Nabobs: Defining the Indian empire and the British nation in the late eighteenth century

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Content NABOBS: DEFINING TH E INDIAN EM PIRE AND THE BRITISH NATION IN TH E LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Copyright 2005 by Tillm an W. Nechtman A D issertation Presented to the FACULTY O F TH E GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY O F SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR O F PHILOSOPHY (HISTORY) May 2005 Tillm an W. Nechtman Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 3180309 Copyright 2005 by Nechtman, Tillman W. All rights reserved. INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ® UMI UMI Microform 3180309 Copyright 2005 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Dedication For Laura. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Ad This dissertation exists only because I have had the help of more people than I could ever name. The following list acknowledges only a few of the many to whom I will forever be in debt. As any graduate student will tell you, there is nothing more important to surviving graduate school than having a strong advisor. I decided to accept the offer to do graduate work at the University of Southern California (USC) because I wanted to work with Philippa Levine, and it has been the single best decision of my career. She has been and continues to be a mentor, a colleague, and a friend, and this dissertation is better for my having worked with her. I also owe a great deal of thanks to Lisa Cody, who advised me while I was completing my MA at the Claremont Graduate University. Lisa encouraged the earliest stages of this project and pointed me in the right directions as it grew. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Carole Shammas and Karen Lang, who with Philippa Levine, constituted my dissertation committee and have all guided me through the construction of this project. Doing graduate work at USC has been a truly remarkable experience. The university is a vibrant place to work, and it has also proven to be a generous supporter of graduate studies. I could not have supported myself through the long stages of this project had it not been for institutional support from the university. As well, a host of individuals at the university have supported me and my work more than they could know. Jack Wills and Roger Dingman were instrumental members of my qualifying committee. Laveme Hughes, Brenda Johnson, Lori Rogers, and Joe Styles constitute the core of USC’s history department. Were it not for the four of them, the department could not function on a daily basis, and their help has been instrumental in both my graduate career and my work at USC. iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I would be remiss if I failed to acknowledge that my gratitude extends far beyond the institutional boundaries of USC. The Early Modem Studies Institute, a joint venture between USC and the Huntington Library, helped to fund my research at two critical moments. A research grant in the Fall of 2002 funded the initial stages of my research in London, and a fellowship from the Institute for the academic year 2004-5 allowed me time to finish the project. This project benefited greatly from the help and advice of a number of outside scholars around the globe including Peter Marshall and Kathleen Wilson. I am particularly indebted to Andrew Mackillop and Michael Fisher, two of the most generous scholars in the profession today. This dissertation clearly benefited from their help and influence. I will long be in the debt of the members of the various seminars at the Institute for Historical Research in London, especially the members of the Eighteenth-Centuiy Seminar, the Imperial History Seminar, and Catherine Hall’s Seminar on Reconfiguring British History. I am particularly grateful to David Cannadine who authorized a series of free student memberships to the Institute, one of which fell into my hands. No research project of this size could be accomplished without the help of a massive number of people. While I cannot list everyone who helped me here, it is imperative that I thank the staff of the Oriental and India Office Collections (OIOC) at the British Library. Only those who have ever had the pleasure and the privilege to work in this archive can know what an incredible group of people staff this library. I do not exaggerate when I say that the staff at OIOC has been instrumental not only in my work on this project but also in the broader field of imperial studies. Of course, OIOC is part of the larger British library (BL), which, I believe, is the best archive in the world, and I thank every member of the staff there for their help. Likewise, I thank the staff of the BL’s Colindale Library, the repository iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of most of the BL’s press archives, for their help mining through wheel after wheel of microfilm. The staff at the National Library of Scotland (NLS) and the National Archive of Scotland (NAS) all helped me organize my research in their archives and went beyond the call of duty when they copied and mailed materials to me in London and in the United States. Assistant Director Dr. V.N. Dhaulakhandi of the Birla Musuem in Pilani, Rajasthan made sure that I had a quality copy of John Russell’s portrait of Elizabeth Plowden, which continues to be the crowning visual achievement of chapter five. Jonathan Marsden, deputy surveyor of the Queen’s Works of Art, helped me track down several pieces of furniture brought back from India by Company employees that eventually made their way into the Royal collection. Mr. and Mrs. David Peake, the current owners of Sezincote Estate, graciously mailed me a generous collection of materials on their home and gave me permission to use them in this project. My thanks also go to Kate Crowe, Events and Projects Coordinator at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Not only did she help me organize a tour of the building - including the Foreign Secretary’s office - to see some of the East India Company’s art that made its way to Whitehall, she also gathered a collection of official photographs (and permission to use them) for me. These photographs greatly enhanced the first section of chapter five. Graduate life is never an easy prospect, as any graduate student will certify. I have survived eight years only because of the support of a long list of friends, all of whom have been instrumental to this project. Petula Iu has been a friend since my days at Claremont Graduate University. Phil Stem and Stephen Vella were fellow imperial researchers, and their company helped me through a rather long British winter. I have benefited from and am thankful for the intellectual and moral support of my friends and colleagues at USC, v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. especially the members of the History department’s dissertation writing group: Craig Loftin, Jeff Kosiorek, Treva Tucker, and Chris Jimenez y West. I thank Richard Allen for the many lunches at the BL, during which he listened to me rambling, helped me organize my thoughts, and encouraged me to take a day or two off when it seemed like I need one. I would not have seen Portsmouth were it not for his recommendation. Mike and Louise Armstrong kindly invited a lonely and lost American graduate student to their home for a gathering of ex-patriots on the 4th of July. My deepest thanks go to Keith Surridge and Justine Taylor, both of whom helped me feel at home in London. I owe more to their conversations and intellectual help than I can ever say, but I honestly believe that the greatest gift they gave me was their companionship. I would not have survived the long months of research without their friendship. I owe a special thanks to two friends from my undergraduate days at Georgetown University, Ai Dang and Christopher Machin. They have both been cheerleaders for me throughout this project, and I want them to know I appreciate it. I also want to thank my parents, Carl and Sam Nechtman, who have helped this project along in many ways. Their generosity was particularly helpful during my research trips, when exchange rates made graduate work more difficult, to say nothing of more costly, than usual. Anyone who knows me at all knows that I have two small poodles, Wilson and Percy, who mean a great deal to me. They have missed many a walk because I was out of the country or caught up with my writing. I would thank them for their patience if poodles had any patience at all. I will thank them, though, for making me laugh on days when I wanted to cry and scream and for making it more fun to sit in my office working long hours on warm Californian days when being outside seemed very tempting indeed. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. One person, though, towers above this project - my wife, Laura Greco. For nearly a decade now, she has shone for me like the North Star in the night sky, constant, true, faithful, and steady. She has been my first (if not always my fastest) reader and my best critic throughout this process. Though it has taken me away from home for months on end and cost us a small fortune in book bills, plane tickets, boarding house fees, and photocopies, she has always insisted that I carry forward with this work. She has seen, even when I did not, how much it means to me, and she has made it part of her life as well. She has lived with nabobs in her house simply for the love of me, and for all of her support, I dedicate this dissertation to her. It would not have been possible, or even worth it, without her. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii List of Illustrations x Abbreviations xiii Abstract xiv Introduction 1 Chater 1: Imagined Distinctions: British Observations of Eighteenth-Century South Asia Grappling with Difference 27 A Tale of Three Cities 35 India as a New Eden 55 India as Paradise Lost 67 Chapter 2: “Flesh and Blood Cannot Bear I t ” Temptation and Corruptibility in British India Transformations 90 Corruptible Visitors to India’s Eden 97 Palpable dangers: Reversing British Imperial Teleologies 103 Defending the Illusion: Criminal, Not Corrupted 124 The Indian Defense: Conforming, Not Corrupted 133 The Empire Comes Home: The Dangers of Corruptibility 148 Chapter 3: “Under the PaMick Eye:” Inventing an Imperial Peril Building the Public Case 157 Spectacular Perils and the Specter of a Growing Evil 160 Scripting the Drama and Staging the Spectacle 175 Nabobs and Newspapers: Imperial Scandal awl the National Media 181 From Bad Character to Caricatures: The Literary Nabob 204 viii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter 4: Imperial Clutter: Nabobs and the Artifacts of Empire in Metropolitan Britain A Mogul Take-. The Perils of Trading Places 214 The Space Between: Nabobs, Nation, and Empire 221 A lew d in the Crown?: Indian Wealth in Domestic Britain 245 Importing Empire: Indian Commodities In an Imperial Nation 266 Chapter 5: Nabobiaas: Gender, Luxury, and Empire Ambivalent Iconography: From India House to the India Office SIM Unsettled Seas: Gender Relations and the Passage to India 314 The Threats of Empire: British Women in Eighteenth-Century South Asia 326 Imperial Scandal and Domestic Gossip 348 Sprung up like Mushrooms: Empire and Luxury ia Domestic Settings 363 ‘The Great Sultana ftom the Waves:” Nabobiaas in Domestic Britain 376 Conclusion One Empire. Two Nations: The Limits of Imperial Identity 391 The Nabob at Home: New Categories of Imperial Difference 403 Bibliography 411 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Illustration 1. India, c. 1765. 36 Illustration 2. Western Coast of India, c. 1765. 37 Illustration 3. Eastern Coast of India, c. 1765. 41 Illustration 4. Bengal, c. 1765. 49 Illustrations. T heBullock-Driver,Cowasjee, 86 The Gentlemans’ Magazine, October 1794. Illustration 6. The Friendly Agent, James Gillray, 9 June 1787. 148 Illustration 7. Admission Ticket for the Trial of Warren Hastings, 1788. 171 Illustration 8. Impeachment ticket fo r the trial o f 171 W-rr-n H-st-ngs, James Gillray, February 1788. Illustration 9. Dun-Shaw, James Gillray, 7 March 1788. 193 Illustration 10. Blood on Thunder Fording the Red Sea, 198 James Gillray, 1 March 1788. Illustration 11. The Bow to the Throne, alias, the Begging Bow, 199 James Gillray, 6 May 1788. Illustration 12. A Civilian, perhaps William Hickey, 227 Arthur William Devis, Calcutta, c. 1785. Illustration 13. Portrait o f an Unknown Gentleman with a Hookah, 227 John Seton, Calcutta, c. 1778. Illustration 14. Self-Portrait o f Charles Smith, Charles Smith, London, 1795 227 Illustration 15. Sir William Jones, Arthur William Devis, Calcutta, 1793. 227 Illustration 16. Mr. and Mrs. Hastings, Johann Zoffany, Calcutta, 1783-4. 228 Illustration 17. The Auriol and Dashwood Families, 229 Johann Zoffany, Calcutta, 1783-7. Illustration 18. Court Cards, the Best to Deal With, Anonymous, London, 1788. 264 Illustration 19. The Shah Ghost, from The London Magazine, December 1759. 279 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Illustration 20. Cheetah with Two Indian Attendants, 281 George Stubbs, London, 1764-1765. Illustration 21. Lady Surrounded by Her Pets, 284 Thomas Rowlandson, London, undated. Illustration 22. The Westminster Hunt, James Gillray, London, 27 April 1788. 287 Illustration 23. The Westminster Hunt (Detail), 288 James Gillray, London, 27 April 1788. Illustration 24. The Hindu Temple in Melchet Park, 294 William Dauiell, London, c. 1800. Illustration 25. Bust o f Hastings at Melchet Park, Anonymous, c. 1800. 295 Illustration 26. Daylesford House. 296 Illustration 27. Sezincote House. 297 Illustration 28. The Bedroom Pavilion, Sezincote House. 297 Illustration 29. The Cow Bridge and Snake Pool, Sezincote House. 298 Illustration 30. The Hindu Temple, Sezincote House. 298 Illustration 31. Mantle from Daylesford House, Thomas Banks, c. 1790. 299 Illustration 32. Ivory TaMe and Four Ivory Chairs, 300 formerly owned by Warren Hastings. Illustration 33. M aid Ivory Table, formerly owned by Warren Hastings. 300 Illustration 34. Ivory Couch, a gift to Warren Hastings from Muni Begum. 301 Illustration 35. The India Office Council Chamber, FCO. 309 Illustration 36. Fireplace Relief, Michael Rysbrack, 310 India Office Council Chamber, FCO. Illustration 37. Mrs. Hastings, John Zoffany, Calcutta, 1783-4. 325 Illustration 38. Mrs. Elizabeth Sophia Plowden and her Children, 332 John Russell, London, 1797. xi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Illustration 39. The Sale of English Beauties in the East Indies, lames Gillray, 16 May 1786. Illustration 40. Sevemdroog Castle, Shooter's Hill. Illustration 41. Guildhall, London. Illustration 42. The Royal Pavilion, Brighton. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Abbreviations British Library BL The Dictionary o f National Biography PNB East India Company EIC Foreign and Commonwealth Office FCO Oriental and India Office Collections OIOC National Archive of Scotland NAS National Library of Scotland NLS University of Southern California USC Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. A tS fe K f This dissertation is a study of the relationship between the British nation and the British empire in South Asia in the eighteenth century. It details a moment when the British nation and the British empire co-existed, and indeed evolved, side-by-side, each dependent upon the other. Specifically, it investigates the “Nabob Controversy” in order to explore the mutually constitutive interactions between Britain and South Asia in this period. The study focuses on the figure of the East India Company (EIC) employee as the human frontier between empire and nation, a figure who moved fluidly between the two spaces. Labeled “nabobs,” a corruption of the Mughal title mwah, by their contemporaries, EIC employees represented an imperial vanguard; they, more than any other group, witnessed South Asia in the last half of the eighteenth century and “conjured” it into being for domestic audiences through their letters, tales, drawings, and diary accounts. EIC employees imagined India for domestic British audiences in the eighteenth century, and, upon their retirement, they frequently imported concrete artifacts such as clothing, wealth, jewelry, and animals - not to mention such abstract cultural forms as new aesthetic sensibilities and new-found fluency la “exotic” languages, intellectual traditions, and religious beliefs. While domestic audiences accepted the imagined India that EIC employees painted for them, they rejected the appearance of South Asian cultural forms in domestic settings when these same individuals returned as nabobs. Parliamentary inquiries into the affairs of Lord Robert Clive, and the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, represent only the two most famous instances of negative public reaction to the return of the nabobs to domestic Britain. As such, the nabob controversy must be seen as a widespread critique that played itself out in Parliament and in courtrooms, on the stage and in newspapers, in political xiv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. cartoons and novels, In pamphlets and protests, as well as around gossip tables throughout Britain. The furor surrounding the nabobs in domestic Britain during the last half of the eighteenth century is explainable only as part of broader attempts to define both the British nation and the British empire in this period. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Introduction On 11 September 1970, the Vice-President of the United States, Spiro Agnew, stood up to address the California State Republican Party Convention then being held in San Diego. As he had in previous speeches, the vice-president spoke angrily of the growing numbers of Americans who were publicly agitating against President Nixon’s policies on the nation’s involvement in the war in Vietnam. These critics were, he suggested, nothing more than a community of “nattering nabobs of negativism.” For Agnew and his speechwriter, William Safire, the phrase “nattering nabobs of negativism” may have been little more than a felicitous bit of alliteration. The same speech, after all, went on to claim that these negative nabobs had formed a new sort of 4-H Club, what Agnew called the “hopeless, hysterical, hypochondriacs of history.” At the same time, though, Agnew wanted the phrase to be rhetorically memorable. These nattering nabobs had assaulted the President’s Vietnam policies once too often; they were, he concluded, “an effete corps of impudent snobs.”1 Nabobs - it was a clever word and a catchy insult. More importantly, though, it was a term whose historical legacy made it a rich piece of political oratory. Agnew chose to label as nabobs those who challenged a war they saw as an aggressive piece of American imperialism, those who questioned the government’s policies in Southeast Asia, and those whose vocal criticisms were drowning out the Nixon administration’s positions on the war in Vietnam. In the final decades of the twentieth century, nabobs were those who nattered about the militant expansion of American foreign policy into Vietnamese domestic affairs. 1 Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew, address to the California Republican state convention, San Diego, California, September 11,1970. See, Congressional Record, 92n d Cong., 1970,116, 32017. See also, The Washington Post, 27 August 1987, C4. I owe a debt of gratitude to my colleague at USC, Craig Lofdn, for recommending that I seek out Agnew’s clever phrase in the course of my research on eighteenth-century nabobs. 1 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Two hundred years earlier, in the final decades of the eighteenth century, nabob was the label used to identify a group of British merchants who were actively involved in building the British empire in South Asia. Unlike twentieth-century critics of the war in Vietnam, eighteenth-century British nabobs were the vanguard of British overseas ventures in South Asia, and, unlike Agnew’s nabobs, eighteenth-century British nabobs were not the ones behind domestic criticism of the growth of British imperial power on the Indian subcontinent. Rather, they were themselves the targets of domestic critics who feared the growth of such an empire. Eighteenth-century British nabobs were not natterers but, rather, found themselves to be the targets of negative nattering. The chapters that follow represent the history of a word - nabob - that emerged out of the British imperial experience in South Asia in the last half of the eighteenth century, and they will argue that the term was bom as an insult, a slander, and a slur - as it continued to be for Agnew in September 1970. As it did in the American context some two hundred years later, the term nabob cut to the core of late-eighteenth-century domestic divisions about the constitution of the British nation and the British empire as well as the interrelationships between the two. Late eighteenth-century Britain was a nation fraught with perilous contradictions. It was a relatively new nation, forged, as Linda Colley has shown, not only by the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707 but also by a growing general agreement about which groups belonged to the nation and which did not. The British, Colley has written, “came to define themselves as a single people not because of any political or cultural consensus at home, but rather in reaction to the Other beyond the shores.” Freedom 2 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. loving Britons belonged to the nation, and slavish Frenchmen were their foil.2 As such, the full story of the development of British national identity cannot be told without, as Martin Daunton and Rick Halpem have argued, “moving beyond the British isles to a consideration of empire,” a world in which Irish Catholics and Scottish Highlanders, who were themselves subaltern at home, participated in the British national project of imperial conquest.3 The very process of empire, as C.A. Bayly has suggested, was responsible for “absorbing the ‘indigenous peoples’ of the British isles themselves,” beginning in the last half of the eighteenth century.4 At the same time, as scholars like Kathleen Wilson have adeptly shown, late eighteenth-century consensus about the make-up of the British nation was internally contradictory. It emerged out of and only thinly veiled deeper contradictions.5 Britishness was a national identity that fused together the British isles - the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Wales - under a German royal dynasty and atop a multi-national, racially diverse, and geographically vast empire. The complexity of both the history of the nation and the history of the empire tangled the simple dualisms that might otherwise have defined the nation and its people. There exists, as Sudipta Sen has written, an “unremarked-upon 2 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 6. 3 Martin Daunton and Rick Halpem, “British Identities, Indigenous Peoples, and the Empire,” in Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600-1850, ed. Martin Daunton and Rick Halpem (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 5. See also, Sudipta Sen. Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York: Kentledge, 2002), 6. 4CA. Bayly, “The British and Indigenous Peoples, 1760-1860: Power, Perception, and Identity,” in Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600-1850, ed. Martin Daunton and Rick Halpem (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 20. 5 Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715- 1785. (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3-7. See also, Kathleen Wilson, “Citizenship, Empire, and Modernity in the English Provinces, c. 1720-1790,” in Eighteenth Century Studies 29:1 (Fall 1995), 69-96. See also Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), 4. 3 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. complicity” between the history of Britain and that of its global empire. This tale of complicity “splinters the normative binary of the self and the other in unexpectedly instructive ways,” generating what Sen has labeled “a quarrel with.. .the scholarship on O rientalism w hich “has reduced a whole array of discourses to the essential dyad of dominant and subordinate, colonizer and colonized.”6 This dissertation is a history of Britain and the British empire in the late eighteenth century, but it is also a history that is both pre-national and pre-imperial. It is a study of a moment in the history of British imperialism when what it meant to be “British” was not yet stable and when the rigid hierarchies of high-nineteenth-century imperialism were still in flux. It explores a period in which “the identities of both British and indigenes were subject to constant re-negotiation,” when neither identity was stable but rather when “both were fractured and various, changing over time and space in constant interplay and mutual redefinition.. .These identities were defined and took meaning only in relation to each other.”7 This dissertation, then, details a moment when the British nation and the British empire co-existed, and indeed, evolved, side-by-side, each dependent upon the other. It is the story of what Janne Punzo Waghome has called the concomitant processes of “Westernization” in South Asia and “Eastemization” in Britain.8 More specifically, though, this dissertation will explore a small group of people who were collectively labeled nabobs and attacked by domestic British observers in this period for exposing the degree to which the projects of building a nation and building an empire 6 Sen, xxiv-xxvii. 7 Daunton and Halpem, “British Identities,” 6. 8 See Jaime Punzo Waghome, The Raja’ s Magic Clothes: Re-Visioning Kingship and Divinity in England’ s India (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 11. See also Julie F. Codell and Dianne Sachiko MacLeod, “Introduction,” in Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture, ed. Julie F. Codell and Dianne Sachko MacLeod (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1998), 1 . Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. were mutually constitutive. But, what exactly, was a nabob? Literally, nabob was a bad transliteration of the term nawab, the title given to aristocratic regional leaders within the Mughal empire in South Asia. It was a relatively new word in eighteenth-century Britain. As late as 1759, The Annual Register still felt compelled to define the term for its readership, noting that “the nabobs are a species of viceroys to the Grand Mogul, grown almost independent, in their several provinces.”9 A nabob in 1759 was, therefore, a Mughal nawab whose title had been mispronounced and poorly transliterated by the British press. By the last decades of the century, domestic critics of Britain’s Indian policies had begun to use the term to refer to their fellow Britons in South Asia. India, Horace Walpole noted in 1784, was a “nest of monsters,” and the East India Company (EIC) was the “spawn of nabobs.”1 0 Walpole’s 1784 comment was not, by no means, his first reference to EIC employees as “nabobs,” but he was certainly among the first to apply the term disparagingly to Company servants. Both the Oxford English Dictionary and Hobson-Jobson record that Walpole had adopted the term as a pejorative as early as the 1760s.1 1 What remains even more abundantly clear, however, is that using the term nabob as a negative epithet for EIC employees was a development of the last half of the eighteenth century. By 1771, Town and Country Magazine published a story, “The Memoirs of a Nabob,” in which the title character was not a Mughal representative but rather an EIC employee, and the piece began by reminding its readers that “a nabob, according to the modem acceptation of the word, is a person who in the East-India Company’s service has by art, fraud, cruelty, and imposition 9 The Annual Register; or, A View of the History, Politicks, and literature of the Year 1758 (London, 1759), 13. 1 0 James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750-1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 224. 1 1 The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., 20 vols., ed. J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), x, 186. See also, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, 2d ed., ed. William Crooke (Sittmgboume, Kent: Linguasia, 1994), 610-611. 5 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. obtained the fortune of an Asiatic prince and returned to England to display his folly and vanity and ambition.”1 2 Clearly then, the definition of the term nabob underwent a significant shift in the years between 1759 and 1771, if not in the last half of the eighteenth century more broadly. This dissertation will explore this shift as well as the increased popularity of the image of the nabob as a rapacious villain, a thief, and a criminal in the period from the British victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 through to the end of the eighteenth century. In this period, Britain’s imperial project in South Asia fell under the management of the EIC. Chartered by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600, the Company had always enjoyed a guaranteed monopoly over all trade east of the Cape of Good Hope, and in the last half of the eighteenth century, it moved to establish itself as a territorial power in South Asia to promote that trade vis-a-vis not only the indigenous trading powers of the east but also over growing competition from other European powers like the Dutch, the Portuguese, and the French. By the end of the eighteenth century, the EIC was a complex institution. On one hand, it was a private trading corporation and an economically significant joint stock company. As historians of the Company have noted, it was both a profitable private investment in the eighteenth century and a significant economic institution on the national level.1 3 On the other hand, the same Company was increasingly establishing itself as territorial master over vast tracts of land in South Asia, raising questions in Britain about the propriety of a trading company’s entering into matters of statecraft, diplomacy, revenue collection, and military affairs. As Horace Walpole was quick to notice, the Company 1 2 The Town and Country Magazine; or, Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction, and Entertainment (London, 1771), 28. 1 3 See Philip Lawson, The East India Company: A History (New York, Longman, 1993), 96-102. See also, John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (London: Harper Collins, 1993), 362-391. See also, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (New York: Random House, 2003), 21-28. 