Native corps” and threatened “to desert and go into [rebel] Seringapatam by all opportunities.”106 Still more alarming – though less credible – was the rumor reported in one letter by an unknown European soldier, signed only Mooreallum, that lascars in his cantonment were whispering “not long before all white face gone; this Governor, very fine Governor, he tell black men that they better than white man, and that sepoy never to mind again one word they say.”107 If such letters help to explain why officers in August 1809 lost their resolve, they also provide an early hint into how officers – having lost the mutiny itself – would win the fight over its memory. In short, officers and their supporters insisted that their surrender was a heroic sacrifice to Barlow, whose actions had imperiled the presidency and possibly the Company’s empire as a whole. No one would be more active in crafting this narrative than John Malcolm. When the mutiny broke out, Malcolm was still a lieutenant colonel, nursing a grudge that he had not been chosen to lead a recent diplomatic mission to Persia.108 Though Malcolm was one of the tiny minority of officers who actually signed Barlow’s “Test” of loyalty, it is clear that his real sympathies lay with the mutineers, urging Barlow again and again to concede to their demands. Indeed, Barlow soon became convinced that Malcolm was a sort of double agent, working in secret to strengthen the officers’ position.109 After the mutiny, Malcolm returned to Britain where he embarked on a new stage of his career, publishing a series of tracts meant to establish his authority as an expert on Indian affairs. Among these was a weighty, two-volume narrative of the 1809 mutiny, Observations on the Disturbances in the Madras Army in 1809. Though it is the most understudied



105



106

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109

Letter from Lang to Fort St. George, July 27, 1809, Further Enclosures in the General Letter of 10th September 1809, 2C:50. Letter from Samuel Gibbs to Lt. Col. Davis, August 10, 1809, Further Enclosures in the General Letter of 10th September 1809, 1810, 2D:31. Letter from “Mooreallum” to Robert [?], August 10, 1809, Further Enclosures in the General Letter of 10th September 1809, 2E:30–31. Letter from Malcolm to Minto, March 18, 1808, Correspondence from Lt. Col. Malcolm, 1807–1808, 96, NLS MP MS 11312. Malcolm’s account of his actions written during mutiny, dated August 24, 1809, can be found in Sir John Malcolm’s Papers on Madras 1809, BL Add MS 13637. He discusses Barlow’s growing suspicions on f. 141.

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of his works, it would play a major role in reshaping public opinion about the events of 1809.110 When Malcolm first heard of Barlow’s appeals to sepoys, he condemned them in the harshest terms: “The character of the European Officer will perhaps never again be regarded by sepoys with the respect & veneration which it once inspired and the consequences of the notion of a different feeling may prove deeply injurious to the public Interests of the British Govt in India.”111 In his Observations, he developed this theme further. His nominal obedience to the government in 1809 allowed him to condemn the most radical claims of the mutineers, which he dismissed as the sentiments of “a few wrong-headed and violent old officers” and “man-headed boys.”112 If the mutiny had never been a real threat, then Barlow’s appeal to sepoys was consequently a foolish and inexcusable overreaction: These officers are to them [sepoys] the only representatives they know of the Government they serve; they are the sole link in the chain of their attachment … had this dreadful contest continued, the passions would have had their way, and a few months might have changed the character of our native soldiery, and rendered them more formidable than all the enemies we ever had to encounter in India.113

It was in response to this argument that Robert Grant asked the question discussed at the beginning of this chapter: If using sepoys against European officers was so imprudent, why had Clive used the strategy to quell the mutiny of 1766? Malcolm added a postscript to his narrative to address the issue, rejecting any effort to compare Barlow’s maneuvers and “the open, military, and manly conduct of Lord Clive.” Despite superficial similarities, Malcolm argued that changes within the Company itself rendered any parallels nonsensical. In 1766, Indian officers had held real authority: “the native officers had much greater influence than the European subalterns of the corps.” In the intervening decades, though, their power had been stripped away until sepoys and their Indian officers were not, as Malcolm had put it in 1808, “full Moral Agents.”

110 For more on Malcolm’s publications, see Harrington, Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India. Some indication of the influence of Malcolm’s narrative can be surmised from the fact that it prompted a book-length refutation: Anonymous, Observations on Lieut.-Colonel Malcolm’s Publication, Relative to the Disturbances in the Madras Army; Containing a Refutation of the Opinions of that Officer (London: Printed for Black, Parry, and Co, 1812). 111 Sir John Malcolm’s Papers on Madras 1809, 18v, BL Add MS 13637. 112 Malcolm, Observations on the Disturbances in the Madras Army, 26, 75. 113 Malcolm, 36.

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Although Malcolm lamented the marginalization of Indian officers, he presented it as an irreversible fact. With Indian officers no longer able to lead their men, any move that threatened the connection between European officers and their sepoys might render the Company’s army a mob, vulnerable to those external agents – whether wandering fakirs or the disappointed scions of lost dynasties – that supposedly lurked just outside of the Company’s ken.114 6.6

The Officers’ Triumph

Even as Malcolm and Barlow’s other opponents were working to reshape popular opinion in Britain, in India the government’s apparent victory in 1809 quickly proved to be hollow. Faced with the challenge of meting out punishment for a mutiny that had involved such a large proportion of the army’s leadership, Minto and Barlow ultimately decided to begin by trying the three men they deemed most culpable: Lieutenant Colonel John Bell, who had commanded the rebels at Srirangapatna; Major Joseph Storey, who had led the mutiny at Masulipatam; and Lieutenant Colonel John Doveton, who had ordered his men to march from the frontier-station at Jalnah to join up with other mutineers.115 Each charge carried a maximum possible sentence of execution. In fact, though capital punishment was extremely common for Indian officers in the case of sepoy revolts, European officers were very rarely subject to such extremes. The mutiny Clive had suppressed in 1766, for instance, had resulted in almost no recriminations for those involved. Barlow’s government seems to have been determined that 1809 would be an exception. The prosecutor, J. A. Leith, described Bell’s actions at Sriringapatna as “the most unprecedented and extraordinary that ever came before a military tribunal in this country.”116 The officers on the jury disagreed. Bell was found guilty, but sentenced only to be cashiered – removed from the Madras Army’s officer corps. Storey was also found guilty, but received an even milder sentence: an honorable discharge. Doveton was acquitted entirely. Each verdict made clear that the mutineers’ capitulation had done nothing to alter their demands or their sense of an exclusive community. The trials also highlighted the government’s inability to challenge those views:

114 Malcolm, 54–56. 115 The Fort St George Council, Government Gazette Extraordinary, September 25, 1809, in House of Commons, Copy of a LETTER…Dated Fort St. George, 12 October 1809, 16. 116 Proceedings of a General Court Martial...of Lieut.-Col. John Bell, 49.

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After the three failed prosecutions, the Madras Government gave up any further punishment. In the end, no European officer would spend a single day imprisoned as a result of the 1809 mutiny, at that point the largest military revolt in the Company’s history. The only casualties were among the sepoy detachment from Chitradurga and the Indian cavalry sent from Mysore that had clashed before Srirangapatna. The outcome forms a glaring contrast with the Company’s response to the Vellore Mutiny, in which more than six hundred Indian sepoys and civilians had lost their lives.117 It hammers home the status that the Company’s European officers enjoyed as members of a protected colonial elite, even when mobilized against the state. Equally, it illustrates the violence of that state toward groups outside that aegis. More than just a dizzying juxtaposition, the legacy of Vellore loomed large in the ways that Bell, Doveton, and Storey mounted their defenses. Mutiny by European officers was depicted as permissible if it could be framed as necessary to prevent mutiny by sepoys. Bell, whose trial was first, was most explicit in making this claim. At the climax of his defense statement, Bell explained that he had fired on the dragoons and the Mysore cavalry to avert the horrors of a general rising of the Sepoys in the garrison … I vindicate this act with confidence. I have saved the effusion of innocent blood. I stopped an insurrection in the garrison, the probable consequences of which can be best conjectured by those who remember the fatal incidents at Vellore.118

Storey similarly justified his decision to arrest his commanding officer at Masulipatam (who had remained loyal to the government) as an attempt to prevent a revolt by sepoys, claiming that he had been compelled to do so by soldiers and sepoys together with “their arms in their hands.” Refusing to imprison his commander would have led to “the dire consequences of evil strife, and the spilling of much British blood.”119 Doveton presented as part of his defense a series of letters he had written to his superior, Thomas Sydenham at Hyderabad, in which he maintained that Barlow’s policies would have led to “a scene too horrid for the mind of man to contemplate.” If this was too ambiguous, he added, “[i]t is my

117 For more on this contrast, see Devadas Moodley, “A Tale of Two Mutinies: Vellore, 1806 and Madras, 1809” (Mutiny at the Margin: New Perspectives on the Indian Upris­ ing of 1857, Edinburgh University, 2007), www.csas.ed.ac.uk/mutiny/­confpapers/ Moodley-Paper.pdf. 118 Proceedings of a General Court Martial...of Lieut.-Col. John Bell, 202. 119 Joseph Storey, The Memorial of Joseph Storey, Esq. Late a Major of the 19th Regiment of Native Infantry, in the Service of the Said Company under the Presidency of Fort St. George (London: 14 Cavendish Street, 1812), 3.

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thorough acquaintance with the dispositions of the natives of this country, as well as the impression of events but too recent, which have forced from me the above sentence.”120 In each case, the prosecution was unable to provide a persuasive answer to this argument. In many ways, it was a repetition of James Stuart’s acquittal in 1780: Courts martial were by definition juried by other officers, and, though the officers who had been active in the mutiny were obviously excluded from the pool, support for the rebels had been widespread. Indeed, the end of Bell’s trial nearly prompted a new round of conflict between the Madras Government and the officer corps, when one officers’ mess had to be censured for toasting Bell as “a brave but unfortunate officer.”121 The officers, though, were not just appealing to the “brother officers” on the jury. All three chose to publish versions of their defense for a British press, suggesting that they expected that their defenses would resonate with a wider audience.122 These pamphlets do not seem to have been particularly popular in and of themselves – only Bell’s underwent a second printing, and that only twenty-five years later – but they joined a swelling flood of literature condemning Barlow’s policies and, in so doing, vindicating (or at least helping to excuse) the officers’ response. By December 1812, Barlow’s opponents cobbled together a majority in the Court of Directors and ordered his recall. It was a massive professional defeat for the governor. (Adding salt to the wound, Barlow would soon be consumed in a highly scandalous divorce, when he discovered that his wife had been carrying on a lengthy affair with his cousin, who had acted as his secretary in India and who had fathered at least one



120



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122

Proceedings of a General Court Martial, Held at Bangalore, on the Trial of Lieutenant Colonel John Doveton (London: Edmund Lloyd, Harley Street, 1810), 68–69. Defense of Lieut. Burges, September 24, 1810, Court Martial against Lieut Hammond, et. al., 365, BL IOR/F/4/362. The trials of both Storey and Doveton were printed in 1810. See Proceedings of … the Trial of Lieutenant Colonel John Doveton and Minutes of the Proceedings of a General Court-Martial Holden at Bangalore on the 10th of January 1810 on Major Joseph Storey of the 1s Battalion of the 19th Regt. of Native Infantry, Late Senior Officer Commanding Masulipatam (London: Black, Parry, and Kingsbury, 1810). Storey also published a lengthier memorial to the Court of Directors, seeking to be restored to the Madras Army. Storey, The Memorial of Joseph Storey. Bell published a full copy of his defense in 1810, which had been censored from court records, and a second edition of the same work, more lavishly edited, was published in 1835. For the former, see John Bell, The Defence of Lieutenant-Colonel John Bell, of the First Battalion of Madras Artillery, on His Trial at Bangalore: Before a General Court-Martial, as It Was Read in Court by His Counsel, Charles Marsh, Esq (London: Black, Parry, and Kingsbury, 1810). For the 1835 version, Proceedings of a General Court Martial...of Lieut.-Col. John Bell.

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of her children.)123 It was also a major setback for Barlow’s efforts to establish civil authority in the Madras Presidency. In Madras, Barlow was replaced with Hugh Elliot, one of Minto’s relatives, who would serve as governor of Madras until 1819. An aging administrator, Elliot remained a background figure throughout this tenure.124 Real power instead would be exercised by the military faction in Madras, especially those officers connected to the Wellesleys’ patronage networks. Under their influence, stratocracy would reach its apex. After a brief decline, by the 1820s, military officers would again predominate in the political and diplomatic posts, and they would enjoy unprecedented prominence in the highest levels of the Company’s administration in this same period.125 Already, this chapter has pointed to John Malcolm as one of the most active officers in this process. In 1811, writing his first history of the Company, Malcolm had placed himself within a well-established rhetorical tradition, reminding his readers that “[t]his Empire … has been chiefly established, and must be constantly maintained by the sword.”126 At the time, this does not seem to have been a popular approach: He blamed his failure in 1808 to secure his much-desired position as diplomat in Persia on his association with Wellesley.127 By 1815, his fortunes had shifted: He was knighted and in high demand as an expert on affairs in India. That position was due at least in part to the success of his publications, including A Sketch of the Sikhs (1811) and The History of Persia (1815), each of which, as well as his later Memoir of Central India (1823), depicted Asian society as one of warfare and military might.128 By 1827, Malcolm’s ideas had gained enough support that he was made governor of Bombay, though his career fell short of his ultimate ambition of being appointed governor-general.129 In Bombay, Malcolm fiercely 123 Case of George Hilaro Barlow against Dame Eliza Barlow, February 13, 1816, Papers Concerning George Barlow’s Divorce, 11–18, BL MSS Eur F176/36. 124 According to Elliot’s granddaughter, Elliot’s “government at Madras was unmarked by any events of conspicuous interest, or at least by any in which he individually bore a part.” Emma Elliot-Murray Kynynmoumd, A Memoir of the Right Honourable Hugh Elliot (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1868), 413. 125 Fisher, “Indirect Rule in the British Empire,” 407; Douglas Peers, “Soldiers, Scholars, and the Scottish Enlightenment: Militarism in Early Nineteenth-Century India,” The International History Review 16, no. 3 (August 1, 1994): 452. 126 John Malcolm, Sketch of the Political History of India, from the Introduction of Mr. Pitt’s Bill, A.D. 1784, to the Present Date., 2d ed. (London, 1811), 439. 127 Letter from Malcolm to Minto, March 18, 1808, Correspondence from Lt. Col. Malcolm, 1807–1808, 96, NLS MP MS 11312. 128 Harrington, Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India, 4, 8–10. 129 Lees, “Administrator-Scholars and the Writing of History in Early British India,” 832–33.

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fought to protect the Company’s armies from any reduction or reform, demanding in particular enhancements to the status, perquisites, and authority of the European officers of sepoy regiments. Echoing the language that he had used to critique Barlow, he continued to identify the possibility of sepoy revolt as the most pressing danger in the Company’s rule, writing in 1830 that “[i]t cannot be too often repeated this Army [the sepoy forces] is our safety and our danger.”130 If Malcolm’s career provides the most striking example of the success of the officers’ vision of militarized empire, he was not alone. Another prolific advocate of this view would be Charles Metcalfe, who rose briefly to serve as acting governor-general from 1834 to 1835. Unlike Malcolm, Metcalfe was a civil official, but he was one with deep military roots. He had marched with the Company’s army during the Second Anglo-Maratha War and reportedly developed close ties to the officers he served alongside.131 He shared this unusual career path with another of the foremost advocates of colonial militarism in this period, Mountstuart Elphinstone, who had similarly marched as a civilian alongside the Company’s armies before becoming governor of Bombay.132 It is worth considering whether the horizontal community that gave the Company’s European officer corps its coherence might also have extended to some of these more irregular figures, who had followed the officers into the field. Whatever Metcalfe’s status as a “brother officer,” he affirmed that this corps was the paramount source of imperial stability. In 1814, he warned, “Our Native Army is certainly a phenomenon, the more so as there is no heartfelt attachment to our Government on the part of our native troops.” Sepoys’ loyalty, he wrote elsewhere, could come only from European officers, who were “the life and soul” of the army.133 In the Madras Presidency, the officers’ empire would culminate in the governorship of Thomas Munro, himself a decorated officer in the Madras Army, from 1820 to 1827. Munro is best known for his ryotwari system, a set of policies that defined land use and ownership in Madras in contrast to the “permanent settlement” established in Bengal



130

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133

John Malcolm, Report to Lord Wm. Bentinck on the Bombay Army and the Army Generally, 1830, f. 319 v, BL IOR/L/Mil/5/397, coll. 71. C. A. Bayly, “Metcalfe, Charles Theophilus, Baron Metcalfe,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, January 3, 2008), https://doi-org .wooster.idm.oclc.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/18617. C. A. Bayly, “Elphinstone, Mountstuart (1779–1859),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2008), www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/8752. Quotes from Metcalfe and Kaye, Selections from the Papers of Lord Metcalfe, 144, 199.

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in 1793.134 The intricate details of this system are beyond the scope of this work, but it is worth noting that it did not lead to any substantial increase in military officers’ authority. Indeed, throughout his tenure as an administrator, Munro seems to have made less use of the rhetoric of “rule by the sword” than did Malcolm and Metcalfe. A far less prolific writer than Malcolm, he offered fewer public defenses of the maxim.135 On leave in Britain in 1809, he also avoided much of the controversy of the officers’ mutiny. However, a “Sketch of a Plan for the Indian Army” that he submitted to Dundas in 1810 gives some hint where his sympathies lay. Most significantly, he warned Dundas that There is no instance of a great standing Army having remained obetient [sic] to the laws unless its superior Officers were enabled to maintain their rank in Society … the permanent obedience of this Army to the Government can be secured only by holding out to its Officers a reasonable hope of being enabled to retire with Comfort after the expiration of their period of Service. Cut the tie which binds them to their native Country, and the Indian from a [British] national is converted into a mercenary army.136

In the immediate wake of the 1809 crisis, with its roots in the elimination of the tent contract, Munro’s point was clear: The mutiny had been the inevitable result of the diminution of the officers’ status. More significantly, the path forward lay not in tempering officers’ greed, but in sating it. Munro’s role as a stratocrat is visible less through his sparse writings than in his own career. He had earned his reputation through warfare, principally the seizure of Dharwar during the Third Anglo-Maratha War (1817–18). A district in modern-day Karnataka, Munro had taken and held the region as a military governor, raising irregular levies across its territories to collect revenue and to secure its borders. Malcolm celebrated this action as an apotheosis of the kind of militarized, paternalist authority that he thought was the root of power in India: The country comes into his hands by the most legitimate of all modes, the zealous and spirited efforts of the natives, to place themselves under his rule, and to 134 The best analysis of this system is Stein, Thomas Munro. 135 In fact, Munro actually chastised the commander of the Madras Army for being too suspicious about sepoy unrest. Though this was always possible, he argued in one minute from 1823 “that the best way of ensuring the fidelity of our Native troops is to show no distrust…” George Robert Gleig, The Life of Sir Thomas Munro, Late Governor of Madras: With Extracts from His Correspondence and Private Papers (H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1830), 412. 136 Thomas Munro, “Sketch of a Plan for the Indian Army,” April 17, 1810, Correspondence of the First and Second Viscount of Melville on Indian Affairs, 13–14, NLS Acc. 12001/5.

