For centuries, gold and silver had poured into Bengal; they now poured out. The East India Company no longer had to transport bullion to India to purchase goods for selling abroad. Instead, the tax revenues from Bengal supplied all the capital it had previously imported for investing in trade, and more. “If a district yielded, as in the case of [Birbhum], £90,000 of revenue, the Council took care that not more than £5000 or £6000 were spent in governing it,” explained a nineteenth-century historian, William Hunter. “From the remainder, ten thousand pounds or so were deducted for general civil expenses, ten thousand more for the maintenance of the army, and the surplus of say £60,000 was invested in silks, muslins, cotton cloths, and other articles, to be sold by the authorities in Leadenhall Street.” The revenue enabled the British East India Company to build on that London thoroughfare an expansive administrative center, called the India House. Often the Company’s
officials diverted the tax surplus to finance wars in Madras and to purchase tea in China; silver also flowed out when Englishmen sent their profits home. Between 1766 and 1768, Bengal imported £624,375 worth of goods and cash and exported £6,311,250—the amount going out ten times greater than what came in.
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Such an economic drain could not go on forever. By 1769, Bengal had no gold, silver, or other valuables left. A group of Armenian merchants—whose trade in the region long preceded that of the British—petitioned the Calcutta Council, complaining that the lack of currency had brought virtually all business to a halt, so that “not only a general bankruptcy is to be feared, but a real famine, in the midst of wealth and plenty.”
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Then the rains failed. “The fields of rice are become like fields of dried straw,” wrote a superintendent. Recognizing that the cost of rice would go up, British officers and their Indian agents, who enjoyed a monopoly on trading rice, bought up all that they could, often forcing peasants to part with the grain they had kept for planting. The British East India Company dispatched a shipload of grain for its forces in Madras, stocked up 5,000 tons for local troops, and, fearing that revenues would fall short, urged “rigor” in tax collection. By then the famine was in full force.
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“All through the stifling summer of 1770 the people went on dying,” Hunter recounted. “The husbandmen sold their cattle; they sold their implements of agriculture; they devoured their seed-grain; they sold their sons and daughters, till at length no buyer of children could be found; they ate the leaves of trees and the grass of the field; and in June 1770 the Resident at [Murshidabad] affirmed that the living were feeding on the dead.” A third of the people of Bengal, numbering about 10 million, perished.
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The British East India Company’s policies had clearly aggravated the disaster. Despite repeated petitions, the Company had refused to march a brigade of troops out of a hard-hit district of Bihar, where they were appropriating all the available grain, to a region farther west that was better provisioned. (Calcutta’s officials feared that if the troops were
not close at hand, the French would take the chance to invade from bases in the Indian Ocean.) The Company also prohibited trade in rice among the districts of Bengal—unless the grain was destined for the cities of Murshidabad and Calcutta, the administrative centers of Bengal and the Company, respectively. In particular, the southern and eastern districts were permitted to export rice only to Calcutta. A contemporary observer would note that “as much grain was exported from the lower parts of Bengal as would have fed the number who perished for a whole year.”
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Most important, during previous droughts agriculturists would have possessed grain, stored in anticipation of a bad year, as well as jewelry, coins, or other savings they could use to purchase rice. (Neighboring areas had a decent harvest. One zamindar bought rice in Benares, west of Bihar, had it transported down the Ganga in barges, and distributed it to famine sufferers on the riverbanks.) By 1770, however, rural Bengal had no currency left—even as, at the height of the famine, speculators were selling their hoards of rice at six times the usual price. Virtually every employee of the Company reaped huge profits in rice speculation. One Company clerk in Murshidabad, who could ordinarily scrape together no more than £200 a year in savings, allegedly sent £60,000 to England that year.