6 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. wanted to govern “places to which it takes a year to send orders.”1 4 Across long distances and potentially in violation of the terms of its original charter, the Company wanted to exercise powers, Philip Lawson has argued, which “clearly belonged to an agency of the state, not a trading company.”1 5 By the last half of the eighteenth century, the EIC epitomized, to quote John Brewer, “the vital part...played by private initiative in the growth of wealth and empire.”1 6 At the same time, it highlighted the complex relationship between the development of national and imperial policies as well as of state and private interests. From the 1760s onward, these relationships became increasingly entangled as Parliament moved to restrict the Company’s authority. Asserting the Pratt-Yorke decision of 1757, which held that sovereignty in the colonial world was vested in the crown even if specific charters yielded property rights to individuals or companies, the Chatham ministry was the first to make a move against the Company’s sovereignty in South Asia. In the end, the Company and the government reached a compromise in 1767 by which the EIC agreed to pay the state £400,000 a year in return for a promise from Parliament that there would be only limited incursions into the Company’s rights in South Asia. The 1767 compromise represented a calculated gamble on the Company’s part. On the one hand, it represented a recognition of the state’s authority over the nation’s growing empire in South Asia while, on the other hand, it seemed to limit that authority to a merely supervisory role. The gamble proved to be a serious miscalculation on the part of the Company. Pressed by famine in Bengal and increasing economic concerns resulting from 1 4 Quoted in Philip Lawson, The East India Company, 107. 1 5 Ibid., 93. 1 6 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688-1783. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), xv. 7 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. North American boycotts of the Company’s tea trade in the late 1760s and early 1770s, the EIC was forced to approach Parliament in 1772 and request a loan valued at £1 million. Parliament agreed, provided the Company’s authority on the Indian subcontinent be more closely regulated by the state in the future. The result was a series of inquiries into the private behavior of Company employees like Robert Clive as well as the passage of the Regulating Act of 1773, which restructured the Company’s holdings in South Asia under a singular governor-general and his four-member council at Bengal, all of whom would be appointed and approved by both the Company’s directors and the Cabinet. Parliament again turned its attentions to the Company’s management of South Asia in the wake of the American war. A series of regulating acts and India Bills appeared before Parliament in the first half of the 1780s. As Philip Lawson noted, “between April 1782 and April 1784, no less than four ministries with four different prime ministers took power. Each had its own vision of how to proceed on the East India Company Issue, and at one time or another each presented its own India legislation.”1 7 The competition over Indian affairs came to a head in December 1783 when opposition and royal challenges to the Fox-North Coalition’s India Bill forced the ministry from power. William Pitt the younger emerged as the king’s first choice to replace the collapsed coalition, and in 1784, he too submitted his own version of an India Bill, which passed into law in the summer of that same year. Pitt’s India Bill represented a significant turning point in the history of Company control in South Asia. The act established a forceful Board of Control in London that served under strict royal management. It also fortified the power of the governor-general, and it tied the office to crown and ministerial jurisdiction. Control over matters of trade in South Asia was left to the Company and its employees, but effective power over matters of 1 7 Philip Lawson, The East India Company, 123. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. statecraft were handed to the government.1 8 Indeed, the long impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, the newly-retired-govemor-general, which opened in 1786 and was not concluded for the better part of a decade, was a clear warning to the Company’s employees in India that they were merchants and not administrators.1 9 The history of the EIC, then, reflects in miniature the broader history of the growth of Britain’s global empire at the end of the eighteenth century. At a moment in history when, as Linda Colley has demonstrated, the affiliation between the various communities that forged the British nation - the Scotts and the English - was still not fully established, the relationship between the Company and the state suggests the degree to which the link between nation and empire was equally fluid.2 0 At the core of the struggle for control over the nation’s possessions in South Asia was the question of the power of the national Parliament in London to administer the nation’s growing empire around the globe. The Company, then, is best understood alongside other residents of Britain’s global empire in this period - groups like the North American rebels, West Indian planters, and members of the Irish Patriot Party and the Irish Volunteer Army. Each of these communities, as individuals, institutions, or corporations, viewed their relationship to the state through the lens of empire. Each saw Parliament as a domestic political body whose power 1 8 The struggle between Parliament and the Company is well documented in Philip Lawson, The East India Company, 120-125. See also, Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 26-28. See also, Keay, 362-420. 1 9 For more on the Hastings impeachment, see PJ. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (London: Oxford University Press, 1965); Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Warren Hastings,” in The Historical Essays of Macaulay, ed. Samuel Thurber (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1892), 247-278; Charles Lawson, The Private Life of Warren Hastings (New York: MacMillan and Co., 1895); Penderel Moon, Warren Hastings and British India (New York: MacMillan and Co., 1949); Alfred Lyall, Warren Hastings (London: MacMillan and Co., 1915); Patrick Turnbull, Warren Hastings (London: New English Library Ltd., 1975); Keith Felling, Warren Hastings (New York: MacMillan and Co., 1954); A. Mervyn Davies, Strange Destiny: A Biography of Warren Hastings (New York: Putnam, 1935); Jeremy Bernstein, Dawning of the Raj: The Life and Trials of Warren Hastings (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000); Lionel J. Trotter, Warren Hastings (New York: Dutton and Co., 1910). 2 0 Colley, Britons, 105-117. 9 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. encompassed the nation - but not always the imperial world. A rich historiography has detailed the degree to which each of these communities’ specific interests shaped their vision of the nature of the imperial relationship, but as a collective, this historiography has conclusively shown that both the British nation and the British empire were still in the process of solidifying their institutional structures in the late eighteenth century and that the interrelationships between nation and empire both contributed to and complicated both processes in this period.2 1 This dissertation will look at the EIC as a pivotal institution in the history of the relationship between the British nation and the British empire both because it was a private 2 1 This historiography is too rich to list here in full. Two sources that leap to mind have already been mentioned. They are Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People and Linda Colley, Britons. Some of the most significant other sources that detail the relationships between the British state and the British empire in the late eighteenth century include: Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Fred Anderson, The Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (New York: Knopf, 2000); Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divide: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); James Horn, “British Diaspora: Emigration from Britain, 1680-1815,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P.J. Marshall (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 28-52; H.V. Bowen, “British Conceptions of Global Empire, 1756-1782, ” in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26:3 (September 1998), 1- 27; David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jacob M. Price. “Who Cared About the Colonies?: The Impact of the Thirteen Colonies on British Society and Politics circa 1714-1775,” in Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 395- 436; Nicolas Canny, “The Marginal Kingdom: Ireland as a Problem in the First British Empire,” in Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 35-66; Eric Richards, “Scotland and the Uses of the Atlantic Empire,” in Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 67-114; Jack P. Greene, “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P.J. Marshall (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 208-230; H.V. Bowen, “British India, 1765-1813: The Metropolitan Context,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P.J. Marshall (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 530-551; Richard B. Sheridan, “The Formation of Caribbean Plantation Society, 1689-1748,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P.J. Marshall (New York: Oxford University press, 1998), 394- 414. 10 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. British corporation that built an imperial world in South Asia and because its employees were fundamental agents in the process of shaping British perceptions about South Asia both as a landscape and as an imperial project. Because they served at the very edge of the national-imperial divide and because they moved fluidly between national and imperial settings, Company employees were the human frontier between the domestic and the foreign components of the British imperial system in the late eighteenth century. Chapter one of this dissertation will explore the ways in which Company employees provided late eighteenth-century domestic audiences with accounts of India that helped them to imagine India, to borrow a phrase from Ronald Inden, whose work has persuasively shown how western knowledge about India - including much of the material produced by the field of Indiological studies - has been generated by a western desire to deny South Asians both the right and the ability to manage their own world.2 2 This chapter will build on Inden’s argument to demonstrate how early notions about India were rooted in the need among Company servants to find difference on the subcontinent. The core of this argument emerges from the simple fact that building an empire in South Asia in the late eighteenth century was an intellectual challenge. Unlike so many other imperial locations, India was manifestly not empty when the British arrived there. Certainly, this is not to say that the North American continent, the islands of the Caribbean, New Zealand or Australia were empty spaces either, but the British justified their settlement of these locations using the dubious legal doctrine of terra nullius.2 3 As Richard Drayton has shown, the doctrine not only gave colonization a legal footing, it suggested a moral one as well. If Adam and Eve had been cast from the Garden of Eden to work the land by the sweat 2 2 See Ronald B. Inden, Imagining India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 2 3 See Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 12. 11 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of their brow as punishment for the crime of original sin, the natives of places that were deemed to be nuttius had failed in their divine obligations.2 4 Colonizing the voids was both legally justified and morally necessary. India, though, was not void when the British arrived. Rather, it was filled with evidence of great civilizations from both the past and the present - civilizations that, in some cases, rivaled Britain itself. As a growing body of historiography by scholars like Nabil Matar and Linda Colley has demonstrated, the imperial encounter in eighteenth-centuiy South Asia reminded Britons that they were just a small piece of the broader world. This was a time when British imperialism had not yet developed, much less earned, the swaggering global confidence that it would display in the nineteenth century. Rather, this was a time and a place where the British were always in the minority, where they faced military powers much greater than their own, and when they were always in danger of being pushed out of South Asia altogether.2 5 Moreover, the British in India found evidence that the subcontinent was the source of a great deal of the world’s intellectual heritage. It was, one Company servant noted, “the mother of science and art.”2 6 The subcontinent was far from being terra nullius, meaning that, in order to build an empire in South Asia, the British had to generate a theory of difference - a set of observations about India that made the civilizations of the subcontinent different from and inferior to British civilization. Chapter one will argue that Company servants were 2 4 Richard Drayton, Nature’ s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘ Improvement’ of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 1-25. 2 5 See Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 241-307. See also, Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 43-82. See also, Nabil Matar, “England and Mediterranean Captivity, 1577-1704,” in Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modem England, ed. Daniel J. Vitkus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 1-54. 2 6 William Macintosh, Remarks on a Tour through the Different Countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1786), i, 191. 12 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. instrumental in this process, and it will show, through a comprehensive survey of the letters, diaries, and other forms of correspondence sent back to Britain by eighteenth-century Company employees, that EIC employees transformed the Indian subcontinent into a didactic tale by reducing the landscape to a new Eden - a terrain so fertile that the indigenous people were supplied with what one Company servant would call “subsistence without much toil.”2 7 Once Company employees had generated a picture of India as a place where nature provided for all of the daily wants of its people, Company servants could develop the concomitant picture of the people of India as a lazy, listless, indolent, and luxurious community who put no effort into their own world. Though they were surrounded by evidence of abundance and civilization, so the theory argued, they had not contributed to their surroundings. In short, they lived in a world that was undeveloped though it appeared to be otherwise; they lived in a world that was terra nullius because the abundance of nature, rather than the sweat of human labor, had established the basis for civilization and life. Indian civilization, therefore, became the basis for British arguments in favor of colonization and imperialism. Company servants were responsible, then, for articulating a racialized vision of the subcontinent that rendered India as a place that both could and should be colonized, but they did so by pressing forward with an argument that suggested that the abundance of the place itself “enervated” the people who lived there.2 8 India was too fertile; life there was too easy. 2 7 Alexander Dow, The History of Hindustan, 3 vols. (London, 1772), iii, viii. 28 Some will, of course, object to the use of the term “racialized” for a period as early as the late- eighteenth century. It should become clear, however, through the course of the chapters that follow that eighteenth-century Britons were actively engaged in a process of differentiating themselves from the populations of South Asia as the imperial process forged closer and closer ties between India and Britain. While the construction of difference in the eighteenth century did not take on explicitly racist overtones, as it would in the nineteenth century, eighteenth century Britons always defined themselves as different from South Asians in such as way as to rank themselves above the colonized populations of India. In this way, as the following chapters will demonstrate, eighteenth-century categories of 13 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The subcontinent tempted its inhabitants with the forbidden fruit of indolence. Rather than rooting their imperialist agendas in skin color and race, Company employees constructed racial hierarchies based on cultural and environmental foundations. As Roxarn Wheeler has persuasively shown, “skin color and race as we know them today have not always been powerful tools to convey difference.” Rather, she has argued, race has tended to function on “several registers,” including such categories of difference as “climate, humors, anatomy, and Christianity,” and it was to these alternate categories of difference that Company employees looked when imagining India as a subordinate geography inhabited by subordinate people from subordinate civilizations.2 9 Chapter two will investigate the ways in which this theory of difference painted Company servants into a comer even as it justified their mastery over the subcontinent. On the one hand, the theory was a clever piece of imperial teleology that reduced South Asia’s rich historical heritage and vibrant eighteenth-century civilizations to mere voids, terra nullius. On the other hand, it suggested that the land was dangerous and polluting; it posited a theoiy of environmental enervation that threatened anyone who touched the subcontinent’s rich soil. It challenged assumptions about nationality and identity put forward by men like David Hume, who had theorized that the “same set of manners will follow a nation, and adhere to them over the whole globe.”3 0 Initially, chapter two will demonstrate, theories of enervation worked in the Company’s favor in South Asia. In many ways, the British came to India late in the game, difference represent an early manifestation of later imperial hierarchies that would serve to buttress racial and racist thinking. For more, see Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment, and British Imperialism in India, 1600-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 12-14. 2 9 Roxann Wheeler. The Complexion of Race: Categories o f Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 2. 3 0 David Hume, “Of National Characters,” in Essays Moral Political and Literary, 2 vols. (London, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1875), i, 250. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the Portuguese and the Dutch having established trading headquarters on the subcontinent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Assuming that contact with India enervated people allowed Company servants to suggest that their European imperial competitors had been enervated by their long association with South Asia. If the British imperial project in South Asia was pushing them aside it was because these older and more established European imperial settlements in India had been weakened by the pernicious environment that made the subcontinent the target of imperial powers in the first place. In many ways, these arguments mirrored the nineteenth-century process of “going native,” but, it is important to note, the actual process was different. Being enervated in India was something that happened to Europeans as well as South Asians. It was not so much a process of “going native” as of “going subcontinental.” It was something that could happen to anyone, and that, the chapter will argue, became the root of the problem for Company employees. If India was a dangerous place, as the theory suggested it was, there was no way of preventing Company servants themselves from being contaminated during their time there. As Linda Colley has recently argued, the idea that Britons could be contaminated by being exposed to alien environments was far from new. In her study of captivity narratives, Colley has demonstrated that Britons who were captured by foreign powers were less threatening than their fellow Britons who were captured by foreign powers and converted to the religions and customs of their captors.3 1 These British converts suggested that being British was a fungible identity at precisely the moment when efforts were underway in Britain to consolidate a national identity, and domestic concerns about the power of other people to convert British subjects reached a critical level in the Indian context. 3 1 Colley, Captives, 99-134, and 241-268. 15 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In part, this concern stemmed from the fact that the supposed “conversion” of Britons in India, like the conversion of Britons in other settings around the world, problematized the interaction between Britons and others writ large. More importantly, though, if Britons in India could be enervated by the Edenic qualities of the subcontinent, the entire legal, intellectual, and moral justification for Britain’s imperial project in South Asia collapsed as well. The fear that Company employees might become nabobs - that they might “go subcontinental,” as it were - suggested that Britain no more deserved to be the imperial master of India than the Indians themselves. Chapter two, then, will trace the intellectual attempts by politicians and theorists like Edmund Burke to re-establish British immunity from imperial enervation. It will argue that Burke’s prosecution of Warren Hastings, the retired-govemor-general of British India, was precisely an attempt to argue that morally solid Britons could not be corrupted in South Asia - that the project of British imperialism on the subcontinent was sound so long as it was left to sound individuals.3 2 Chapter three will explore the ways in which Burke’s efforts during the Hastings impeachment trial both popularized and expanded the image of the EIC nabob as an imperial specter in late eighteenth-century Britain. Because he was not arguing against the idea of imperialism per se but rather against the specific form that imperialism had assumed under Pitt’s 1784 India Act and Hastings’ twelve year tenure as governor-general in British India, Burke had to build a case that justified the continuation as well as the reformation of British imperialism in South Asia, and he knew he needed some degree of popular support to achieve this goal. As Anna Clark has recently suggested, Burke turned the Hastings impeachment into a public scandal - a legal battle of epic proportions - that dramatized the 3 2 Burke’s perspective on the British empire has rightly been identified as unique among British intellectuals. For more, see Mehta, 153-189. 16 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. former-govemor-general ’ s crimes with bombastic rhetoric and theatrical antics.3 3 More significantly, Burke’s attacks on Hastings linked the former-govemor-general to popularly held theories about Oriental despotism, which had been generated by European thinkers like Montesquieu. In his articulation, Montesquieu argued that Oriental despots governed through passion rather than through reason or the law.3 4 This was a theory that perfectly fitted the vision of South Asia that Company servants had shipped home in their letters and diaries. Oriental despots governed a land that was wealthy, proficient, and abundant. They allowed their luxurious whims to obscure their obligations to their subjects, reducing a despot’s duty to administer power to a mere excuse to abuse it. By arguing that Hastings had become an Oriental despot while the governor-general of South Asia, Burke generated a line of thinking that immediately caught the attention of the domestic public and, more importantly, the domestic press because it was a line of thinking that suggested that India could produce British-Oriental despots - despots who could then come back to Britain to pollute the domestic political landscape. It was a line of thinking that turned concerns about preserving the teleological justifications for British imperialism in South Asia into concerns about preserving the British political system from being colonized itself by the enervating forces of South Asian luxury and what observers called “Asiatic” political corruption. In the final years of the eighteenth century, then, at precisely the moment when, as Benedict Anderson has argued, national states and national identities were emerging in Europe through “the spontaneous distillation of a complex ‘crossing’ of discrete historical forces,” the growth of British imperialism in South Asia, 3 3 Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 84-112. 3 4 Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit o f the Laws, ed. and trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 283-284. 17 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Burke’s grandiloquent rhetorical strategies at the Hastings impeachment, and the popularization of the image of Hastings the Nabob in the popular media generated a fear that the British nation might itself be overwhelmed by the process of Britain’s becoming an imperial power.3 5 If the presence of nabobs in domestic Britain at the end of the eighteenth century appeared to suggest that the process of imperialism was reversing itself and inscribing imperial culture onto the nation, chapter four of this dissertation will explore the concrete ways in which that process was witnessed by domestic audiences, and it will argue that it was concrete material artifacts from India, brought home by Company servants, that became the most visible examples of the dangerous inversion of the imperial process. In essence, the fourth chapter of this dissertation is a study of the material culture of empire, and it joins itself to a large body of historiographic work that has questioned the degree to which empire was a relevant experience in the daily life of domestic Britons in the late eighteenth century. Whether it has concluded that domestic Britons did or did not care about the colonies in the late eighteenth century, most of this historiography has tended to focus on imperial commodities as the most significant representation of the colonial and imperial world in domestic Britain.3 6 3 5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York; Verso, 1991), 4. 3 6 See James Walvin, Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1600-1800 (New York: New York University Press, 1997); H.V. Bowen, “Tea, tribute, and the East India Company, c. 1750- c. 1775,” in Hanoverian Britain and Empire: Essays in Memory of Philip Lawson, ed. Stephen Taylor, Richard Connors, and Clyve Jones (Rochester Boydell and Brewer, 1998), 158-176; Richard Conors, “Opium and Imperial Expansion: The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Asia,” in Hanoverian Britain and Empire: Essays in Memory o f Philip Lawson, ed. Stephen Taylor, Richard Connors, and Clyve Jones (Rochester Boydell and Brewer, 1998), 248-266; Kathleen Wilson, “Empire, Trade, and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral Vemon,” in Past and Present 121 (November 1988), 74-109; Kathleen Wilson, “Empire of Virtue: The Imperial Project and Hanoverian Culture, 1720-1785,” in An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689-1815, ed. Lawrence Stone (New York: Routledge, 1994), 128-164; N.E.S. Griffiths, “Fish, Fur, and Folk,” 18 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. This chapter will echo Jacob Price in asking “Who cared about the colonies,” and it will answer that question by arguing that many in late eighteenth-century Britain cared about the empire.3 7 As Martin Daunton and Rick Halpem have noted, “metropolitan residents consumed the products, ideas, and knowledge of the far reaches of empire, even if they did not directly encounter indigenous peoples.” This chapter will stress their point further, and build upon the argument that these imperial products were examples of the ways in which the process of imperialism functioned as “a significant constitutive element in British identities.”3 8 Unlike many other works that have argued that material culture was the means by which domestic Britons experienced empire in this period, though, this chapter will make the case that it was only the combination of agents of the empire, people like the nabobs, using material artifacts from the empire that concretely manifested the realities of empire within the metropolitan world. As one correspondent to Henry Mackenzie’s conservative, Edinburgh-based periodical The Lounger would note in April 1785, objects themselves were in The Atlantic Region to Confederation, ed. Philip A. Buckner and John G. Reid (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 40-60; Ralph Davies, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: David and Charles, 1962); Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675-1740 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); T.H. Breen, “Baubles of Britain: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” in Past and Present 119 (May 1988), 73-104; T.H. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicanization of Colonial America, 1690-1776,” in Journal of British Studies 25:4 (October 1986), 467-499; T.H. Breen. “The Meaning of Things: Interpreting the Consumer Economy in the Eighteenth Century,” in Consumption and the World o f Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 249-260; Carole Shammas, “Changes in English and Anglo-American Consumption from 1550 to 1800,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 177-205; Jack E. Wills, Jr., “European Consumption and Asian Production in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 133-147; Michael Warner, “What’s Colonial about Colonial America?,” in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 49-70; David Shield, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Patrick O’Brien, “Inseparable Connections: Trade, Economy, Fiscal State, and the Expansion of Empire, 1688-1815,” in The Oxford History o f the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P.J. Marshall (New York, 1998), 53-77. 3 7 Jacob M. Price, 395-436. 3 8 Daunton and Halpem, “British Identities,” 1. 19 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. inanimate. The writer, who signed his name only as Neuter, recorded that he had been shocked by the reception he received at a local dinner party when he showed up wearing a scarlet waistcoat rather than a buff-colored one. He had selected the waistcoat, he wrote to The Lounger, simply because he preferred the color. His host and hostess, though, objected to it because a scarlet waistcoat was, in their neighborhood, a political statement - a sign of the wearer’s affiliation with the policies of the Pitt administration while a buff-colored coat marked one’s association with the opposition policies of Charles James Fox. For Neuter who protested himself to be “no more a Pittite than a Hittite,” the lesson was clear - a simple object, a piece of clothing, and even a color took on new meaning when they were drawn into different social settings by different sets of people.3 9 Building on the work of others who have studied the influx of imperial commodities into Britain in the eighteenth century, chapter four will argue that nabobs animated these commodities because they made clear the connections between the commodity and the imperial setting from which it came. Domestic Britons could wear cotton clothing, drink tea, and even sweeten it with sugar without making the connection between these commodities and the imperial world. Empire “unsettle[d] the equanimity of late eighteenth-century Britain,” but it did so, as Uday Mehta has rightly noted, silently.4 0 Nabobs, though, made these connections both evident and human; they made it inescapably clear that Britain and India were, to quote Mehta, “braided concerns.”4 1 Moreover, they brought home with them not only imperial groceries but, as the chapter will show, a myriad of other concrete souvenirs from their careers in India, and all of these objects made the threat that India might be colonizing the British 3 9 The Lounger, 3 vols., 9 April 1785, (London, 1787), 84-88. 