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enjoy the benefits of a government which, when administered by a man like him, is one of the best in the world.137

Munro’s ryotwari system shows that there was no precise consensus of how a stratocratic empire should be administered, either across the Company or even among the adherents of “rule by the sword.” Scholars have demonstrated that the ideological approaches circulating in the Company in this period stemmed from a wide range of sources, from the Scottish Enlightenment to burgeoning Orientalist studies to the patronage networks that had emerged under Wellesley.138 This chapter has suggested that the Madras Army as a set of institutions and a site of a horizontal community was another contributing factor. I also argue that those officers played a crucial role in how ideas about militarism and military rule gained a foothold in the Company administration. The officers’ empire, such as it was, emerged as the product of decades of conflict about the role of the Company’s army in colonial government. For years, civil officials had sought to rein in their officers, who in turn had pointed to a successive series of external threats that made any such reduction risky. The Company’s growing military paramountcy in the south seemed in the early nineteenth century to give a brief advantage to civil authorities, but this vanished when officers reframed how they claimed their authority, embedding their significance instead in the maintenance of internal stability. Barlow’s fall showed that, already by 1813, Britons involved in colonial affairs were more worried about sepoy revolt than they were about stratocracy. In the 1740s, when the Madras Army had raised its earliest sepoy battalions, this new category of combatant was envisioned as part of a campaigning force, distinguished from other forms of militarized labor such as peons, topasses, or coffreys that were employed in a multitude of roles beyond the battlefield. Drawing on already well-established tropes that imagined warfare in India as chaotic and mobbish, the Company’s European officers reified their own importance by insisting that their authority and their expertise were essential in transforming sepoys into a disciplined force. By the turn of the nineteenth century, this narrative had the force of myth. Writing in 1808, Malcolm celebrated the early days of the Madras Army when “natives of India … were easily defeated however great their numbers by a small corps of their Brothers,” so long 137 Quoted in Stein, Thomas Munro, 219. Emp. added. 138 Contrast Martha MacLaren, “From Analysis to Prescription: Scottish Concepts of Asian Despotism in Early Nineteenth-Century British India,” The International History Review 15, no. 3 (1993): 469–501 and Peers, “Soldiers, Scholars, and the Scottish Enlightenment,” 441–65.

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as these were “armed, disciplined, and directed by” European officers.139 In the intervening decades, though, the role of sepoys in the empire had extended beyond the battlefield to become central to the way that officials imagined their control over colonial society. Gyanendra Pandey, in his seminal study of colonial perceptions of communal violence, offers insight into this emerging set of assumptions. Pandey argued that colonial administrators’ responses to moments of conflict in India tended quickly to collapse any dispute into the classic, reductive Orientalist dichotomy described by Edward Said.140 Looking a wave of “rioting” in Varansi (Benares, in the Bengal Presidency) in 1809, Pandey showed how the details of the incident were flattened into a simple storybook structure: “Evil clashes with evil. Good intervenes. Order is restored.”141 “Irrational” Indians performed meaningless violence, while “rational” colonial actors sought to limit the damage. What Pandey left unexplored, though, was how “[g]ood intervenes.” At Varanasi, as elsewhere in British India, that unseen force was in fact a sepoy regiment. Alongside the continued celebrations of sepoys as an extension of European prowess on the battlefield, these troops by the early nineteenth century had become avatars of colonial order, narratively construed as passive tools through which the colonial garrison state asserted power over its subjects. The officers who condemned Barlow’s attempts to mobilize sepoys against them in 1809 – implicitly or explicitly – pointed to the fragility of this model, the ease with which sepoys were perceived as slipping back into the irrational mob. Once more, Malcolm provides an example of this. In 1809, in a report about the mutiny meant for Minto, Malcolm described the anger of the sepoys who had survived the attack outside of Srirangapatna: “The Women of this Corps [i.e., the campfollowers and wives of the sepoys] were very violent and active in exciting the men to revenge their brethren.”142 Misogynist tropes of women as hysterical and prone to madness offered proof that the sepoys, losing trust in their European officers, were teetering on the verge of chaos. Scattered evidence we have of how sepoys responded to the crisis of 1809 paints a picture strikingly different from this reported irrationality. Malcolm, “Memorandum on the State of the Madras Army,” 3v, NLS MS 11653. Said, Orientalism, 47–49. 141 Gyanendra Pandey, “The Construction of ‘Communalism’: British Writings on Banaras in the Nineteenth Century,” in Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots, and Survivors in South Asia, ed. Veena Das (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 101. 142 Malcolm, “A Short General Statement of Events Subsequent to the Events of 26th of July 1809,” 24, BL Add MS 13637. 139

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On the contrary, soon after the skirmish, the surviving Indian officers from Chitradurga gathered to write a formal petition to Barlow’s representatives on the spot, explaining that they had been deceived in their march. They begged the governor “shew some means to us and we glad [sic] to serve under your authority, if your goodness please to employ us at any place.”143 The somewhat awkward English underscores that this document was written outside of the Madras Army’s European hierarchies. The Indian officers and the men they commanded nevertheless chose a form of formal address that made use of their status within the Company. The same thing occurred at Nandidurga (Nundydroog) near Bengaluru. When sepoys realized that their European officers had committed themselves to a mutiny, they approached the highest-ranking Indian officer in the garrison, Shaikh Ismael, and “entreat[ed] [him] to report to the commanding officer [that he] must not [act?] against the King’s party.” When he did so, his commander, Major James Welsh, stripped him of his commission, but Shaikh Ismael took the case to Barlow, navigating the hierarchies of the Madras Government in ways that he hoped would preserve his aspirations.144 In decades that followed, Indians would continue in this same vein to mount protests and critiques of the colonial state that made use of the army’s internal structures. These disputes would reach their peak in 1857 – not in Madras, where the officers’ stratocracy had triumphed most dramatically, but in Bengal, where those same ideals had nevertheless become firmly rooted. For decades, officers had denied the possibility that sepoys could themselves espouse the organization, agency, and innovation needed to challenge the state. When a spiraling rebellion broke out across North India, centered first in the Bengal Army, the Company’s white officers found themselves unable to make good on their long-standing guarantee that they alone could maintain stability in the empire. It was a failure from which the officer corps – and the Company as a whole – would never recover.

143 The Humble Petition of the Subedars, Jemidars, Havildars, Naigues, and Privates of belonging to the 1st battalion N. I. to Lt. Col. Davis, no date, Further Enclosures in the General Letter of 10th September 1809, 2F:49. 144 Letter from Shaik Esmaull, Subedar of 2/3 N. I. Grenadier Company, to the Adjutant-General of the Army, August 12, 1809, Ibid., 2F:42.

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Breaking the Officers’ Sword

On May 10, 1857, a battalion of sepoys stationed at Meerut (modernday Uttar Pradesh) rose up in rebellion against their British officers. In a flurry of violence, the sepoys seized their weapons, fired on their European commanders, and killed many of the Britons in the cantonment.1 The men then set off for Delhi, some forty miles south of Meerut, where they would demand an audience with Bahadur Shah Zafar, the Mughal emperor whose power under British suzerainty was largely ceremonial. Encouraged by his younger sons and grandsons, Zafar joined the revolt, calling for a larger rebellion against “the tyranny and oppression of the treacherous and infidel English.”2 The events marked the beginning or perhaps more accurately the acceleration of the most sustained challenge to colonial rule that the Company would ever experience. At the center of this conflict was the Bengal Army: Sixty-nine of its seventy-four sepoy regiments were implicated to at least some degree in the unrest.3 They were joined by Indians drawn from every level of colonial society – from peasants to Dalits to emperors – who fought the Company for more than a year across northeastern and central India. Casualty estimates are exceedingly difficult to come by in such a complex conflict, but some measures suggest up to four thousand Europeans and as many as eight hundred thousand Indians were killed.4 That

1 The events at Meerut are covered in detail in J. A. B. Palmer, The Mutiny Outbreak in Meerut in 1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). 2 The quote is drawn from the Azamgarh Proclamation, purportedly written by one of Zafar’s grandsons. Rachel Fell McDermott et al., eds., Sources of Indian Traditions, 3rd ed., Introduction to Asian Civilizations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 98–100. For more on the emperor’s role in the 1857 rebellions, see William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar and the Fall of Delhi, 1857 (London: Bloomsbury, 2006). 3 Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (New York: Manchester University Press, distributed by Palgrave, 2004), 19. 4 Douglas M. Peers, India under Colonial Rule: 1700–1885 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 64.

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horrific disparity reflects the uncontrolled violence with which British forces responded to the rebellion, desperate to reestablish a veneer of control over the region. By the end of 1858, most of the major pockets of resistance had been stamped out in a wave of heavy-handed retribution, but British rule in India was permanently transformed. Two long-established governing structures in the region were extinguished. First was the remnant of the Mughal Empire: Bahadur Shah Zafar was imprisoned in Burma until his death in 1862, and his heirs were executed.5 Second was the Company itself, which was dissolved as the British state moved to take direct control over India. The transfer of power finally accomplished what Dundas had first demanded in 1784: the elimination of the Company as an independent military authority and the consolidation of its forces into those of the British Army proper. Despite the flood of ink dedicated to the events of 1857, the Company’s final collapse has been curiously undertheorized, treated almost as an overdetermined afterthought. It is true that the British state had been slowly eroding the Company’s functional autonomy in Indian affairs for decades – indeed, since the Regulating Act of 1773. In 1813, the Company had lost its once jealously guarded monopoly on trade into India as well as control over the movement of Britons in the region. In 1833, it further ceded its remaining monopoly on trade into China, and, in 1853, the British Government began directly appointing civil and judicial officials in India, removing much of the patronage that remained to the Court of Directors.6 This timeline might thus suggest that the elimination of the Company as a governing power in 1857 was simply the acceleration of an inevitable process.7 When examining the Company’s military institutions, though, this development seems much less preordained: Despite the Company’s gradual loss of civil and commercial autonomy, similar reforms of its armies had been stymied. As late as 1853, when the state appropriated the authority to appoint civil officials, the Company’s Directors retained the power to nominate military officers and staff.8 The persistence of this source of patronage was a manifestation of the power that the officers’ ideology had on British imperial frameworks: Their autonomy was accepted as essential to the stability of British rule in India.

Dalrymple, The Last Mughal, 412–48. 6 Webster, The Twilight of the East India Company, 2–3. 7 This argument is effectively argued in Webster, The Twilight of the East India Company. 8 Peter Stanley, White Mutiny: British Military Culture in India (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 9. 5

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The sudden destruction of the Company, only four years later, marked a repudiation of this logic. The Company’s armies, starting with its European forces, were quickly absorbed into the British imperial military, as administrators were finally able to realize the calls for “consolidation,” now referred to as “amalgamation.”9 With it came a new model of empire, no less militaristic than its predecessor, but which no longer centered on the Company’s officers.10 For years, these officers had presented themselves “the keystone by which our sovereignty is maintained” in India, trumpeting their local expertise as the sole authority that could both mobilize the sepoy army and prevent rebellion therein.11 The long shadow of Vellore retained conjuring power within the colonial government as a worst-case scenario that could justify Company officers in a wide range of behaviors – from their unrelenting demands for political influence to the shock of mutiny itself. Yet, when that long-prophesied revolt occurred, they proved singularly unable to restore order. Their inefficacy did what had eluded centuries of interlopers, decades of calls for reform, and round after round of charter debates: It signaled the end of the Company and the enervation of the ideologies on which its rules had been based. Referring to the events of 1857 as a “mutiny,” as many Britons did at the time, is to use a controversial and indeed misleading moniker.12 Activists and scholars alike have persuasively argued that the term obscures the sheer diversity of participation in the rebellions and, through its negative connotations, delegitimizes their grievances. Even contemporary Britons in 1857 noted this pitfall. One essayist emphasized that depicting the conflict as “a mere mutiny of the Bengal Army” downplayed the gravity of the crisis, which he maintained was better understood as

9 It is not clear why officials in the mid-nineteenth century used the term “amalgamation,” rather than “consolidation,” to refer to the transfer of the Company’s forces to the British Army proper. The plans to “amalgamate” the Company’s armies do not seem to have made specific reference to the earlier consolidation models, so the difference may thus simply be happenstance. 10 The plan for amalgamation was designed and carried out by Charles Wood, Secretary of State for India from 1859 to 1864. See Charles Wood, “Original Report of the Committee on the Amalgamation of the British and Indian Army,” 1860, BL IOR/L/ Mil/5/522. 11 Quote taken from Anon., “Original Papers Elucidatory of the Claims Preferred by the Officers of the Honourable Company’s Army in India, Published by Their Authority,” [London]: [1794], 21v, BL IOR/L/Mil/17/2/464. 12 As early as 1858, before the revolts had even been fully suppressed, a compendium of correspondence from the Bengal Government was published in Madras using this language. Anonymous, Narrative of the Indian Mutinies of 1857, Compiled for the Madras Military Male Orphan Asylum (Madras: Asylum Press, 1858).

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a national revolt.13 In 1909, Indian nationalist V. D. Savarkar sought to reframe the conflict as the “War of Indian Independence,” and this name that remains popular in India to this day.14 By the 1980s, other scholars – notably Eric Stokes and Rudrangshu Mukherjee – offered yet another framework, positing that the rebellions were best understood as a series of interconnected agrarian revolts.15 It is a mark of these ongoing debates that the Economic and Political Weekly’s volume of collected essays on the subject, published to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the conflicts, was called, simply, 1857.16 My own choice to refer to 1857 as a set of rebellions reflects the current scholarly emphasis that no single conflict, single cause, or single objective fully tied together all participants. Yet, if the term “mutiny” does not capture the full scope of the rebellions, it should perhaps not be cast aside entirely. A mutiny is a particular kind of protest, one rooted within and against a military structure. As seen throughout this book, mutinies could occur around almost any grievance, from loss of profit to an unpopular change in uniforms to a more systemic shift in the nature of military service. Such breakdowns of order were thus no more or less inherently “legitimate” or ideologically fueled than any other form of revolt. Within the Company, though, the long history of such challenges and the inflated significance they held in conceptions of governance made even a whiff of unrest among sepoys an obsession for Britons at every station in colonial society. In 1857, even as the revolt expanded beyond Meerut, the weight of this discourse ensured that British contemporaries would slot the rebellions neatly into the narrative of mutiny, where it would sit uncomfortably for the Company’s officers as indisputable evidence of failure. 7.1

Paramountcy and Persistence

By the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the control the Company had begun to assert over South and central India’s military landscape had solidified even further. The Third Anglo-Maratha War (1818–1819) devastated the ability of the Maratha confederation to rival the Company militarily, leading the Marquess of Hastings, then 13 Anonymous, “The Indian Campaign,” Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 6, no. 147 (August 21, 1858): 181. 14 Jyotirmaya Sharma, “History as Revenge and Retaliation: Rereading Savarkar’s The War of Independence of 1857,” in Bandyopadhyay, ed., 1857, 123–33. 15 Eric Stokes and C. A. Bayly, The Peasant Armed: The Indian Revolt of 1857 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt, 1857–1858: A Study of Popular Resistance (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984). 16 Bandyopadhyay, 1857.

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governor-general, to declare that the Company had achieved paramountcy in the region.17 This was an exaggeration: The Madras Army continued to be deployed against so-called “rebel” forces across its territories, clashing with political and martial elites who remained outside the reach of colonial structures. Nevertheless, these operations lacked the prestige of previous wars, like those against Mysore.18 With the south imagined as “pacified,” the Madras Presidency gained a reputation as a stultifying backwater, especially for ambitious military men. As one Madras officer, Albert Hervey, complained in 1850: The Bengal and Bombay Presidencies are those on which the attention of Europe has been fixed, as playing the most distinguished part in the tragical drama which has been lately enacted, whilst the sister Presidency of Madras has apparently sunk into insignificance, and been termed, by the wouldbe-witty, the benighted Presidency.19

The shift in military theaters, though, did not mean an end to combat. In fact, the Company’s forces – including the Madras Army – were almost perpetually engaged in warfare in this period, with major campaigns against Nepal (1814–1816), Burma (1824–1826 and ­ 1852–1853), Afghanistan (1839–1842), the Sikh khalsa state (1845–1846 and 1848– 1849), and even against China in the First Opium War (1839–1842).20 Throughout these conflicts, Company officers developed what Douglas Peers termed a “cult of the officer,” in which questions of strategy, tactics, and logistics and indeed of imperial rule itself were secondary to an “emphasis more directly on the character of the officer.”21 This ideological conceit echoed and built on the same claims officers had advanced since the campaigns for equality of rank in the 1780s. Then, Company

17 John Malcolm, The Political History of India from 1784 to 1823, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1826), 592–93. 18 Crowell, “The Madras Army in the Northern Circars, 1832–1833,” 1–5. 19 Albert Hervey, Ten Years in India, or the Life of a Young Officer, 1850, v–vi. 20 For an overview of these conflicts Mason, A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers and Men. This, though, is a dated text that replicates much of the discourse of the “cult of the officer” described in this chapter. For more specific studies of these campaigns, see John Pemble, The Invasion of Nepal: John Company at War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Barua, “Military Developments in India, 1750–1850,” 610– 13; William Dalrymple, The Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839–42 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013); Antoinette M. Burton and Andrew J. Bacevich, eds., The First Anglo-Afghan Wars: A Reader (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014); Matthew A. Cook, Annexation and the Unhappy Valley: The Historical Anthropology of Sindh’s Colonization (Leiden: Brill, 2016). 21 Douglas M. Peers, “‘The Habitual Nobility of Being’: British Officers and the Social Construction of the Bengal Army in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Modern Asian Studies 25, no. 3 (1991): 568.