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The East India Company did spend £9,000 on famine relief, mainly by buying rice in the districts and distributing it in the cities of Murshidabad and Calcutta—even as it collected from Bengal that fiscal year a substantial rent of £1.4 million. Bihar, where many villages lost four-fifths of their population, yielded the Company a little above £400,000 for 1770, an amount that led the London directors to complain of being “deeply affected to see ourselves disappointed.” Amazingly, at the end of that year a tremendous crop stood in the fields, planted by hands no longer alive to reap it. In February 1771, the Calcutta Council reported to the directors: “Notwithstanding the great severity of the late famine and the great reduction of people thereby, some increase has been made in the settlements [revenue collections] both of the Bengal and the Behar provinces for the present year.” The revenue did not fall, commented a
subsequent governor-general, Warren Hastings, “owing to its being violently kept up to its former standard.”
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Large harvests appeared the next two years as well, and the Company’s annual earnings continued to rise as its agents forced villagers to pay the rent owed by dead neighbors. “While the country every year became a more total waste, the English Government constantly demanded an increased land-tax,” Hunter wrote—adding that the collections inevitably faltered. The villagers of Birbhum “were dragooned into paying the land-tax by Mussulman troops, but notwithstanding the utmost severities the receipts seldom amounted to much more than one-half of the demand.”
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The level of taxes that the Company had grown to expect could not be met because there were now far fewer plantings of rice to tax. With no hands to tend them, a third of Bengal’s fields returned to jungle. Most of the province was a fertile delta, formed over millennia by the Ganga and its distributaries: in the absence of cultivators its natural state was tropical forest. The impenetrable growth invaded formerly prosperous villages and shadowed tiny hamlets where the few inhabitants lived in terror of the jungle’s rampaging elephants and man-eating panthers. In 1780, two battalions of sepoys—native soldiers in the employ of the British—trying to force their way through Birbhum (a district considered at one time to be “the highway of armies”) found “all the way a perfect wilderness” infested with tigers and bears. Communications broke down throughout Bengal because the postmen began to get carried off by wild animals. Many of the surviving villagers deserted their lands and, led by Hindu sadhus or Muslim fakirs (men of religion), took to waylaying British consignments for grain or cash and looting any fields of rice they could find. The rebellion was the first of innumerable peasant and tribal uprisings that would harass the British Raj for the rest of its reign.
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Bengal’s capital city of Murshidabad, where the dead had lain in piles on the street, fed on by dogs, jackals, and vultures, never recovered from the famine and its aftereffects. By 1771, Calcutta—which historian Narendra K. Sinha states “was well supplied with grain at a time when
many places from which it was brought were destitute”—stood alone in all of Bengal as an island of wealth. Desperate people trekked to Calcutta in search of food. “I have counted from my bed-chamber window in the morning when I got up forty dead bodies lying within twenty yards of the wall, besides many hundred lying in the agonies of death for want, bending double, with their stomachs quite close contracted to their back-bones,” wrote a correspondent who signed himself J.C. in
The Gentlemen’s Magazine
, and who did not care to have the dying so proximate. “I have sent my servants to desire those who had strength, to remove further off.”
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UNTIL THE FAMINE broke out, few people in the United Kingdom comprehended the source of the East India Company’s profits. “Numerous fleets of large ships, loaded with the most valuable commodities of the East, annually arriving in England in a constant and increasing succession” had given rise to a misconception, a parliamentary committee subsequently observed. “This export from India seemed to imply also a reciprocal supply, by which the trading capital employed in those productions was continually strengthened and enlarged. But the payment of a tribute, and not a beneficial commerce, to that country, wore this specious and delusive character.” The depopulation that resulted from famine eventually led to a steep drop in the Company’s revenues, burst the speculative bubble in its shares, forced it to seek a loan from the Bank of England, and laid its affairs open to scrutiny. Clive, deemed by some to be the richest man in the United Kingdom, had become a member of the House of Commons—but was obliged to answer to Parliament for corruption. He was charged with having received in India valuable gifts that were deemed to belong rightfully to the Company. Although he was cleared of blame, for unknown reasons Clive took his own life in 1774.