4 0 Mehta, 38. See also, Aran Appadurai, The Social Life o f Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 4 1 Ibid., 171. 20 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. landscape seem concrete, present, tangible, and real to domestic observers who worried that the all-too-permeable homeland was being overrun with bits and pieces from South Asia. If nabobs brought India home with them after having been corrupted by the Indian landscape, the fear was that they might never recover from the enervation they had experienced in South Asia. Europeans - from Company servants themselves to Montesquieu - had argued that climate was the cause of the enervated state of the people of South Asia. If such exposure did act to enervate them, the hope always remained that by returning to domestic settings, they could restore themselves to their previous state. A nabob, it was hoped, could settle back in at home, rest back up, and become a Briton again.4 2 This process of environmental rejuvenation was complicated by the fact that nabobs brought material artifacts from India home with them, surrounding themselves with the accoutrements of the pernicious Indian environment. In chapter five, this dissertation will explore the ways in which these micro-Indias became threatening centers of enervation not only for the nabobs but also for domestic Britons, particularly British women, who, the chapter will show, were thought to be particularly vulnerable to the temptations of nabobery as a nabob’s fortune made it much easier to keep pace with the vicissitudes of late eighteenth-century fashion, which, it was thought, tempted women more readily than it did men. This chapter will look at the ways in which debates about nabobs in particular, and empire more broadly, coupled themselves to domestic debates about gender, consumerism, the credit economy, luxury, and domestic identity in this period. It will argue that the confluence of these debates explains why so many women were attacked as nabobinas, as they were labeled by the popular media of the day, despite the relatively small number of women who went to India in this period. 4 2 See Montesquieu, 242-244 and 279-281. 21 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Through a study of the few British women who did go out to South Asia in the late eighteenth century as well as a study of the wives, the mothers, the sisters, and the daughters of Company servants who did not do so but were labeled as nabobinas anyway because of their association with nabobs, this chapter will show that women presented a double challenge to the project of British imperialism and to efforts to maintain a firm barrier between the categories of nation and empire. Like the nabobs, nabobinas blurred the cultural boundaries that had originally been markers of difference within the imperial paradigm by importing bits of empire back to the metropolitan world and displaying them there. More significantly, though, they also bound questions about imperial barriers to discussions of sexuality and biological race that were increasingly becoming the foundation for a new system of distinguishing between the colonized and the colonizer - a system of scientific racism that would root difference in blood, heredity, and genetics, thus replacing the complex and manifold categories of difference that had previously existed with a racial system that seems more familiar to twenty-first century observers. In short, the following chapters look closely at what Kathleen Wilson has described as “the murkiness created when cultures of identity circulate between nations at the point of contact.”4 3 They argue that the history of the development of the British nation and the history of the development of the British empire were always part of a process that Mary Louis Pratt has called “Transculturation.”4 4 Postcolonial theorists from Edward Said to Homi Bhabha have argued that the colonized world is a product not only of the colonial 4 3 Wilson, The Island Race, 190. 4 4 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 6. 22 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. experience but also of the imagination of the colonizers themselves.4 5 This dissertation will suggest that the same can and should be said for Britain itself. As Bhabha has so effectively demonstrated, India is an imperial hybrid - the product of indigenous traditions and imported influences forced upon it by the violences of empire.4 6 This dissertation hopes to explore the ways in which those same violences were re-inscribed in the process of forging a nation, as Linda Colley has called it, in domestic Britain.4 7 Partha Chatterjee has adeptly argued that the process of imperial conquest shaped the ways in which post-colonial India defines itself as an independent nation, making the persuasive case that imperialism has left permanent Western standards by which India continues to measure it progress towards modernity. The result, of course, is that India has always and will always fail to achieve on a par with the west.4 8 The process of colonization and conquest, then, has become not only the means by which the British defined their own supremacy over South Asia but also the means by which South Asia understands itself in the present. As Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer have shown, the intellectual foundations of imperialism - the relationship, as Bernard Cohn has detailed, between knowledge and power - stain the fabric of post-colonial societies today, rendering the indigenous, pre-colonial voices of these worlds, as Gayatri Spivak has written, forever mute.4 9 In the chapters that follow, I hope to demonstrate the degree to which these same 4 5 See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 1-28, and Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 132-162. See also, Homi Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside of Delhi, May 1817,” in The Location o f Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 102-122. 4 6 Bhabha, 112. 4 7 Colley, Britons. 4 8 Partha Chatteijee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), and Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 4 9 See Carole A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, “Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter 23 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. processes wrote themselves onto the history of the British nation - to show not only that British history is the product of the imperial encounter but also that the resultant history is its own hybrid. Modem Britain has emerged as a nation from the process of building and then losing an empire, and in the process, the voices of a non-imperial Britain have been lost to modem historians. The process of empire hybridized both sides of the equation, and, though it did so in distinct and unequal ways, it silenced both the colonizer and the colonized. Certainly, this is not to deny the fact that the history of empire has long been written by the colonizer to justify the actions of colonial powers throughout the colonized world. As Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper have shown, the colonial archive was collected by colonizers, organized by colonizers, and arranged in a way to buttress colonization itself. The colonial archive has always produced a story of a nation marching out into the world and building an empire where previously nothing had existed, but as resistance to and criticisms of the nabobs in late eighteenth-century Britain suggest, the narrative history of a pre-existing nation and its efforts to build an empire have always been in danger of being overwhelmed by the entangled realities that existed between empire and nation.5 0 As J.R. Seeley noted many years ago, there is a distinction between the history of the British nation and the British empire. For Seeley, Britain, or as he liked to term it, Greater Britain, was the manifestation of the expansion of the English state, but, he cautioned, it was wrong-headed to see England and Great Britain as the same thing.5 1 van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 1-22; Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms o f Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271- 316. 5 0 See Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in The Tensions o f Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 1-58. 5 1 J.R. Seeley, The Expansion o f England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 12-13 and 38. 24 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Though his thinking was provincial and even chauvinistic when he argued that British history was only English history written across the globe, Seeley was correct to note that British history is much more than a domestic history or the history of a single nation-state. British history, this dissertation will argue, is an imperial history, and Britishness is an imperial identity, forged through the history of imperialism. As a result, the following chapters will explore the series of attacks, impeachments, inquiries, and criticisms of EIC employees-tumed-nabobs, what I will call “the nabob controversy,” and it will argue that they represented a larger struggle between domestic Britons and imperial Britons over the actual constitution of the nation itself. The nabob controversy was a moment when the relationship between Britain as a nation and Britain as an empire came into critical focus as the central topic of public debate. The nabobs were willing to see the boundaries between empire and nation, center and periphery, here and there blurred because they had been to both places and because they understood Britain to be something bigger than one European nation-state. They hinted at the expansive nature of Britishness as a communal identity even as it was emerging in the final years of the eighteenth century, and they articulated the imperial realities that underpinned it by demonstrating in material terms that Britishness was the net result of a series of imperial encounters that were rooted in global differences and diversity. They suggested that Britain was an empire, in short, to a group who would rather have seen it as a provincial nation state. In the final pages of her 1992 work Britons, Linda Colley predicted the coming of a crisis of national identity for the British nation, and she suggested that the rise of a federal national structure was likely to emerge as the component kingdoms that constituted the 25 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. nation began to pull apart as independent regions rather than a unified nation-state.5 2 Colley, of course, was writing some six years before the 1998 passage of both the Government of Wales Act, which established a National Assembly in Wales, and the Scotland Act, which declared that Scotland should have its own parliamentary legislature. Colley’s concluding thoughts in Britons were astute, to be sure, but they were hardly prophetic. Great Britain, as it exists today, is the product of its imperial past as much as is India, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, or Australia. Each shares a claim to Britishness because each participated in the construction of the British imperial experience that was the core of Britishness. As such, the British nation developed as a part of the imperial encounter just as did the colonial world and the empire writ large, but it never developed a fully national core of its own. Domestic critics of the nabobs struggled to marginalize them and to erect barriers between empire and nation, but their efforts were never fully successful. Though they “negatively nattered” about the arrival of the nabobs in domestic Britain, late eighteenth- century critics of the presence of imperial culture in metropolitan settings were never fully able to define the nation as something that existed outside of the experience of empire Itself. The nabobs, then, represented not only the vanguard of the imperial experience, but, the coming chapters will show, the vanguard of an imperial history - the history of a communal identity that was imperial at its very core. 5 2 Colley, Britons, 374-276. See also, Jo Littler and Roshi Naidoo, “White Past, Multicultural Present: Heritage and National Stories,” in History, Nationhood, and the Question of Britain, ed. Helen Brocklehurst and Robert Phillips (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 330-341. 26 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter One Imagined Distinctions British Observations of Eighteenth-Century South Asia For those who made the long journey, either overland or by sea, between Britain and its South Asian possessions in the eighteenth century, the experience of empire invited narration. As Linda Colley has suggested, empire was linked very concretely to the process of “telling the tale.”1 At its core, the process of imperialism demanded mobility; individuals had to move back and forth between familiar and unknown landscapes to establish connections Mid relationships between the two, but to conceive of this human experience only in terms of the construction of power relationships would be to miss the profound intellectual challenge posed by the process. Empire was a process, a voyage, and a human experience. Became the men and women who went to British South Asia in the eighteenth century fashioned their experiences into personal stories for their own benefit and for that of their friends and family at home, British imperial history on the subcontinent emerged out of a nexus of individual narratives - narratives that served several purposes simultaneously. On the one hand, personal stories of time spent in India were tools for remembering the past, but, more broadly, they were a way of explaining South Asia to those who had never been there. For those who had been to India, therefore, narratives, stories, and tales from the subcontinent helped them to remember their time in South Asia and to share those memories in domestic Britain. For those in the metropolitan world who had not been there, however, these same stories were even more 1 Colley , Captives, 73-99. 27 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. powerful Unable to recall India, metropolitan audiences could only imagine it, and first hand accounts from India were the fertile fuel that fired the British imperial imagination in the last half of the eighteenth century. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, it is difficult to conceive erf the world as a truly novel space. Many of us can close our eyes and conjure images of the Taj Mahal, whether we have physically been to Agra or not. Photography, air travel, motion pictures, the internet, and the vast scope of the international tourist industry have opened the world to us whether we circumnavigate the globe or sit safely in our own living rooms. We may not use it and it may be fabulously inaccurate, but we all carry with us a mental map of the world, a collection of images, stereotypes, and perceptions formed out of a nexus of information that is, historically speaking, a relatively recent resource. The eighteenth-century British imperialists in South Asia, however, faced a world that was profoundly novel. Travel literature, records from the spice trade, and early imperial efforts in South Asia supplied eighteenth-century empire-builders with limited glimpses of the people, terrain, and cultures of South Asia, but the scanty nature of this information cannot be over-emphasized. Not unlike tourism, which was itself a burgeoning industry in eighteenth-centory Britain, imperialism drove individuals into new environments, and it demanded that they conceive not only of ways to describe what they saw but also to understand it Neither of these tasks was easy, for both the eighteenth-century imperialist and his more benign cousin, the tourist, had to rationalize the world they saw as well as to describe it to their families, friends, and superiors at home who had no point of reference from which to comprehend the narratives they heard. As such, both processes demanded comparison and commentary. 28 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Armed metaphorically with a sword and a sketchpad, the imperialist and the tourist had to make sense of the novelty and difference they experienced in the world through comparative analysis with more familiar settings, both for themselves and for the benefit of their home audiences. As Mary Louise Pratt has noted, both the imperialist and the tourist helped to generate narratives of the world that allowed Europe to imagine itself in relationship to “something it became possible to call ‘the rest of the world’.”2 How else, we might ask, could William Harwood have either remembered or described the taste of grilled whale meat years after he first sampled it during a delayed anchorage at St. Helena Island during his passage from India to London in 1781? “[I] saw the manner in which they cut up the whale and separated the blubber from the carcus [sic],” Harwood wrote in M s journal, recording that the flavor of the grilled rib meat was “tolerably good.” To both Harwood and Ms audience in Britain, such a description would have been of only limited value. What, after all, does “tolerably good” taste like? Only in reference to a standard and well-known flavor could Harwood hope either to remember or to convey the flavor of the meat, which is why he noted that it tasted “not unlike a corned beef stake [sic].”3 Though Harwood’s seems, at first glance, to be nothing more than a banal comparison between two culinary flavors - the eighteenth-century equivalent of the commonplace claim that some food “tastes like cMcken” - Ms journal entry merits deeper attention because, at the core, the passage demonstrates that the intellectual construction of difference within the eighteenth-century imperial context was, at its core, an exercise in comparison. Confronted with an experience or, in this instance, a flavor that was completely novel to Mm, Harwood’s ability to describe the experience was limited to referential points 2 Pratt, 5. 3 This Journal has only been attributed to Harwood, but it is not officially labeled as being his. It is clearly by a person m board the same ship that carried Philip Francis home to Britain in 1780-81, and Harwood seems a likely candidate to have been the author. See Unattributed journal of a voyage from India to England, 3 December 1780-19 October 1781, OIOC Mss Ear D565,21. 29 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and to more familiar experiences from his own life. Comparison became the tool with which Harwood reduced the experiences of empire to a simple and manageable form. Because he lacked a vocabulary to speak about the flavor of whale meat itself, he was forced to fall back on a comparative description drawn on metropolitan British culinary traditions. Though the grilled flesh of the whale did not tickle Ms taste buds with memories of the roast beef of old England, it did arouse closely related, if somewhat inferior, gastronomic thoughts of its Irish equivalent, corned beef - vaguely familiar and yet just slightly exotic. Harwood’s attempt to convey the flavor of grilled whale flesh could just as well have come from an eighteenth-century British traveler’s tale as from a servant of the EIC’s expanding empire in South Asia, but Harwood was not simply a tourist An EIC employee, William Harwood left South Asia in 1780 on board the same East Indiaman that carried Sir Philip Francis back to London after Ms tenure as a member of the Supreme Council of Bengal under Warren Hastings, and Harwood’s journal suggests that its author was no more satisfied with the vicissitudes of imperial travel than was the typically irritable Francis, whose voyage home was made more than unusually uncomfortable by the injuries of a gunshot wound he had received in a duel with Hastings in August 1780. Before we castigate Harwood and Francis as provincial chauvinists who could not tolerate global travel, it behooves us to recall that the gfemorization of travel is a recent historical phenomenon. Travel is hard work, even today, and it was even more so in the past Travel was slow and tedious, and in a world defined by stable communities, travelers stood oat and were stigmatized as alien, indefinite, and dangerous.4 These parameters certainly defined Harwood’s passage home, which was unusually slow. Having left South 4 See Casey Blanton, Travel Writing: The Self and the World (New York: Routledge, 2002). See also Kristi Siegel, ed., Issues in Travel Writing: Empire, Spectacle, and Displacement (New York: Peter Land, 2002). See also, Steve Clark, ed., Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonkd Theory in Transit (London: Zed Books, 1999). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Asia in December of 1780, Harwood and his shipmates would not arrive in Britain until October of 1781, a trip of more than ten month’s duration.5 Moreover, the passage was particularly rough. Prior to their landing at S t Helena, Harwood had complained that “the weather is rainy and very cold - the wind variable.” Meals, he noted, were “very unpleasant” as there was “no sitting at Table or keeping any-thing on i t ” The sMp was “exceeding uncomfortabie at night Tables, Chairs, Chests, &c, &c - all broke loose.”6 The violent weather of the winter of 1781 forced Harwood, Frauds, and the other passengers sailing with them to make an extended stopover at St. Helena Island, where Harwood would first enjoy grilled whale meat, but, aside from that experience, Harwood seems to have enjoyed neither the passage from India nor Ms time on St. Helena. He was not at home in the broader world. Travel, after all, was work. In April 1781, he wrote that he was “weary of continual islands,” and one month later, he proclaimed Mmself “tired to death of this wretched place.”7 On the surface, it would seem, Harwood was homesick, but Ms journal points to something deeper, hinting at the imperialist attitudes that operated in Harwood’s mental map of the world around him. It is noteworthy that Harwood, after an extended tour of the South Asian subcontinent, should find himself “weary of continual islands? on Ms passage home to Great Britain, wMch was, after all, Ms island homeland.8 As PMlip Morgan has argued, the island, 5 Warren Hastings’ voyage home in 1785, by comparison was noted for being remarkably quick at just under eight months’ duration. For more on the time typically needed to travel between Britain and South Asia (both by sea and by land), see Holden Furber, “The Overland Route to India in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Journal of Indian History 29 (1951), 105-133. 6 Unattributed journal, OIOC Mss Eur D565,10. 7 Ibid., 19-21. 8 Harwood’s is not the only account in which Britain is described as being other than an island. A 1757 editorial in the Newcastle General Magazine noted that the presence of French settlements next to British settlements around the globe necessitated a global strategy for British defense that assumed the British nation was a “continental state.” See Wilson, The Island Race, p. I. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, one American patriot complained that the colonies were viewed as “a parcel of little insignificant conquered islands” by the politicians in London. See Philip D. Morgan, 31 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. as an intellectual category, is contextually rich. “One drinks of Oceana, Utopia, and the New Atlantic, the whole ‘Edenic island discourse,’ of Prosper©, Fletcher Christian, and Robinson Crusoe.”9 The island connotes independence from other lands, freedom, and insularity, o h the one hand, and isolation, marginalization, and confinement, on the other. In her recently published The Island Race, Kathleen Wilson has pushed these rich contradictions to the fore, arguing that “the trope of the island...although long powerful in the imaginary literature and material policies, began to serve not only as a metaphor but also as an explanation for English dominance and superiority in arts and arms” in the eighteenth century. “Islands,” Wilson has written, “became important devices in the examination of self, society, and species,” as well as “the engines of new ways of thinking about nation, race, and gender.”1 0 Where Wilson has suggested that being an island was critical to British perceptions of national identity in the eighteenth century, what becomes clear In Harwood’s statement is that he drew lines of comparison between the geographic label “Island” and the imperial settings in which he found himself on Ms passage home. “Island” became in his journal not a neutral term but rather a disparaging geographic marker, pregnant with connotations of isolation, marginalization, and even inferiority. In his mind, Britain was the longed-for homeland and the referential center. It superseded its status as an island; it was the metropolitan core of Harwood’s world, Be they islands or not, locations such as S t Helena or any of the other ports frequented by East Indiamen traveling to and from South Asia were, to Harwood’s European imagination, islands of civilization that cleft him from the wider “Encounters between British and ‘Indigenous’ Peoples, c. 1500-e. 1800,” in Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 160-1850, ed. Martin Daunton and Rick Halpem (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 55. For more on British history as the history of an island, see, Ken Luna and Ann Day, “Britain as Island: National Identity and the Sea,” in History, Nationhood, and the Question o f Britain, ed. Helen Brocktekirst and Robert Phillips (New York: Palgrave, 200*), 124-136. 9 Philip D. Morgan, “Encounters between British and ‘Indigenous’ Peoples, c. 1500-c. 1800,” 55. 1 0 Wilson, The Island Race, 5. 32 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. world rather than bonding him to it in much the same way that stormy winter weather had locked Mm and his shipmates at St. Helena. Harwood’s journal descriptions of his passage home, therefore, mark out some of the clear differences between the thoughts and writings of eighteenth-century tourists and eighteenth-century empire-builders. For both groups, Britain was the referential core. Both groups participated in the discourse of Orientalism that, to quote Edward Said, “was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’).”1 1 Both engaged in the narrative process of critical observation, but only empire-builders like Harwood and Francis were actively employed in the process of constructing a physical, political, economic, and social world hierarchy that ordered Britain as the center above imperial peripheries such as Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, or even St. Helena. As a result, the comparative constructions of the imperial world drafted in the imaginations and commentaries of men like Harwood or Francis gained traction in imperial policies throughout the eighteenth century, and arguably beyond. This chapter will explore the rhetorical construction of South Asia built by eighteenth-century Britons. While no two Britons “saw” the same things the same way in eighteenth-century South Asia, a common line is discernible. As Said rightly noted, the common end of “travel literature, imaginary utopias, moral voyages, and scientific reporting” was to bring the East into “sharper and more extended focus” for the W est1 2 This chapter will not argue that EIC employees were the first or the only people to transmit narrative accounts of India back to metropolitan Britain. Indeed, as Kate Teltscher has shown, early-modern English collectors like Samuel Purchas and Richard Hakluyt, 1 1 Said, Orientalism, 43. 1 2 Ibid., 117. 33 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. communities of missionaries, and other European travelers had long been writing about India,1 3 As Sudlpta Sen has noted, “the age of Enlightenment had already apprehended the Orient as a serious object of study in the comparative progress of humankind.”1 4 The progress of the Company’s expansion in South Asia facilitated the collection and dissemination of travel narratives from South Asia in the late eighteenth century even as the growing significance of Britain’s Indian possessions to the national interest made India an even more critical subject of study.1 5 As such, this chapter offers a study of the travel narratives sent home by Company employees in South Asia, and it argues that eighteenth-century Britons in South Asia mentally mapped out the world they found there through comparisons with the world they had left behind them in Britain. In doing so, they constructed for themselves as well as for their families, friends, and employers a world that was easily comprehended because it was predicated on metropolitan norms. The flora and fauna of South Asia, its geography, climate, people, history, cultural heritage, and political systems were all mapped out in ways that defined the region not on its own terms but rather through its deviations from a normative model established in Britain. The process of imagining India crafted a history of South Asia that was Ideological, reductive, and determinative.1 6 By default, South Asia failed to measure up to the historical model established in Britain. The subcontinent was fruitful, to be certain, and it had produce! great civilizations early on, but the very bounty of the land had left the people B Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600-1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 12,74-108. See also Ania Loomba, ColonialismiPostcolomalism (New York: Routledge, 1998), 107. 1 4 Sen, 31. 1 5 See Loomba, 71. See also, Alas Frost, The Global Reach o f Empire (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2903), 6-10. 1 6 The phrase “imagining India” is used here with specific reference to the work of Ronald Inden. See Inden, Imagining India, 34 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. listless, lazy, and indolent. Indolence, in tarn, had given rise to despotic regimes and superstitious religious beliefs. Contrapuntally, so the story went, the people of the British isles had straggled on m island, cast out Roman invaders, fought against political tyranny, and resisted the charms of superstitious religiosity. This comparative model justified, in the minds of eighteenth-century British imperialists in South Asia, Britain’s place atop the imperial hierarchy. It explained how, to use William Harwood’s term, Britain had become more than a mere island while the South Asian subcontinent had become merely part of a chain of “continual islands.” A T ale o f Three Cities James Romney, a iieutenant-cdonel in the Bombay Army from 1779 to 1804, was a poetic as well as a military man. Among Ms surviving papers - disorganized, tattered, and inaccessible as they are - are collected poems and drafts of at least a half a dozen plays. Amid this morass, there is a draft of an undated and unaddressed letter in wM cfa Romney asks, “My dear friend! ought we not to suffer the heart to speak its own language?” India, he goes on to confess, “has its charms, and 1 should be ungrateful if I did not acknowledge that I had met with satisfaction and pleasure in i t ”1 7 Romney9 s chaotic collection of personal papers makes it all but impossible to ascertain what exactly he had found satisfying and pleasurable about Ms tenure on the Malabar Coast, but his brief comment does focus historical attention on what other eighteenth-century Britons thought and felt upon their arrival in Smith Asia. What were their first emotions upon landing cm the subcontinent? Which sites struck them, and which left them disappointed? Did they find South Asia pleasurable as did Romney, or was his impression of the subcontinent an anomaly? What did they make of the new imperial landscapes that stretched before them? 1 7 Papers of Lieutenant-Colonel James Romney, OlOC Mss Eur F198/2, collection unsorted. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Two layers of analysis are required to unravel these questions. On the one hand, the answers must be distinguished between the three primary landing sites in eighteenth-century British India: Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. Throughout the eighteenth century, Britain’s territorial holdings in South Asia were not geographically contiguous, and each presidency town produced a distinctive set of initial responses. At the same time, it is possible, upon careful investigation into the myriad of diaries and letters written upon or shortly after an individual’s first landing in British South Asia, to discern a more homogenous thread through this eclectic collection of materials. Most Britons, upon landing is South Asia, first noticed, for good or ill, elements of the natural settings and the outlines of the European settlements of each of the presidency towns - not an unlikely thing to notice given that it was these settlements into which they Illustration 1. India, circa 1765.1 8 would be integrating. With respect to their natural blessings, Calcutta and Madras do not seem to have been able to compete with the natural charms of the island settlement of Bombay. George Patterson noted in the early months of 1770 that “no place in the world 1 8 Map scanned from Peter Robb, A History of India {New York: Palgrave, 2002), 89. 36 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. can be pleasanter than the Malabar Coast during the Monsoon.”1 9 In a letter of 6 November 1771, Charles Ware Malet agreed, if somewhat guardedly. “This island is reckoned the most healthy settlement we have in the East Indies,” he wrote, “and I believe not without reason.”2 0 Earlier, Malet had written to his father that Bombay had “the command of a most noble harbour for which reason it is of the utmost consequence to the company being the only place in India where they have docks to refit their ships.”2 1 As the secretary to Rear Admiral Sir John Lindsay and Admiral Sir Robert Haiiand, successively the naval commanders-in-chief in the East Indies from 1769 to 1771 and 1771 to 1774 respectively, George Patterson had a privileged window onto life in Bombay. Upon his arrival there, Patterson and his party were greeted with a local festival, a gathering he ' t e & —■ ' ft T E R '\ 3 m s s L \ f t r t A u r / f c t ; * s i 3 * i at G9*>) ,1 A R A B I A N SB A \ Kvso B w r f a setacamy ^ . W s f t e t Jar«aiSv2 , \ , (stands \'p \ i Illustration 2. Western Coast of India, circa 1765.2 2 described as “a kind of feast in the Indian maimer where a number of Gentleman and Ladies are collected together to dinner - the table is covered with a profusion of Victuals, not one sixth part of which can be ate [sic], and the side board is stored with a variety of wines.”2 3 The settlement, he noted, “abounds with plenty of Provisions, that is, the wealthy may have 1 9 Diary of George Patterson, OIGC Mss Eur E379/1,110. 2 0 Sir Charles Wane Malet to Mr. Hardy, 6 November 1771, OIOC Mss Eur F149/47,19. 2 1 Sir Charles Wane Malet to his father, 12 August 1770, OIOC Mss Eur F149/47,5. 2 2 Map scanned from Robb, 89. 2 3 Diary of George Patterson, OIOC Mss Eur379/1, 153. 37 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the best of everything on their table, but this requires attention; their cattle, sheep, hogs, foul, turkies [sic], &c they must feed themselves. Goats are in abundance, and Buffaloes round every field and every high way - their best sheep they bring from Bengal, from Persia, and Sindry.”3 4 By his own admission, therefore, Patterson moved in a charmed circle of elite Europeans in Bombay who could afford to import the finest foods and wines and to celebrate in an elevated and lavish style, and Ms carefully written record of the Bombay settlement focuses almost exclusively on the lifestyles, manners, customs, and habitations of Ms high- ranking European comrades. The geograpMc center of Patterson’s world was Bombay’s “Green,” a “spacious square in the center” of the settlement around wM cfa were built “a church and many good Houses.” The church, though “spacious and neat,” employed “Chtmam instead of tyleing [sic]” on its roof but was saved from being completely exotic by its “good steeple and clock.” At the harbor’s edge stood the old fort of Bombay, which, though “by no means fit to sustain a modem attack” was “well furnished with Cannon” and a surrounding ditch that filled with water in the rainy season so that it “servo! as a place of safety for the Company’s valuables.” While the old fort provided additional security for the Company and its employees at Bombay, a newer wall that was, according to Patterson, “fortified after the modem manner,” enclosed the town and secured it from outside invasion.2 3 For Patterson, life in Bombay was insulated and secure. His only complaint about Bombay proper seems to have been that the streets of the city “very irregularly crossed and recrossed at different angles.”2 6 His perceptions of the presidency hardly extended beyond 2 4 Ibid., 179. 2 5 Ibid., 183. 2 6 Ibid. 38 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the fortified walls that guarded him, and when he did allow his thoughts to wander outside the security of Bombay’s walls, his perspectives focused exclusively on the highest levels of European life on the Malabar Coast. “Several of the principal people of the Island have,” he noted, “very good Country Houses.” The governor, for instance, had converted an old church into an estate, and he had “formed the Body of the Church into a Hall.” Patterson went on to add that the “gardens are the largest and the best in the Island but laid out quite in the Dutch taste, in a variety of angles.”2 7 Of Bombay’s native inhabitants, Patterson admitted that “the Island.. is inhabited by all kinds of Indians, Persees or Persia men as they call themselves, Gentoos, Moremen, Malabars, Maleys, Aumahls, Cooleys, &c, &c, &c.. .but I had not opportunities to see so many of them as I could have wished”2 8 In contrast to Patterson, who came to Bombay when he was thirty-six years old and after many years in the Company’s service, Charles Malet, whose career in South Asia would eventually span almost three decades and would include posts as the Resident at Poonha from 1786 to 1797 and a seat on the Bombay Council from 1797 until 119%, was only eighteen years old when he arrived in South Asia in 1770. Bombay’s charms went no further for the young EIC employee than its naturally good harbor and Its reportedly beneficial climate. The island, he reported, was “very barren,” for which reason the presidency settlement was “obliged to be supplyd with everything by the Marattoes the people who are the inhabitants of this part of India.”2 9 Malet’s table, unlike Patterson’s, was not overflowing with six-fold the amount of food each mouth could eat. Lower down the ranks of the island’s European community supplies were less than plentiful, and Malet, who unlike Patterson, did come into close contact with Bombay’s native populations, marveled 2 7 m d., m . * Bid., 203. 2 9 Sir Charles Warre Malet to Mr. Hardy, 6 November 1771, OIOC Mss Eur F149/47,19. 39 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. that South Asians on the Malabar Coast could make do on a diet o f “nothing but a little rice and other different fruits.”3 0 For the average European resident of Bombay in the eighteenth century, neither Bombay’s society nor the accommodations measured up to Patterson’s elevated standards. Sir Jasper Nicholls, a lieutenant-general in the British Army and later commander-in-chief in India, wrote that he could not “say that Bombay pleases me, the society has not been much attended for the better lately.”3 1 Charles MaSet echoed his feelings in a letter to his sister dated 26 January 1771. Apologetically, he wrote that he could offer no “long and entertaining account of everything I see and do here. I wish for mine own sake, there was anything to be seen or done which merited a recital.”3 2 It was Isack Pyke, commander of the East Indiaman Stringer, however, who wrote most blisteringly about the British settlement at Bombay. “The Town,” he suggested, consisted of little more than “3 irregular streets of despicable and mean cottages full of beggars or those who look like suck” On one end of the settlement, he noted “8 indifferent houses” that were “open to an enemy.” Indeed, Pyke argued that the entire settlement was vulnerable to invasion. “In my opeaion [sic],” he wrote, “it would be very easy to land in the.. .bay and plunder” the entire island. It was, he suggested, “an easy matter.”3 3 Though it is likely that no imperial settlement measured up to the expectations set by major European cities like London, the E1C presidency settlement at Bombay seems to have been a particular disappointment to all but the highest-ranking Europeans like Patterson; it simply was not as nice a place to live as was metropolitan Britain. Those like Pyke, Nichdls, and Malet saw themselves as deprived of the conveniences, comforts, and 3 0 Ibid. 3 1 Papers of Sir Jasper Nicholls, OIOC Mss Ear F175.8,1 . 3 2 Sir Charles Wane Malet to his sister, 26 January 1771, OIOC Mss E ur FI49/47, 31. 3 3 Journal of Sir Isack Pyke, OIOC Mss Eur K9,32. 40 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. companionship that coaid reasonably be expected in the metropolitan centers of the world; at Bombay, they were, as Malet wrote, “in a manner cat off from all the world.”3 4 Of the three presidency towns in eighteenth-century British South Asia, Bombay, on the Malabar Coast, was, is fact, the farthest removed, either by land or ocean travel. Indeed, to travel from either Madras or Calcutta to Bombay via an overland route would have taken an eighteenth-century traveler out of British-controlled territories and through such native terrains as the Mataatta States or the kingdoms of Mysore or Hyderabad. This sense of geographic isolation alone would have marked Bombay as different from the other two presidency towns, though neither Madias nor Calcutta measured up to the natural charms or advantages of the Malabar Coast. To newly arrived Britons in the eighteenth century, Madras in particular failed to meet the geographic advantages of Bombay. Richard Carr Glyn, a servant in the Bengal Civil Service from 1809 to 1841 very plainly wrote, upon landing in Madras for the first time in October 1812, that the town bad “little to recommend it ” 3 5 More than ten years later, 5 f c H A H ...... 2AM \ . ■ & y 0 ' • ^ / H<<j-ssaa« • - ti-jjtim ^ yi.wu.pawri ' V i i l V ) / . i B A Y R E : 4 OF - „ BENGAL . 5 «/f? un£cs?i8ryy * i 1 fcrvsfcv O ( ,2^ \ C-P'i-ttwA Illustration 3. Eastern Coast of India, circa 1765.3 6 3 4 Sir Charles Warre Malet to his sister, 26 January 1771, OIOC Mss Eur F149/47, 31. 3 5 Richard Carr Glyn to his grandmother, 25 October 1812, OIOC Mss Ear D561. 3 6 Map scanned from Robb, 89. 41 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Ensign William Harry Massie of the Bengal Army agreed. His landing at Madras had been most uncomfortable, he recalled, because “Madras lies on a sandy beach, quite open to the sea, without any protection.” As a result, all ships are obliged to anchor out at sea about 2 miles. Of course, from this the inconvenience is very great for landing and shipping goods, what is managed entirely by means of the native boats, half M l of water and dreadfully damaged in getting over the surf which breaks quite awfully on the shore with a roar you hear an immense way out at sea.3 7 Richard Glyn concurred “The most remarkable thing” about Madras, he wrote his grandmother, “is the tremendous surf which breaks upon the shore.”3 8 The rough seas and inhospitable landings described by Massie and Glyn plagued the Coromandel Coast from Fort St. George at Madras to Fort S t David, south of Pondicherry. Major John Corneille, traveling in 1754 as the secretary to the commander-in-chief at Madras, Colonel John Aldereoii, noted that it was impossible to approach within three miles of Fort St. David because of the rough seas. Even at that great distance, he marveled, “the poor mate” traveling onboard ship with him had fallen overboard and been lost in the tempestuous waters.3 9 The rough seas on the Coromandel Coast necessitated what was perhaps the most distinctive feature of landings on that side of the South Asian subcontinent - certainly to arriving Britons - the catamaran. The only means by which one could navigate the rough waters of the Coromandel Coast, Richard Glyn told Ms grandmother, was “in boats of a curious construction sewed together so as to be quite pliant and flexible.”4 0 Arriving at Fort St. George in 1724 on board the East Indiaman Stretkam, Judith Weston noted that “no sooner was our sMp spyed [sic] by the Govsrs. watch at the dock but His Cattermaiass were 3 7 William Harry Massie to his brother, 17 October 1826, OIOC Mss Eur B74,70. 3 8 Richard Carr Glyn to his grandmother, 25 October 1812, OIOC Mss Eur D561. 3 9 Memoirs of Major lotas Corneille, OIOC Mss Eur 8215,33. 4 0 Richard Carr Glyn to M s grandmother, 25 October 1812, OIOC Mss Ear D561. 42 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. dispatched to examine who we were and from whence we came.” The catamarans, she went on, “are extremely surprising at a distance as they seem.. .to walk on the sea and well they may for a cattennaran is only three short planks tyed [sic] together.”4 1 Though less impressed by the catamarans sailing the waters of the Coromandel Coast than Weston, William Hickey found them no less novel. He marveled that the natives would dare sail in vessels that “must necessarily leak greatly,” and he balked at the inefficiency of a boat that required that one member of the crew be “stationed for the sole purposes of bailing the water out; and to prevent newcomers, especially women, from seeing the quantity of water constantly pouring in by the seams at her bottom.” 4 2 John Corneille was more impressed. He had been surprised, he wrote, “with the sight of a black man who seemed to be walking on the water towards us” during his approach to the coast off Fort St. David. “On nearer approach,” Corneille noted, “we perceived he was standing on a couple of teams that were tied together (called Cattennaran) on which wonderful vessel they go - many leagues to sea, even in bad weather. TMs fellow was sent off to know our name and from whence we came.”4 3 Once on shore, British settlements on the Coromandel Coast were deemed less pleasing to newly arrived Britons in the eighteenth century than was Bombay. One sailor on board the East Indiaman Harcmrt wrote in 1773 that Fort St. George lacked all the amenities he had come to expect of a metropolitan center. “There are no Inns, Taverns, or Houses of Entertainment,” he complained. Indeed, the only thing that closely resembled these public amenities was “a kind of Punch House at the Black Town which is only a Mile 4 1 Journal of Judith Weston, OIOC Mss Eur B162,4. 42 William Hickey, The Memoirs of William Hickey, & & . Peter Quennell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), 118. 4 3 Memoirs of Major John Comeilie, 40. 43 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. off” where “nobody of Caraeter [sic] ever siepes [sic]/*4 4 In a letter to Ms sister dated 24 January 1764, Charles Smith wrote that he felt trapped at Madras. “Good God,” he lamented, “what would I not give to be able to transport myself amongst you all, happy in each other’s company, if it were but for a day.” He was, he continued, “almost induced to determine on paying you all a visit, to live a year happily with you all, and then return again to broil in India.” Lacking the funds to retire from the service of the EIC - indeed even the funds to pay for his return voyage to Britain - Smith wrote that Ms greatest fear was that he would never be able to make his way home, at least not before India, and Madras in particular, had destroyed Mm. He hoped, he concluded that he would be able to return home before he was “quite grey,” fearing that tMs would not be the case. “When I do come you will see a fat ugly monster, just able to support Ms own weight, and I wish you may be able to say on the right side of forty - at any rate, I shall serve for your little one to laugh at.”4 5 Even the European residents of the settlement lacked metropolitan graces. Thomas Rumbold wrote Ms father from Madras in October 1778 begging for more letters from home. The quality of society in Madras depressed Mm. “It is impossible for you to form any idea of the infinite pleasure we poor India people have,” he lamented to Ms father, “in receiving letters from our friends.”4 4 More te n a year later, Rumbold continued to berate Ms family for not sending Mm enough mail. “1 must begin,” he wrote to his brother in March of 1779, with scolding you for sending me such a short Epistle by the Stafford. How can you say you have nothing to inform me of when not a day ran possible [sic] pass in London without some occurrence that would give me pleasure and entertainment If I was to say I was at a loss for a subject to write upon, it would be very excusable as no Race can be more barren of news than Madras.4 7 44 Unattributed journal in the form of a letter address to Charles Maynard, 1 s t Viscount Maynard, OIOC Mss Eur E292,78, 43 Charles Smith to M s sister, 24 January 1764, OIOC Mss Eur E340/1,74. 45 Sir Thomas Rumbold to M s father, 3 October 1778, OIOC Mss Ear Photo Ear 099. 47 Sir Thomas Rumbold to his brother, 18 March 1779, OIOC Mss Eur Photo Eur 099. 4 4 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. If Rumbold meant to suggest that it was hard to make friends is the European society at Madras, he was not alone. “The people of Madras are not so hospitable,” one young sailor wrote, “as to ask every stranger who arrives to walk in and be at Home, this being only a mistaken notion generally received in England.’*8 In the metropolitan center of empire, the rumored hospitality of the British imperial world had gained currency that was simply not sustained by the facts in imperial outposts like Madras, perhaps explaining why William Ford of the Bengal Civil Service wrote to Ms father asking that he send a pair of English Mastiffs out to him as a gift. Life in British India, he wrote, was lonely, and he longed to have “such a faithful English servant” that, he predicted, would be “of infinite use in protecting our Cattle and property from the gangs of lions and wolves with which this country is pestered.” Certainly, nothing would intimidate Asian ‘Vermin” like lions and wolves quite like the “dread” inspired by “a Mastiff or Bull dog,” and either, he noted, would provide more adequate and familiar company than any Asian guard® Madras, along with the Coromandel forts of S t David and S t George, were unsociable places that were difficult to reach. Moreover, they were uncomfwtably hot Captain Francis Irvine of the Bengal Army wrote to his father that he preferred the climate at Madras to that at his regular post in Bengal, but, he admitted, “I keep my health best in the hot weather ” adding that most agreed Bengal to be “a far superior country, and more comparable [sic] to a stranger.”® In September 1772, Robert Harland wrote for an official transfer from Madras to escape the heat. “I find this Country is by no means favourable for my constitution,” he explained, noting that he could not hope to survive a year in Madras. The state of his health, he insisted, made Ms “return to a colder climate absolutely 48 Unattributed journal, OIOC Mss Eur E292,78. 4 9 William Ford to M s father, 6 August 1802, OIOC Mss Eur C476,46. 5 0 Captain Francis Irvine to M s father, 27 August 1805, OIOC MSS Ear Photo Eur 355, 45 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. necessary.”5 1 William Hickey was more explicit about the heat of the Coromandel Coast What Ms shipmate had ironically termed “a delightful breeze,” Hickey found to be an alarming land wind blowing offshore of the coast that was “so intensely hoi that 1 could compare it only to standing within the oppressive influence of the steam of a furnace.”5 2 For Britons back at home reading such commentaries on the weather in British India, the comparison drawn between South Asia would hardly have been received with neutrality. Heat, in eighteenth-century climatelogical terms, was a curse to the native populations of a land In his The Spirit o f the Laws, Montesquieu had argued that the character of a people was determined by the climate and environment in which they lived Those living in cold climates, he argued, “are more vigorous” because “in cold climates one will have little sensitivity to pleasures.” The result, Montesquieu concluded, was that in hot climates like that in South Asia, “the heat of the climate can be so excessive that the body will be absolutely without strength.”® The weather in India, thus, made the subcontinent ait unpleasant, if not dangerous, place to live. Indeed, the only features of life on the Coromandel Coast that seem to have agreed with the inhabitants of Madras and Forts St. George and St. David are the forts themselves and the governors’ houses within them. Of Fort S t David, John Corneille wrote that it was “one of the strongest of [the Company’s] possessions in India.” Even then, Corneille admitted, “the fort is but small and much crowded with buildings.”5 4 Corneille’s superior, Colonel John Aldercon, commander-in-chief at Madras, noted that the crowning achievement of the crowded fort was “the garden house in which the Governor generally 5 1 Robert Haiiand to an unidentified recipient, 30 September 1772, OIOC IOR H/MSC/111,33. s Hickey, The Memoirs of William Hickey, ed. Peter Quennell, 117. 3 Montesquieu, 231-234. * * Memoirs of Major lofan Corneille, 41. 46 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. resides.” It was, he wrote, “an elegant Building; the Hall particularly is a very noble one, and all the Apartments large and airy, conveniently adapted to the climate.”5 5 William Massie wrote that Fort S t George, like Fort S t David, was “most perfect and strong.” So strong, in fact, that the fort’s strength became the primary argument against “the removal of the presidency to a more advantageous situation 2 or 3 degrees to the North which was at one time talked of.”5 6 As at Fort St. David, the Garden House at Fort St. George was the principal residence of the governor, and, according to one Company employee, it was “an elegant structure,” though it did not fully compare with the country estates of the gentry back in Britain. The house, it was noted, “might pass for a very superb building” inside the fort, but not when compared with other estate houses. Indeed, it paled next to the country houses of the wealthy gentlemen of Madras, “the Magnificence of which it cannot be compared with.”5 7 Britons on the Coromandel Coast did enjoy access to “a most notable” new hospital “which the Company have built at a small distance from” Madras, which was “exactly calculated for the warmth of the Climate, the air having a free passage on all sides of it and elegant Verandoes [sic] supported by Pillows [sic] for those recovering to walk and amuse themselves in, being sheltered from the rain and shaded from the scorching sum”5 8 But, as many noted, the settlement lacked other essential institutions. Writing his father in March 1778, the newly arrived governor of Madras, Thomas Rumbold, noted that the church at Madras was “dirty and very much neglected indeed.” To his mind, worse still was the fact that “nobody seemed to think it meaningful to attend divine worship.”® Another resident of Madras concurred, suggesting that “the church” was “scarcely worth being taken of, except 5 5 Journal of Colonel John Aldereoa, OIOC Mss Eur C348,10. ® William Harry Massie to M s brother, 17 October 1826, OIOC Mss Eur B74,70. 5 7 Unattributed journal, OIOC Mss Eur E292,82. 5 8 Ibid., 84. 3 9 Sir Thomas Rumbold to Ms father, 12 March 1778, OIOC Mss Eur Photo Ear 099. 47 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. it be for its’ having withstood the shock of many a weighty cannon bail, the marks of them being very evident upon its steeple now.”6 0 Even William Massie, who, writing from 1826, found Madras mote developed than any eighteenth-centaiy observer, admitted that he found the city to be more “handsome” than astonishing. The view of the waterfront of Madras from the sea, he wrote his aunt, “would make an excellent sketch,” but he noted, the difference between these streets, buildings, and inhabitants to those of an English town [was that there were] noe {sic] of the plain staring forward red brick three story houses, but every now and then a large white building with colonnades and Pillars, or a Pagoda carved over with the most extraordinary but rich figures or a mosque with its twisted and gilt spires, surrounded by the striking contrasts of native huts, made of bamboo, rushes, or grass and most with a kind of rude verandah supported on crooked branches, under which in heaps lie the people apparently in.. .total idleness, instead of the busy industry of our streets, no carts stirring, no “ Gee up or Gee oF Madras was a city built by Europeans in South Asia, but, in Massie’s reckoning, it failed to measure up to the standards of European urban planning. For Massie, Madras was less a city per se than a study in urban history, a text book in which one could find the very first essays of architecture, improving by degrees from the comic huts with 3 or 4 sticks put across to form a door, then with regular bamboo pillars supporting transverse beams, flat topped and the intervals filled up with matting and plaster, next the regularly [sic] tiles and sloping roof to let the rain run off and perchance a chimney,...and a variety of stages till we come to the tall columned and Saxon arched buildings of Europeans with long flights of steps wheeling up to the entrance.6 * For Massie, then, Madias exceeded Bombay because there the Europeans had attempted to build a first-rate European-styled urban center, but it also served imperial purposes because, in juxtaposing European civic achievements to those of South Asia and South Asians, it seemed to confirm Britain’s mastery over the subcontinent 6 0 Unartribiited journal, OIOC Mss Eur E292,82. 6 1 William Harry Massie to his aunt, 10 October 1826, OIOC Mss Eur B74,92. 48 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Above either Bombay or Madras, however, stood the presidency town of Calcutta and Fort William in Bengal, the center of British imperial activity in South Asia in the last half of the eighteenth century, and, after the passage of Lord North’s Regulating Act of 1773, the supreme presidency in British South Asia and the seat of the governor-general of British India and Ms council. Calcutta, Fort William, and the British settlements in Bengal were not unlike Madras in that they all lacked the natural distinctions that marked the Malabar Coast and the Bombay settlement in particular. A survey of East Indian ports undertaken by the crew of the HMS Ariel in 1789 and 1790 determined that Britain’s Bengal settlements were almost inaccessible and particularly unhealthy. ‘ The inconveniences of the Hoogley [River],” the report noted, “are serious ones.” Sand banks clogged the river in multiple locations forming “obstacles to the Navigation of large ships” and occasioning “tedious delays.” More treacherous still, these banks shifted frequently so that even “the most skillful pilot cannot insure the dispatch often necessary in times of war.”6 2 As William BAY OF BE NGA L Illustration 4. Bengal, circa 1765.® ® Report of a voyage by HMS Ariel, 1789-90, OIOC Mss Ear B288, 3. ® Map scanned from Robb, 89. 49 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Massie would later record, Calcutta “gives one an idea of having been an immense sandbank thrown up by the sea, the Ganges forming the Channel through it with islands scattered about here and there which soon form abrupt and distinct ranges or lumps of hills.”6 4 Sand banks could beach a ship, even sink it, in the tidal waters leading into Calcutta, but, it was the climate of Bengal itself that posed the clearest and most present danger to British settlements in the region. “The unheaMiyness [sic] of the lower parts of the Hoogley,” argued the report, threatened the health of entire crews. According to the report of the Ariel, only sustained clearing and cultivation could render Bengal a safe place for Britain and Britons. Such actions might, the report advised, “in time remove or temper this unhealthyness [sic]” so that “future ages may see the Mouth of the Ganges pouring out innumerable vessels of Commerce.” However, it continued, “at present to refit a ship of war in Bengal is to risk being disabled in the most serious point, that of sickness among the Crew and which the best precautions may not be able to prevent”6 5 The heat in Calcutta was part of the problem. It bred disease, some argued. At the same time, Calcutta was not as hot as other parts of the imperial world. John Stewart, the judge-advocate of Bengal, wrote that the heat in Bengal soared from March through June, but he cautioned that the weather was, in general, “more tolerable” in Calcutta “than I have felt it in North America during the summer months.” In fact, he recorded, Calcutta’s climate was perfectly suited to supply the wants of life. “Almost all the year round,” he reflected, “you have garden stuff of every kind in the greatest abundance.”® ’ m William Massie, Eastern Sketches, OIOC Mss Ear B74,177. ® Report of a voyage by HMS Ariel, 1789-90, OIOC Mss Eur B288, 3-4. 6 6 John Stewart, “Letter Back to Britain from Calcutta, 7 March 1773,” in Lucy Sutherland, Politics and Finance in the Eighteenth Century, at. Aubrey Newman (London: The Hambledon Press, 1984), 232-233. 50 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Better still, the city of Calcutta reminded John Stewart of scenes from home. When imagining the settlement, he advised his family at home to conjure views of the Thames back in London. The river at Calcutta offered the same panorama, he argued, except that it was “broader and much more deep and rapid” than the Thames. The city was “laid off in regular and wide streets with spacious and showy houses, such as in appearance eclipse (not to speak of London) almost anything in Paris or Italy.” Rather than admitting that anything in South Asia surpassed European cities, though, Stewart had to note that Calcutta was a shallow city - nothing more than appearance. It would not, he wrote, “bear examination.” All of the buildings there, he carefully explained, were constructed “of brick plastered over and whitewashed.”® 7 Calcutta tried to be a first-rate metropolis, but it failed just beneath the surface of its thin, whitewashed veneer. Unlike Madras or Bombay, Calcutta filled those who saw it for the first time with a wave of urban appreciation. It was, so their preliminary descriptions suggest, a first-rate metropolis. As William Dalrymple has noted, Calcutta was just entering the “height of its golden age” in the final years of the eighteenth century. “The British bridgehead in Bengal,” Dalrymple has argued, “was unquestionably the richest, largest and most elegant colonial city in India.”6 8 William Hunter, a junior clerk with the EIC, would have agreed. “Im a g in ehe wrote to his family in Britain, “everything that is glorious in nature combined with everything that is beautiful [in] architecture and you can faintly picture' to yourself what Calcutta is.”