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officers had insisted that their knowledge of “the manners, language and customs of the natives” was “at least as necessary to unite the natives in action as the knowledge of military discipline.”22 Accounts of field operations in the nineteenth century reflected this rhetoric, attributing any battlefield success to particular abilities of European officers to inspire their men. During the First Anglo-Burmese War, for instance, Madras officer F. B. Doveton described “both sepoys and Europeans” as “being animated throughout by the finest spirit, though the duty was incessant and the privations severe.” Praise and “great credit” for this was due not to the soldiers themselves, but rather to the leadership of Major Yates, who had led Doveton’s regiment.23 Officer Joseph Greenwood used similar rhetoric to describe three of his fellows who had been killed during the First Anglo-Afghan War: “[Robert] Sale, Denny [William Dennie] and [Thomas] Monteath were hosts in themselves, for however trying the circumstances, the troops under them felt confidence in their leaders, whom they knew to be equal to any emergency.”24 Interestingly, two of these officers – Sale and Dennie – were actually in the royal line, but had served in India, and only in India, since the Anglo-Mysore wars.25 That they were hailed for their effective leadership of sepoys suggests that the “cult of the officer” placed more emphasis on supposed local expertise and understanding than on institutional identity. In contrast, military writers attributed failure in the field almost universally to disruptions in the ideal relationship between officers and their sepoys. Greenwood, for instance, blamed the Company’s disastrous defeat at Kabul in 1842 on William Elphinstone, a royal officer put in command of the campaign without any prior experience in Asia: How many brave and talented officers, alas! were in this unfortunate affair lost to their country, and how bitter must their reflections have been, while the work of disorder and destruction was going on, that they were sacrificed by the downright folly of those who were so totally unfit to command them!26

Quotes from Petition to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty (1784) and Petition to the Court of Directors (1784), Add MS 22432, 244–45, 250. 23 Frederick Brickdale Doveton, Reminiscences of the Burmese War, in 1824–1826 (London: Allen and Co., 1852), 274. 24 J. Greenwood, Narrative of the Late Victorious Campaign in Affghanistan [sic], under General Pollock (London: Henry Colburn, 1844), 248, emp. added. 25 Biographical information from James Lunt, “Sale, Sir Robert Henry,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, September 23, 2004, https://doi-org.wooster.idm .oclc.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/24533; James Lunt and H. M. Chichester, “Dennie, William Henry,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, September 23, 2004, https://doi-org.wooster.idm.oclc.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/7501. 26 Greenwood, Narrative of the Late Victorious Campaign in Affghanistan [sic], under General Pollock, 248–49. It speaks further to the primacy of “the cult of the officer” that the loss of sepoys and soldiers did not warrant a mention. 22

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The rise of men like Thomas Munro, John Malcolm, and Charles Metcalfe to the highest echelons of the Company’s government meant that this “cult of the officer” and the model of stratocracy it implied gained considerable influence in colonial policy. Theirs, though, was not the only vision for empire. Stratocracy found one of its most potent rivals in none other than William Bentinck, erstwhile governor of Madras, who served as governor-general from 1819 to 1828. Recalled in 1807 after the mutiny at Vellore, Bentinck nevertheless returned to India still confident in the need for policies that would radically transform Indian society through civil institutions, so as to “civilize” its subjects. Bentinck was particularly interested in education as a mechanism for these changes and supported Thomas Babington Macaulay’s plans for English-language schools to “Anglicize” India.27 Both Bentinck and Macaulay also expanded Christian missionary work in India and pursued ambitious plans to overhaul the Company’s legal system.28 These priorities led Bentinck to decry that top-heavy Company armies were unnecessary relics, unfit for reform. In 1835, he went so far as to declare: “I fearlessly pronounce the Indian army to be the least efficient and most expensive in the world.”29 Bentinck’s position as governor-general placed Malcolm, Munro, and other military officials in the subordinate presidencies of Bombay and Madras on the defensive, all the more so since the Company’s southerly territories had lost their strategic importance for military planning. In the face of this marginalization, officials and officers turned arguments about the need for local knowledge inward. Local expertise was needed not just to defend and to expand colonial territories but to govern them. These claims served to check the authority of the Supreme Government in Bengal to interfere in their presidencies. Munro’s ryotwari system of property and land use was justified as an effort to preserve

The development of liberalism and empire has been well studied. See, for instance, Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 50–52, 102–10; Mehta, Liberalism and Empire; Pitts, A Turn to Empire, chaps. 4 & 5. Macaulay’s educational policies were most famously outlined in his Minute on Education (1835), accessible at T. B. Macaulay, “Minute by the Hon’ble T. B. Macaulay, dated the 2nd February 1835,” Resources on South Asia, Frances W. Pritchett, ed. Columbia University, accessed December 30, 2020, www.columbia .edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835 .html. For Bentinck, see John Rosselli, Lord William Bentinck: The Making of a Liberal Imperialist, 1774–1839 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 28 For Macaulay’s legal reforms during the Company era, see Singha, A Despotism of Law; Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, chap. 2. 29 William Bentinck, “Minute by the Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief,” March 13, 1835, printed in Demetrius C. Boulger, Lord William Bentinck, Rulers of India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), 201. 27

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local customs and social systems, framed explicitly as a rejection of the property system developed in Bengal. In contrast, Bentinck’s reforms were more universalizing in their scope. These tensions can be traced in almost every aspect of the Company’s governance, from legal practices to debates over language to economic policies, but they are particularly visible in a military context, as officers and officials countered the centralizing ambitions of men like Bentinck’s with calls to purportedly inescapable strategic realities.30 One common complaint found in officers’ memoirs from this period and widely repeated in subsequent scholarship is that the centralized colonial government discouraged newly arrived officers from acquiring the expertise needed to command their sepoys.31 Albert Hervey, the officer who so lamented the Madras Presidency’s diminished status, grumbled that “[a] young fellow is often laughed out of the good intention of studying the language, by being told that it is all stuff and nonsense … that all he has to do is say ‘Accha’ (Anglicè, ‘very good’), to every thing that may be told or reported to him … nothing else was required.”32 John Kaye and G. B. Malleson, in their hugely influential history of the 1857 rebellions, wrote in a similar vein to suggest that the crisis had been precipitated by a growing disconnect between European officers and their sepoys: “[l]ittle by little the Sipáhi officer shook out the loose folds of his Orientalism.” They attributed officers’ inattention to the draw of polite society in colonial settlements, especially the growing number of “fair young English maidens” in India who “yielded attractions beside which the gossip of the lines and the feeble garrulity of the old Subahdár were very dreary and fatiguing.”33 Such ubiquitous complaints, though, rest on an uneasy foundation. They assume that there had been some “golden age” as described by Kaye and Malleson, when Company officers were patriarchs to their

For more on the efforts of the subordinate presidencies (Bombay and Madras) to challenge Bengal’s authority under Bentinck, see Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India., 9–24; Douglas M. Peers, Between Mars and Mammon, 36–37; Trautmann, The Madras School of Orientalism, 1–25. 31 Peers, “‘The Habitual Nobility of Being,’” 556–57; Mason, A Matter of Honour, 19–20. 32 Hervey, Ten Years in India, 59–60. 33 John William Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War in India, 1857–1858 (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1864), 188–89. The complaint that the arrival of white women in colonial society produced a more racially stratified society can be found across the European imperial world. It is effectively critiqued in Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, x. For a similar critique, focused more specifically on India, see Jane Robinson, Angels of Albion: Women of the Indian Mutiny (London: Penguin, 1997), 15–28. 30

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sepoys, in turn fondly treated as their “bábá lóg,” their children.34 It is certainly true that, in the mid-nineteenth century, relatively few officers were fluent in any Indian language. In 1833, only six officers in the Madras Army passed their examinations.35 Perhaps even more tellingly, Hervey boasted that he had attained this rare achievement because he had “fagged thus hard for three months” to learn Hindustani, which suggests that the exams required a relatively low bar of fluency.36 Yet, it is not easy to determine whether this paucity of linguistic abilities was really evidence of a decline. Significantly, neither Robert Clive nor Eyre Coote, officers often celebrated as exemplars of charismatic commanders of sepoys, spoke any Indian language.37 In 1796, when the Bengal Army published a trilingual “abstract” of the articles of war for sepoys in English, Persian, and Hindustani, the editor included a transliteration of this last text, explaining, “that Officers who may not be competent to read the translation in either the Persian or Naguree Characters will by a little attention to the Key be able to read it in the Roman Letters, and to explain it to the Men under their command.”38 Clearly, the Bengal Government had no expectation in 1796 that the commanders of sepoy detachments had even the basic ability to read Indian scripts. Formal certification in languages was not even introduced until the nineteenth century.39 Though the Company’s continued expansion in the nineteenth century undeniably brought with it a reification of social boundaries, it is worth remembering that formal divisions along racial and cultural lines had already been well established in the Company’s armies by the mideighteenth century. The sheer prevalence of handwringing about officers’ alienation from their sepoys thus seems at first puzzling: The Company’s military institutions had been designed in many ways to ensure that divide. When contextualized within broader debates over colonial 34 Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War in India, 1857–1858, 188. 35 Dasgupta and Roy, “Discipline and Disobedience in the Bengal and Madras Armies, 1807–1856,” 70. 36 Hervey, Ten Years in India, 51. 37 H. V. Bowen, “Clive, Robert, First Baron Clive of Plassey,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, January 3, 2008, https://doi-org.wooster.idm.oclc.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb/5697; H. C. Wylly, A Life of Lieutenant-General Sir Eyre Coote, K. B. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), 172. 38 East India Company, Abstract of the Articles of War; in English, Persian and Hindoostanee, the Latter in Naguree, and Roman Characters (Calcutta: Printed by order of the Hon’ble Governor General in Council, 1796), 3. 39 Bernard Cohn, “The Command of Language and the Language of Command,” in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 34–43. For more on colonial language study, see Michael Herbert Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006), chap. 3.

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ideology, though, the worries take on another kind of significance. Rather than concerns about sepoys themselves, the laments helped to clarify the officers’ position vis-à-vis other sources of colonial authority in India. Emphasis on learning Indian languages and on sepoys’ “feelings and prejudices” directly challenged the efforts of civil reformers like Bentinck and Macaulay, who crusaded for the introduction of Englishlanguage education across India. Similarly, young officers were encouraged to reject the trappings of colonial society in favor of the regiment, a recommendation that served to entrench the divide between civilian and military power.40 In 1839, Edward Frederick, an officer in the Bombay Army, drew on this familiar rhetoric in a pamphlet condemning Bentinck’s comments about military inefficiency. Any effort to diminish the armies of Bombay and Madras, he argued, would be imprudent because “it would at least weaken those bonds that so powerfully, yet imperceptibly, connect us with the natives in general, and our military subjects in particular.”41 7.2

“Nothing Less Than Another Vellore”

It was unnecessary for Frederick to state the consequences of “weaken[ing] those bonds.” The threat implicitly remained centered on fears of internal security and potential revolt. In 1830, in a minute written to Bentinck on the Bombay Army, John Malcolm reiterated what had become almost a refrain in his writings about India: “We have through the efforts of our Native Army triumphed in Wars and rebellions, Plots and Conspiracies may be formed [within its ranks], but they will never succeed while we maintain the good spirit and fidelity of this branch of our force.”42 Bentinck, eager to diminish that very army, dismissed Malcolm’s warnings: Of internal dangers nobody, I believe, entertains less alarm than myself. In answer to those almost universal representations from authorities of the existence of danger, and the consequent necessity of maintaining a large native army, I have in vain asked to have pointed out to me what the danger is … A vague expression is often used that ours is a Government of opinion. Our security rests upon a very much better foundation, upon the fact which every

Malcolm, “Review of an Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Native Infantry by the Late Captain Williams,” 423. 41 Edward Frederick, Remarks on the Government of India and on Its Military Organisation (London: Levey, Robson, and Franklyn, 1839), 45. 42 John Malcolm, “Report to Lord Wm. Bentinck on the Bombay Army and the Army Generally,” 319 v–320r. 40

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one from his own observation and experience is thoroughly convinced of, and which is true, that our power is irresistible.43

Even within the proclamation, though, it was clear that Bentinck was rowing against conventional wisdom. Fears of “internal dangers” were espoused by “almost universal representations,” and, indeed, Bentinck’s efforts at dispelling those anxieties would ultimately prove unpersuasive. Bentinck’s unwillingness to acknowledge this risk may reflect his own history as the governor blamed for the Vellore Mutiny. After 1806, Bentinck had been obliged to fight bitterly to counter those charges to revive his career in India.44 The mutiny remained a watchword among Britons in India, one that called into question the prudence of reformers like Bentinck and that helped to shore up officers’ authority within and over the Company’s government. Though remembered only vaguely today as a brief prologue to the events of 1857, the mutiny of the sepoys at Vellore in 1806 cast a long shadow over the Company in the nineteenth century. In 1812, rumors consumed the garrison at Kollam that its sepoys had formed “a daring conspiracy” to rise up against the Europeans in the fort. The local political resident, Colonel John Munro, looked backwards to understand the supposed conspiracy, concluding that “[s]ome remains of the rebellious spirit which prevailed at the time of the Vellore mutiny appeared to subsist among the Troops.”45 Similar panic occurred twenty years later at Bangalore, where colonial police reportedly discovered “a deep-laid conspiracy … having for its object the subversion of British supremacy in Mysore, by a massacre of all the Europeans at Bangalore!” As at Kollam, the existence of the plot was dubious, more rumor than fact, but it was widely believed and Europeans in the garrison barricaded themselves in the barracks in fear of “nothing less than another Vellore massacre.”46 Nor was this shibboleth confined to the south. In 1824, during the First Anglo-Burmese War, sepoys at Barrackpore in the Bengal Presidency refused orders to embark for the conflict, protesting the conditions both of their voyage and of the campaign itself. British officers on the spot fired on the troops, treating the refusal as an open mutiny. In the wake of the violence, those officers pointed to Vellore to justify

Quoted in Boulger, Lord William Bentinck, 178–79. 44 Bentinck, Memorial Addressed to the Court of Directors. 45 Letter from John Munro to the Fort St. George Council, October 2, 1812, TNSA MS vol. 3, 367. 46 F. B. Doveton, “The Bangalore Conspiracy in 1832,” The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Miscellany, Third Series, II, no. November–April (1844): 620–24. 43

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their actions.47 Charles Metcalfe, almost beside himself in a panic, wrote to a friend that the revolt at Barrackpore was “[n]ews … of the blackest hue and the most awful omen, such as for a time must necessarily absorb all the faculties of a man anxiously alive to the dangers which beset our empire in India.”48 When rebellion in 1857 first began to boil into open conflict, many Britons in India looked back to Vellore as precedent. Charles Edward Trevelyan published a series of letters in the Bengal Hurkaru under the pseudonym Indophilus, in which he discussed Vellore’s “parallelisms and its lessons” for officers in 1857. A civil official, Trevelyan nevertheless affirmed the official military line, depicting the sepoys at Vellore as senseless and acting with “demonaical [sic] fury” and the European soldiers who had suppressed the mutiny as the thin red line against irrational destruction. He celebrated Vellore as an example of “the spirit of the British soldier … the redoubted spirit.”49 He concluded that the Company’s security – in 1857 as much as in 1806 – depended on officers who managed their sepoys with “the sternness of the Disciplinarian and Commander, in happy combination with the tenderness of the Father and the Friend.”50 As such language suggests, the idealized myth of the paternal officer and his “bábá lóg” sepoys was a security issue – a way to maintain order and to stave off what many claimed was the worst “internal danger” in the Company’s territories. Pointedly, this meant that this relationship was not envisioned as a vibrant form of cross-cultural engagement or as a real vector of sympathy. Indeed, sepoys’ efforts to appeal to their officers’ paternal benevolence were usually brutally rebuffed. In 1843, a regiment of Indian cavalrymen on expedition to Jabalpur (Jubbulpore) in modern-day Madhya Pradesh sought recourse when their campaign was unexpectedly extended indefinitely. Their commander refused to hear their complaints, so the troopers penned a series of collective memorials to Brigadier General Watson, an officer higher up the chain of command under whom the men had previously served. They addressed Watson as “our Salter” (i.e., one whose salt they ate) and “our Nourisher,” insisting that they “looked upon him as a friend and a father.” Because the

Wredenhall Robert Pogson, Memoir of the Mutiny at Barrackpore, 1833, 15. For more on Barrackpore, see Premansukumar Bandyopadhyay, Tulsi Leaves and the Ganges Water: The Slogan of the First Sepoy Mutiny at Barrackpore 1824 (Kolkata: K. P. Bagchi & Co., 2003), 66. See also Peers, “‘The Habitual Nobility of Being,’” 562–65. 48 Metcalfe and Kaye, Selections from the Papers of Lord Metcalfe, 152–53. 49 Charles E. Trevelyan, Letters of Indophilus on the Mutiny of Vellore: Its Parallelisms and Its Lessons, Reprinted, by special request, with a few explanatory notes, from the “Bengal Hurkaru” ([Calcutta], 1857), 4–5. 50 Trevelyan, 18. 47

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petitions survive only in translation, it is difficult to subject them to any close rhetorical analysis. Nevertheless, it is significant that the documents contain both Indian and European idioms recalling Watson’s “fatherly” obligations to his former troops.51 Instead of acknowledging these ties, though, Company officials treated the petitions as an open mutiny: The regiments involved were disbanded, two sepoys were executed, and several others were sentenced to imprisonment with hard labor.52 Far from empathizing with the petitioners, the Bengal Government used the dispute to increase the power of the commander at Jabalpur over his men, granting him “the responsible power of instant decision” to carry out capital punishment to prevent future demands.53 The ideal of paternal authority was thus a system of control, in which “affection” was really a tool through which Company officers could gather intelligence about their sepoys. Charles Napier, who became commander-in-chief of the Company’s forces in 1849 after nearly two decades in India, described how this surveillance should operate in his treatise, Defects, Civil and Military, of the Indian Government, published posthumously in 1853. Relaying his account of the conquest of the Punjab, Napier described an incident in which sepoys had begun “growling” over the length of their expedition. In response, “a young and excellent [British] officer” had prodded into their complaints “half jestingly,” which allowed him to “get acquainted with the real feelings of his troops.”54 Again, this interaction was not an invitation to negotiation or to form real friendship. On the contrary, the unnamed officer’s goal was to investigate and thus to check a threat to order. The unhappy sepoys suggested that they might discourage others in their families and villages from joining the service. Since the Bengal Army relied heavily on kin networks among the Brahmin peasantry in North India, this had potential to disrupt the Company’s flow of recruits. The incident led Napier to call on the Company to reduce its reliance on this Brahmin military labor market in favor of Gurkhas.55 51 Full records relating to this protest can be found in the collection Copy of the Proceedings about the Mutiny of the Madras Light Cavalry, 1843–1854, BL IOR/L/Mil/5/428, coll. 410. The quotes from the letter to Watson are taken from “Letter to Colonel Watson from the Third Troop,” December 4, 1843, on page 270 v of that collection. 52 Minute by the Marquess Tweeddale, Commander in Chief, no date. Ibid., 261–64. 53 Extract of a Letter from Fort William to the Court of Directors, November 21, 1844. Ibid., 290r. 54 Charles James Napier, Defects, Civil and Military, of the Indian Government, ed. William Napier (London: Charles Westerton, Hyde Park Corner, 1853), 56. 55 Napier, 130. For Brahmin peasant recruitment, see Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company, 51–55. This suggestion would be adopted after 1857. See Streets, Martial Races, 1–12.

