My new book, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain is on the late 18th century, the British conquest of India and the trial of Warren Hastings. It tells also of the death of the Nawab of Arcot. Many of the British servants of the East India Company managed to control South India by credit, basically by continuing to give loans to the Nawab at usurious rates of interest that he could never repay. But this provided them access to his court, access to his lands, right to collect revenue on his behalf, and also the legal right to use him to conduct warfare. There were political wars that the Nawab conducted basically to collect money for his creditors, most of whom were these British civil servants who would come to India, make a fortune in four or five years, and then go back to London and buy big estates and often buy themselves seats in Parliament.
When I was working on the book, I did not realise that a cousin of Edmund Burke, a man by the name of William Burke, was an agent in the 1760s for the Raja of Thanjavur. It turns out that William Burke made a good deal of money representing the Raja against the Nawab of Arcot because the two of them were locked in a kind of battle in the 1760s-1770s. William Burke invested his money as well as Edmund's in East India Company shares in the 1760s. Then in 1769 there was a huge crash of stock value in the London because of the crisis in India. That year there was a huge famine in Bengal, like the 1943 famine, when a third of the population perished. When the market crashed, William and Edmund lost all their money. And poor Edmund, who went on the to criticise the Company, had a good reason to complain. I didn't know all these stories until I did this research. The relationship between the stock market, and investment, war, imperialism, then as now, was fairly similar.
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Hi Rajeev,
OT. I thought you might be interested in this:
http://www.hindu.com/2007/01/15/stories/2007011502601100.htm
Interview with Nicholas B. Dirks.
My new book, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain is on the late 18th century, the British conquest of India and the trial of Warren Hastings. It tells also of the death of the Nawab of Arcot. Many of the British servants of the East India Company managed to control South India by credit, basically by continuing to give loans to the Nawab at usurious rates of interest that he could never repay. But this provided them access to his court, access to his lands, right to collect revenue on his behalf, and also the legal right to use him to conduct warfare. There were political wars that the Nawab conducted basically to collect money for his creditors, most of whom were these British civil servants who would come to India, make a fortune in four or five years, and then go back to London and buy big estates and often buy themselves seats in Parliament.
When I was working on the book, I did not realise that a cousin of Edmund Burke, a man by the name of William Burke, was an agent in the 1760s for the Raja of Thanjavur. It turns out that William Burke made a good deal of money representing the Raja against the Nawab of Arcot because the two of them were locked in a kind of battle in the 1760s-1770s. William Burke invested his money as well as Edmund's in East India Company shares in the 1760s. Then in 1769 there was a huge crash of stock value in the London because of the crisis in India. That year there was a huge famine in Bengal, like the 1943 famine, when a third of the population perished. When the market crashed, William and Edmund lost all their money. And poor Edmund, who went on the to criticise the Company, had a good reason to complain. I didn't know all these stories until I did this research. The relationship between the stock market, and investment, war, imperialism, then as now, was fairly similar.
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