® * Not every Briton in late eighteenth-century Calcutta shared Hunter’s appreciation for the city. Mrs. Jemima Kindersley noted in 1768 that Calcutta was an “awkward” place. m Ibid, p. 233. 6 8 William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (London: Harper Collins, 2002), 407. ® Quoted in Ibid. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. It was “so irregular that it looks as if all the houses had been thrown up in the air. and fallen down again by accident as they now stand.” The city, Kindersley went on to note, was bustling with construction, and “everyone who can procure a piece of ground to build a house upon consults Ms own taste and convenience, without aay regard to the beauty or regularity of the town.”7 0 Even as she condemned Calcutta’s disorder and heterogeneity, . therefore, Kindersley singled out the economic bustle that fueled the city in the last decades of the eighteenth century, driving the city’s growth as well as its significance to British imperialism on the subcontinent well into the nineteenth century. By 1823, when Reginald Hefaer was promoted to serve as the first Anglican primate' at Calcutta, it had grown immeasurably, and the new bishop found it a veritable city of palaces. G.T. Allen found that he agreed with Heber’s assessments when he arrived in Calcutta some twenty years later. Allen remarked that the British had built, at Calcutta, a settlement that merited the very label of “city.” “Calcutta.. .the great emporium of British commerce in India,” he wrote, was “deservedly termed ‘ The City of Palaces’.”7 1 For Allen, however, Calcutta, despite its being a South Asian city, was, by no means, a uniquely South Asian metropolis. To be sure, the city' was filled with exotic people - “Afghans, Persians, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, CMnese, and people from every quarter of Europe and Asia” - but it was not for its kaleidoscopic array of humanity that Calcutta struck Allen. Rather, it was the city’s familiarity that drew Mm in. Allen admired “the grace and beauty of its long line of Buildings,” its “stretches of Corinthian Columns,” and the myriad gardens of the city all of which had been “laid out with that.. .vivacity that sheds an unfading charm and 7 0 Quoted in Ibid., 408. 7 1 G.T. Allen, The Traveler’ s Scrapbook, OIOC Mss Eur B366,23. 52 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. loveliness on all around.” The city, Allen noted, excited “the admiration of all who behold it,” and he agreed with Bishop Heber, who had often compared Calcutta to St. Petersburg.7 2 Heber’s comparison, echoed here by Allen, is an interesting and telling reminder that Britons in South Asia understood the world around them - its diversity, difference, and complexity - in terms of how that world compared to a normative model they had left behind in Europe. In the midst of a landscape that was as dramatically different from the European normative models they had known as was Calcutta, m m such as Alien and Heber latched onto any sight that was even remotely familiar. To their way of seeing, the British settlement at Calcutta bore striking resemblances to Peter the Great’s northern capital, and, as William Massie’s earlier description of the Madras settlement and W s own observations on Calcutta show, Heber and Allen may have had a point Calcutta, Massie suggested, was more two cities than one. “The European part is very handsome,” he wrote. “Every house is high and separate by an obligation of the government a certain distance from each other. They have most of them trees round them and a gardes.”7 3 “Entirely separate always from the European [city],” Massie noted, was the “Black Town,” which ran along the edge of the shore marking “a strange contrast” with the European settlement. As Massie described it, the Black Town was little more than “an immense heap of mat sheds,” that were themselves merely a fire hazard for “if one was to take fire the whole might be burnt down in half an hoar.”7 4 Given the disparity between the two C alottes described by William Massie, Allen and Heber’s claim that the presidency settlement reminded them of St. Petersburg seems less absurd and takes on new meaning. As represented by Allen or Massie, Calcutta’s “European 7 2 Ibid. 7 3 William Hany Massie to Mr. Townsend, 28 April 1827, OIOC Mss Eur B74,193-194. 7 4 Ibid., 194. 53 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. part” certainly had more ia common with St. Petersburg, relative to its similarities wife the “Black Town,” than it did with anything else that they saw in South Asia. Calcutta was, therefore, a grand metropolis in comparative and relative, rather than In absolute, terms. Such was certainly the point of William Massie’s 1826 account of Government House at Calcutta. The edifice, he wrote, “gives a most grand idea of the British power and government in India. It is a most splendid palace, and quite in the style of an English building.” That Government House was “in the style of an English building” rendered it worthy to exemplify Britain’s administrative power in South Asia, but even Massie admitted that Government House’s merits were limited and comparative.7 5 Though the structure well merited “the name of palace,” it was still only the “principal object” of “the most splendid part of the Town,” a town whose splendor was magnified by its juxtaposition against the poverty and squalor of the native settlements that adjoined it7 6 The three British presidency settlements at Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, therefore, drew the immediate attention of arriving Britons throughout the eighteenth century and even beyond. Whether they failed to measure up to European standards or conjured up images of the imperial majesty of S t Petersburg, the presidency settlements remained the first and primary demands on the attentions of arriving Europeans; however, Europeans like Heber, Allen, and Massie were quick to shift their attention to the native populations of South Asia, their communities, their lifestyles, their cultures, their histories, and their religious practices. As had been the case at Calcutta, perceptions of the native world of South Asia were never neutral observations. Rather, they became comparative models to be juxtaposed against the European normative models of the three British presidency 7 5 For more on architecture and the presence and presentation of imperial power, see Thomas Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’ s M aj. (New York; Oxford University Press, 2002). 7 6 William Massie to his father, November 1826, OIOC Mss Eur B74,118-119. 54 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. settlements and of Europe per se, and, as we have seen, the act of comparing quickly became the means by which to justify hierarchies of merit, power, and domination across South Asia. Initial British perceptions of the native populations of South Asia and the subcontinent itself were more homogenous than those of the European settlements and the natural terrain of the subcontinent Certainly some observers focused their attention on the diverse and novel climates of South Asia while others closely studied the political traditions of the subcontinent South Asia’s manifold religious traditions captured the attention of some Europeans, wMle others found that they were drawn to the subcontinent5 s many architectural wonders. As a result, individual observers on distinct themes and subjects produced accounts that are specific to their field. However, the synthesis of these observations produced a distinctively British historical narrative of South Asia. Stated most simply, eighteenth-century British observers saw South Asia as a living historical text, but their imaginative creation was more than a simple narrative. The history of South Asia that formed in the collective imagination of eighteenth-century Britons was steeped in lessons that confirmed the supremacy of the western world and justified the subjugation of South Asia to European imperial control. India, therefore, was a didactic tale played out on the vast terrain of the South Asian subcontinent South Asia stood apart from other imperial terrains became it was hard for Europeans to deny that the subcontinent had a past that predated any European presence. As we have seen, European settlements in South Asia were commonly the first things that caught the eye of arriving Britons in the eighteenth century. In part, this had a great deal to do with the simple fact that most Europeans landed at European settlements and that it was within these settlements that they lived, slept, and ate while in South Asia. At the same time, 55 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. focusing on European settlements also allowed eighteenth-century Europeans to ignore the fact that the South Asian subcontinent was covered with architectural reminders - palaces, temples, forts, and rains - of civilizations and histories that predated and, by some accounts, surpassed anything Europe had to offer. William Macintosh was neither the first nor the last European to note that “all history” pointed to “India as the mother of science and art” Even the most perfunctory survey of South Asia’s sights, Macintosh went on, was enough to explain to him why it was that “this country was anciently so renowned for knowledge and wisdom that the philosophers of Greece did not disdain to travel thither for their improvement; and imported thence many notions, which they incorporated with their systems of philosophy.”7 7 Macintosh’s goal, like that of many other Britons in eighteenth-centmy South Asia, was to explain how such a celebrated civilization had fallen to a series of invasions and conquests of which the British was only the most recent From the beginning, the colonial project in South Asia challenged British imperial policies. As Sadipta Sen has written, India was one of the first locations where the distinctions that formed the foundation of British imperialism around the globe were “put on trial.”7 8 Elsewhere in the imperial world, the British could stake their conquest on the legal doctrine of terra rmllius, which, as Richard Drayton has argued, seemed to provide colonialism with both a moral and a legal footing.7 9 As Macintosh himself suggested, though, India was far front a void when the British found it That the subcontinent had fallen victim to a long string of historical conquests seemed a simple fact. Explaining the reasons 7 7 Macintosh, i. 191. 7 8 Sea, xxvii. 7 9 See, Drayton, Nature’ s Government. See also, David Lowenthal, “The Island Garden: English Landscape and British Identity,” in History, Nationhood, and the Question of Britain, ed. Helen Brocklehurst and Robert Philips (New York: Pal grave, 2004), 137-150. 56 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. behind these conquests was not as easy. Explaining and, more importantly, justifying the British conquest of the subcontinent was even harder still. Macintosh’s answer to these challenges, not unlike the answers of many of his contemporaries, began with the geographic and environmental distinctions between Europe and South Asia. Robert Orme spoke for many when he wrote that it was South Asia’s climate that marked it out from other parts of the world. The heat of the tropical sun quite literally, he suggested, desiccated the South Asian subcontinent As we have seen, Montesquieu had argued that the character of the climate and the population of any given geography were intimately linked, and it was not uncommon for Britons in South Asia to comment on the heat, nor was it uncommon for them to link Indian weather to the social behaviors of the people of the subcontinent8 0 “In happier climes,” Orme argued, “the arts and sciences have been courted to heighten the blessings of life or to assist the labours and wants of it,” but “such a spirit” could not exist for long, he wrote, among “a people bom under a sua too sultry to admit the exercise and fatigues necessary to form a robust nation.”8 1 The natives of South Asia, he argued, had grown listless under the parching tropical sun. So too, however, had generations of invading powers to the subcontinent like the Tartars who had been “enervated” by the “climate and habits of Indostan."® South Asia was, Alexander Dow agreed in his 1772 The History o f Hindustan, marked by its climate. “The languor occasioned by the hot climate of India, inclines the native to indolence and ease.” Based upon the observations of men like Dow and Orme, it was not surprising that John Corneille, upon his arrival, expected South Asia to be a parched and desolate plain. Writing early in 1756, he noted that he had expected to find “nothing but a scorching sun, a 8 0 Montesquieu, 231-234. 8 1 Papers of Robert Omse, OIOC Mss Ear Orme/lndla 1 ,7-10. 8 2 Ibid., 22. See also Harrison, 96-97. 57 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. parched country, inhabited by a set of savage idolaters, sickness, and death in abundance, and life gloomy, sad, and melancholy.” Upon his arrival, however, “the fantome [sic] vanished, and 1 was agreeable [sic] disappointed: for bountiful nature has not here been sparing of their blessings,” According to Corneille, South Asia’s climate was “most delightfully pleasant,” especially from January to March when the heat was tempered by cool breezes. During the rainy seasons, the monsoonal rains “mitigatefd] the power of a perpendicular s u e ” and “refreshed and embellished nature with the charms of a cheerful spring,” while covering “the face of the earth.. .with new verdure.”8 3 Corneille found the soil of the subcontinent to be sandy but, at the same time, “so well adapted to the climate, as to yield two, and in some places three crops in the year.”8 4 Rain was in short supply outside of the monsoon seasons, he admitted, but the people of South Asia stored excess rain during the monsoons “in reservoirs (called in the country language Tasks).”8 5 Indeed, by Corneille’s account, the tanks were only rarely used, as “Nature has ordained it that wherever you dig, water is found at nine or ten feet from the surface.”8 6 la Ms travels across the subcontinent, Corneille had found that this “nearness of water to the surface accounts for the quick growth and great luxuriancy of most of the trees in this country which in a short space of time affords a good shade from the inclemency of the Sun.”8 7 Trees, in particular, stand out in Corneille’s account of the natural environment of South Asia for their rich abundance and sheer diversity. The Banyan tree, he wrote, was a marvel for the fact that it threw out roots from its branches to find water and, in doing so 8 3 Memoirs of Major John Corneille, 113-114. 8 4 Ibid., 118-119. That South Asia was capable of producing two, and in some places three harvests a year, was of more than common interest to British viators. See, John Fryer, Dr. Fryer ’ $ Travels - A New Account ofEast-India and Persia (London, 1698), 186. 8 5 Memoirs of Major John Corneille, 116. ^ Ibid., 119. 8 7 Ibid., 121. 58 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. provided sheltered spaces for humans. “I have seen one of these trees,” he recorded, “that upwards of a thousand men might find shelter under which from its lofty shady head, has a most majestic appearance.”® Its shade aside, the Banyan tree was surpassed, in Corneille’s estimation, by South Asia’s diverse fruiting trees. The subcontinent was rich, he suggested, with “Pineapples, oranges, lemons, limes, citrons, pomegranates, tamarinds, and many more not known in Europe even by name. Most of them adapted to cool and quench thirst.”3 9 No tree, however, compared with the Coco, which was preferred, Corneille wrote, because it “supplied so many wants.” From the Coco, he recorded, South Asians extracted two kinds of liquor; one of which is extracted by butting off the heads o f the tearing shoots, which distils a palatable kind of sharp sweet liquor called Toddy; the other is the fruit, being twice as large as a man’s fist, contains better than half a pint of pleasing water, both have the qualities of cooling and quenching thirst and are esteemed by the native very wholesome.9 0 Eves Dow, it would seem, agreed in large measure with Corneille’s assessment. The South Asian sun was almost unbearably hot, he wrote. It “enervated” the bodies of those on the subcontinent, but, he suggested, it simultaneously rewarded by producing “in a manner spontaneously, the various fruits of the earth.” As a result, South Asians were supplied with, Dow recorded, “subsistence without much toil.” In marked contrast to the climate of his native Britain, Dow noted that South Asians never experienced “the chill blast of winter” because “the seasons are only marked by an arbitrary number of nights and days.”9 1 “Such,” Corneille concluded, “are the gifts of nature” in South Asia, that though “much is wanted,” the people remained “well supplied.”9 2 For Dow and Corneille, the climate of the South Asian subcontinent rendered it a new Eden, a paradise where nature itself supplied every necessity of life. The sun-drenched 122. w Ibid., 122-127. 9 0 Ibid., 123. 9 1 Dow, iii. viii. 9 2 Memoirs of Major John Corneille, 116-123. 59 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. South Asian soil produced abundantly for the people of the subcontinent, explaining how early South Asian civilizations reached far beyond any other ancient civilization that British imperialists had ever encountered - either in Britain or la the wider world. Corneille and Dow traveled throughout Britain’s South Asian possessions and beyond, and the world they saw, in contrast to the imperial world that had opened up before European imperialists in North America, Australia, New Zealand, or many of the South Pacific islands being newly explored in the late eighteenth century, was replete with splendid examples of past civilizations. As the secretary to Colonel John Aidercon from 1754 to 1757, John Corneille traveled back and forth from Madias to Bengal more often than most of Ms contemporaries, and he praised South Asia as “capable of producing everytMng for.. .life.” Consequently, he continued, the subcontinent’s inhabitants had had to undertake only the slightest efforts to cultivate the land or build their civilizations. As a result, Corneille argued that the evidence he saw of South Asia’s past left him with the impression of a civilization “not much better than in a state of nature,” or, he might have said, terra For Corneille to suggest that he, or any European, found South Asia in a “state of nature” was a wholly problematic claim. Unlike the Americas or even Australia, New Zealand, and many of the islands of the South Pacific, South Asia was a densely populated subcontinent prior to the arrival of the European powers, and it was peppered with architectural reminders of the thriving civilizations of the past and the present - many of which could have rivaled European states for size, grandeur, and power. Indeed, Kenneth Murchison, who had served as the surgeon onboard the East Indiaman Fox from 1772 to 1773, noted upon Ms arrival in Calcutta (where he joined the Bengal Medical Service in 1776) that the European settlements in South Asia were weak relative to those of the native m Ibid., 63. 60 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. populations. “Our natural strength in the East is but very trifling compared to that of the Natives,” he wrote in his journal. Noting that the people of South Asia had emerged out of a past that was muck superior to that of most of Europe and that they enjoyed a degree of civilization unparalleled in the rest of the imperial world, he went on to suggest that Britain was foolish to rely on the fact that South Asians were ignorant “of their own superior power” as the sole security for British imperial power in the region.9 4 Unlike the world that the British and their fellow European imperial powers found in other regions of the imperial world, South Asia was a highly developed geography where the myriad of architectural structures and ruins attested to past and present civilizations. Even Corneille had to admit that the world he found as he traveled between the British settlements at Madras and Calcutta was impressive. ‘ The place that first deserves note,” he recorded in his journal in 1755, “Is called Chillingbrum, which is a considerable Pagoda about thirty miles from St. David” The pagoda, Corneille noted, was more a complex than a singular edifice. “It consists,” he wrote, “of several detached buildings, all surrounded with two walls at about forty yards different from each other, high and strong, built in a square form to enclose the whole.” The effect of the complex was that of a strong and impressive architectural achievement - that much Corneille did not deny. At the same time, as Ashis Nandy has argued, the British viewed South Asia’s eighteenth-century splendors in such as way as to cleave them apart from the Indian past “The civilized India was,” lie has written, imagined as part of a “bygone past’ now it was dead and ‘museumized’.”9 5 As such, the pagoda complex at Chillingbrum failed to meet Corneille’s definition of European architectural magnificence. “The inside,” he argued, 9 4 Journal of Dr. Kenneth Murchison, OIOC Mss Ear G52,52. 9 5 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy; Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 17. 61 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “appears not to have been finished.” It did, he noted, have an overall impression of grandeur but not, he suggested, “from any taste in the architecture but from the magnitude of the building; stones of a most prodigious size being raised a considerable height.”9 6 He was similarly struck at Gomboconum where he found a town full of pagodas and famed for having the tallest pagoda, in all of South Asia, consisting, he recorded, “of eleven stories.”9 7 For Corneille, it was the size and scope of South Asia’s architectural offerings that most often struck him. Colonel Robert Kelly of the Madras Army agreed with Corneille when he suggested that the fortresses of South Asia were impressive more for their size than anything else. Between Trichinopoly and Vellore, he wrote, “there is not a Fort worth notice.” Those he had seen were “much out of repair” and required “considerable additions to render” them suitable as fighting fortresses, and, despite their size, many of the forts Kelly observed were still too small to accommodate adequately a modem garrison. The fort at Vellore, for example, could not house a Brigade of troops, “even without horse,” unless the troops were to “lie in the streets, and be pinched for room even in that situation.”9 8 In the face of Dr. Murchison's bleak assessment of the relative strength of British and South Asian power in the eighteenth century, Kelly’s observations seem to suggest that it was the scope of the South Asian terrain and the size of the fortifications of the native powers of the subcontinent, rather than their actual strength, that had impressed the surgeon upon M s arrival in Bengal. Where structures did impress him beyond their size, John Corneille was quick to find faults. Of the pagoda at Chillingbrum, Corneille wrote that Its decoration was, to his mind, less than appropriate, the exterior being decorated with “a heap of cruel, indecent 9 6 Memoirs of Major John Corneille, 81-83. 9 7 Ibid., 9 2. * Memoranda date 1785 by Colonel Robert Kelly, OIOC Mss Eur D1146/6,8-9. 62 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. figures, that from the similitude which they bear to what I have observed on all buildings of that kind, induced me to imagine they are representations of some fabulous traditions concerning their gods,”9 9 While making camp at Miavensmm, Corneille likewise noted that the community’s largest structure was “ornamented...[to] make a tolerable grand appearance” and “painted with a great variety of symbolic figures and ornaments.” Such decoration, he suggested, was “not unpleasing.. .to the beholder,” but, he went on to argue, the building was “gaudy” as a whole.1 ® For Corneille, therefore, sheer magnitude rather than architectural genius distinguished the pagodas of South Asia, allowing him to underestimate the significance of buildings that were older than many in Europe and more advanced architecturally and technologically than most European structures erf similar age. Because the structures he saw in South Asia lacked architectural genius, they were impressive only because they were large - little more significant than the stacked Saracen Stares of Stonehenge on the Salisbury plain. Indeed, compared with the stately grandeur and geometric simplicity of Stonehenge, the gaudy decoration and lascivious ornamentation of South Asian structures defiled rather than elevated Corneille’s perceptions erf what he saw.1 0 1 That John Corneille was disappointed by most of the architectural specimens he found in South Asia is not to say that nothing ever impressed him. His arrival at TricMnopoly, for example, forced Mm to admit that both the town and fortress around which it had b a a built were significant. The large fort was nearly four miles in drcumference, he < ® Memoirs of Major John Corneille, 83. m Ibid.,9G-92. 1 0 1 Stonehenge itself was a popular subject of the eighteenth-century British observer, having been brought to the fore as a symbol of the British past by antiquarians like William Stukeley, whose 1740 Stonehenge: A Temple Restor'd to the British Druids was one of the earliest studies of the monument Interestingly, Stukeley argued that the Druids who built Stonehenge were the descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel and that Britain, as a result, was a new “Promised Land.” See, Simon Schama, A History of Britain: Volume I B - The Fate of Empire, 1776-2000 (New York: Hyperion, 2002) 15. 63 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. wrote, and two strong walls and a deep ditch surrounded the entire structure. “There arc high battlements and round lowers at proper distance; the gateways are four in number and remarkably well defended.”1 0 2 Taken as a whole, Corneille found TricMnopoly “very stupendous, and a work of infinite labour,” and he noted that the city had once been a center of Hindu administration and long the residence of South Asian princes. The city was peppered, he went on to write, with the “remains of.. .stately and grand buildings,” all built “according to the architecture of the country.”1 ® South Asia, therefore, did have its own architectural past - a fact even Corneille could not escape. At the same time, the fort at TricMnopoly that so impressed Corneille was, he noted, made of nothing more than mere earth. The town, he suggested, depended upon the “strong mud fort garrison.”1 0 4 Corneille’s perceptions of TricMnopoly, therefore, were not unlike Philip Pittman’s during his sojourn through the towns and villages between Fort S t George and Fort St. David on the Coromandel Coast These settlements, he noted, were assumed to be of the “'highest perfection” among the natives, though to his own eyes, they were the very “face of misery.” The houses of the native population of the Coromandel Coast were “mostly built of mud without any other furniture than a bank inside raised of the same materials which answers the purposes of beds, tables, and chairs.”1 0 5 That both Corneille and Pittman should so quickly notice that the central structures of native life in South Asia were made of mud revolved their observations back to Corneille’s earlier claim that South Asia existed in a perfect state of nature. Certainly both Pittman and Corneille would willingly have admitted that South Asia was dotted with centers of civilization that far exceeded a “state of nature” per se, but, both men’s 1 0 2 Memoirs of John Corneille, 93-95. m Ibid., 96. m Ibid., 93-95. 1 0 5 Philip Pittman to Edward Gibbon, Senior, 27 February 1771, OIOC Mss Eur E334/5. 64 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. observations make it clear that the physical infrastructure of South Asia, be it the houses of the average native family or the fortresses that protected the community, literally rose up out of the fertile soil of the subcontinent. If, as Alexander Dow had suggested, South Asia was a rich Eden-like garden that provided food enough for the inhabitants of the subcontinent without their lifting a finger on their own behalf, Corneille and Pittman’s observations expanded the scope of the subcontinent's generosity. By giving the civilizations of South Asia environmental causation and by suggesting that the land itself provided the very infrastructure of the subcontinent’s many civilizations, British imperialists could reduce the problematic, if not embarrassing, comparisons that emerged when the ruins of South Asia’s past were juxtaposed against those found in Europe - or in Britain itself. Stonehenge might be rough-hewn, rude, and simple, but it was also stately and geometric. It lacked the gaudy, if not indecent, decoration of South Asian pagodas, and, most significantly of all, it represented a massive work of human labor. Whoever set Stonehenge’s massive slabs of granite on their ends did so only with a great deal of effort, and it was precisely this agency that could be denied to South Asian structures and, by extension, South Asia’s civilizations, if, as Pittman and Corneille’s observations suggest, they simply grew out of sun-enriched soil. South Asia was a rich land, but, as we have seen, eighteenth-century Britons placed little or no value on the wealth of the land itself. Nature, as Uday Singh Mehta has argued, had been defined as a “worthless inheritance.”1 0 6 Human labor alone determined the value of a place; it alone defined ownership. The subcontinent’s rich history was the product of earthly generosity rather than human labor. South Asians had not worked this land; it had worked itself. It was, therefore, reduced to terra nullius. 10 6 See Mehta, 11-12 and 123-128. 65 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. At the same time, connecting South Asia's architectural heritage to environmental causes allowed British observers to avoid what otherwise might have been complicated comparisons between South Asian architectural styles and those of Europe itself. Though the fortress at TricMnopoly was made of mud, Corneille found a great deal about that city that was familiar to Mm - perhaps even uncomfortably so. The town reminded him, he wrote, “somewhat [of] the Gothic” style then popular in Europe.1 0 7 lik e Corneille, Dr. Kenneth Murchison was similarly impressed when he visited the nawab’s palace near Muradabad in December of 1776. The fort outside the palace consisted of three cupolas, he noted, “the principal one in the centre, with small turret and minarets at the comers.” Murchison was particularly taken by the ground plan for the fortress, which was square, and strong along European models but which was simultaneously rich with decorative pillars and columns “similar to what is in Europe called Gothic.”1 0 8 As would Allen and Heber some decades later, Corneille and Murchison, therefore, rationalized the architectural world they found in South Asia not on its own terms but rather in comparison to European normative standards. The forts near Madras and the town of TricMnopoly both made a good effort at achieving something like the Gothic style then popular in Europe, but neither was wholly successful. Murchison was careful to note that the fort at Muradabad was “similar” to the Gothic style, and Corneille found TricMnopoly to resemble the Gothic - but only “somewhat” Both observers, then, made it clear that South Asia’s architectural past did not exactly meet the standards of the European Gothic style. Rather than either recognizing or suggesting connections between South Asian architectural styles and the Gothic style in Europe, Murchison and Corneille carefully denigrated the “pseudo-GotMc” that they uncovered in South Asia, a style, after all, that grew up out of the m Journal of Major John Corneille, 95. 