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Lord Dalhousie, as governor-general, was aghast at the report of the unrest, arguing that it would have been better to discharge the unhappy sepoys at the first hint of discontent. Such a response, Napier maintained, would have been a grave error: It would have left the officer unaware of a new threat to the Bengal Army and would have placed the dismissed sepoys beyond the reach of surveillance and martial law. Pillorying Dalhousie’s suggestions, Napier concluded arrogantly: “[f] ortunately, my knowledge in governing soldiers was greater than Lord Dalhousie possessed.”56 The rebuttal points to the final role that officers’ claims of paternal authority played in the construction of empire: as a means through which officers could challenge the Company state itself, particularly its civilian government. Like a patriarchal household, framing officers’ authority over their sepoys as that of a father over his children made “state” interference in that bond inherently illegitimate. Once again, this assertion had its roots in the critiques that officers had made of Barlow in 1809, when the budding terror of sepoy revolt had been weaponized as a justification for mutiny. Napier took this logic to its furthest extreme. A royal officer, Napier had made a name for himself fighting in the Peninsular Wars before being appointed to command the Bombay Army in 1841. At first glance, then, he seems to have been precisely the kind of continentally trained royal officer that officers in the Company line disliked.57 However, as Hew Strachan argued in his classic study of the politics of the British Army, Napier was a uniquely ambitious officer, and his aspirations for political influence placed him in sync with the Company officers’ worldviews.58 During his career in India, Napier adopted the view that empire in India could be maintained only by “military strength,” for that was “what the Indians really venerate.”59 Accordingly, any effort by civil officials to control or still worse to replace that authority would destabilize British power. Defects, Civil and Military, served as an elaboration of these ideas, centered foremost in a vicious excoriation of the Company’s

Napier, Defects, Civil and Military, 60. 57 Ainslee T. Embree, “Napier, Sir Charles James (1782–1853), Army Officer,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, January 3, 2008, https://doi-org.wooster.idm .oclc.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/19748. 58 Strachan, The Politics of the British Army, 81–91. 59 Napier, Defects, Civil and Military, 36, emphasis in original. Napier’s conquest of Sindh was itself a controversial campaign, taken against civil officials’ direct orders. This is captured in the famous Punch cartoon, in which Napier announced his conquest with a one-word telegram: “Peccavi” (I have sinned/Sindh). Wendy Doniger, “Presidential Address: ‘I Have Scinde’: Flogging a Dead (White Male Orientalist) Horse,” The Journal of Asian Studies 58, no. 4 (1999). 56

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civil government. In a passage that could have been written in response to Bentinck’s dismissal of “internal dangers” in 1835, Napier asked his readers: “How can one hundred and fifty millions of people, who hate us mortally be ruled, if the sword be sheathed, and the Government [is] given to civilians acting in the offensive manner described by Mr. Shore [John Shore, erstwhile governor of Bengal].”60 Like Malcolm, Napier maintained that “[m]utiny with the Sepoys is the most formidable danger menacing our Indian empire.”61 The conquest of Sindh and the Punjab gave Napier ample experience with this discontent. Lengthy campaigns were a constant source of dissatisfaction for soldiers, and these expeditions were no exception. More significantly, victories over Sindh and the Sikh armies prompted yet another radical shift in India’s military landscape, tightening still further the monopoly the Company had on military prestige and employment. This was further exacerbated when the Company under Dalhousie annexed several other previously dependent states in the mid-nineteenth century, including Awadh and Jhansi. Their courts, which had functioned as alternative centers for military employment and prestige, were dissolved, replicating in North and central India the same constriction of the military labor market seen in the south at the turn of the century.62 Together, these complaints would form the foundation on which the rebellions of 1857 grew.63 At the time, though, Napier continued to uphold “the cult of the officer” – a paternal, but authoritarian figure – as the only means to check military unrest. Though Napier’s disdain for the civil government was unusually heated, the conclusions that he drew from that were hardly unique, and Company policies had for years worked to extend the authority granted to military officers on the spot, especially in times of perceived mutiny. Defects, Civil and Military met initially with a lukewarm reception: Napier’s tirades against Dalhousie and other administrators were simply too strident.64 Only a few years later, though, when news of the 60 Napier, Defects, Civil and Military, 36–37. Shore, like Bentinck, was considered a reformist, who had worked to bring Cornwallis’s plans to fruition For more on Shore, see Shore and Furber, The Private Record of an Indian Governor-Generalship. 61 Napier, Defects, Civil and Military, 3. 62 For more on Dalhousie’s policies and their implementation, see Zak Leonard, “Law of Nations Theory and the Native Sovereignty Debates in Colonial India,” Law and History Review 38 (May 2020): 373–406. 63 Matthew Stubbings, “British Conservatism and the Indian Revolt: The Annexation of Awadh and the Consequences of Liberal Empire, 1856–1858,” Journal of British Studies 55, no. 4 (October 2016): 737–39; Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt, 1857–1858, 36–38 and 63. 64 Strachan, The Politics of the British Army, 91.

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rebellions of 1857 reached Britain, Napier’s brother, William, published a new edition celebrating his late brother’s “surprising clearness and foresight” in predicting mutiny.65 Charles Napier’s augury was perhaps less remarkable than it seemed: The specter of sepoy revolt, most visible in the shadow of Vellore, was a persistent trope in Company debates. For decades, officers had warned of a budding mutiny as a way to extend their personal power, especially when they were operating beyond the Company’s established settlements. When finally faced with the crisis they had longed predicted, though, the Company’s British officers found themselves unable either to prevent discontent among their ranks or to quell the rebellions that followed. Instead, British royal forces would take center stage in a slow and bloody campaign of repression. Far from demonstrating the validity of the Company officers’ version of militarized empire, Napier’s predictions helped to underscore its ultimate failure. 7.3

Rebellion and the Restoration of Colonial Order

Like most rebellions, the discontents of 1857 were long in the making, sharpened and given explosive power by a more immediate trigger. This proximate cause came in late 1856 when the Bengal Army announced that it would be replacing sepoys’ standard-issue musket with a new, more accurate rifle that, crucially, had to be loaded with ammunition packaged in a “greased cartridge.” Rumors flew that the lubricant used in this case was made with a mix of pig and cow fat, equally abhorrent to Muslim and Hindu recruits.66 According to some, this was no accident or oversight: On the contrary, it was part of a secret plan to force sepoys to convert to Christianity. The parallels between the greased cartridges and the hat-like turban introduced before the Vellore Mutiny are inescapable, and, just as in 1806, administrators in 1857 reacted first by seeking to assuage and to disprove the rumors. Whether or not the cartridges were greased with animal fat was beside the point: The rumor acted as synecdoche for more sprawling fears that a fundamental transformation was taking place in the nature of the Company’s service. Again echoing the prelude to Vellore, sepoys in the Bengal Army were faced with a rapidly shrinking military and political landscape and even found their position in the Company rendered ambiguous as Napier

65 For the new edition, see Charles James Napier, Defects, Civil and Military, of the Indian Government, ed. William Napier, 4th ed. (London: Charles Westerton, Hyde Park Corner, 1857), i–ii. 66 Badri Narayan, “Reactivating the Past: Dalits and Memories of 1857,” in Bandyopadhyay, ed., 1857, 181–82; Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857, 27–44.

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pushed for alternate recruitment models. In garrison after garrison, sepoys voiced their anger: The violence at Meerut in May 1857 was an outgrowth of this movement, one that catalyzed a rapid widening of the conflict. At that point, sepoys’ grievances spread outward, appealing to a wider Indian society with its own grievances about the expanding, increasingly extractive colonial state. The sepoys and camp followers who spilled out of military bazaars across the region played leading roles in what quickly became a more general rebellion. In much of Awadh, sepoys returned to the villages from which they had been recruited, stoking agrarian revolt. This phenomenon led scholars Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Eric Stokes to describe the sepoys as “peasants in uniform,” whose anger at the Bengal Army was quickly transmuted into more broadly resonant agrarian discontent.67 More recently, other scholars have pushed back against the idea that sepoys’ martial identities were so easily disposable, insisting instead that sepoys’ experiences within the Company’s regiments had granted them a unique perspective that built on top of their identities as peasants.68 In a militarized empire like that which the Company had constructed, concerns about military service and soldiers’ status were inextricable from broader questions about the balance of power within society, meaning that much of the rebellion was inevitably focused on military institutions. Given the long history of mutiny in the Madras Army, the failure of the revolt in 1857 to spread substantially into the south may seem surprising. In fact, there are signs that the discontent in Bengal did resonate with colonial subjects in both Madras and Bombay. Across both presidencies, officials arrested scores of Indians for “treason,” their crimes running the gamut from singing seditious ballads to open violence. Sepoys even killed two Europeans at Vellore itself in November 1858.69 Nevertheless, such instances were isolated and relatively minor compared to the sprawling rebellions in the north. The circumscribed geography of the revolt contrasts with the widespread nature of the European officers’ discontent, especially in the 1790s, and, as we will see, with the similarly pervasive

Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt, 1857–1858, 167; Stokes and Bayly, The Peasant Armed, 14–15. 68 See Kaushik Roy, “The Beginning of a ‘People’s War’ in India,” in Bandyopadhyay, ed., 1857, 135–55; Sabyasachi Dasgupta, “The Rebel Army in 1857: At the Vanguard of the War of Independence or a Tyranny of Arms?,” in Bandyopadhyay, ed., 1857, 161–75; Rajat Kanta Ray, The Felt Community: Commonalty and Mentality before the Emergence of Indian Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 431–32. 69 This example, along with others, is described in N. Rajendran, “The Revolt of 1857: Rebellious Prelude and Nationalist Response in Tamil Nadu,” in Rethinking 1857, ed. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007), 180–209. 67

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protests that would be mounted by European soldiers in the immediate aftermath of 1857. This was no accident. In instances of white military revolt, common cause between garrisons and with a wider public had been carefully cultivated through networks of correspondence, rapidly circulating publications, and high-profile lobbying committees. In 1857, sepoys and other rebels sought to exchange information along similar networks, and support for the discontent could be seen in vernacular newspapers or in rebellious signs posted in public spaces.70 In Bengal, European officials became particularly concerned over chapatis, pieces of flatbread which were apparently being circulated from town to town, but obsessive investigations were never able to derive any meaning from the symbol.71 The obscurity of that message points to the wide divergence between this movement and “stratocratic” rebellions of previous decades. Where the colonial state had tolerated or even actively encouraged the circulation of information in those white protests, in 1857, it turned the full weight of its institutions to suppressing such exchange, making open exchange of petitions or plans impossible. The prospect of conspiracies embedded in Indian society had already been a source of anxiety for colonial officials long before 1857: “vernacular” publications and even the English-language press had consequently been carefully policed to prevent “[d]iscussions having a tendency to create alarm or suspicion among the Native population.”72 In 1857, the Madras Government went further, enacting new laws to tighten those restrictions. A sepoy or Indian civil servant who merely “fail[ed] to report rebel wanderings or activity” could be dismissed from the Company without their pension.73 Britons as far afield as Singapore and even New Zealand and Ireland obsessively surveilled subjects, terrified that the revolt would spread further, but, in part because of those measures, the uprising remained confined to Awadh and the northwestern reaches of Bengal.74 Rajendran, “The Revolt of 1857,” 199. See also Clare Anderson, Indian Uprising of 1857–8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion (London: Anthem Press, 2007), 115. 71 For more on the salience of these rumors – and of British reaction to them – see Homi K. Bhabha, “By Bread Alone: Signs of Violence in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 198–211. 72 Ritika Prasad, “Imprimatur as Adversary: Press Freedom and Colonial Governance in India, 1780–1823,” Modern Asian Studies 55, no. 2 (2021): passim, quote from 362. 73 Quoted in Shumais U, “Impact of the Revolt of 1857 in South India,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 77 (2016): 411. 74 For Singapore, Rajesh Rai, “The 1857 Panic and the Fabrication of an Indian ‘Menace’ in Singapore,” Modern Asian Studies 47, no. 2 (2013): 365–405. For Ireland and New Zealand, see Jill C. Bender, The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), chap. 3. The broader process of suppression in 1857 is discussed in Bayly, Empire and Information, chap. 9. 70

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Even this circumscribed revolt was enough, though, to devastate the Company’s European forces, the supposed “palladium” of empire. Many Company officers fell short of the ideal of decisive courage that they were meant to embody. General William Hewitt, who commanded the garrison at Meerut, was singled out for particular excoriation in 1861 in a privately printed pamphlet, The Fatal Falter at Meerut.75 In a frequently quoted passage, its author, an Irish surgeon in Bengal, described Hewitt as “[a]n officer totally unfit, both as regards mental capacity and physical vigour, for any command whatever … seventy years of age, corpulent and disqualified for energetic action.”76 Another anecdote of incompetence came from Kanpur in modern-day Uttar Pradesh, where Colonel Ewart is said to have rushed out among his rebelling troops, appealing to them desperately, “My children! My children! Oh, my children!”77 In ironic subversion of Ewart’s failed authority, one of the mutineers is later said to have mocked the colonel by asking if he approved of the neatness of the rebels’ parade maneuvers.78 It is difficult to imagine a sharper metaphor for the purported failure of the Company officers’ paternalism. British military response to the rebellion was focused on four major hotspots. First, rebels seized Delhi, organizing under the banner of the Mughal emperor.79 Second, in early June, another group of soldiers and civilians took control of Jhansi, which had been recently annexed by the Company, and handed it over to Lakshmi Bai, mother of Jhansi’s heir apparent.80 The third and fourth hotspots were both in Awadh, where the movement against British rule was most widespread. There, Dhondu Pont, known by the British as Nana Saheb, amassed a substantial following as a member of the Maratha elite, who like the emperor in Delhi and the Rani of Jhansi had been shunted aside by the encroaching colonial state.81

75 Daniel O’Callaghan, Scattered Chapters of the Indian Mutiny: The Fatal Falter at Meerut (London: Re-printed by the Army and Navy Co-operative Society, Limited, Victoria Street, Westminster, SW, 1897). 76 Quoted in James C. Dickinson, “Our Indian Military Stations: Meerut,” in Illustrated Naval and Military Magazine, vol. VII (W.H. Allen & Company, 1887), 334. In the wake of the revolt, one of the critiques leveled at the Company’s army would be that its practice of promotion by seniority ensured that commanders tended to be old and out-of-touch. 77 Mason, A Matter of Honour, 247; David, The Indian Mutiny, 188. 78 Rudrangshu Mukherjee, “‘Satan Let Loose upon Earth’: The Kanpur Massacres in India in the Revolt of 1857,” Past & Present, no. 128 (1990): 101. 79 The most extensive coverage of the siege at Delhi is Dalrymple, The Last Mughal. 80 Harleen Singh, The Rani of Jhansi: Gender, History, and Fable in India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 81 Brian Wallace, “Nana Sahib in British Culture and Memory,” The Historical Journal 58, no. 2 (June 2015): 589–613; Thomas R. Metcalf, Aftermath of Revolt: India 1857– 1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 219.