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The British Parliament gave the East India Company a loan of £1.4 million and appointed Warren Hastings, a gifted protégé of Clive, as the first governor-general of India. Hastings instituted an English-style legal system in Bengal, basing certain of its aspects on what he understood
to be local custom. He also sought to repair the Company’s fortunes by canceling the portion of Bengal’s revenues that were to go to the emperor in Delhi, and by subjugating Oudh, a prosperous kingdom west of Bengal, and subjecting it to rigorous tax collection. As a result, Oudh became “forlorn and desolate” and in 1784 underwent famine. Hastings returned to England a rich man, but he, too, had to answer for his foreign adventures.
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In an impeachment trial that dragged on for nine years, statesman Edmund Burke accused Governor-General Hastings of venality and brutality. The Company’s revenue collectors, Burke charged in some of the most sensational testimony of the time, had stripped naked the wives of tax defaulters, dragged them from their homes, “put the nipples of the women into the sharp edges of split bamboos and tore them from their bodies.” Although Burke’s outrage was genuine, historian Nicholas Dirks argues that his crusade had a deeper motive. Burke hoped to cleanse the emerging empire of corruption and cruelty—and to ensure that its benefits flowed not just to employees, shareholders, and directors of the Company but, more broadly, to the people of the United Kingdom. He succeeded in his greater objectives. In the end Hastings was acquitted but, according to Dirks, “Empire emerged from the trial stronger than ever.”
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IN 1793, AFTER a period of anarchy and intermittent famine that lasted two decades, Governor-General Charles Cornwallis reformed the land revenue system in Bengal. (He had earlier commanded the British forces that were forced to capitulate to George Washington’s army in Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781.) Cornwallis returned to the zamindars their hereditary role of collecting taxes and fixed the annual revenue owed to the state (at £2.68 million) in the hope that such a permanent settlement would inspire them to tend their fiefdoms. Using the steady income from Bengal that Cornwallis’s reforms assured it, the East India Company went on to conquer or otherwise annex kingdoms in central, southern, and western India. Compliant princes were permitted to continue ruling their kingdoms, as long as they paid a retainer for protection
by the Company’s troops. Bitter campaigns in the northwest ended with the fall of the Sikhs in 1849, bringing the border of the Raj to the edge of Afghanistan.
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In most of the newly conquered territories, the Company gathered its own land tax, which again it called rent. A levy of up to a third of the potential crop, which was often more than the harvest actually produced, ultimately became the norm for rent across much of India. As a result of the relentless benchmark of rent—in contrast to the Mughal tax, which varied with the harvest—land rapidly passed out of the hands of farmers and into the possession of moneylenders. An elderly peasant explained to a revenue official the essential insecurity of the system: “They told me that the river was passable at such and such a ford,” he said, “and on their word I tried to cross it, but fell into a deep hole and was nearly drowned. They told me, when I struggled back to shore, that the average depth was quite safe. But that would not have kept me from drowning.” To pay their rent after a poor harvest, farmers had to mortgage their future crops and eventually their plots, ultimately losing everything to usurers and ending up as laborers working for low wages in what had been their own fields. In the past, a peasant’s land was secure even if he could not pay taxes. But British law in India invariably upheld the rights of creditors, who became critical cogs in the machinery of revenue extraction.
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A variety of economic traumas, ranging from the ravages of war and exactions of rent to natural calamity, led to a series of famines all over India. The Madras region, for instance, suffered famine in 1783, 1792, 1807, 1813, 1823, 1834, and 1854. Unlike the Bengal famine of 1770, the nineteenth-century calamities excited little comment in England, where influential scholars such as James Mill argued that poverty rather than wealth was India’s intrinsic and unvarying condition. Hindu legal codes contained guidelines for helping ordinary people through “seasons of calamity,” and Mill pointed to the existence of such regulations as evidence that “a state of poverty and wretchedness, as far as the great body of the people are concerned, must have prevailed in India” in the past, just as in the present.
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