1 0 8 Journal of Dr. Kenneth Murchison, 3-4. 66 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. soil and was rooted not in the human imagination but rather in a state of nature. The pagodas, temples, and palaces of Tiichinopoly and the fortress at Muradabad were prevented from attaining too much significance as indicators of past or present civilizations or of past or present power. Rather, their significance was marginalized, and the structures were reduced to natural phenomena, leaving the people of South Asia without any place in their own history, Europeans, it would seem, fashioned their own styles, constructed their own buildings, and determined their own history. In the garden of Eden that was South Asia, it was nature alone that was the active agent, nature that had given birth to the civilizations of the past, the natural generosity of the soil that had fed the populations with its natural abundance, and nature that had thrown up the houses, palaces, temples, and forts that had housed the people of the subcontinent since the dawn of time. India as Paradise .Lost By the end of the eighteenth century, theories of diversity and difference rooted in the climate, like those set forth by Montesquieu in his The Spirit o f the Laws, were increasingly having to compete with other theories that explained the origins of the world’s divergent populations. At the same time, climatological justifications of difference still enjoyed a degree of popular support, as the observations we have been studying demonstrate.1 0 0 These theories, like the emerging discourses on race, helped to rationalize colonial domination, but, as Edward Said reminded us, they did much more. Postulations of difference that ranked the West above the rest of the world served to justify colonial rule before it was even established.1 1 0 On the one hand, then, South Asia was, as John Corneille had described it, a veritable utopia. The soil was fertile, the tropical weather was both enjoyably pleasant and 1 0 9 See also Sen, 120. 1 1 0 Said, Orientalism, 39. 67 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. salubrious to one’s health, and the native populations realized all their daily needs, seemingly with no effort on their own part. “One might naturally conclude from the foregoing description of this part of the world” he wrote in Ms memoirs, “that where nature has so well done her part, its inhabitants ought to be happy.” In contrast to this picture, was the fact that South Asia had, by the time Corneille arrived in the 1750s, fallen victim to a long progression of invaders and was proving unable to resist conquest at the hands of such European powers as the Dutch, the Portuguese, the French, and, of course, the British themselves. South Asia had the potential to be a new Eden, Corneille argued, but, as history seemed to suggest, humans “so much ha[dj.. .it in our power to spoil even [Nature’s] best gifts that now nineteen in twenty of the people [of South Asia] are wretchedly miserable.”1 1 1 For some eighteenth-century observers, the source of tMs misery might well have been understood as the result of what nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century observers would know as race. Europe’s “discovery” of the rest of the world exposed the continent’s otherwise provincial populations to a myriad of people who were different from them, and eighteenth-century theorists were hard at work trying to explain these differences. Two primary schools of thought increasingly came to dominate tMs debate in the last half of the century. On the one hand, theorists who rooted their model in biblical history argued that the story of creation allowed for only one form of divine creation. Any population that deviated from this norm, therefore, had to have been created outside of the human model - to have an independent descent than from Adam, just as did all of the other nonhuman animals of the planet This line of argument, as Sudipta Sen has shown, would eventually lead to polygenetie accounts of race.1 1 2 Even Linnaeus, Roxann Wheeler has rightly 1 1 1 Journal of Major John Corneille, 127-128, 1 1 2 Sen, 120. 6 8 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. reminded us, originally categorized. Homo sapiens into varieties by their skin color.1 1 3 On the other hand were a group erf theorists who likewise accepted a single ancestor for ail humankind. This group, led by men like Baffon and Blumenbach, argued that this original ancestor’s progeny had spread across the globe and experienced alterations in their physiognomic make-up as a result of climatic differences.1 1 4 As Audrey Smedley has convincingly argued, “race,” as we have come to know it in the modem world, was a category that emerged out of Europe’s engagement with the broader world. The very word, she has noted, did not come into use in English until the seventeenth century, and even then, if meant different things to different people.1 1 5 Scholars tike Martin Daunton and Rick Halpem have agreed, arguing that race was a new and important category in the eighteenth century, but, they have stressed, it was “not the primary category of identity.”1 1 6 In point of fact, the discourse on race was but one (albeit one of the newest) of many categories of difference that would have been intelligible to eighteenth- century Britons freshly arriving in South Asia. “Skin color,” Wheeler has written “was not the o n ly - or even the primary - register of human difference for much of the eighteenth century, and climate was not the only factor believed to shape appearance and influence behavior. Commerce, for example, was reckoned a powerful force in its own right”1 1 7 In addition, Wheeler has argued, eighteenth-century Britons would have relied on two of the oldest categories of difference - religion and clothing.1 1 8 1 B Wheeler, 25. See also, Margarita Dfaz-Andreu, “Britain and the Other The Archaeology of Imperialism,” in History, Nationhood, ami the Question o f Britain, ed. Helen Bfocidehafst and Robert Phillips (New York: Mgrav®, 2004), 227-241. 1 1 4 See Sea, 120. For more on the origins of race and racism, see Ivan Hannaford. Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: The Johns Hopidas University Press, 19%). 1, 5 Audrey Smedley, “The Origin of Racism in England and Spun,” ia Racism: A Global Reader, ed. Kevin Reilly, Stephen Kauffman, and Angela Sordino (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), 63. 1 1 6 Daunton and Halpem, “British Identities,” 4. 1 3 7 Wheeler, 5. m Ibid„ 14. 69 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. For eighteenth-century British observers, India seemed to validate the manifold theories of difference then circulating in Europe. In fact, the subcontinent seemed to suggest that these various theories did not compete with one another at all. Rather, South Asia seemed to provide evidence that difference was, in fact, the product of a series of factors that started with the environment, inscribed itself onto the character of a population, and expressed itself in the cultural and social forms of the community writ large. Alexander Dow expressed this formula the most succinctly in his 1772 The History o f Hindustan. In India, he explained, “the fertility of the soil, which in other Kingdoms constitutes the great prosperity of the natives, was a source of misfortune to the Indians.” South Asia’s very abundance was such that even those who were “in some degree industrious” could not resist the temptation to “indolence.” Where the population was “in want of but a few things,” he argued, the very “natural productions” of the country, in time, “rendered {the population] opulent ”m As one EIC employee in Bengal summarized the case, where “the fertility of the soil easily supplies] the few natural wants of the Natives” the “spirits yield more easily to indolence and indulgence.”1 2 0 William Macintosh agreed. The bounty of the natural environment had stifled the people of South Asia. He wrote that “European nations” where long cold winters shortened the natural growing season for crops and where the soil was as often rocky and infertile as it was otherwise, enjoyed “a love of novelty; and an ardour of improvement, which leads to a contempt of past times, and a high estimation of the present” In Asia, however, he found that the past rather than the present was elevated and revered. “In India, both on tMs side and beyond the Ganges,” he wrote in Ms Remarks on a 1 1 9 Dow, M i. iix-ix. 1 2 0 Charles Grant, Observations on the State o f Society Among the Asiatic Subjects o f Great Britain, GIOC Mss Ear E93,84. 70 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Tour Through the Different Countries o f Europe, Asia, and Africa (1786), “there is a scrupulous tenacity of ancient customs and manners, and the object of emulation is, not to invent any tiling new, but to preserve in their original purity, the usages and the doctrines of the most remote antiquity.”1 2 1 Where the population did not have to work to produce its own livelihood, so Ms argument ran, there was no cause to do other than relish in the past and to luxuriate in the bounty, and even the opulence, of the natural world. South Asia’s natural gifts, as AsMs Nandy has argued, were transformed in the imperial imagination into the seeds of what was perceived as South Asian decay, and tMs decay served both to explain why colonization was possible and, more importantly, why it was necessary. The British mission was to save South Asians from the subcontinent itself.1 2 2 The narrative progression that moved from South Asia’s opulence to South Asian’s indolence did not stop there. Rather, as the earth’s generosity accumulated as wealth in South Asia, the native populations, unaccustomed to having to exert energy on their own behalf, became easy targets for outside invaders, “the objects of depredation to the fierce nations of Northern Asia.”1 2 3 So it was, Philip Francis wrote to Lord North from Calcutta in January 1775, that “the natives of Bengal have for ages past considered themselves as a conquered people, and have willingly paid a fixed tribute to their different conquerors.”1 2 4 John Shore, the future governor-general of British India, agreed, noting that the people of the subcontinent were “timid and servile.” Indians, he continued, were “insolent to their inferiors; to their superiors, generally speaking, submissive,” and the then governor-general John McPherson agreed with Mm, lamenting that “the picture wMch he draws and the low ebb at which he states the popular virtues o f’ the people of South Asia “are not fictitious 1 2 1 Macintosh, i. 189. m Nandy, The Intimate Emmy, 17. m Dow, iii. iix-ix. 1 2 4 Philip Francis to Lord North, 12 January 1775, OlOC Mss Ear K49. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. representations.”1 2 5 South Asia had the potential, Dow thus argued, to be both “the seat of the greatest empire” and “the mixse of the most abject slaves.”1 2 6 The effect of British perceptions of that “state of nature” in which South Asians found themselves trapped was that the native populations of the subcontinent were rendered archaic, primitive, and as much a part of the past as the myriad of ruined temples, palaces, and fortresses that filled the pages of British diaries, letters, memoirs, and travel narratives. South Asia became a living pastiche of human history, a vibrant diorama in which South Asians acted out in their daily lives long-lost examples of the earliest stages of the human condition. Even as a prisoner in Haider A M ’s jail in the kingdom of Mysore, Richard Runwa Bowyer, Second lieutenant of the Hannibal, marveled at the superiority he felt over his captors. His Mysoriaa guards, he wrote, “were much amused at seeing us eat in such a form as having a Cloth laid with China to eat out of and Knives and Forks and Spoons &c.” because “they lay out no Cloth, eat out of non [sic] but coarse Earthen Vessels, using their fingers instead of Forks & c”m For John Corneille, the rude habits of the people of South Asia were nowhere better evidenced than in their dress. Robert Orme noted that the clothing of the people o f South Asia had not changed in almost a full millennium. The dress of the subcontinent, he wrote, “has at this day the same cut which it had a thousand years ago.”1 2 8 John Corneille agreed and was specifically convinced by the style of dress worn by South Asia’s lowest classes. ‘The lower class of males,” he wrote, “go naked, except a little piece of linen in lieu of a fig leaf, and such is the force of custom, that our European ladies here can look on a man in simple nature’s dress.”1 ® The South Asian subcontinent had not only stagnated its civilizations in a state of nature, it would seem, but also the very clothing and 1 2 5 Charles Grant, 69-71. 1 1 6 Dow, H i. k , 1 2 7 Journal of Richard Runwa Bowyer, OIOC Mss Ear A94,181. 1 2 8 Papers of Robert Orme, OIOC Mss Ear Omse/India 1,11. See also Cohn, 106-162. m Memoirs of Major John Corneille, 135. 72 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. habits of its people who ate with their fingers and dressed in rude strips of linen that were no better than the fig leaves that Adam and Eve had adopted at the dawn of biblical history. Environmental causes, therefore, seem to have isfantilized the people of South Asia, making it easy for men like Bowyer, Dow, Mackintosh, and Corneille to dismiss as uncultured, uninspired, and even primitive the ancient civilizations that they encountered on the subcontinent. At the same time, these same observers had to come to terms with the fact that the civilizations did exist and that they did show signs of having been - if not still being - successful, powerful, and even “advanced.” Here again, the natural wealth of the subcontinent provided British observers with a valuable tool for marginalizing the rich heritage of South Asia’s past and present South Asia was indeed, they admitted, a rich place, but, as Corneille was quick to observe, “riches are frequently the cause of,..great men’s destruction.” Both “power and its attendant riches are,” he cautioned, “frequently the road to ruin.”1 3 0 British observers, therefore, came to justify more advanced aspects of the world they found in South Asia as part of a broader trend in the character of South Asians themselves towards too great an enjoyment of luxury and opulence that was, in itself, a result of the ease with which everything came to people of a geography as rich as South Asia. A naturally inspired quest for luxury certainly explained the rich scene one observer found at the end of Ms journey from Cawnpore to Agra, where he first set eyes on the Taj Mahal in January 17%. To the eyes of the young Englishman, the Taj Mahal was an unparalleled vision, the cupola of which could be seen more than five miles distant. “On the Thames,” he wrote, “I should look is vain for a building to compare with the marble Tage [sic] or eves with the Red Stone fort, which extends some hundred yards into the River and is two miles in 1 3 0 Ibid., 283-284. 73 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. circumference.” The first sight of the Taj Mahal left the young British traveler speechless. “When my companion who had been here before, asked me what I thought of it,” he recalled, “I could not answer. I was mate with astonishment! But that best conveyed to him what were my thoughts.”1 3 1 The Taj Mahal may have left British visitors mute, but it did not confound their ability to compare what they found in South Asia with familiar sights from home. The Taj Mahal was “ almost as large as S t Paul’s,” and its four main turrets were “ nearly the height of the Monument,” but it far surpassed both London landmarks in its elaborateness and splendor. The decoration of the Taj Mahal was such that those visiting it in 1796 felt compelled by an unspoken feeling of awe to remove their hats as if “by mechanical impulse.” They were, one member of the party recorded, “overtaken by a sight so truly novel, grand, and magnificent, that imagination itself could scarcely have painted it.”1 3 2 For the British party that visited the Taj Mahal in 1796, therefore, Shah Jahan’s great mausoleum stood in line with the great monuments of metropolitan London except that it surpassed them in ornamentation, grandeur, and richness - certainly something to be expected on a subcontinent so widely given to luxury. Like the Taj Mahal, the apartments built near it for high ranking imperial officials, the ruins of a nearby palace built by Shah Jahan for one of Ms ministers, and the marble and jasper tombs of members of Shah Jahan’s court within the shadows of the great Taj Mahal were all markers of the opulence of South Asia, sights that marveled British observers but not always with sheer wonder alone. Agra, one member of the party remarked, was a city of narrow streets where “most of the houses [were] ill built.” The city was, as such, a marked contrast to the elaborate structures of 1 3 1 Unattributed account of a journey to Agra, 1796, OIOC Mss Eur B284,4-5. m Ibid,, 5-6. 74 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. South Asia’s elite, who, after all, built places like the Taj Mahal simply to bury their dead1 3 3 It was not only the dead, however, who lived in opulence in South Asia. George Patterson, who, when he did move in non-European cliques, moved almost exclusively in elite South Asian circles, observed that the nawab of the Carnatic lived in a splendid style the likes of which he had never encountered previously. The nawab’s palace was “covered all over,” Patterson wrote, “with rich carpets.” In the nawab’s durbar court, the ground was covered with a large piece of cloth of gold in the middle of which sat the nawab’s throne, which was itself “covered with a rich canopy, curiously wrought, fringed, ornamented and supported with four small gilt pillars about 9 feet high one at each comer.”1 3 4 The elegant splendor of Shah Jahan’s Taj Mahal or the Durbar court of the nawab of the Carnatic stood, as John Corneille would note, in marked contrast to the poverty that persisted in most British accounts of South Asia, which was, he argued, “principally owing to that excess of luxury so remarkable in these Eastern people, which grows up with them from their infancy, and requires great sums to answer it’s [sicj demands.” Most of the people of the subcontinent, “notwithstanding the richness of the soil,” were “rather miserably poor,” driven, Corneille argued, to that state by a communal quest for luxury so profound that an elite few impoverished the multitudes. “The state of poverty which the peasants are kept in,” he argued, “frequently reduces them to the utmost misery, for as they are obliged to be satisfied with their daily bread, a bad season puts it out of their power to get even that small pittance, they in the best can only afford.” Many died, he wrote, “for read 1 3 3 Ibid., 5-7. 1 3 4 Wary of George Patterson, GIOC Mss Eur E379/3,26. 75 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. want,” and it was not uncommon to see parents “selling their children to supply the craving calls of nature, often for the small value of about half a crown.”1 3 5 South Asian luxury, therefore, undermined the very fabric of civic humanity. It melted communal ties and frayed the threads of such fundamental relationships as those shared by a parent and a cMld. To the minds of British observers, South Asian luxury and opulence gave way to greed and corruption in a world where, amongst themselves, South Asians were not fellow citizens but rather potential thieves - not thieves, as Warren Hastings wrote in 1772, “like the robbers in England, individuals driven to such desperate courses by sudden wants” but rather “robbers by profession, and even by birth, they are formed into regular communities, and their families subsist by the spoils they bring home to them.1 3 6 In concordance with Hastings’ assessment, Richard Smith noted that the people of South Asia “have no idea of publick spirit - the welfare of the nation is a sentiment unknown - Each individual acts for himself, to accumulate wealth is his first object no matter by what mode.” Across the continent, Smith lamented, “private interest is the only God they worship.”1 3 7 While they may have agreed with Smith in general that private interest motivated most South Asians, many British observers of eighteenth-century South Asia would not have called it their only god. Indeed, British observers commonly commented on South Asia’s religions, and most linked the subcontinent’s religions to broader social problems. By the eighteenth century, the South Asian subcontinent had long been controlled by the Mughal emperor from his Islamic court in Delhi, a fact all British observers noticed. John Corneille distinguished between “the Moors who now govern this country,” a people who “are Mahometans,” and “the original inhabitants” who are “Pagans.. .divided into a great number 1 3 5 Memoirs of Major John Corneille, 283-285. For more see, Bridget Orr, “‘Stifling Pity in a Parent’s Breast’: Infanticide and Savagery in Late EgMeeEth-Centuiy Travel Writing,” in Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolomal Theory in Transit, ed. Steve Clark (New York: Zed Books, 1999), pp. 131-146. m Charles Grant, 68. 1 3 7 Papers of Robert Orme, OIOC Mss Ear Orme/OV88,171. 76 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of Casts, or Tribes, distinguished one from the other by a painted mark on the forehead.”1 3 8 For most eighteenth-centoy British observers, South Asia’s Hindu population was both more novel than its Islamic counterpart and more closely tied to the subcontinent’s ancient customs and traditions and to its present state of being. According to Corneille, Hinduism’s caste structure accentuated self-mterestedness among the people of South Asia. Each caste held other castes “in great contempt,” thus undermining any sense of civic community. Where Christianity supported a sense of community and charity in Europe, Corneille saw Hinduism as socially divisive. What else could be expected, he asked, of a system in which members of superior castes “think [themselves] defiled if [they] even touch one of an inferior?”1 3 9 Governor Holwell sustained Corneille’s view when he suggested that Hindus were a “people, who from their infancy are utter strangers to the idea of common faith.” They were, he went on, “crafty, superstitious, litigious, and a wicked people,” and the worst among them were the members of the Brahmin caste.1 4 0 As many historians have noted, the British defined India’s Brahmins as the heirs and guardians of traditional Hinduism. They relied upon the fact that the Brahmins used written texts to narrate their religious heritage, preserve their liturgical traditions, and explain their theological beliefs. Brahmins’ iistellectaalism, it has been argued, made them the most readily familiar caste to eighteenth-century Europeans, themselves influenced by the reason, rationalism, and text-based intellectualism of the Enlightenment1 4 1 At the same time, as Holwell’s reflection suggests, the Brahmin’s supremacy among Hindu castes set them up as 1 3 8 Memoirs of Major John Corneille, 131. m Ibid. 1 4 0 Charles Grant, 66. 1 4 1 See Thomas R. Metcalf, ideologies o f the Raj (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 11- 13. See also Robb, 16-20. See also Sugata Bose and Ayesfaa lalal, Modern South Asia (New York: Routtedge, 1998), 77. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. targets for imperially-minded Europeans. If the Brahmins held power, then it was from the Brahmins that power had to be wrested. Expanding on Holwell’s point, Charles Grant argued that the entire structure of Hinduism was little more than “the work of a crafty and imperious Priesthood, who feigned a divine relation and appointment, to invest their own order in perpetuity with the most absolute empire over the civil state of the Hindoos, as well as over their minds.”1 4 2 Hinduism was, as such, more a political system for control than a religion, a political system, Grant would argue, designed to secure the Brahmin’s “absolute dominion,” a dominion that forced itself upon the attention of British observers for the fact that “no similar invention among men seems to have been so long and so completely successful.”1 4 3 As a religion, Hinduism, therefore, mirrored the wider sense of self-iaterestedness that drove the populations of South Asia Ignorance alone, John Corneille suggested, prevented the masses of the subcontinent from realizing the degree to which they had been subjugated by the Brahmins and a religion “whose principal view.. .is self interest.”1 4 4 If Hinduism sustained Brahmin self-interestedness, it did so, most British commai.taf.ors noted, through superstitious channels that reminded eighteenth-century British Protestants of Roman Catholicism. Abraham Caldecott, accountant-general of Bengal from 1793 to 1802, wrote home to Miss Pettet of Dartford in Kent that Hindus were “idolaters,” which, as she would know, meant that they put “implicit faith in the assertions of their priests.” They were blindly dedicated to ceremonies such as widow-burning and “likewise another custom” that sounded like a perversion of the Maypole dances that had been swept 1 4 2 Charles Grant, 98. 1 4 3 Ibid., 170. m Journal of Major John Corneille, 131-132. 78 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. away in Britain in the wake of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Caldecott wrote that the ritual began when the people erected a long post by orders of their priests and fix a cross on at the top of it, with a groove fit for it to turn round upon; at one end of the cross pole, two large hooks are fastened, which being thrust into the fleshy part of a mans shoulders, he is in that manner hoisted up by means of a rope fixed to the other end of the cross pole, and is swung round with great velocity, as fast as those who have hold of the rope can ran round with it.. .sometimes however, the flesh gives way and the poor deluded wretch is fortunate if he escapes with his life; but never without a broken limb; yet such is their infatuation that an accident of that kind does not deter others from undergoing the same severe penance.1 4 5 The ritual, he noted, “shews [sic] to what a pitch of Enthusiasm the ideas of religion has [sic] convinced them.” As such, he concluded, Hindus were a close-minded community, easily persuaded “to the belief of the most improbably [sic] stories” and prejudiced “against the reception of any new Doctrine which the Christian church might wish them to adopt”1 4 6 Superstition, Charles Grant agreed, extended “among the Hindoos to every hour, and every business of life.” Hindus, he noted, “are afraid of evil Spirits, such as are denominated by us, Demons and Genii. They believe the world to abound with them; every little district has its haunted places; and Persons who pass them often make some offering, or render homage to appease and conciliate the residing Genii.” Hindu believers performed “a short exorcism” when people yawned, they employed “ablutions and ceremonies” in their daily lives to remove “contracted defilements,” and they observed “rigorous fasts, and a still greater number of festivals.”1 4 7 As Ueutenant-Colonel Robert Kyd of the Bengal Army suggested, “every person conversant with the Roman Catholick forms of worship, must have been struck with the minute conformity of the ceremonial Hindu Poujah with the Roman 1 4 5 Abraham Caldecott to Miss Pettet, 14 September 1783, OIOC Mss Eur D778. m Ibid. Bor more on this religious practice, see also, Fryer, 179. 1 4 7 Charles Grant, 153-164. 79 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Calholick mass; and have been led on such ground to consider the one originating from the other.” Kyd went on to argue that certain it is, that the various genuflections, Crossings, covering and uncovering of the Chalice, Elevation of the latter, adoration, accompanied with the tingling of a small bell, Prostration, decoration of the portable altar, evocation of the Deity in a dead language, tear the most minute conformity with that of the Roman Cathotick [sic] superstition, together with their confession and absolution by their religious directors, with the dangerous degradation of the morals of the body with the people, accruing from this interceded thralldom impos’d upon them by the religious order.m Kyd, a close friend of the scholar and orientalist William Jones, rationalized the difference he found in South Asia in much the same way that other Britons had done before Mm, by comparing South Asian institutions to those of Europe. Where others had found a disparity between comparable institutions, Kyd, however, found direct lines of compatibility between Roman Catholicism and Hinduism, both of wMch stood in marked contrast to Britain’s established Protestant order. To Kyd’s mind, Hinduism, like Catholicism bound the worshiping public to rituals and superstition. Both, he argued, relied upon “the performance of their devotions which they generally utter with a distracted and listless inattention,” and both left their congregation’s eternal souls to the “varied external Pantomimic Mummery of the Priesthood.”1 4 9 As it did under the absolute monarchy of Bourbon France, therefore, religion stifled the populations of India under the twin thumbs of superstition and the authoritarian power of an out-of-touch priesthood. For most British observers ia eighteenth-century South Asia, therefore, the Brahmin caste was a mlcrocosmic study of the problems that plagued the subcontinent more broadly, A naturally innate desire for luxury, John Corneille argued, explained the profound self- interest that, he felt, drove the Brahmin priestly class. It had given rise to religious forms 1 4 8 Papers of Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Kyd, OIOC Mss Eur F 95/i, 12. m Ibid„ 12-13. 80 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. that were superstitions and self-interested as well as to rampant poverty in most parts of South Asia. Greed, he wrote, and a desire for wealth, drove the strongest to plunder the weaker elements of society, and the advent of Islamic control over the subcontinent had grafted these features of South Asian society to the political system. “The original inhabitants of this country,” he explained, “were Gemtoo idolaters distinguished by their different casts, but at present it is, and has been for many years in the hands of the Moors. And where they reign despotism prevails.”1 5 9 Under Mughal control, “the inferior classes are kept in extreme poverty,” he explained, by “being constantly plundered by the stronger, they in turn by their superiors and so on to the highest in power, who accumulates riches by the distress of his subjects.”1 5 1 Luxury and opulence, therefore, infected South Asia’s political structure as well as its religious institutions and broader culture, making honorable, fair, equitable, and just governance an anomaly and almost impossible on the subcontinent. The people of South Asia, Corneille argued, languished “from the abominable government that prevails over this kingdom which is nothing but a perfect scene of tyranny, exerted from the highest in power, to the lowest”1 3 2 Corneille’s observations on South Asian political systems were not novel in the eighteenth century. Montesquieu’s The Spirit o f the Laws had argued that South Asia’s climate and geography necessitated a despotic political system. “If servitude there were not extreme,” Montesquieu had cautioned, “there would immediately be a division that the nature of the country cannot endure.”1 ® But, for John Corneille, the nature of South Asia’s 1 5 0 Memoirs of Major John Corneille, 282. 