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The clash between his adherents and the British at the garrison of Kanpur would become the most infamous episode of the rebellion in later British histories: There, the vast majority of those on the Company’s side, including a large number of women and children, were killed in two massacres. Their deaths gained almost sacred primacy in subsequent British imperial mythologies and added urgency to expeditions aimed at the fourth and final center of the rebellion: the British Residency at Lucknow, which was besieged until November 1857.82 To restore British authority in these hotspots, British imperial officials pieced together what was in fact a fairly multifaceted coalition of forces. Many sepoys in the Bengal Army remained loyal to the Company during the conflict, mostly those in the Punjab, but, even at the epicenter in Meerut, there were sepoys who refused to join the march to Delhi.83 Such troops, along with remnants of the Company’s European regiments, were active in all of the British counterattacks. These were joined by other forces sent from Indian states under indirect rule, such as Hyderabad, where the Nizam had similarly decided to back the Company.84 However, the most prominent part of the British counterrebellion would be that played by the British Army proper. In 1787, the prospect of sending four additional royal regiments to India had produced a constitutional crisis in Parliament. In the months that followed May 10, 1857, some three dozen British regiments flooded into India, many of whom had been diverted from the Second Opium War (also called the Arrow War).85 The interactions between these arriving forces and the Company’s remaining Europeans were as fraught as they had always been. Company soldiers griped as usual that the British Army was too Europeanized and wanted the army to act “exactly as it was done in the Crimea.” Royal forces in turn grumbled that Company soldiers were inattentive to their drills.86 In the British press, though, such disputes were downplayed, and Company and royal forces were presented as unified in a heroic contest.87

For the legacy of Kanpur, see Mukherjee, “Satan Let Loose upon Earth”; Robinson, Angels of Albion, 1997, chap. 6. For Lucknow, Robinson, Angels of Albion, 1997, chap. 8. 83 Palmer, The Mutiny Outbreak in Meerut in 1857, 79. 84 Metcalf, Aftermath of Revolt, 220–23. 85 Stanley, White Mutiny, 98. 86 Quoted in Stanley, 100. See also James Thomas Harris, China Jim: Being Incidents and Adventures in the Life of an Indian Mutiny Veteran (London: W. Heinemann, 1912), 60–61. 87 Stanley, White Mutiny, 86. 82

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Indeed, the rebellions of 1857 were a very “literary war,” as Paul Fussell famously wrote of the First World War.88 Sketchy accounts sent by telegrams and mail ships offered British readers across the empire a new pantheon of heroes, constructed in real time, in which little distinction was made between Company and Crown service. Instead, writers framed stories of the rebellions as a “holy war.”89 Britons, regardless of the source of their commissions, were sanctified. Rebels – and, all too often, Indians utterly uninvolved in the conflict – were demonized. Reports of casualties in ongoing battles provided a muster roll of martyrs. Company officers killed in the fighting who avoided the critiques leveled at men like Hewitt and Ewart were valorized in ways that differed radically from the ideal of the paternal officers celebrated in the previous half-century. Henry Lawrence, for instance, who was killed early during the siege of Lucknow, had been a studious linguist, following in Malcolm’s footsteps to establish himself as a strategic and diplomatic expert on India. After his death, his memorial would make no mention of his carefully cultivated reputation for local knowledge. Instead, he became a bastion of Britishness and of Protestantism, a “Christian Statesman, Philanthropist, and Soldier; who, in the Punjab, Rajpootana, and Oudh, taught how kindly subject races should be ruled.”90 Such martyrs were in turn revenged by conquerors, celebrated in similar terms. The campaign to retake Awadh was led by Henry Havelock, a British royal officer who had decades of experiences in India. Havelock died soon after relieving the besieged Britons at Lucknow in November 1857, prompting a wave of national mourning in which one eulogist wrote, “his character as a Christian, as well as a valiant soldier” put him “in the highest rank of military celebrities.”91 Once again, long-established tropes of officers’ fitness in India, especially claims to local expertise, were cast aside in narratives that instead heralded their quasi-racial, quasi-religious identity as Britons, a model that some scholars have referred to as “Christian militarism.”92 This alternate understanding of

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 5. 89 For an example of this rhetoric, see An Old Soldier, “The War In India,” The Times, September 29, 1857, The Times Digital Archive. 90 C. R. Wilson, ed., List of Inscriptions on Tombs or Monuments in Bengal Possessing Historical or Archaeological Interest (Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat press, 1895), 4. 91 Cheyne Brady, ed., “Henry Havelock, of Lucknow,” Dublin University Magazine, 1833–1877; Dublin 51, no. 302 (February 1858): 198. 92 John Peck, War, the Army, and Victorian Literature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 72–85; Max Jones, “What Should Historians Do With Heroes? Reflections on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain,” History Compass 5, no. 2 (2007): 443–45; Gareth Atkins, “Christian Heroes, Providence, and Patriotism in Wartime Britain, 1793–1815,” The Historical Journal 58, no. 2 (June 2015): 414. 88

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military leadership in India was made manifest in July 1857, when Sir Colin Campbell took command of British operations. A royal officer with limited experience in India, Campbell had come to prominence as a commander in the Crimean War. Company officials had long opposed such appointments on the basis that royal officers trained in Europe lacked the knowledge needed to navigate the idiosyncrasies of Indian warfare. Retreating from generations of argument, Lord Ellenborough, formerly governor-general, wrote of Campbell’s appointment, “they have now a General who knows well what war is—the lions are at last led by a lion.”93 This new heroic language not only closed the difference between Company and Crown soldiers; it vindicated Britons in seeking retribution against those who had challenged the “holy” empire. Many British authorities treated Indian society as universally culpable in the rebellion – or, at the very least, suspect. Men such as Theophilius Metcalfe and J. G. S. Neill meted out indiscriminate violence against the Indian population as British forces regained control.94 Some degree of this bloodshed may be glimpsed in a letter from an anonymous official in the Punjab published in The Times in September 1857: “The hanging and flogging still go on … [we] are keeping the native officers to be shot here, to make an impression. We have a hard day’s work before us again to-day, for another batch have come in.”95 Repeated across North India throughout 1857 and 1858, such exhaustive punishments led to a sharp disparity in final casualties, in which Indian deaths outnumbered Europeans’ by a factor of more than a hundred to one. At the time, few in Britain questioned the brutality: Neill, who was killed in September 1857, was widely mourned across the empire as a hero.96 The scattered nature of the rebellions of 1857 meant that the end of the conflict was a piecemeal process. The first major British victory came in September, when Delhi was recaptured. Campaigns in Awadh and across central India proceeded more slowly, finally petering out in July 1859. By that point, though, British rule in India had already undergone a dramatic transformation. After two and a half centuries of bitter contests over patronage, privilege, and power, the East India Company was 93 “Lord Ellenborough on India,” The Times, October 17, 1857, The Times Digital Archive. 94 Mukherjee, “Satan Let Loose upon Earth”; Dalrymple, The Last Mughal, 403, 428–30. 95 “The Indian Mutinies,” The Times, September 22, 1857, The Times Digital Archive. 96 T. R. Moreman, “Neill, James George Smith,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, May 24, 2008), https://doi-org.wooster.idm.oclc .org/10.1093/ref:odnb/19863.

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finally dissolved. No mere formality, it reflected a broader reevaluation of the empire itself, and no part of the Company’s rule seemed more in need of rethinking than its army. As one writer put it in October 1857: The best way to establish our Indian empire on impregnable foundations will be to act upon principles as opposite as possible to those which it has been heretofore ruled by that singular corporation the East India Company. For a whole century our possession of India has been a mere military occupation … No wonder that such a government should at last have exploded in mutiny and murder.97

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The Officers’ Failure

The Company’s governance of India ended in August 1858. When the bill passed its final reading in Commons, The Times proclaimed, “So ends the great East India Company … For good or evil, a power has passed away from the earth.”98 As a corporation, it would persist for some decades to come, and, in a development that sits squarely between atavistic nostalgia and postmodernist irony, it was even resurrected in 2010 as a gourmet food brand by an Indian businessman.99 Though its autonomy as a colonial force in India had been gradually chipped away over decades, the final legislative transformation left much unclear. Company officers’ relative independence as a corps meant that “amalgamating” this body into the wider British Empire would require returning to previous controversies. As in earlier debates about consolidation, Company officers and their supporters mobilized quickly to demand their autonomy. For the first time since the 1780s, though, their arguments failed to persuade. By 1861, the Company’s officer corps was finally absorbed into the British Army proper, a process of “amalgamation” that symbolized a new kind of imperial rule – one that was no less militaristic, but wherein that militarism was more firmly woven with a globalized empire. In fact, the rebellions of 1857 had not entirely erased any hint of the officers’ vision of empire. Familiar rhetoric about the need to increase officers’ autonomy against the civil state could still be found in the wake

97 “How to Establish Our Empire in India,” The Times, October 27, 1857, The Times Digital Archive. Emp. added. 98 “The India Bill Was Read a Third Time and Passed,” The Times, July 9, 1858, The Times Digital Archive. 99 David Robin and Bharat Yagnik, “Uncommonwealth: London-Based Businessman of Gujarati Origin Sanjiv Mehta Has Turned History on Its Head by Buying out the Biggest Symbol of the Oppressive British Raj-The East India Company,” The Times of India, August 18, 2010, sec. Times Nation.

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of this conflict. In September 1857, a letter by Phipps P., a Bengal officer, published in The Times argued the rebellions were yet more evidence of the need for strong commanding officers. “It is true that regiments badly commanded have mutinied,” he admitted, “but this does not occur in native regiments alone, and I would name more than one of Her Majesty’s regiments which have done the same.” In contrast to these “badly commanded” forces, he celebrated one commander, Gabriel Martindale, who “was always present, and took a particular pleasure in drilling the recruits himself … all the native officers were always treated with respect and kindness … No regiment could have been in a higher state of discipline and efficiency.”100 Martindale’s men, it followed, would not have mutinied. The civilian Charles Edward Trevelyan, writing as Indophilus, offered up similar arguments. Already we have seen his letters that placed the rebellions of 1857 in the well-worn framework of the Vellore Mutiny, calling on administrators to reestablish a sepoy army in which officers joined “the sternness of the Disciplinarian” with “the tenderness of the Father.”101 For decades, this rhetoric had allowed officers to use episodes of disorder among sepoy regiments to enhance their own status in the empire. Now, those claims rang hollow. Editors in The Times responded to Indophilus by chastising his continued commitment to “the old Indian school.” Rather than maintaining “tenderness” to sepoy troops, they proclaimed, “[t]here should have been more consideration for Englishmen, and might have been less for Hindoos.”102 Phipps’s efforts to defend the foundations of the Bengal Army stoked even greater anger. One blistering letter signed only with the symbol for omega excoriated the officer: “He dares to compare the soldiers of England with the perpetrators of these crimes! Does he dare to call himself an Englishman?”103 Sensationalized reports of violence in India, especially against white women, had soured the national mood for the officers’ purported ideal of paternal benevolence. In late October, by which point British forces had made considerable gains against the rebellions’ strongholds, The Times reminded its readers that the rebellions provided ample evidence of the failure of this mythologized paternalism. “Years of kindness and confidence yielded no



100



101 102



103

Phipps P., “The Old Bengal Army,” The Times, September 22, 1857, The Times Digital Archive. Op cit. “An Indian Officer, Who Rose by His Own Deserts,” The Times, December 25, 1857, The Times Digital Archive. Anonymous, “The Bengal Army,” The Times, September 25, 1857, The Times Digital Archive.

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protection—the very officers who defended to the last the character of their men were marked out specially for brutality.”104 The pages of The Times were not the only place in which officers’ erstwhile claims faltered. As plans for “amalgamation” began to accelerate in the British Government, Company officers and their supporters found similarly that the old rhetoric had less influence in Parliament. In July 1860, William Henry Sykes, formerly a Bengal colonel, sought to challenge amalgamation with the familiar logic that Company officers alone could succeed in Indian battlefields. He pointed to Britain’s initial failure during the First Anglo-Afghan War, insisting that the army had only been able to “redeem our honour” when commanded by a Company officer. George Pollock “had never been in the Royal army, had never been drilled by a Royal drill master,” but he had convinced his sepoys to fight “with that tact and knowledge of the Native character which distinguished him.” Sykes praised how Pollock “spoke to them [the sepoys] as a father speaks to his children, and urged the necessity of avenging the recent reverses.”105 Charles Wood, the secretary of India in charge of amalgamation, responded tersely: “Sir Robert Sale, a Queen’s officer, defended Jellalabad; Sir George Pollock, a Company’s officer, relieved it. The honours, therefore, were fairly balanced between the two.”106 Elsewhere, Wood went further in dismissing the long-held belief that officers needed lengthy experience in India to command there effectively. After studying the Company’s records, he could find no evidence “that the ordinary duty performed by an English Subaltern in a native regular Regiment, gives him in fact any material knowledge of managing Natives.”107 The new British Indian Army that emerged through these debates differed in substantial ways from the Company’s earlier forces. Among the most obvious changes was a radical shift in how (and who) British officials sought to recruit that army. British imperial military ambitions were just as reliant in 1860 as they had been in 1600 on Indian military labor, but, after the rebellions of 1857, Britons became deeply distrustful  of



104



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106 107

“The Tide of Success in India Has Been Turned Against the Mutineers,” The Times, October 26, 1857, The Times Digital Archive. “European Forces (India) Bill,” HC Deb, vol. 160, col. 354, accessed August 19, 2020, https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1860-07-30/debates/225f12ff-a8f84d95-adf6-c8200069d6aa/EuropeanForces(India)Bill. HC Deb, vol. 160, col. 356–57. Charles Wood, “Copy of Dispatch from Sir Charles Wood, Secretary of State for India, dated October 10, 1860, relative to the Native Army future constitution,” Miscellaneous Papers Relating to the Army Amalgamation (Series II), 3r, BL MSS Eur F699/1/3/8/2.

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the high-caste, North Indian peasants who comprised the bulk of the sepoy army in Bengal. In their stead, officials placed new emphasis on an emerging theory of “martial races,” identifying some groups as biologically suited for soldiering. At the top of this supposed hierarchy were Sikh and Gurkha recruits, the latter of which Napier had already identified in 1853 as a more obedient alternative to North Indian sepoys.108 Paradoxically, despite the Madras Army’s quiescence during the conflicts of 1857 and the relative dearth of high-caste sepoys within it, the martial race theory only furthered the southerly presidency’s marginalization. George MacMunn, the most prolific proponent of the martial race theory, maintained that Indian society in the south had been enervated by British domination, such that “sadly the older races lost their fighting power.”109 By the end of the century, the remnants of the Madras Army would be entirely dissolved, replaced with a more centralized imperial force drawn from the northernmost parts of the subcontinent. This transformation of the composition and organization of the British Indian Army had a dramatic impact on both Indian society and the ­British Empire across the Indian Ocean. Yet, the debates preceding the amalgamation largely ignored those issues, focusing almost myopically instead on the louder questions about the status of the European officer corps. Significantly and in keeping with Wood’s polite response to Sykes that “honours” were “fairly balanced” between Crown and Company forces during the First Anglo-Afghan War, Wood explicitly sought to ensure that no individual Company officer would be materially harmed by the amalgamation.110 After all, despite the perceived failures of the Company’s military ideologies in 1857, the actions of Company officers and private soldiers to restore order – and to take revenge against the rebellion – were celebrated alongside those of their royal counterparts. For many officers, though, the promised parity seemed illusory. The issues of supersession and limits on promotion that had long led officers to protest consolidation had not been resolved, and many private soldiers worried that amalgamation might mean that they would be transferred out of



108



109



110

Napier, Defects, Civil and Military, of the Indian Government, 134. For more on the turn to Sikhs and Gurkhas as a result of the 1857 rebellions, see Streets, Martial Races, chap. 1. George MacMunn, The Martial Races of India (London: Sampson Low, Marston, & Co., Ltd. 1933), 224. In the course of the debate in July 1860, Wood accepted as a friendly amendment guaranteeing that British officers, soldiers, and their dependents in India would maintain the same “pay, pensions, allowances, promotion, and otherwise, secured to the military forces of the East India Company.” See HC Deb., vol. 160, col. 399–400.

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India to other theaters in the empire. Even before the details of Wood’s plan were made known, officers and soldiers alike had already mobilized in protest, beginning a mutiny of their own that consciously echoed those of 1857. For the first time, though, Company officers confronted an imperial state no longer willing to yield to their demands. 7.5

“John Company Is Dead”

When news of amalgamation reached India, some unknown soldier in Madras scrawled a condemnation across the barracks wall at St. Thomas Mount: “D— the Queen, Company for ever, give us bounty, shoot Briggs.”111 The last line was directed toward the colonel of the regiment, who apparently supported the reforms. If so, Briggs was unusual: Most of the officers who had served in the late Company would have sympathized with the graffiti artist. Newspapers bristled with hyperbolic letters from the corps. One paper from Madras, The Phoenix, concluded that “[n]ever were men under the circumstances more shabbily treated.”112 In The Times of India, one officer styling himself “Paddy O’Rattletrap” employed a caricature of an Irish dialect to highlight the perceived social differences between Crown and Company: “Shure! I wasn’t misself born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but I never dreamt I’d be afther having a wooden one thrust down my throttle in my ould age!”113 Yet, though the fight against reform continued for more than a decade, officers found that their ability to influence policy had evaporated with the rise of a new form of imperial militarism. As in earlier protests against consolidation, letters to the editor were only one prong of a broad campaign against reform. Petitions, pamphlets, and the reports of collective committees flooded the British government and press. One Member of Parliament noted wryly that the flood of documents “had shown how well the [British] officers of the Indian army could fight on any question in which they took an interest. If that were a sample of the manner in which they fought in India, it

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113

Letter from the Officer Commanding the Centre Division to Fort St. George, Palamanair, June 16, 1859, copied in India Office, Copy of Papers Connected with the Late Discontent among the Local European Troops in India (London: Ordered to be printed by the House of Commons, 1860), 397. “The First Fruits of the Amalgamation,” The Times of India (1861–Current); Mumbai, India, July 16, 1861. (Reprinted from The Phoenix.) I am grateful to Cat Long, my undergraduate research assistant, who found time in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis in spring 2020 to dig through English-language newspapers in India for officers’ responses to amalgamation. Anonymous, “Amalgamation, or Punch in Parenthesis,” The Times of India (1861– Current); Mumbai, India, July 17, 1861.

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was very satisfactory.”114 According to Wood’s report, in the period from 1859 to 1865, the Company’s former officers submitted a total of 909 petitions to the British government: 21 to the India Office, 146 to the House of Lords, and 732 to the House of Commons.115 Wood paid careful attention to memorials sent in by individuals, most of which detailed relatively narrow questions about precedence and seniority. He was less welcoming of petitions submitted by soi-disant “committees acting on behalf of the Indian officers,” which articulated collective objections to the government’s plans for amalgamation.116 Like Cornwallis in 1795, Wood considered these groups illegitimate, suggesting that the collective identity of the Company’s “brother Officers” as a political body had become less acceptable since the turn of the nineteenth century. By far the most radical challenge to Wood’s reforms, though, would be spearheaded by European soldiers. In the summer of 1859, privates rose up across India in a mutiny of their own. One soldier explained his understanding of their grievances at length: I am … discontented at having to serve Her Majesty, for whom I never enlisted. I took an oath of allegiance to the Company; the Queen’s name was never mentioned to me, good, bad, or indifferent … The Government, by passing an Act of Parliament, transferring us to the Crown, acknowledges that we do not belong to the Queen’s service. Had we belonged to it, why should they pass an Act!117

Once again, Meerut emerged as a hotspot, as European soldiers apparently intentionally mimicked the rebellions of 1857. If their demands were not met, the garrison at Meerut threatened they would march to Delhi.118 It is not clear how the city fit into their complaints. There was no longer any Mughal emperor to elevate, nor does it seem likely that these soldiers would have seen the restoration of that empire as germane to their goals. Presumably, then, the threat to depart for Delhi was more symbolic, a way to emphasize to their superiors the gravity of their

114 HC Deb., vol. 160, col. 399. 115 Charles Wood, Original Report of the Royal Commission on the Memorials of Indian Officers, 1863, 7, BL IOR/L/Mil/5/523. 116 Wood, Original Report, iv and 177. 117 India Office, Copy of Papers Connected with the Late Discontent, 542. In fact, the oaths of service did mention the queen. The final paragraph began, “I do also make oath that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty, Her heirs and successors, and that I will, as in duty bound, honestly and faithfully defend Her Majesty, Her heirs and successors, in person, crown, and dignity, against all enemies  …” Quoted in India Office, 384. Soldiers’ complaints suggest that the Company’s European troops did not interpret this in the same way as their superiors did. 118 India Office, Copy of Papers Connected with the Late Discontent, 15.

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complaints. Having seen the bloody retribution meted out against sepoys in 1857, Ed Fahey, a private in the Bengal Army, predicted a similarly gruesome fate for these new mutineers: “Patrick,” he wrote to one of his friends, “I assure you that it is much better for them to say their prayers … as, if they attempt to move, they will get it as hot as ever John Pandy did, and damned well they know it.”119 Fahey, though, was wrong. British officers worked desperately to avoid any bloodshed. In some correspondence, the government in Calcutta explained that the leniency was necessary, as any violent contest between the state and its white soldiers would risk renewed rebellion among Indian subjects: “Such a catastrophe [mutiny among European soldiers] would be painful and deplorable enough in itself at any time … but what its consequences would be in India in the still unsettled spirit of many classes of Her Majesty’s native subjects, no man can predict.”120 The warnings, though, papered over a more straightforward reason for officers’ ambivalence: Many agreed with the mutineers and likely played an active role in encouraging the protests.121 Regiments in the Bengal and Madras armies were the most active in the protests. In addition to the flashpoint at Meerut, troops at Barrackpore, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and even Lahore staged strikes. Where the colonial state had heavily stamped down on the spread of information about Indian unrest in 1857, letters circulated relatively freely between European garrisons, allowing soldiers to coordinate their efforts and their rhetoric. The Bengal Government received word on May 7, for instance, of a European cavalry regiment in the Northwest Provinces that “protest[ed] in an excited manner against being handed over ‘like bullocks’ to the Crown.” On May 24, the garrison at Bangalore furiously denounced that “they had been transferred like guns and bullocks to the Queen.”122 For one last time, the Company’s stratocracy allowed military actors to challenge civil authorities and metropolitan policies. Colin Campbell, as commander-in-chief, far from condemning the collective revolt, praised the men for having “acted with deliberation and hitherto calmness and respect to their officers.”123 He put together a massive court of inquiry at Meerut, in which each soldier was given room to state his grievances, a procedure that was repeated in other garrisons



119

122 123

120 121

Fahey’s letter enclosed in India Office, Copy of Papers Connected with the Late Discontent, 32. India Office, 19. Stanley, White Mutiny, 134–35. See Copy of Papers Connected with the Late Discontent, 16 and 388, emp. added. India Office, Copy of Papers Connected with the Late Discontent, 16.

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in which protests proved particularly intense. Each complaint was recorded and sent back to Britain, resulting in one of the most in-depth sources we have on the experiences of white soldiers in the East India Company.124 Opponents of Wood’s reforms in Britain took these reports as ammunition against amalgamation.125 In fact, even before the protests began, the British courts had determined that the soldiers’ transfer into the British Army did not constitute a breach of their rights.126 Yet parties on all sides of the debate took assiduous care to express support for European troops and officers, disagreeing only on how their interests could be met. Officers formerly in the Company’s service warned that enforcing the transfer would decrease the prestige of the European forces in India, fanning the flames of a renewed sepoy revolt. They hinted at “the very serious results which may be expected to follow if our present native soldiery should see that English soldiers are leaving the service of the State at their own pleasure.”127 The only safe alternative, it followed, was to give up the plan for amalgamation, allowing soldiers to remain in a “local” service, distinct from the British Army proper even if it was no longer commanded by the Company. Wood ignored these warnings, pushing forward with amalgamation. As a compromise, he agreed to allow soldiers to choose either a discharge from the service or a new bounty upon reenlistment. Some 60 percent of soldiers took advantage of the former option and left the regiments. Some might have enlisted again later, but the immediate effect of the 1859 soldiers’ mutiny was thus the opposite of what officers might have hoped.128 Rather than buttressing their demands for a separate army in India, the protests resulted in an emptying out of the Company’s European regiments, making amalgamation a much more dramatic transformation than initially planned. In granting discharge to those soldiers who claimed that the Company and Crown’s service were distinct, Wood made progress toward his stated goal: “One Army, One Artillery, One Mutiny Act, One Queen’s Regulation, One Queen, and One Empire.”129 Without such unity, he argued, the new imperial Raj would necessarily



124

125 126 127 128

129

This body of literature needs more study, but forms the basis of Stanley’s work in White Mutiny. HC Deb., vol. 160, col. 396. India Office, Copy of Papers Connected with the Late Discontent, 8. India Office, 3. During the courts of inquiry, many soldiers had testified that they had served for a time in the British Army before enlisting in the Company’s suggesting that movement in and out of the military profession was not uncommon. See, for instance, the testimony of John Jackson in India Office, 527. Quoted in Stanley, White Mutiny, 211.

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fail. Officers who had once argued precisely the opposite – that only an independent army could prevent “annihilation” – continued to lobby against Wood’s reforms, but were never able to assert decisive influence over military policy. This book began with an examination of William Hodges’s painting The Marmalong Bridge, in which an armed sepoy had been foregrounded as an essential part of a picturesque landscape transformed by colonial order. One of the impacts of the rebellions of 1857 for Britons across the empire was to dislodge this conceit. In 1858, artist Joseph Noel Paton unveiled a new painting at the Royal Academy, a strikingly dramatic scene unmistakably meant to depict the massacre of Britons at Kanpur. At the center of the work was a group of British, Anglo-Indian, and Indian women, clutching each other and their children in desperate prayer. In the background, a party of sepoys advanced on the women, evidently to kill them. Horrified critics panned the scene as gruesome and called for it to be taken down.130 Rather than aspects of colonial stability, sepoys had become symbols of loss of control, so alarming as to be literally unviewable. In response to the backlash, Paton reworked his canvas. He overpainted the sepoys and replaced them with new figures: a corps of Scottish Highlanders rushing to the rescue of the praying women (Figure 7).131 The modification exemplifies Britons’ shifting attitudes about warfare in India and, crucially, about how imperial safety could be guaranteed. No longer the purview of sepoys (or their absent European officers), that security had been reassigned to Scottish soldiers, clad distinctively in kilts and bonnets.132 The symbolic shift acted out in Paton’s canvas spread and echoed across the English-speaking world. The same year also saw the debut of a dramatization of the siege at Lucknow in 1857 by Dion Boucicault, entitled Jessie Brown after a soldier’s wife who had been in the residency. Boucicault himself had to play the main “villain,” Nana Sahib (Dhondu Pont), who had led the rebel forces at Kanpur and Lucknow, because no actor wanted to be associated with such a universally hated figure.133 In the climax of the play, the residency seems on the brink of collapse, and the women

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131 132

133

Alison Blunt, “Embodying War: British Women and Domestic Defilement in the Indian ‘Mutiny’, 1857–8,” Journal of Historical Geography 26, no. 3 (July 1, 2000): 416–17. Blunt, 417. For more on how Scottish military service was conceived of in this period, Streets, Martial Races, chap. 1. Wallace, “Nana Sahib in British Culture and Memory,” 597.

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Figure 7 Joseph Noel Paton, In Memoriam, 1858. Wikimedia Commons.

ensconced within it begin to talk of suicide should Lucknow fall. In the nick of time, though, the plucky eponymous heroine springs to her feet amidst this despair, shouting “Hark—hark—dinna ye hear it! Dinna ye hear it! Ay! I’m no dreamin’, it’s the slogan of the Highlanders … my Scotch ears can hear it far awa’ … d’ye hear—d’ye hear? The Campbells are comin’!”134 Audiences were then treated to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” shrilled through bagpipes as the 93rd Highlanders took to the stage, the royal troops “driving the Sepoys down.”135 The empire celebrated in Paton’s painting and on Boucicault’s stage was no less ruled by the sword than the Company’s had been. The transformation lay instead in the assumptions on which that rule was understood. The imperial society that violently reconstituted itself in the wake of 1857 was shaped by the exclusionary rhetoric of the British

134

135

Dion Boucicault, Jessie Brown: Or, The Relief of Lucknow (New York: Samuel French, 1858), 30. Boucicault, Jessie Brown, 31.

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counter-rebellion, in which the categories of “Briton” and “Indian,” of “black” and “white,” of “Christian” – present and substantial since the earliest days of the Company’s activities – took on newly intransigent significance. Such harsh lines left many in the margins, including, for instance, Indian Christians and “Eurasians” who had experienced their own traumas and dislocations during the rebellions. As Clare Anderson has shown, mixed-race subjects faced new pressures in the imperial Raj to establish their “whiteness” and their identity as victims during 1857, to maintain access to elite colonial structures.136 The status of the Company’s British officers was, of course, much less liminal. Though there were Anglo-Indians within its ranks, the Company’s officer corps had symbolically and institutionally been a white-coded body, reflecting the belief that only European officers could be effective commanders.137 At the same time, Company officers had relied on a simulacrum of liminality to maintain their distinct position in colonial society, claiming a unique ability to understand and to maintain affective ties with their Indian troops. After 1857, the guardianship of empire was placed in the hands of soldiers whose virtues were explicitly disconnected from that kind of cross-cultural mediation. In severing authority from that colonial context, the repainting of imperial power after 1857 swept away the final claim on which the Company’s autonomy had rested. In its stead, imperial officials would develop a new understanding of their military authority in India and on how that power could be propagated across the empire.

136 Anderson, Subaltern Lives, 142–44. 137 According to MacMunn, Anglo-Indian officers who were granted status as “European” officers were called Brindians. MacMunn, Martial Races, 271.

Conclusion

In 1873, J. T. Norgate, an officer in the new British Indian Army, published what he claimed was an English translation of the memoirs of his erstwhile subedar, Sita Ram Pandey. By the turn of the twentieth century, the text, From Sepoy to Soobadar, was widely read by British officials in India and was even retranslated “back” into Urdu for use in language training. The memoir traced the career of its purported author, Sita Ram, during his fifty years in the Bengal Army, providing a detailed glimpse into a military landscape reshaped by colonial expansion. The popularity of Sita Ram’s memoirs and the widespread credulity they met among the British imperial ruling class shows that the conceit of “rule by the sword” survived the rebellions of 1857 and the “amalgamation” of the Company’s armies at least in the imaginations of the British imperial elite. A tale of adventure and derring-do, Sita Ram’s memoir described a vision of Indian society teeming with warfare and in which the Company’s European officers dominate. It was a mythologized version of the past that appealed to Sita Ram’s readers’ increasing nostalgia for the Company Raj. According to his memoir, Sita Ram’s first brush with anarchic violence in India came almost as soon as he left home with his uncle to enlist in the Bengal Army. While on the road, they joined with a band of traveling musicians who turned out to be thuggees in disguise, murderous cultists said to stalk travelers across India in the early nineteenth century.1 Sita Ram survived the encounter and went on to enjoy an even more exciting military career: He fought in every major campaign undertaken by the Bengal Army in this era except for the First Anglo-Burmese War. During the Third Anglo-Maratha War, he killed an Arab cavalryman and rescued a beautiful young woman, who promptly became his wife. Sita Ram remained loyal to the Company during the rebellions in 1857 only

For the myth of thuggee, see Kim A. Wagner, “The Deconstructed Stranglers: A Reassessment of Thuggee,” Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 4 (2004): 931–63. 1

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to discover that his long-lost son was among the mutineers and that Sita Ram’s own corps had been chosen as the firing squad executing him. (In tears, Sita Ram was able to convince his commander to permit him to stay in his tent during the execution.) In the closing pages, Sita Ram reflected on his life in the Company’s service with evident satisfaction: “I have not acquired any fortune, but I have my paternal estate, and the pension of a Soobadar, which is enough for me. The people in my village seem to respect me, and are now fully impressed with the ease and benefits they enjoy under the Raj Ungreese (English rule).”2 Making sense of Sita Ram’s purported memoirs is a fraught task. British imperial officials treated it as authentic, as have most scholars. George MacMunn, advocate of the martial race theory, described the text as the “first and last word of what the sepoy really thinks.”3 James Lunt, who published an updated version of the book in 1970, concluded after surveying the available evidence, “I can only say that the longer I have studied them—and this study has extended over twenty years—the more convinced I have become in essence they are true.”4 There are good reasons, though, to be skeptical of these claims. Alison Safadi has recently offered a persuasive challenge based on her reading of linguistic oddities in Norgate’s text, including Sita Ram’s use of distinctly Arabic idioms where one might expect to find Hindustani or Sanskrit-derived expressions.5 There are also questions around the origins of the work itself. The original Urdu text – if it ever existed – has not survived. Norgate claimed it was published in an unnamed “Indian Periodical since defunct.”6 Still more dubiously, Norgate included in his preface a positive review of the work supposedly from The Times in 1863, but no such piece ever ran in that paper.7 Even setting aside issues of language and of provenance, there is simply the fact that Sita Ram’s reported career, though technically possible, would have required an unusual number of regimental transfers and a

2 D. C. Phillott, ed., From Sepoy to Subadar Being the Life and Adventures of a Native Officer of the Bengal Army, Translated [?] by Douglas Norgate (Calcutta: Printed at the Baptist Mission, 1911), 7–8, 38, 48, 120, 126. (The parentheses here represent editorial interjections by Norgate.) Note that these quotes are from the 1911 edition of the text, rather than Lunt’s 1970 adaptation, which was substantially rewritten. 3 MacMunn, The Martial Races of India, 175. 4 Pandey, From Sepoy to Subedar, xviii. 5 One example is Sita Ram’s use of “Tauba” (“repentance”) as an interjection, rather than, for instance, “Ram!” Safadi, “From Sepoy to Subadar/Khvab-o-Khayal and Douglas Craven Phillott,” 58. 6 Phillott, From Sepoy to Subadar, front matter. 7 Safadi, “From Sepoy to Subadar/Khvab-o-Khayal and Douglas Craven Phillott,” 48.

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level of picaresque coincidence that beggars belief.8 Debating the authenticity of Sita Ram’s memoirs, though, is perhaps less productive than exploring why they proved so popular and so convincing to British imperial administrators (and officials-in-training) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its prominence as a text for language instruction meant that the memoirs were part of the standard canon for how officers thought about the Company’s past. The narrative that it offered to the up-and-coming imperial ruling class was heavily nostalgic, capturing the Company Raj as a lost golden age of heroism, loyalty, and charisma, in which Sita Ram had been a fully dedicated adherent of the Company. That fidelity stemmed, as always, from Sita Ram’s attachment to his European officers. His first captain was described a quasi-divine figure, whose martial qualities and affection for his sepoys ensured their fidelity, a perfect embodiment of that once-dominant ideal: [T]he Captain of my company was a real Saheb, like what I had imagined all Sahebs to be. His name was Burumpeel (Blomfield perhaps). He was six feet three inches in height, his chest like Hunooman’s [Hanuman], and his strength enormous. He used often to wrestle with the sepoys, and when in the akhara (wrestling arena) he was the universal admiration of all the men.9

In providing an archetype for how a European officer should act in India, Sita Ram’s text also offered a familiar complaint that the current crop of men in such posts had failed to meet the grade. In the wake of the shift from Company to Crown rule, Sita Ram’s memoirs described those inadequacies as inherent to the new British Indian Army. As he complained in the closing pages of the text, “The Companee Bahadoor and its officers were much kinder to the people of India than the Sirkar [Circar] is now; and if it were not for the old servants of the Company, it would be far worse than it is.”10 The popularity of Sita Ram’s purported autobiography makes clear that “amalgamation” did not put an end to the long-running debates about the best way to ensure sepoy loyalty and attachment to the British Empire. As H. Bruce, one of the officers most involved in planning out the British Indian Army, had put it in 1861, “present and future statesmen must remember, as those who are gone did, that the Empire ‘has been acquired and must be maintained by the sword.’”11 What 8 For a discussion of these movements, see Mason, A Matter of Honour, 207–15. Mason ultimately concluded that Sita Ram’s memoirs seem true. 9 Phillott, From Sepoy to Subadar, 14. 10 Ibid., 123. 11 H. Bruce, “Memorandum upon the Future Organisation and Construction of the Native Army,” Calcutta, September 26, 1861, 4, BL Mss Eur F699/1/3/8/1.

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had changed was not the logic of militarism, but rather the consensus about who was best suited to maintain control of the proverbial sword. Under the Crown, the centralized state took over decisively the roles and influence once claimed by the Company’s European officers, positioned as a horizontal community of “brothers.” A literal example of this can be seen in the rise of rhetoric describing the British Raj as the “ma-bap government” (literally, mother-father). In the early nineteenth-century model, individual officers described themselves as benevolent patriarchs to sepoys, who were their “bábá lóg,” their children. That model was now replaced by a similar relationship rewritten onto the state as a whole.12 Military officers could still act as intermediaries through which paternalism was performed, but they were only proxies for a larger relationship. Members of the Indian Civil Service and other imperial officials played an equal, if not more important, role in creating those affective ties.13 The prominence acquired by the theory of martial races further displaced European officers from their erstwhile position as guarantors of imperial stability. The theory established that particular demographics in India were inherently predisposed to soldiering. At its core, this was not a new idea: The earliest surviving printed regulations of the Madras Army, from 1766, had identified “preferred” castes for recruiting, and, throughout the nineteenth century, the martial fitness of sepoys was often construed in distinctly racialized terms.14 Douglas Peers has argued that this language even began to replace caste as the best way to identify effective recruits as early as the First Anglo-Burmese War.15 It is also worth noting that caste itself was becoming increasingly racialized  –  understood as an inherent, unchanging, and physiological ­construct – in this same period.16 After 1857, race science provided a useful lens through which to vindicate officials’ unease with the Brahmin peasant-soldiers who had long been considered the ideal sepoys in Bengal. In their place, officials rebuilt their fractured regiments with Sikhs from the Punjab and

Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, 21. 13 For more on the ICS as the face of the ma-bap government, see William Gould, Bureaucracy, Community and Influence in India: Society and the State, 1930s–1960s (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2010), 43. 14 Madras Military Department, Orders, Rules, and Regulations, 25. For a discussion of the communities identified here, see Chapter 2. 15 Peers, “‘The Habitual Nobility of Being,’” 566; Joseph Sramek, Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765–1858, 1st ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 15–16 and Chapter 3. 16 Crispin Bates, “Race, Caste and Tribe in Central India: The Early Origins of Indian Anthropometry,” Edinburgh Papers in South Asian Studies 3 (1995): 3–35. 12

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Gurkhas from Nepal – two groups seen as having been particularly loyal during the rebellions.17 As Kate Imy argued in her excellent study of the British Indian Army, the theory of martial races was not just about recruitment and battlefield efficacy. It also sought to provide an answer to the persistent question of how sepoys’ attachment to the empire ought to be maintained. George MacMunn celebrated Gurkhas’ loyalty as an innate part of their racial identity: “Their soldierly qualities and simple ways endear them to those who soldier with them … Their lack of interest in Brahminical holiness and in anti-British intrigue and hatred, is the despair of those subtle brains who fish in troubled waters.”18 With loyalty thus described as a communal quality, the job of retaining sepoys’ fidelity shifted away from individual officers to the state’s collective relationship with Gurkhas. One example of this new role, explored in Imy’s analysis, can be seen in the First World War, when the British Raj set up an institutional system to preserve the religious piety of Gurkhas sent on expedition. Upon their return, they were required to travel to Dehradun to undergo a ceremony of repurification to dispel the taboos around crossing the kala pani (dark water or open ocean).19 These policies inverted the rhetoric that had developed in the wake of the Vellore Mutiny, when the civil government in Madras was roundly criticized for failing to understand sepoys’ religious “prejudices” as well as their local officers did. These measures all stemmed from the same transformation in policy: Imperial administrators no longer looked to officers – individually or as a community – as irreplaceable links in the chain that connected the empire, the state, and the army. For many of these officers, this represented a disappointing loss of prestige, and nostalgic narratives of the Company’s era proliferated. MacMunn himself, even as he set out the new, “scientific” model for the British Indian Army, recalled Bengal in the early nineteenth century as a much rosier period: How eagerly the sepoy flocked to the Company’s service, both the mercenaries’ descendants, the low caste men, and now the high caste yeomen, is one of the glories of the British memories. The officers who led from the front, the officers who saw that food and pay were regular, the Company that liberally rewarded its soldiers, all made a happy and romantic story.20

17 18 19 20

For more on this shift, see Streets, Martial Races. MacMunn, The Martial Races of India, 199. Imy, Faithful Fighters, chap. 3. MacMunn, The Martial Races of India, 173.

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Sita Ram’s book is a part of this mythology of a golden age of loyal sepoys and charismatic commanders. From the first episode in the book, when Sita Ram’s uncle – himself already an officer in the Bengal Army – killed the thuggees they met on the road, the memoir presents the Company’s armies as vehicles of order.21 Sita Ram’s Bengal Army was also a source of social homeostasis. After decades of service, Sita Ram returned to his birthplace, using his pension to maintain his “paternal estate” in placid retirement. This contrasts sharply with the glimpses we have of sepoys in the eighteenth century, in which service in the Company’s regiments often translated to unexpected mobility, as suggested by the extraordinary cases of Yusuf Khan’s brief rise as the commandant king, Dean Mahomet’s success as a restauranteur and masseuse in Britain, and even the short-lived careers of Rusul Khan and Madar Khan as deserters to Hyderabad. Sita Ram had no such opportunities: Possible career paths within the Company Raj were flattened into internal promotions and pensions. The Bengal Army that appears in the text is also one largely free of unrest. The rebellions of 1857 are presented as the only moment of military disorder – a sudden, unexpected break. Even the mutiny at Barrackpore was omitted. The use of the memoir thus contributed to a broader process in which the conflict, protest, and resistance that had characterized the expansion of the Company’s armies was erased. This obfuscation has persisted in more recent scholarship. There is a wealth of tactical and operational histories of the East India Company, focused especially on the importation and adaptation of European technologies and practices in an Indian military context.22 Discipline has pride of place in such analyses as a key characteristic of the Company’s eighteenth-century innovations: The use of volley fire and other regimented maneuvers, drawn from European styles of drill, have long been understood as transformative to warfare in India.23 Less attention has been paid to the transformative properties of indiscipline in a military context. It is significant that, when historians and other writers do

21 Phillott, From Sepoy to Subadar, 7–8. 22 See, for instance, Barua, “Military Developments in India, 1750–1850”; Roy, “Military Synthesis in South Asia”; Kaushik Roy, War and Society in Colonial India, 1807–1945 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010); Bryant, The Emergence of British Power in India. 23 For more on the issue of discipline in the early Madras Army, see Chapter 1. For scholars’ emphasis on its institutional importance, see Parker, The Military Revolution, 133; Dasgupta and Roy, “Discipline and Disobedience in the Bengal and Madras Armies, 1807–1856,” 76; Dutta, “Disciplining the Madras Army during the Early Years of the English East India Company’s Dominance in South India,” 897.

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call attention to moments of military unrest in the Company’s forces before 1857, they often frame the incident in question as “the first sepoy mutiny” or “the other sepoy mutiny.” Such language maintains the assumption that such violence was an aberration, foreclosing the possibility of a longer history of military rebellion.24 The Company’s Sword has insisted that sepoy regiments, as well as their European counterparts, were not just sites from which colonial order emanated. They were sites of negotiation and contradiction, in which conflicting ideas about military service and political power confronted and interacted with each other. Recruits drawn from professional networks around the globe moved uncertainly through its ranks, creatively engaging with the expectations of their positions. Soldiers, sepoys, and officers alike were all involved in navigating these intersections, each hoping to secure different kinds of social, financial, or physical mobility. Such men, though, were never on equal footing. Colonial administrators, along with British society, were always more comfortable with the demands and ambitions of white, elite officers than they were with those of either European privates or their Indian counterparts. The Company’s European officers used that inequity to their advantage, insisting they were the sole authorities who could keep the ambitions of the wider army in check. More than tools through which Company power expanded, officers were the interpreters of its authority, producing a concept of empire that for a time secured their own prominence within its governance. The persistent popularity of Sita Ram’s narrative into the twentieth century reveals that many of the dynamics, binaries, and constructs of that mythology survived the Company’s collapse, tempering the blade of yet another imperial sword.

24 For a scholarly example, see Bandyopadhyay, Tulsi Leaves and the Ganges Water. For similar discussions in the popular press, see Aliyeh Rizvi, “The Other Sepoy Mutiny,” The Bangalore Mirror, June 1, 2014, sec. Opinion, https://bangaloremirror .indiatimes.com/opinion/others/mysore-gate-tipoo-sahib-cantonment-barracksbengaluru-pete-british-major-general-t-hawker-fakir-syfut-ali-shah-havildar-syedtipoo-hyder-ali-khan/articleshow/35909718.cms?; “First Sepoy Mutiny Took Place in Vizagapatam,” The Hindu, October 2, 2016, sec. Visakhapatnam, www.thehindu .com/news/cities/Visakhapatnam/First-Sepoy-Mutiny-took-place-in-Vizagapatam/ article15047062.ece; M. S. Neelakantan and Sandeep Kumar, “First Indian Mutiny Was in Vellore Fort,” The Deccan Chronicle, July 11, 2016, online edition, sec. Other News, www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/in-other-news/110716/first-indian-mutinywas-in-vellore-fort.html. An exception to this broader trend is the work of Sabyasachi Dasgupta, but his analysis of military protest stops short of making an argument about how this transformed the state. Dasgupta, In Defence of Honour and Justice.

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Index

Abdul Khaliq, 163, 184, 185 Act of Union, 12, 41 Adam, John, 178 Adlercron, John, 146–47, 169 adventurers, 9, 24, 87, See also mercenaries British, 89–97 declining influence of, 103 Eurasian, 97–98 French, 75 Swiss, 90 Afghanistan. See First Anglo-Afghan War Ali Sahib, 80 American Indians, 31, 37, 40, 43, See also Haudenosaunee Nations American Revolution, 14, 24, 141, 143, 155 role of American Indian allies, 42, 44 role of free black and enslaved troops, 42, 44, 45 Ananda Ranga Pillai, 49, 92 Anateram, 182 Anglo-Indians. See Eurasians anti-Catholicism, 33, 90 Anwar ud-Din Khan, 48, 64, 94, 99 death of, 67 Arcot. See also Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah, Anwar ud-Din Khan Circar and, 120 conflict with Thanjavur, 115 Haider Ali and, 77 long-time ally of Madras Government, 11, 62, 94 subsidiary alliance with the Company, 106, 136, 177 Arnee, 183 Asaf Jah I. See Nizam ul Mulk, Asaf Jah I Asaf Jah II, 102, 105, 107, 110 Aurangzeb, 8, 27, 89 Awadh, 8, 63, 86, 118, See also Shuja ud-Daula annexation of, 221

276

dominance of Bengal Army over, 59 1857 rebellions and, 223, 225 subsidiary alliance with the Company, 106 Azim ud-Daula, 177 Bahadur Shah Zafar, 207, 208 Bangalore, 217 1859 mutiny and, 235 Bannerman, John, 172 Barbados, 31, 39, 46 Barlow, George Hilaro 1809 mutiny and, 21, 171, 193, 196, 198 legacy of, 204 reforms and, 178, 179, 189 Barrackpore, 217, 235, 245 Battle of Adyar, 48–50, 53 Battle of Buxar, 2, 118 Battle of Plassey, 60, 117, 120, 151 Battle of Pollilur, 157 Battle of Quebec, 43, 152 Begum Samru, 89 Bell, John, 193, 198, 199 Bencoolen, 10, 116 Benfield, Paul, 133 Bengal, 2, 8, 57, 59, 63, See also Calcutta (Kolkata), Mir Jafar, Mir Qasim, Siraj ud-Daula, mutinies increasing economic and political significance of, 117 major administrative hub, 10 1766 mutiny and, 138 “supreme government” in India, 116, 118, 143 Bengal Army, 9, 16, 17, 58, 59, See also mutinies:1824, mutinies:1766, mutinies:1796 “buckserries”/baksariyas, 63 development of sepoy corps, 47 1857 rebellions and, 206, 207, 222, 224, 226

Index 1859 mutiny and, 235 post-1857, 245 rejection of 1809 mutiny, 192 Bentinck, William, 178, 176, 180, 189 as opponent of stratocracy, 213, 216 recall of, 183 Board of Control, 143, 149, 162, 169, 184, See also Dundas, Henry Boigne, Benoit de, 20, 97, 104 employment with Mahadji Sindhia, 86, 87, 90, 102 refusal to join campaign against Hyderabad, 93 resignation from Madras Army, 85, 91 social ambitions of, 112 Bombay (Mumbai), 35, 128 First Anglo-Maratha War and, 156 John Malcolm as governor, 201 major administrative hub, 10 status as “subordinate” presidency, 116 Bombay Army development of sepoy corps, 47 1857 rebellions and, 223 support for 1809 mutiny, 192 Boucicault, Dion, 237 British Army, 5, 33, See also Adlercron, John, Campbell, Alexander consolidation and, 20, 144, 159, 163, 167, 209, 229, 231 terminology, 209 formalization of military labor, 45 post-1857 British Indian Army, 231, 240, 242 response to 1857 rebellions, 225 status relative to Company officers, 144 training of, 13 use of American Indian military labor, 42 use of free black and enslaved troops, 41 use of mercenaries, 24 British Crown. See also British Army authority in India, 52, 129, 144–49, 169, 208 Company officers’ petitions and memorials to, 160–62 British imperialism, 7, 149, 151 Britain as “holy empire”, 228 diffusion of race as a concept, 37 education reform and, 4, 213, 216 increasing centralization of, 12 increasingly interventionist colonial state, 119

277 military service and social status in, 26 post-1857, 209 public opinion and, 1, 137, 141, 170, 173, 197, 198, 204, 230 shift toward stronger state control, 142, 169, 243 subsidiary alliances and, 106, 111, 112, 127 threat of sepoy rebellion and, 183 British Navy formalization of military labor, 45 training of, 13 use of free black and enslaved troops, 41 British North America, 31 American Indian Nations and, 37 militias and, 39 use of free and enslaved black men as soldiers, 35, 36 British Parliament dissolution of Company and, 229 four regiments crisis, 149, 162, 226 India Act of 1784, 143 “nabob” crisis and, 15, 152, 153 Regulating Act of 1773, 116, 118, 143, 208 Brooke, Henry, 115 Broun-Ramsay, James. See Dalhousie, Earl of Bruce, Herbert, 242 Buck, George, 95, 98, 111, 140 Burgoyne, John, 148 Burhan ibn Hasan, 49, 67, 71, 99 Burke, Edmund, 1, 7, 15, 118 Burke, William, 123 Burma, 208, 211, 212, 217, 243 Calcutta (Kolkata), 59, 117, 159 Calcutta Gazette, 154, 192, 193 Campbell, Alexander, 145 Campbell, Colin, 228, 235 Caribbean, 24, 31, 41, 51, 143 as model for India, 37 use of free and enslaved black men as soldiers, 36, 45 Carnatic (region), 135, See also Arcot Carnatic Wars, 58, 65, 75, 90, 151 Central Provinces, 177 Chanda Sahib, 64, 67 chartered companies, 27–30 Chennai. See Madras Child, John, 128–29 Child, Josiah, 128

278

Index

civil administration, 5, 118, 127, 128, 130, 194, 204, See also Bentinck, William, Malcolm, John, Clive, Robert, Munro, Thomas, Wood, Charles, Barlow, George Hilaro, Clive, Edward, Shore, John, Fullarton, William, Macartney, George, Whitehill, John, Langhorne, William, Du Pré, William Clive, Edward, 188 Clive, Robert, 53, 57, 60, 69, 117, 138, 147 legacy of, 173, 197, 215 Close, Barry, 195 “code of counter-mutiny”, 18, 19 coffrees, 31, 37 colonial legal system civil court system, 4, 118 courts martial, 137 colonial militarism colonial garrison state, 3, 6, 135, 205 distinction from imperial militarism, 233 “rule by the sword’, 1, 3, 6, 15, 19, 21, 24, 40, 52, 174, 203, 204 distinction from stratocracy, 188 post-1857, 238, 240 stratocracy, 3, 7, 17, 22 1809 mutiny and, 199 1857 rebellions and, 223 British public support for, 173 “cult of the officer” and, 213, 221 ideology of, 204 post-1857, 239 reduction of Company’s power and, 178 role of officers in, 188, 202, 208, 220 colonial picturesque, 23, See also Hodges, William Coote, Eyre, 53, 139, 147, 162, 215 Cornwallis, Charles American Revolution and, 45 as governor general of Bengal, 57, 104, 143 ban on mixed-race men from the Company, 98 critique of “brotherhood” of officers, 163, 234 Ireland and, 168 kidnapping of Tipu Sultan’s sons and, 163, 184 Muzaffar Jung and, 108 patron of Barlow, 179 revenue collection and, 119

Coromandel Coast, 124, 130, 135, 145 Court of Directors, 17, 120, 172, 208 1809 mutiny and, 190, 194 conflicts with European officers, 162, 180 Cradock, John, 176, 180 Cuddalore, 48 cypayes, 47, 48 D’Agar, Charles, 32 Dalhousie, Earl of, 220 Dalling, John, 187 Daulat Rao Sindhia, 102 Deccan, The, 8, 62, 88 Delhi, 8, 207, 225 Dennie, William, 212 desertion, 77, 95, 105, See also sepoys as means to assert agency, 80 as subject in diplomatic treaties, 106 Dhondu Pont, 237, See Nana Sahib diplomacy. See also residents, subsidiary alliances desertions and, 78, 105 formalization of, 104 mercenaries and officers as agents of, 86, 92, 94, 95, 104, 111, 127, 174 recruitment and, 31, 42 Dodwell, Henry, 82 Doveton, F. B., 212 Doveton, John, 198, 199 Du Pré, William, 101 Duane, William, 164, 166 Dundas, Henry, 143, 159, 166 Dundas, Robert, 191, 203 Dunmore, 4th Earl of (John Murray), 42, 45 Dupleix, Joseph Francois, 49 East India Company, 12 dissolution of, 6, 178, 208, 228 expansion of, 7, 175 Elliot, Gilbert. See Minto, Lord Elphinstone, Mountstuart, 178, 202 Eurasians, 97, 160, 239, See also race Ewart, John, 225 Fancourt, Amelia, 184 Farrukhabad, 108, 109 First Anglo-Afghan War, 211, 212, 231, 232 First Anglo-Maratha War, 155, 156 First Anglo-Mysore War, 75, See also Second Anglo-Mysore War,

Index

279

Third Anglo-Mysore War, Fourth Anglo-Mysore War Fletcher, Robert, 101, 125, 131, 138, 139 Floyer, Charles, 115 Foote, Samuel, 153 Fort St. David, 48 Fort St. George, 10, 32, 37, 55 construction of, 116 French seizure of, 48, 130 Fort St. George Council, 113, 127, 131, 135 Fourth Anglo-Mysore War, 103 France, 12, 41, 103, 105, 116, See also French Foreign Legion Francis, Philip, 118 Francklin, William, 91 Frederick, Edward, 216 French East India Company, 47 French Foreign Legion, 90 Fryer, John, 128 Fullarton, William, 154, 157

role in regional politics, 62, 76, 78, 93, 106 subsidiary alliance with the Company, 79, 106 use of European soldiers, 102 Hyderabad Subsidiary Force, 107, 108, 194

Gillespie, Rollo, 184 governors-general, 118, See also Cornwallis, Charles, Dalhousie, Earl of, Metcalfe, Charles, Bentinck, William, Minto, Lord, Shore, John, Wellesley, Richard, Hastings, Warren Grant, Robert, 173, 197 Greenwood, Joseph, 212 Gurkhas, 63, 232, 244

Kammandan Sahib. See Muhammad Yusuf Khan Kanpur, 226 Kaye, John, 214 Keigwin, Richard, 35, 128, 145 Kirkpatrick, James Achilles, 105, 106, 110, 111 Kirkpatrick, William, 105 Kolff, D. H. A., 58 Kollam (Quilon), 19 Kolsky, Elizabeth, 17, 165

Haider Ali, 9, 10, 75, 77, 88, 147, 156 Hastings, Warren, 1, 7, 15, 86, 95, 112, 118 Haudenosaunee Nations, 31, 40, 42 Havelock, Henry, 227 havildars, 10 Hearsey, Andrew Wilson, 161 Hervey, Albert, 214, 215 Hewitt, William, 225 Hobart, Robert (4th Earl of Buckinghamshire), 93, 104, 105, 108, 166 Hodges, William, 23, 32, 40, 44, 53, 237, See also colonial picturesque Humphreys, Samuel August, 164, 166 Hyderabad, 8, 64, 78, 105, See also Asaf Jah II, Nizam ul Mulk, Asaf Jah I 1809 mutiny and, 195 1857 rebellions and, 226 1859 mutiny and, 235

Imam Khan, 110 Impey, Elijah, 118 Indian nationalism movement, 22, 210 Jabalpur (Jubbulpore), 218 Jaggar Naullnow, 74 Jamaica, 31 Jasanoff, Maya, 85, 87 jemadars, 10, 75, 136, 158, 187, See also Jaggar Naullnow Jhansi, 221, 225 joint-stock companies. See chartered companies

Lang, Ross, 148, 195 Langhorne, William, 128 Lawrence, Henry, 227 Lawrence, Stringer, 52, 53, 68, 130, 137, 145 Lucknow, 226, 237 Macartney, George, 139, 148 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 213, 216 Macdowall, Hay, 179, 190, 194 Mackay, George, 115 MacMunn, George, 232, 241, 244 Madar Khan, 79, 80, 109, 111, 245 Madar ul-Mulk, 101, 122 Madras, 40, See also Second AngloMysore War, Northern Circars, mutinies, Master, Streynsham and French assault on Fort St. George, 48

280

Index

Madras (cont.) as important site of conflict between civil and military authority, 10 efforts to limit mobility of Indian officers and troops, 73, 94 1809 mutiny and, 16, 199, 200 major administative hub, 9 precarious balance between civil and military authority, 126 shifting ideas of race and, 38 status as “subordinate” presidency, 116, 119 Second Anglo-Mysore War and, 156 Madras Army, 10, See also Vellore Mutiny of 1806, mutinies:1809 as a political body, 11 declining significance of, 211, 232 development of sepoy corps, 26, 47, 54, 55, 64, 94, 73 diminution of most prominent rivals and, 177 1857 rebellions and, 223 1859 mutiny and, 235 expansion of, 19, 57, 65, 80, 91, 99, 116, 130 military development and, 77 “poligar wars” and, 108 race and, 243 role in 1776 mutiny, 120 role in development of stratocracy, 204 Madras Revolution of 1776, 52, See also Stuart, James, Pigot, George, Majority Council, Fletcher, Robert American Revolution and, 154 legacy of, 20, 120, 128, 140 origins of, 113, 127, 142 outcome of, 115, 137 Madras School of Orientalism, 119 Madurai, 9, 12, 61, 68, 73, 99, 183 Mahfuz Khan, 48, 69 Mahomet, Sake Dean, 17, 59, 60, 66, 245 Majority Council, 127, 135, 136, See also Fort St. George Council dependence on military support, 131 military reform and, 135 origins of, 127 restoration of half-batta, 132, 134 Wallajah and, 132 Malcolm, John, 6, 21, 52, 178, 201 “cult of the officer” and, 213 1809 mutiny and, 191, 192, 193, 196 career of, 188 defense of stratocracy, 203–205, 216 Vellore Mutiny of 1806 and, 183, 186 Malleson, G. B., 48, 53, 214

Maratha Confederacy, 8, 93, 100, 102, See also Daulat Rao Sindhia military development and, 77 Marquess of Hastings, 211 Marriott, Thomas, 184 martial masculinity, 53 martial virtue, 19 Martin, Claud, 86, 87, 91 Martindale, Gabriel, 230 Master, Streynsham, 32, 33, 40 Meerut, 207, 223, 225, 226, 234 mercenaries, 29, See also Perron (né Pierre Cullier), Raymond, adventurers, Roach, Thomas, Boigne, Benoit de, Thomas, George as cultural intermediaries, 88, 92, 94 colonial state’s displacement of, 104, 111 Company’s use of, 93 military knowledge and, 88 nineteenth-century, 92 role in Indian courts, 20 Metcalfe, Charles, 178, 179, 202, 218 “cult of the officer” and, 213 military infrastructure, 10, 51, 52 as site of racial exclusion, 37 commandants and, 73 non-white actors in, 34, 36 sepoys and, 67, 111 Virginia and, 35 West India and, 42 military labor. See also soldiers, British and European, in Company armies, mercenaries, sepoys, peons, soldiers, non-white, in Company armies, coffrees demand for, 31 recruitment and, 24, 41 source of social mobility, 46, 79, 91, 245 militias, 13, 35–36, 39, 46 civic virtue and, 39, 46 Minto, Lord, 186, 189, 191, 195, 198 Mir Jafar, 60, 117, 152 Mir Qasim, 117 Mooniapah, 185 Mughal Empire, 7, 58, 62, 89, See also Aurangzeb dissolution of, 208 fragmentation of, 7 Rajput soldiers and, 63 Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah

Index “dual sovereignty” and, 120 capture of Chanda Sahib and, 67 death of Anwar ud Din and, 64 debts to European creditors, 120 decline of, 140 dynasty of, 63 employment of European officers and soldiers, 94, 98, 100 heir of Anwar ud Din, 49 Madar ul-Mulk and, 122 Madras Government and, 11, 65, 93, 117 Madras Revolution of 1776 and, 115 origins of, 99 petitions and, 160 Thanjavur and, 115 Muhammad Yusuf Khan as commandant, 66–69, 245 fall of, 97 professional networks and, 9, 18, 66, 83, 91, 187 significance of name, 88 Wallajah and, 12, 66, 99, 120 Muiz ud-Din, 163, 184 Munro, John, 1, 19, 190, 217 Munro, Thomas, 119, 178, 202–204, 213 “cult of the officer” and, 212 ryotwari system, 202 mutinies. See also Bengal Army, Vellore Mutiny of 1806, Bombay Army, Madras Army, Madras Revolution of 1776 Company’s long history of, 128, 183 during the Second Anglo-Mysore War, 183 1809, 16, 21, 52, 171, 174, 189, 190 connections to 1806 revolt, 174 legacy of, 203 origins of, 175 outcome of, 194, 198 public opinion and, 196 1824, 212 1857 rebellions, 6, 22, 63, 183, 206, 207, 218 as “holy war”, 227 legacy of, 229, 237, 245 origins of, 222 outcome of, 228 terminology and, 209–210 1859, 234–37 role of Company’s military cultures and, 175, 194, 199 1683, 35, 128 1766, 138, 197

281 1796, 16, 164, 166, 171 1798, 107 terminology and, 6 Muzaffar Jung, 64, 104 Mysore, 9, 10, 88, See also Tipu Sultan, First Anglo-Mysore War military development and, 77 rival of Madras, 75 nabobs (in sense of Company nouveaux riches), 15, 114, 153 naigs, 10 Nana Sahib, 225 Nandidurga (Nundydroog), 206 Napier, Charles, 219–22 Napoleonic Wars, 14, 46 native commandants, 68, 69, 187, See also Muhammad Yusuf Khan navayats, 64 nawabs, 9, 59 Neill, J. G. S., 228 Nepal, 211, See also Gurkhas Nightingale, Carl H., 38 Nizam ul-Mulk, Asaf Jah I, 78 Norgate, J. T., 240 north India, 58, 221 Northern Circars, 120, 124, 135, 183 officers, British and European, in Company armies, 5, 6, 15–18, 53, 111, 125, See also Pollock, George, Sykes, William Henry, Martindale, Gabriel, Ewart, John, Watson, Lewis Wentworth, Malcolm, John, Frederick, Edward, Clive, Robert, Greenwood, Joseph, Doveton, F. W., Elphinstone, Mountstuart, Stuart, James, Doveton, John, Macdowall, Hay, Marriott, Thomas, Scott, John, Lawrence, Stringer, Keigwin, Richard, Rumley, Charles, Fletcher, Robert, Floyer, Charles, Roberts, George, Martin, Claud, Polier, Antoine barriers for non-Britons, 90 capital punishment and, 198 civic virtue and, 14 depictions as superior to Indian counterparts, 136 depictions as would-be rebels, 154

282

Index

officers (cont.) divide between military and civil authority and, 216 employment in Indian armies, 94, 177 equality of rank debate, 150, 155, 161, 162, 211 expansion of officer corps, 136 financial compensation and, 132, 135, 138, 151–53, 190 growing political authority in colonial governance, 115, 120, 127, 140, 144, 204 lack of fluency in Indian languages and, 214 maintaining order within the colonial state and, 174 marginalization of, 213 paternal benevolence and, 225, 230 race and, 239 reorganization of British Indian Army and, 232 response to 1859 mutiny, 235 social mobility and, 20, 87, 144, 151 trans-imperial “brotherhood” of, 159, 160–62, 164, 165, 169, 170, 191, 194, 198, 224, 233, 243 officers, Indian, in Company armies, 10, 16, 17, 140, See also Pandey, Sita Ram, Madar Khan, Muhammad Yusuf Khan, Shaikh Ismael, jemadars, subedars, Syed Ibrahim, Imam Khan 1809 mutiny and, 206 capital punishment and, 198 depictions as would-be rebels, 135 marginalization of, 158, 187, 188, 197 social mobility and, 20, 73, 74, 83 officers, royal, 145, 150, 155, 167 Ongole, 80 Orientalism, 205 Orme, Robert, 48, 56, 68, 114, 187 palaiyakkarars, 61, 71, 89, 100, 175, See also Muhammad Yusuf Khan pamphlets. See also Young, Arthur 1806 mutiny and, 183 1809 mutiny and, 200 1857 rebellions and, 225 trans-imperial “brotherhood” of officers and, 144, 164, 166, 216, 233 xenophobia and, 124 Pandey, Gyanendra, 205 Pandey, Sita Ram, 18, 240–43, 246

Paradis, Louis, 48, 64 Parker, Geoffrey, 49, 76 Paterson, George, 100 Pathans, 63, 82 Paton, Joseph Noel, 237 patronage of Company, 20, 112, 119, 161, 164, 188 decline of in the Court of Directors, 208 Madras Revolution of 1776 and, 115 stratocracy and, 204 Peers, Douglas, 3, 211, 243 peons, 30, 37, 39, 41, 47 Perron (né Pierre Cullier), 102, 107 petitions British and European officers and, 16, 134, 144, 158, 159–62, 168, 233 non-white military labor and, 44, 74, 206, 219, 224 Pigot, George demilitarization and, 136 1776 mutiny and, 20, 113, 127, 139, 180 significance of appointment as governor of Madras, 123 tensions with European officers, 125 Yusuf Khan and, 72, 121 pirzadahs, 80 Pitt, Thomas, 151 Pitt, William, the younger, 143, 159 Polier, Antoine, 86, 87, 90 Pollock, George, 231 Pondicherry (Puducherry), 47, 64, 116 Proclamation of 1775, 42, 45 race after 1857, 239 fluidity of, 34 martial race theory, 63, 232, 241, 243 solidification of, 5, 25, 34, 36, 38, 40, 98 xenophobia and, 114, 124 Rajputs, 30, 63 Ramroo, 181 Randall, William, 101, 121 Rawdon-Hastings, Francis. See Marquess of Hastings Raymond, 102, 105 residents, 105, 109, 111, 112, See also Kirkpatrick, James Achilles, Willes, John, Kirkpatrick, William revenue collection, 4, 119 Rhymer, Thomas, 33 Roach, Thomas, 89, 92

Index Roberts, George, 107 Roe, Thomas, 26, 32, 33, 40, 53 Roy, Kaushik, 76 Rumley, Charles, 134, 140 Rusul Khan, 79, 80, 83, 106, 109, 245 Safar Salamani, Khoja, 87 Sale, Robert, 212 Sardhana, 89 Saunders, Thomas, 65 Scotland, 34 Scott, John, 156, 157 Second Anglo-Maratha War, 177, 202 Second Anglo-Mysore War, 76, 81, 156, 159, 183, 188 influx of royal regiments and, 147, 155, 167 “Second Hundred Years War”, 7 Seeley, John, 57 sepoys, 5, 14, 16, 17, 26 caste and, 62, 63, 232, 243, 244 critiques and protests of stratocracy, 206, 223 depictions as would-be rebels, 40, 56, 135, 173, 202, 217 depictions in British artwork, 44, 237 desertions and, 74–76, 78–81, 177, 181 distinctions from peons, 47 distinctions from white soldiers, 51, 186 1809 mutiny and, 195 1824 mutiny and, 217 1857 rebellions and, 224 etymology of, 47 financial compensation and, 82, 77 formalization of, 10, 51 new restrictions and, 175, 180, 181 paternal benevolence and, 32, 187, 188, 205, 218–19 post-1857, 244 recruitment and training of, 52, 55, 56, 63, 76, 204 religion and, 83 Second Anglo-Mysore War and, 158 social mobility and, 20, 67, 73, 83, 95, 111, 245 Seven Years’ War, 25, 41, 71, 143, 151 Shah Alam II, 2, 118 Shaikh Ismael, 206 Shaikh Ramsawmy, 181 Sheik Abdul Ryman, 182 Shivaji, 94 Shore, John, 166, 171, 179 Shuja ud-Daula, 118 Sikh Empire, 90, 92, 221

283 Sikhs, 63, 232, 243 Sindhia, Mahadji, 85, 86, 102, 112 Sir Josiah Child’s War, 27, 51, 129 Siraj ud-Daula, 59, 117 slavery, 35 Smith, John, 93 Smith, Joseph, 100, 122 soldiers, British and European, in Company armies, 5, 14, 16, See also mutinies:1859, mutinies:1809 challenges to Wood’s reforms and, 234 civic virtue and, 14 French, 29, 75 German, 29 Irish, 24, 29, 33 recruitment of, 13 Scottish, 29, 33, 145, 237 social mobility and, 20, 245 Swiss, 29 soldiers, non-white, in Company armies. See also sepoys, peons, coffrees free black and enslaved, 24, 39 institutional status of, 44 recruitment of, 13, 38 south India Company paramountcy in, 174, 210 fluid military economy of, 19, 74, 83, 86, 87, 91, 110, 125 Spain, 109 Srirangapatna, 193, 194, 198 Stern, Philip, 129 Stoler, Ann Laura, 16, 97 Storey, Joseph, 198, 199 Stratton, George, 113, 115, 141 Stuart, James 1776 mutiny and, 113, 115, 127, 131, 180, 187 as Fletcher’s second-in-command, 126 court martial of, 137, 139 legacy of, 200 military reforms and, 140 Second Anglo-Mysore War and, 148 sepoys and, 158 Wallajah and, 134 subedars. See also Pandey, Sita Ram, Madar Khan, officers, Indian, in Company armies, Syed Ibrahim, Imam Khan, Jaggar Naullnow 1809 mutiny and, 196 exclusion from brotherhood of officers, 158 marginalization of, 136, 187 military infrastructure and, 10 Yusef Khan and, 67

284

Index

subsidiary alliances, 20, See also Awadh, Thanjavur, Arcot, Hyderabad Supreme Council, 118 Supreme Court of Judicature, 188 Surat, 27 Sydenham, Thomas, 199 Syed Ibrahim, 187–88 Sykes, William Henry, 231 telingas, 30, 37, 51 Thalassery, 183 Thanjavur, 100, 115, See also Tuljaji 1782 revolt and, 183 conflicts with Arcot, 115, 121 restoration of, 124 subsidiary alliance with the Company, 106, 125, 136 Third Anglo-Maratha War, 210 Third Anglo-Mysore War, 163 Thomas, George, 89, 91 Timapa Naigue, 61 Tipu Sultan, 10, 76, 103, 147, 156, 163, 175 Tiruchirappalli (Trichinopoly), 67, 68, 183, 186 Tirunelveli, 9, 61, 68 topasses, 31, 37, 39, 97, 181 Travancore, 72, 175 Treaty of Allahabad, 106, 107, 109, 111 Trevelyan, Charles Edward, 218, 230 Tuljaji, 123, 124 ‘Umdat ul-Umrah, 100 “Unhappy Contrast, The”, 149

Varanasi, 205 Vellore, 21 Vellore Mutiny of 1806, 21, 174, 182 1857 rebellions and, 222 legacy of, 183, 199, 209, 217, 230, 244 origins of, 175, 181 theories about, 185, 186, 189 Visakhapatnam, 81, 180 Walker, John, 81 War of Austrian Succession, 41, 48, 64, 94, 116, 145 Watson, Lewis Wentworth, 218 Wellesley, Arthur, 178, 201 Wellesley, Richard, 103, 105, 175, 177 West India regiments, 42, 44–46, 51 West, Benjamin, 43 Whitehill, John, 137, 138 Willes, John, 109 Wolfe, James, 43, 44, 152 women, 5, 90, 92, 205, 230, 237, See also Fancourt, Amelia, Begum Samru Wood, Charles, 209, 231, 234 Wynch, Alexander, 121, 124 Yale, Elihu, 151 Young, Arthur, 142, 169 Yonge, George, 159 Yusuf Khan. See Muhammad Yusuf Khan