1 5 1 Ibid., 129-130. ! S 2 Ibid., 127-128. 1 S Montesquieu, 283. 81 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. princely systems of governance remained the single greatest detraction from the subcontinent’s Edenic perfection. South Asia, he suggested, deservedly.. .enjoyed the epithet of rich - for very few countries in the known world can compare with it for the goodness of the soil, variety and abundance of manufactures, greatness of its rivers, numbers of its inhabitants, and were it not for the earthyness of its climate (which it must be observed is remarkably so only to Europeans) and the badness of its government; two great ingredients towards the happiness of life, it would ire a desirable part of the world to reside in.1 5 4 For Corneille, it was the governing systems of South Asia that most concretely devastated the natural gifts with which the subcontinent had otherwise been blessed. Eastern government, he argued, was despotic, and despotism, so his line of reasoning ran, induced nothing more than “tyrannick [sic] slavery [to] mar the best gifts of nature.” Thus, he argued, “are the greatest advantages of nature thrown away, if we do not improve them.”1 3 5 South Asia’s political systems, therefore, stood in sharp contrast, as far as Corneille could see, with the parliamentary monarchy of Britain, a system that produced “liberty, and good laws, plenty, ease, and happiness.”1 5 6 But, as Charles Grant, an EIC Director and later the Company’s Chairman, noted “despotism is not only the principle of the Government of Hindustan, but an original, fundamental, and irreversible principle in the very frame of society.” South Asia, he wrote, had been a place of “complete despotism from the remotest of antiquity.”1 5 7 Despotism, like plentiful food, grew up natively in South Asia, so British observers would argue, as if from the soil itself. For the British in South Asia in the eighteenth century, it was not only to historic despotism from Ihe dark recesses of antiquity that one needed to look to find supposed examples of South Asia’s proclivity towards despotic regimes. The British faced threats not 1 3 4 Memoirs of John Corneille, 268-269. 1 3 5 Ibid., 286. 1 5 6 Ibid., 282. 1 5 7 Charles Grant, 85-%. 82 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. only from other European imperial competitors on the subcontinent but also from native powers like the Mahratta States and the Mughal empire itself. Foremost among Britain’s indigenous competitors in eighteenth-century South Asia was the Kingdom of Mysore, newly restructured under Haider All and made more forceful and feared still by Ms son, Tipu Sultan. The Kingdom of Mysore presented the British with a double-edged challenge in eighteenth-century South Asia. Not only did Mysore, like France, challenge the onset of British supremacy across the subcontinent, it threatened also to preempt the rise of European hegemony in South Asia - holding out the prospect that adventurous European imperialists could be defeated by native powers in South Asia. Major-General Thomas Munro of the Madras Army wrote home to Ms father in October 1782 that the Kingdom of Mysore was a formidable enemy and a threat, he suggested, on a par with that presented by the rebellious American colonists. “In your letter of May 18, you desire me to give you some account of our wars out here,” Munro wrote. “I would” he continued, “certainly have prevented your request, had I imagined that while you are so deeply interested in the facts of America, you could have paid any attention to the disputes in India.” Those in Britain itself, Munro argued, were being Mind-sided by the American war. Worse still, they were allowing the American rebellion to skew their perception of the military situation in South Asia. Munro had not forgotten “what wrong notions people have of Hyder - 1 did not dare mention things as they really are, lest you should have said that we made a great deal of noise about routing a parcel of blacfanoors.” Munro went on to warn Ms father, though, that, “as a politician and a soldier, it would be doing Hyder injustice to look upon him in the same light as other Eastern Princes - Ms army is not only formidable 83 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. by their numbers, but by the bravery of the adventurers that crowded to his standards from every comer of India”1 5 8 Labeling Mysore as a despotic kingdom, therefore, was a cunning move on the part of British observers, a move that denigrated the enemy and made Mysore’s military strength less significant than its political system at precisely the moment that Britain doubted its ability to match Mysore’s military might. Richard Bowyer, as we have seen, found comfort in the fact that, though he was a prisoner in Haider Alt’s prison, he could laugh at his captors for their childlike manners and uncouth eating habits. He also found some solace in the fact that he was the prisoner of a vicious and even barbarous prince, choosing to match Haider Ali’s despotic cruelty with the fortitude and stoicism of British civility. TMs strength of character, he later remembered, had seen him through not only the physical pain of torture but also the mental and emotional anguish he felt when he learned that Haider Ali’s son, Tipu Sultan, “had ordered all the English prisoners should be put to death.”1 ® Mysore’s despotic and corrupt political system fostered a violent and abusive prison culture, ta t it also fostered a world in which British prisoners had to participate in bribery and corruption merely to survive. Lieutenant Colonel James Dalrymple of the Madras Army, like Bowyer, was taken prisoner in Mysore and housed at the Bangalore Prison. Inside the prison, Dalrymple wrote Ms mother, he survived only through a network of bribery. “I was lucky enough to get some cash conveyed in [to] me before I left the Carnatic,” he explained, “and it has not only been of great service to myself, hut to many of my poor fellow sufferers who I have found without a farthing to bless themselves with.” In contrast to South Asian self-interest, Dalrymple shared his limited cash supplies with those suffering with Mm in the dark prison. “It is only by bribery and corruption that we can get 1 3 8 Papers of Major-General Sir Thomas Munro, OIOC Mss Ear F151/140,43. 1 5 9 Journal of Richard Runwa Bowyer, 60 and 140. 84 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. any thing conveyed into us,” he explained to Ms mother, noting that the very writing supplies he used to write to her were contraband that Ms guards had smuggled into his cell against express orders. Directly disobeying the commands of their superiors, his guards had taken the Englishman’s bribes, rolled paper into a quill, passed the quill into their bodies, and surreptitiously passed Dalrympie5 s letters out of the prison in the same fashion.1 ® 0 Bowyer and Dalrympie, therefore, both found that their prison experience in Mysore confirmed their belief that Mysore was a corrupt and despotic kingdom. For British prisoners like Bowyer and Dalrympie, a judicious combination of faith in their own superiority as Britons and indulgence in the very system of bribery and corruption that sustained the Mysorian prison system got them through their ordeals, but for native South Asians like Cowasjee, a Mahratta bullock-driver for the ElC’s Bengal Army, life in Haider All and Tipu Sultan’s prisons was more complicated. Cowasjee first caught the attention of the British public in 1794 when The Gentleman’ s Magazine ran a story along with an engraving that told of the remarkable reconstructive plastic surgery that had rebuilt Cowasjee’s nose from a flap of skin cat from his forehead after the bullock-driver had been captured by Tipu Sultan and had one of his hands and his nose cut off as punishment for serving the British.1 ® 1 The Gentleman’ s Magazine told Cowasjee’s story with both words and pictures, and both captured the public’s attention. The engraved print included with the story included a portrait of Cowasjee as he appeared after Ms surgery, and it illustrated the basic procedural steps that bad been taken to carve Ms new nose out of his forehead. In addition to marveling at the success of Cowasjee’s surgery, the print celebrated the Mahratta’s new nose as a medical m Lieutenant lames Dalrympie to Ms mother, 1 1 January 1781, QIOC Mss Eur £330. 1 6 1 For copies of the news item covering Cowasjee and M s remarkable surgery, see Mss Eur Photo Eur 75. Also see The Gentleman’ s Magazine and Historical Chronicle (October 1794), 891-892. 85 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. miracle and a victory oyer the physical punishments and harsh cruelties inflicted on the native South Asian by Haider All and Tipu Sultan. A subscription book from Bombay dated 12 March 1794 records that 44 individuals bought copies of the unframed image at ten rupees each and 43 bought copies in frames for one gold motor, and it was not only Britons in South Asia who purchased the portrait The subscription itself notes that those who wished to have copies shipped to Britain either for themselves or for their family and friends could do so “without further expense” courtesy of the EfC, an offer accepted by none other than Joseph Banks who purchased four enframed copies of the portrait and had them delivered to him in London.1 ® Illustration 5. The Bullock-Driver, Cowasjee, The Gentleman's Magazine, October 1794.1 6 8 Cowasjee’s story served two purposes. First, the graphic image of the disfigured South Asian reminded Britons of the cruel enemy they faced in Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan. m This subscription list can be found among the papers of Sir Charles Warre Malet, OIOC Mss Eur F149/97. 1 6 3 Image scanned from The Gentleman’ s Magazine (October 1794), 891-892. 86 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. At precisely the moment when, as Michel Foucault: argued in Discipline and Punish, “the gloomy festival of punishment was dying out” in the public squares of Europe, Cowasjee’s missing nose suggested the archaic, even primitive, nature of the despotism that Europeans like Montesquieu had argued was natural to the subcontinent’6 * Second, however, Cowasjee himself reminded Britons that it was their interest in Cowasjee that had saved Mm from Mysore’s princes. Cowasjee could easily have been forgotten, the subscription leaflet tells us. He had, after all, languished with nothing but a gaping hole in the center of Ms face for more than a year after Haider A M and Tipu Sultan ordered his nose cut off. It was only after he had been released from captivity in Mysore and taken under the care of Ms employer, the EIC, that any action had been taken to come to his aid, only then was he sent to Poonha where a native doctor was said to be able to perform this ancient South Asian surgery and only then that he had realized the hope of a quiet life in peace and comfort as “a pensioner of the Honourable East India Company.”3 ® As viewed by British observers in the eighteenth century, therefore, life in South Asia was nasty, brutish, and short. The subcontinent’s political systems relied on terror, cruelty, brutality, and fear to subjugate the native populations. As Sander Gilman has suggested, the British interpreted Cowasjee’s mutilation as “a sign of the primitiveness of their enemies and their own moral superiority.”1 6 6 Why else, the article in The Gentleman’ s Magazine suggested, was South Asia a place where a surgery to replace noses that had been cut off could be described as “not uncommon” and as having “been practiced from time m Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 8. For more oa British fears of physical mutilation at the hands of South Asian princes, see Fryer, 163. 1 6 5 See the Papers of Sir Charles Warre Maiet, OIOC Mss Eur ¥149/97. m Sander Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History o f Aesthetic Surgery, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 76. 87 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. immemorial?”1 6 7 fa this worid, the British could feel that they were bringing to the subcontinent new forms of enlightened political administration, just as they felt they were helping the South Asians combat the forces of superstitious religiosity and, indeed, the fetters of nature itself that bound them in the past. Certainly they could not believe that South Asians could be expected to change their own political structures because the British reasoned that the physical environment of the subcontinent had left the native populations too indolent to act on their own behalf. South Asians, Alexander Dow argued, thought “the evils of despotism less severe than the labour of being free.” In short, the heat of the South Asian sun rendered “tranquility.. .the cMefest object of [a South Asian’s] desires. His happiness consists in a mere absence of misery; and oppression must degenerate into a folly, which defeats its own ends before he calls it by the name of injustice,”1 6 8 Robert Onne agreed, noting that “the sway of despotic government” had taught the people of South Asia “the necessity of patience.”1 6 9 For Orme, patience here was no virtue, which was precisely how the British could justify imperialism as an obligation to assist the people of South Asia by teaching them the virtue of action. British observers in eighteenth-century South Asia imagined an India that lacked any sort of agency and which juxtaposed Britain with India, liberty with despotism, luxury with prudence, productivity with indolence, self-interest with civic-mindedness, and superstition with enlightened Protestantism. India was a degraded place, but, this model posited, it did not have to remain so. As Charles Grant argued in his 1792 text Observation on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, “we cannot infer from their past state.. .that they would under different circumstances for ever remain the same.” This, he 1 6 7 See QIOC Mss Eur Photo Eur 75. See also The Gentleman’ s Magazine and Historical Chronicle (October 1794), 891-892. Cowasjee’s surgery is also detailed in Gilman, 73-80. m Dow, M L vii-vii. 1 6 9 Papers of Robert Orme, QIOC Mss Eur Orroe/India 1,28. 88 R eproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. suggested, would be to make a fallacious argument, “for upon this principle the Britons ought still to be going naked, to be feeding on Acorns, and sacrificing human victims on the druidical groves.”™ Britain had pulled itself from a bleak historical past; India had failed to do the same. Eighteenth-century Britons understood “India” only as it emerged from this nexus of comparisons, a set of comparisons that both explained how South Asia had come to be subjugated to its own past and why it was that South Asia needed to be fettered to British power and pulled into the present. The imagined India that filled the minds of eighteenth- century observers was, therefore, an India that could be conquered and, more importantly, one that should be conquered as well. 1 1 0 Charles Grant, 188. 89 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter Two “Flesh and Blood Cannot Bear I f ’ Temptation and C om iptfljitj in British Incfa Transformations On Thursday, 28 March 1771, The Bristol Gazette and Public Advertiser reported that “the metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls is one of the principal doctrines of the religion of the Bramins [sic].” It was, the paper continued, “to this opinion [that] an English sailor was indebted for his life.” The sailor, it would seem, had been out for a good day of shooting, but, “unacquainted with the mythology of the country, he killed a bird which those people rank among their gods of the first class.” Unfortunately for the Englishman, a native South Asian witness to his actions promptly accused him of deicide. According to The Bristol Gazette’ s report, “the inhabitants of the neighbouring villages, immediately assembled, seized the sacrilegious European, and condemned him to death.” The paper lamented that “he had not the least hopes of escaping his sentence, as the enraged Indians seemed fully determined to avenge their God.” Bound and afraid, the English sailor seemed doomed, but, as fate would have it, a traveling Jewish merchant happened by just as the execution was set to begin. The merchant had, “by chance...heard of the Englishman’s misfortune,” and he “pressed through the crowd, and pretended to prostrate himself on the earth in order to pray” in such a way that he could speak confidentially to the convicted sailor. “You have only one way left to escape death,” he cautioned, urging the sailor to “say to these people: My father died some time ago, his body was thrown into the sea, and his soul passed into the body of a fish. As I was walking on the seashore, the fish, my father, appeared on the surface of the water; at this instance, the bird that I killed darted at him with an intention to devour him before my Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. eyes - Could I suffer this? - 1 shot him only to prevent his murthering [sic] my father. The English sailor repeated the merchant’s tale to the angry mob, and “they were satisfied with his justification, and quietly suffered him to go about his business.”1 The editors, printers, and writers at The Bristol Gazette very likely ran the story of the fortunate English sailor foe no other reason than that it was an amusing tale and a fun story - a bit of human interest news that celebrated an Englishman’s ability to outwit a group of Sooth Asian Hindus using their own religious beliefs against them. The story ran, after all, under the headline “Extraordinary Anecdote of an English Sailor.” At the same time, this simple yet extraordinary anecdote does point in the direction of broader historical issues. In the story, the sailor wins his freedom only by convincing his Hindu captors that his father’s soul has “transmigrated” into the body of a fish, that he saw his father in the fish, and that he killed the bird only to save his father’s aquatic soul from an ignominious end in the gullet of some seafowl For the sailor, liberty, not to mention life itself, rested on the fact that Ms father’s death and burial in the waters off the Malabar coast had literally transformed him by ushering his soul into the body of a fish. Liberty and life also rested, however, on the fact that the young sailor and Ms Jewish savior themselves indulged in Hindu theology. Certainly, neither believed for a moment that the fish in question was an avatar of the soul of the saitet’s t e d father. Nor did either genuinely believe that the sailor had saved a soul by killing the bird. But, both m m engaged freely in the iserfogica! narratives o f Hinduism far the sake o f negotiating a treacherous scenario - a scenario unique to South Asia and out o f which they could not have extricated themselves were it not for their willingness, if only 1 The Bristol Gazette and Public Advertiser, 28 May 1771. 91 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. temporarily, to indulge in Hindu beliefs that they almost certainly thought to be superstitious nonsense. For just a brief moment, then, the Protestant sailor and the Jewish merchant played the part of believing Hindus. Having found themselves in a distinctly South Asian paradigm, they adopted South Asian beliefs to navigate their course. They allowed that the father’s soul had been transformed, and, in doing so, they allowed themselves to be transformed as well. What would have constituted nothing more than an innocent day of shooting in the home counties proved to be a significant theological struggle, a matter of life and death, on the Malabar coast. Life and survival on the margins of empire required flexibility of thought and fluidity of character. When in India, one did as the Indians did, thought as the Indians thought, and believed as they believed because negotiating life in imperial settings required a new set of tools. As had the sailor’s escape from execution on the Malabar coast, the very process of building Britain’s empire in South Asia in the last half of the eighteenth century revolved around a series of transformations. As we have seen, eighteenth-century observers imagined India along very specific lines. Theirs was a cunning imperial move that infantilized South Asia from the outset and justified Britain’s conquest of the subcontinent For Britons such as William Harwood, this way of thinking about India transformed the subcontinent, marginalizing it as past of a chain of imperial islands that were scattered around the world and rendering Britain the center of gravity for the entire global structure. Writing with the benefit of hindsight from the mid-nineteenth century, Alexis de Toccpevflle appreciated the ways in which the conquest of South Asia had transformed Britain. It was not, he wrote in a letter of 1857, “heroic vanity” that led the island nation to hold so tenaciously to its South Asian empire. Rather, he argued, it was the fact that “the 92 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. loss of India would greatly lower the position of England” that drove the British to stay in South Asia, even in the wake of the uprisings of 1857. “Nothing,” he wrote, “is so wonderful as the conquest, and still more the government, of India by the English. Nothing so fixes the eyes of mankind on the little island of which the Greeks never heard even the name.” For de Tocqueville, its South Asian empire made Britain more than a small island nation. Because it ruled South Asia, Britain seemed bigger than it was, and, de Tocqueville continued, “after having filled this vast place in the imagination of the whole human race,” no nation could “safely withdraw from it.”2 The India that eighteenth-century Britons imagined was both easily mid justifiably conquered. More importantly, an imagined India became the foundation for a chimerical Britain itself. Britons imagined India, but the Britain they knew was no more real. It was only because they had imagined India as small, primitive, and conquerable that Britons could continue to see Britain itself as large, civilized, and the conqueror. The process of imagining India transformed both South Asia and Britain. The two fictions were mutually constitutive. The process of empire, therefore, rested on transformations - both in South Asia and in Britain itself - transformations that were frequently veiled. To eighteenth-century observers, South Asia seemed a place where nature itself had comipted the native populations.3 This selected vision masked the fact that South Asia had a rich past and made it far easier to justify British domination across the subcontinent The India of dghteenth- century British imaginations also transformed Britain from an island nation into one charged with the salvation, the liberation, and the education of the people of South Asia. If nature 2 Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir, Letters, and Remains o f Alexis de Tocqueville (London: MacMillan and Co., 1861), 409. 3 For more on the transformative power of the Indian landscape, sec Harrison, 25-26. 93 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. had stifled South Asia’s native populations, history called Britain to rescue them, hiding, as de Tocqueville noted, the fact that Britain was nothing more than an island. A series of fictitious moves allowed eighteenth-century Britons to transform South Asia into a stagnant environment that debilitated the native populations and cleft the subcontinent from civilization and, similarly, to position Britain as the very center of civilization itself. The India and the Britain imagined into being by eighteenth-century British observers justified British imperialism cm the subcontinent, masking India’s past, Britain’s relative size, and, perhaps, Britain’s will to power. An environmental argument assumed transformations that were beneficial to Britain’s imperial project, but, as this chapter will demonstrate, that same argument opened the possibility of future transformations, malignant transformations, for Britons and for Britain. The environmental core of the India imagined by eighteenth-century Britons established a dangerous Ideological precedent, engendering what Ashis Nandy has called “a false sense of cultural homogeneity in Britain.”4 Though the dramatic differences Britons found in South Asia made Britain look more unified than it was, the origins of that difference constituted a dangerous menace for the metropolitan world. If South Asia’s bounty had both produced a once-great civilization and brought it to decadence and ruin, so too, some would argue, could South Asian luxury pollute, even destroy, the structures of metropolitan Britain and its imperial holdings. As Anna Clark has rightly noted, environmentally-rooted justifications of difference lacked the stability of later categories; they left open the perils of contamination and degeneration.5 South Asians, after all, were not intrinsically decadent; their environment had rendered them so. What prevented Britons 4 Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 32. 5 Clark, Scandal, 6. 94 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in South Asia from taking the same path backwards? How could they be saved from the same fate that had overtaken the native populations? These were the threatening questions that emerged from eighteenth-century British observers’ imagined India, questions that placed employees of the EIC on the very edge of a precarious frontier between the treacherous environment of South Asia and the elevated civilization of metropolitan Britain. The process of empire required that Britons, like those in the employ of the company, go out to India, but, in doing so, it also required that these Britons expose themselves to what was perceived to be the corrosive environment of South Asia - the luxury, the extravagance, the wealth, the indolence, and the decay. As Robert Clive would argue before the House of Commons in 1772, Britain’s imperial project in South Asia placed young British men, men who were themselves “not worth a groat,” in settings where they were tempted daily by “bags of silver,” if not by jewels, gold, and other forms of wealth. The subcontinent, Clive argued, was not unlike a beautiful woman. It was possible to resist South Asia’s temptations for a short while, but, as Clive knew well enough, any Briton, who was not killed by the diseases common among Europeans in South Asia, might spend decades on the subcontinent - constantly tempted by the allurements of wealth and the charms of luxury. “He must,” Clive concluded, “be seduced at last” The matter was a simple one, as he argued, because “Flesh and Blood cannot bear it.”6 Clive’s arguments touched on the very root of the problem facing the British imperial structure in South Asia. The dark-skinned people of South Asia were different than Britons. To eighteenth-century British observers, Indians were a race apart because South Asia itself had changed them. The gap between them and Britons could be measured in many ways - human habits, religious beliefs, political institutions, social behaviors, and 6 Draft of Lord Clive’s Speech, 30 March 1772, OIOC Mss Eur G37/3,51-54. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. cultural practices. But, the intellectual construction of difference - of race - in the eighteenth century, was still fluid enough to be permeable, at least in theory.7 Was it possible for an Indian to change by being brought to Britain? Perhaps. But, what, then, of Britons who went to India? The currents of empire flowed out from and in to Britain in the eighteenth century, and EIC employees who moved back and forth between Britain and South Asia were their human manifestations - a fact that made them a threatening class, a threat both to the imagined sense of the national self as well as to the hierarchy of the nation’s empire. As we have seen, the construction of imperial South Asia was a series of comparative fictions predicated on difference and distinction, and EIC employees were uniquely and dangerously positioned to expose those fictions. Having themselves been exposed to South Asia, they risked being transformed by South Asia’s environment and becoming the means by which South Asia’s luxury, wealth, and even its despotism could flood backwards into Britain. The appearance of South Asian commodities, luxuries, wealth, or cultural forms in metropolitan Britain, in turn, threatened to eradicate the differences upon which South Asia had been imagined and to force the teleologies of South Asia’s imagined historical progress on Britain itself. If differences were erased, distance would be rendered irrelevant, and the fabricated imperial hierarchy atop which Britain sat would collapse. Dislodged from its position as the normative model, Britain no longer seemed a metropolitan carter. It would become, what it always had been, an island nation.8 This reality, then, the fragile nature of an imagined India, and the jeopardy such a model presented in domestic Britain rests at the center of the nabob controversy because, through their comparative commentaries on the world they 7 See Wheeler, 6. 8 Wilson, The Island Race, 5 and 54-58. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. found in South Asia, EIC employees helped to conjure a delicate world into being which, as this chapter will demonstrate, they imperiled when they came home to Britain as nabobs. Corruptible Visitors to India’s Eden Eighteenth-century British observers in South Asia imagined India as a lush garden - a natural Eden - that had made its populations lazy and indolent precisely because it supplied them with all of their daily needs and built for them ancient civilizations. Despotic governments and corrupting religions had not been enough to rouse the spirits of South Asia’s populations out of the natural state of indolence into which they had been lulled by the bounty of their subcontinent, leaving it to British imperial efforts to shake despotism and superstition out of South Asia following the historical precedents established by Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, and the English Reformation. The teleologies conjured in the imaginations of eighteenth-century British observers in South Asia were not entirely unproblematic imperial tools. As we have seen, eighteenth-century Britons had to contend with a number of realities in South Asia that simply did not exist in other imperial landscapes - from the ancient ruins of past civilizations to the powerful military strength of kingdoms like Mysore. Moreover, in South Asia, the British faced the competition of other European powers like the French, the Dutch, and the Portuguese. In the case of the Dutch and the Portuguese, the British faced a particularly critical challenge since both had arrived in South Asia long before either the British or the French, and both had established settlements and imperial outposts on the subcontinent that were larger and wealthier than British interests. Because both the presence of the Dutch and the Portuguese predated that of the British, British observers in eighteenth-centuiy South Asia often included Dutch and Portuguese settlements in their initial descriptions of the subcontinent, and most British Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. observers noted that Europeans in South Asia were not immune from the same environmental degradations that had overwhelmed South Asians.9 Captain Walter Canfield Lennon of the Madras Army first visited the Dutch settlement at Molucca in October 1795 as a member of an EIC expedition headed by Admiral Rainer. The scenery of the island, he noted, “is true nature in its most sublime aspect,” but, he went on, the Dutch settlement itself, had been overwhelmed by the natural and native worlds surrounding it. On the evening of 1 December, Lennon’s party dined at the house o f Governor Cooperus where the large party enjoyed “not a bad dinner, allowing for Dutch cooking of which I have not the most delicate idea.”1 0 It was not the food but rather the general state of Cooperus’ household, however, that most caught Lennon’s eye. “Madam Cooperus,” he wrote, was dressed in the most unbecoming manner possible, a mixture of the Malay and Portuguese. Her outward garment being made exactly like a shift, she looked as if she reversed the order of her dress altogether. Her hair was drawn so tight to the crown of her head, and the skin of her forehead so stretched, that she could scarce wink her eye lids, she seemed however very affable and well bred.1 1 Lennon’s observant eye saw Mrs. Cooperus in much the same way that other British observers saw South Asia itself. She tried to be proper enough, but she failed to meet metropolitan standards by a wide margin. She seemed to wear her under garments on the outside of her clothing, and she pulled her hair back so tightly as to disfigure her face. Moreover, “she chewed betal incessantly, as did the other ladies, in Company and every chair in the room was furnished with a crespedor to spit in.”1 2 Though she had been bom a proper-Dutch woman, Mrs. Cooperus had not survived life in the Dutch imperial world 9 See Harrison, 60-61. 1 0 The Journal of Captain Walter Caulfied Lennon, 1 December 1795, QIOC Mss Eur E74,16. 1 1 Ibid. 1 2 Ibid. 98 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. unscathed. Many years in Molucca had changed her physically, altered the propriety of her style, and addicted her to betel-chewing and the uncouth spitting that went with it. Captain Charles Pittman, a member of the Madras Engineers from 1790 to 1798, found much the same thing to be true of the Dutch women at Molucca when he arrived in 1797. About a third of the women of the island are “fair,” he noted, but the rest were “dark, some very black indeed.” The tropical environment tanned the skin of the Dutch settlers, quite literally altering their physiognomies in the eyes of British observers like Pittman and Lennon. It cut them off from changes in fashion and style in the metropolitan world. Like Mrs. Cooperus, who had taken to wearing her shift as an external garment, the other Dutch women of Molucca, Pittman found, no longer dressed in the fashionable styles of the metropolitan world. “The Dutch ladies are not given to change their dress according to fashion,” he wrote, admitting that he did not know whether this was due to “their rigid economy or to their having so little intercourse with the polite world.” As a stranger to their world, however, Pittman did feel “struck with their antique appearance.”1 3 Males in the Dutch settlements did not fare much better in Lennon’s assessment. Upon visiting the Dutch settlements on the islands of Amboina and Banda in 1796, Lennon noted that the Dutch gentlemen of those islands were often married to “native women of the tenth generation from Europe [sic] blood.” These men seemed “to have no wish to quit their places they are in to return to Europe,” Lennon noted, suggesting that their wives were cmly part of their justification. True, he agreed, it would be almost impossible for Dutch men to introduce women, who were “little more than the chief female slaves of their families,” into proper Dutch society when even the betel-spitting Mrs. Cooperus would no longer have been 1 3 G. Pittman to a Lady at Fort St. George, 6 February 1798, OIOC Mss Eur E334/1G. 99 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. able to amalgamate herself into her native culture.1 4 But, he suggested, more significant than any question of bloodline and race was the fact that the Dutch settlers on Amboina and Banda islands were “fond of dress and wear a number of jewels.” They prided themselves on such luxury that even the dress of their favorite slaves was extravagant. These slaves “attend them in Company,” Lennon marveled, “where they carry their mistresses’ betel boxes which are always an article of great fashion and expence [sic].”1 5 What emerges out of the British observations of Dutch settler life in Molucca is a picture of a world that was at once familiar and novel. Both Pittman and Lennon recognized the outlines of European life among the Dutch settlers, but they also recognized substantial changes - changes wrought by the tropical sun, an isolation from polite European society, mixing with native populations, and the simple abundance of the world around them. Moreover, the Dutch settlers did not seem to take notice of the changes they were experiencing and, if they did, they showed no signs of wanting to reverse the changes or to return to their European homeland. To British observers, the luxury of the tropical world had won the Dutch settlers over in much the same way that it had the native of South Asia. It had, to quote so many British observers, “enervated” the Dutch, thus making it possible that the British could now become the single dominant European power on the subcontinent.1 6 Being won over by South Asian luxuiy and seduced by a life of indolence in the tropics was not the last change that British observers saw in their fellow Europeans in eighteenth-century South Asia. Richard Bowyer, who relied upon his British superiority to 1 4 Journal of Captain Walter Cawlfied Lennon, 209. For more on the Europeans whose exposure to South Asia rendered them “unfit” to return to their homelands, see Harrison, 110. 1 5 Ibid, 1 6 See Chapter One, 57-59. 100 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. survive the hardships of life in Haider Ali’s prisons was shocked to hear that one Portuguese inmate in the prison had poisoned Ms own father after Ms father had beaten Mm. Unlike Bowyer himself, who had determined that his British spirit would survive Haider Ali or Tipu Sultan’s prisons, the two Portuguese men had served long sentences in the prisons of Mysore and worked as interpreters to alleviate their conditions. It was such close association with the brutal prison system of princes like Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan, Bowyer suggested, that drove the younger interpreter to commit “so unnatural and inhuman a thing.”1 7 South Asian despotism and corruption, as we have seen, justified what British observers understood to be a culture of self-interest and greed across the subcontinent. It drove parents to sell their children into slavery for the mere pittance of half a crown, and, as Bowyer discovered, European families were not immune from the same types of decay.1 8 Working in the service of the princes of Mysore had frayed the bonds of filial obligation and familial love that bound the two Portuguese men, but as Bowyer knew all too well, there was not much that Ms fellow Europeans would not do to survive in South Asia, especially in the face of the military might of Mysore. Bowyer’s captivity in Mysore was itself the result of French duplicity. Having first been captured by Admiral Sirffren of France, Bowyer and his shipmates from the Hannibal were turned over to Haider Ali as part of a bargain cut between France and the Kingdom of Mysore. Bowyer and Ms companions were “amazed.. .at Monsr. Suffreins [sic] delivering us over to a Savage Power,” he wrote.1 9 Such “degenerate” behavior, Bowyer acknowledged, was to be expected of the French. Indeed, no less a Frenchman that Napoleon admitted to being tempted by Eastern 1 7 Journal of Richard Runwa Bowyer, OIOC Mss Eur A94,153. For more on British perceptions of Portuguese enervation as a result of exposure to the Indian landscape, see Harrison, 104. 1 8 See Chapter One, 75-76. 1 9 Journal of Richard Runwa Bowyer, OIOC Mss Eur A94,41. 101 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. customs and luxuries. During the course of Ms Egyptian campaign, Napoleon was known to wear Arabian robes, and he once professed: In Egypt I found myself freed from the obstacles of an irksome civilization. I was full of dreams. I saw myself founding a religion, marcMng into Asia, riding an elephant, a turban on my head and in my hands a new Koran that I would have composed to suit my needs. In my undertakings I would have combined the experiences of the two worlds.. .The time I spent in Egypt was the most beautiful in my life because it was the most ideal.2 0 The climate of the east seemed to have overwhelmed even the most fortified continental constitution. For Bowyer and other Britons in South Asia, the hope remained that the British character was stronger - that Britons could escape “enervation.” By no means, though, were EIC employees in India fully out of jeopardy. They risked being overrun by the teleologies of imperial difference they themselves had produced. Because they moved fluidly between Britain and its empire at a moment when, as Sudipta Sen has shown, the firmly segregated boundaries between British and Indian populations had yet to be inserted into the imperial system, EIC employees risked being “enervated” by South Asia as well as becoming the means by which that “enervation” was earned back to Britain.2 1 To late eighteenth-century theorists of race and difference like Barthold Georg Niebuhr, the Prussian diplomat and historian who argued that diversity within a state was “a source of everlasting corruption impeding the progress of man,” EIC employees were the cause of no small amount of concern.2 2 Sitting in a Mysorian prison, Richard Bowyer hoped his boisterous British confidence could get him through his ordeal, but, by the time the young Portuguese interpreter poisoned his father, Bowyer must have begun to appreciate that the 2 0 Quoted in James C. Simmons, Passionate Pilgrims: English Travelers to the World of the Desert Arabs (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1987), 19-20. 2 1 Sen, xxv. 2 2 Hannaford, 237-243. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. bonds of honor and even those of family did not function in the same ways in metropolitan and imperial settings. The experience of empire changed those who came into contact with it- b e they South Asian, European, or British. Palpable Dangers: Reversing British Imperial Teleologies The teleological model cultivated by British observers in eighteenth-century South Asia equally justified the state in which Europeans found South Asia itself and the changes that life in the imperial world wrought on Europeans in South Asia, particularly, as British observers liked to note, on the Dutch, the Portuguese, and the French. This was a clever imperial tool that justified the subjugation of South Asia to British power, and it served as an equally valid strategy for elevating British imperialism above other European forms of imperialism in South Asia. But the teleology of the British model was a double-edged sword that made no allowance for the British themselves. South Asia was a luxuriant Eden that had both cultivated and swallowed up the subcontinent’s past civilizations, and its luxury, despotism, and corruption were equally seductive to Europeans. At its most benign it drove Mrs. Cooperus to sit spitting betel juice all day, but at its most malignant, it drove the French to make deals with tyrants like Haider Ali, it frayed the bonds of filial duty among Portuguese families, and it seduced Dutch settlers to abandon their homeland in favor of jewelry and other trappings of wealth. Early warning signs, however, suggested that the British were far from immune to these same temptations. In February 1771, The Town and Country Magazine reported that the employees of the EIC had been transformed into a plague while in South Asia, and it warned that they were engaged in a sinister plot to revolutionize the nature of Britain’s social and political institutions. These nabobs, as Company employees were labeled, had 103 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. formed themselves into a club, and constantly meet to advance such schemes, as may level our nobility to these fungus’ s o f Asm. This laudable society is particularly attentive to the purchase of all landed estates, at almost any price that is asked, in order to obtain the disposal of boroughs, and thereby party influence.2 3 The trope of the nabob was clear. The nabob was a social upstart who had extorted a criminal fortune from South Asia and hoped to translate it into power, prestige, and status in the metropolitan world. The nabobs were perceived to be a threat in late eighteenth-century Britain, but the questions raised by nabobs about the relationship between the nation and the empire were far from new in the period. As early as April 1689, Elihu Yale, then president and governor of EIC affairs along the Coromandel Coast and in Bengal, issued an order limiting the amount of money that any British citizen should entrust with EIC soldiers and seamen. The order explained that Yale had taken this step as a precaution, one made in consideration of the many great injuries and prejudicing the garrison and shipping have and do suffer by soldiers and seamen running into debt at punch houses, and otherwise for unnecessary and extravagant expences [sic].2 4 Yale’s order may have stemmed systemic corruption among the Company’s servants, but it does not seem to have stopped private forms of illicit profiteering. In 1692, he filed charges against William Fraser, a storekeeper employed by the Company in Madras, for “wrongs and injuries done to the Honble. Compy. and others in his several offices and employment” Fraser had “clandestinely and fraudulently” kept large sums of money for himself out of funds that he had been charged with accepting on the Company’s behalf. Moreover, acting as the Company’s storekeeper, he had, “to the Companies great loss and prejudice,” defrauded his employers by selling goods out of Company warehouses for his 2 3 The Town and Country Magazine (London, 1771), 69. 2 4 The Diary and Consultation Book of Elihu Tale, OIOC Eur Mss Mack General 55, 170. 104 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. own profit and by billing the Company for goods that he put into their warehouses at rates far in excess of what he paid for them.2 5 It was not Company employees alone, however, that were the problem. Since its inception in 1600, the EIC itself had long been a target for anti-imperial criticism. A series of pamphlets dating back more than a century debated the economic, political, and mercantile efficacy of allowing a single company to control what was clearly a significant and growing segment of the English, and then the British, economy. In 1697, a small pamphlet entitled England and India Inconsistent in Their Manufactures argued that the trade with South Asia drained English coffers of their gold and silver only to return “Toyes [sic], Handicraft, and manufactured goods, which we least want, not only to the hindrance of the Consumption of our Wool, but the imployment [sic] of our people (from whence only Riches can have their original).”2 6 The trade in wool, the pamphlet suggested, was to the English economic system what bread was to the body - “the staff of life” and “the principle [sic] nourishment of our Body politick.”2 7 Concerned more with its own profit than the security of the woolen industry, the EIC’s commitment to the importation of Indian goods ignored the needs of and annually weakened the national economy. That the trade in Indian goods, and Asian textiles in particular, had depressed the market for English wool posed a serious threat to the economic stability of the English economy and proved that the English public needed protection from both the Indian trade and the EIC. Parliament responded in 1701 by limiting the trade in Indian cotton. The 1701 act set specific quantities of Indian cotton that could be imported to England but set no limits on 2 5 Ibid., OIOC Eur Mss Mack General 56, 165-166. 2 6 England and India Inconsistent in Their Manufactures, Being an Answer to a Treatise Intitled, An Essay on the East-India Trade (London, 1697), 15. ™ Ibid., 25. 105 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the trade of Indian textiles in the colonial world. While the act slowed the threat of Indian cotton to the domestic wool industry, it failed to protect the world market for woolen goods, and the contentious question of the compatibility of English and Indian trade persisted into the first half of the eighteenth century.2 8 In his 1720 pamphlet, The Trade to India Critically and Calmly Considered, Daniel Defoe continued to make the case that the trade in Indian calicoes was “destructive to our Woollen [sic] and silk manufactures, have lessn’d their consumption, [and] beaten several score of their goods quite out of trade.”2 9 For Defoe, the India trade was a verifiable threat to the English economy and continued to imperil the British economy well after the Act of Union. Moreover, the India trade was a danger to the entire economic system of Europe. “The East India Trade,” he wrote, “exhausts the whole Treasure of Europe, and destroys thereby their trade; carrying every year such immense sums of money in specie out of Europe into India, that the whole body feels the want of it very sensibly.” In return for its specie, India supplied Europe with mere trifles and filled “these parts of the world with gaiety.” Europe, he concluded, was bleeding to death economically, “her bullions which is [sic] the life and blood of her trade” flowing out to India like the blood of “a body in a warm bath, with its veins open’d.”3 0 Europe, and Britain in particular, Defoe concluded, had to treat its ailing economic body, to stem the transition from real wealth to “imaginary wealth.” It had to resist the temptation to trade bullion - true money - for paper and the desire to substitute settled 2 8 From 1700 to 1760, the wool industry in Britain experienced .97 percent growth rate compared with a 1.37 percent growth rate for cotton in the same period. See, Kenneth Morgan, The Birth of Industrial Britain: Economic Change, 1750-1850 (New York: Longman, 1999), 39-41. 2 9 Daniel Defoe, The Trade to India Critically and Calmly Considered (London, 1720), 8. For more on Defoe’s general suspicion of the credit economy, see Marilyn Morris, “Princely debt, Public Credit, and Commercial Values in Late Georgian Britain,” in Journal of British Studies 43 (July 2004), 356. 3 0 Defoe, 37-39. 106 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. accounts for “credit, which indeed is but air.”3 3 The trade to India had to be stopped because, Defoe demanded, it was “a disadvantageous trade, in its own nature, not to England only, but to all Europe.” To continue the India trade was to let the subcontinent act as a grave that “swallows up all, and makes no return; that is, the money never returns; what they send us back is nothing; ‘tis consumed here, and so vanishes and dies away; serving only to amass more bullion to be carry’d away; til, in a word, it impoverishes not England only, but all Europe.”3 2 The Company and its employees, in short, were controversial. Both seemed to import dangerous influences and behaviors into Britain when they returned from South Asia. There was more that was tempting about life in South Asia, however, than the promise of making a quick fortune, cheating one’s employer, or profiteering on the margins of one’s job. The seduction of an imagined India, the lure of exoticism, and the charms of a world that existed in a state of nature were always a palpable part of South Asia’s appeal. As Philip Dormer Stanhope of the First Regiment of Dragoon Guards noted “most of the gentlemen, who have resided any length of time in India,” were addicted to its culture and its luxury. To Stanhope, the Hookah pipe, “a most curious machine for smoaking [sic] tobacco through water,” was just one symbol of this addiction. “Even writers,” he noted, “whose salaries and perquisites scarce amount to two hundred pounds a year, contrive to be attended wherever they go by a Hooka-burdaar, or servant, whose duty it is to replenish the Hooka with the necessary ingredients, and to keep up the fire with his breath.”3 3 For Stanhope, the Hookah was metonymic. It was not the pipe alone that drove Britons in South Asia to spend beyond their means or to sit idly rather than engaging in 3 1 Ibid., 39. 1 2 Ibid., 41. 3 3 Philip Dormer Stanhope, Genuine Memoirs ofAsiaticus (London, 1785), 50-52. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. industrious labor. Rather, it was the subcontinent writ large that wrought these changes on the character of Britons. On leaving South Asia in September 1777, Stanhope confessed that his final impressions of the subcontinent were markedly different from those he had entertained when he arrived. He had come to find “the face of the country.. .uncommonly beautiful, vegetation is so rapid, that after a refreshing shower the fruits of the earth spontaneously shoot forth, as if by magic; and the climate, though hot to an extreme, is far from being so inimical, as is generally imagined.”3 4 Like a smoker to the tobacco in a Hookah, Stanhope was addicted to the India of his imagination. For Stanhope, South Asia was a narcotic - addicting and intoxicating. For some EIC employees, South Asia intoxicated with the promise of status. John Prinsep, who arrived in Calcutta on board the Rodney in 1771 at the age of twenty-five, noted that he was immediately flattered at the honors with which he was received in South Asia. “A number of black men in women’s frocks” greeted his ship, he wrote, “to pay their salams and make obeissances [sic].” To the young EIC employee, the scene before him was nothing short of a total transformation. “I thought myself suddenly metamorphosed into a great man,” he wrote in his memoirs.3 5 Like John Prinsep, William “Bob” Pott felt that his status as well as his wealth had been augmented in South Asia, and he demanded that those around him appreciate that fact. “The morning after [my] arrival [at Pott’s house],” Ms good friend William Hickey later recalled, Pott proposed taking me in his phaeton to Berhampore, when to my utter astonishment upon descending the grand staircase, wMch was lined on both sides with servants, all of whom respectfully salaamed Mm as he passed... I saw a party of light horse drawn up, dressed in rich uniforms and mounted 3 4 Ibid., 154-5. 3 5 Sir Henry T. Princep, Three Generations in India, 1771-1904, OIOC Mss Eur €97/1, 8. 108 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. upon beautiful Arabian horses. The men upon our entering the carriage saluted with their sabre. Upon my enquiring in a low voice of Pott the meaning of this, he laughingly replied they were part of his bodyguard consisting of sixty, and that he never moved from home without their attendance.3 6 like Pott, David Wedderbum, the Scottish commander of the Bombay army, spent a full half of his £3000 annual salary on his domestic affairs, which included two houses in India, two carriages, a livery of six horses, and fifty-three servants.3 7 The number of servants employed in the homes of EIC employees in South Asia drew frequent comment in the late eighteenth century. As Sudipta Sen has noted, “house rent and servants’ wages constituted the most significant charge of housekeeping in Calcutta,” and some Anglo-Indian families were rumored to employ more than one hundred domestic servants, “each and every one considered indispensable.”3 8 Higher ranking men than Wedderbum, Pott and Prinsep were not, however, impervious to the temptations of status and prestige in eighteenth-century South Asia. Philip Francis, a member of the Supreme Council at Bengal under Warren Hastings added postscripts to many of the letters he wrote to the Company in 1774. In these postscripts, the unhappy councilor demanded bitterly that he be granted a house in Calcutta at the Company’s expense. Anything else, he argued, was beneath his dignity. “It is shameful and scandalous,” he wrote in a letter of 30 November, “that I should pay £600 a year for living in a bam, while every one of the old council live in palaces at the Company’s expense.”3 9 In 3 6 William Hickey, The Memoirs of William Hickey, 4 vols, ed. Alfred Spencer (London, 1925), iii. 277-278. 371 thank Andrew Mackillop for pointing me to the letter of David Wedderbum. See David Wedderbum to Lady Janet Erskine, from Bombay, 31 December 1771, NAS GD164/1698/5,1-4. 3 8 Sen, 132. 3 9 Philip Francis to Lord Clive, 30 November 1774, OIOC Mss Eur K49,21. 109 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. another letter of the same month, Francis noted that Ms shabby accommodations made him “contemptible in the eyes of these people.”4 0 Britons like Prinsep, Pott, and Francis were immediately tempted by the potential for social prestige that employment with the EIC in South Asia offered them, but it was not long before the luxury and abundance of South Asia itself began to speak to them. As the naval commander-in-cMef in the East Indies from 1769 to 1771, Rear Admiral Sir John Lindsay was often received by local princes and other South Asian dignitaries. In March 1771, he attended a ceremony with Ms secretary George Patterson who recorded that Lindsay dressed in a new waistcoat whose buttons were made of diamonds.4 1 Lindsay’s waistcoat was no more luxurious, however, than the lifestyles of other Britons in eighteenth-century South Asia, and, arguably, it was less wasteful. Robert Clive was the earliest prominent Company official to come under scrutiny for the extravagant lifestyle he led after Ms return to Britain. He was said to keep as a pet “a ferret that runs about Ms house, and is a great favourite.” The Salisbury Journal reported that its sources had sworn that Clive’s ferret wore a diamond-studded collar “valued at 2,5Q 01.”4 2 Clive Mmself admitted that his life was filled with extravagance in the wake of coordinated attempts in 1763 by the House of Commons and the EIC’s Board of Directors to cut off Ms jaghir, an annual pension, he had received from Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey in 1757. Writing in two separate letters from Bath in January 1764, Clive noted that “I have always liv’d beyond my circumstances in England,” noting that his expenses had depended “on my right to the Jaggeer [sic].”® 4 0 PMIip Francis to Blythe Dutton, 30 November 1774, OIOC Mss Eur K49,27. 4 1 Diary of George Patterson, OIOC Mss Eur E379/2,210-211. 4 2 The Salisbury Journal, Monday 12 April 1772. 4 3 Clive to various correspondents, 1 January 1764, OIOC Mss Eur F128/26,40 and 47. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. So profound was India’s fabled wealth that it called to men as far away as metropolitan Britain itself. Robert Home, a painter who traveled in India from 1791 until his death in 1834 and who served as court painter to the king of Oudh from 1814 to 1825, remembered in his memoirs that life as a painter in metropolitan London was miserable in the late-eighteenth century. “If my affairs don’t rapidly improve,” the struggling painter resolved, “I will. ..go out [to India] myself. It seems a good place in which to make a fortune.”4 4 As one Company employee noted in 1773, wealth seemed so easily had in South Asia that anyone who failed to make a fortune on the subcontinent had only himself to blame, adding that he could only hope he would not find himself leaving for home one day with the shameful reputation “of having gained the least money of any man who has inhabited these regions for ten years and above the rank of a butcher.”4 5 It was not only because the wealth of India allowed them to “wantonly dispose” of large sums of money on diamond-studded buttons for their waistcoats or diamond-studded collars for their pets that EIC employees found South Asia to be a tempting environment.4 6 William Hickey was shocked at the residence of his good friend and associate Bob Pott. “Pott’s house, or, rather palace, for such it might fairly be called, was most splendid [sic] furnished,” Hickey later recalled, “everything being in a style of princely magnificence.” Hickey himself had a suite of rooms in the house that was fit for a king, complete “with warm and cold baths belonging exclusively to them, and every other luxury of the East.”4 7 Both Bob Pott and John Lindsay, found that South Asia altered their aesthetic senses and their sense of modest economy. Both men found themselves demanding more elaborate 4 4 Ella B. Day, Without Permit (1920), OIOC Mss Eur Photo Eur 331,135. 4 5 Joseph Fowke to Lord Clive, 28 September 1773, OIOC Mss Eur D546/7,208. 4 6 The Salisbury Journal, Monday 12 April 1772. 4 7 William Hickey, The Memoirs of William Hickey, ed. Alfred Spencer, iii. 277. I l l Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. fashions and more luxurious homes during their time in South Asia; they had, in short, grown more extravagant. Reckless spending was not, however, the only result when Britons indulged in South Asian wealth. The riches that stretched out before them in South Asia intoxicated many Company employees. A Mrs. Percival, writing from Bombay to a friend in London in 1761, noted that she knew of one EIC employee who had decided to stay on at his post in a remote part of the subcontinent, despite the fact that “everybody condemns him much for staying in such a terrible place.” The young man, she noted, “has been worth a genteel fortune for some years,” but he refused to leave a location that have proven so profitable. “They say,” Mrs. Percival concluded, “he is infatuated.”4 8 Money had pulled the young Briton away from his native land, away from British settlements in South Asia, and away from the company of other British citizens. Joseph Fowke, an EIC employee who made a lucrative career of trading diamonds on the side, likewise found that wealth came to dominate his thinking and led him to a life of reckless spending and idle gaming. In a letter of recommendation written by Lord Clive to Warren Hastings in 1770, Clive noted that Fowke had returned from South Asia with “a moderate fortune very honourably acquired by trade.” Having lost his fortune as a “fatal consequence of gaming,” however, Fowke found himself facing a second tenure in South Asia and in desperate need of both Clive’s recommendation and Hastings’ patronage.4 9 Perhaps it was with his brother’s fate in mind that Frauds Fowke wrote to Ms son in May of 1781 cautioning him to make Ms fortune quickly and to return to London with as much haste as possible. The days of making fortunes in India were, the elder Fowke wrote, limited, 4 8 Mrs. Sarah Matthison Percival to an unknown correspondent, 4 April 1761, in the Fowke Collection, OIOC Mss Eur D546/7,17. 4 9 Robert Clive to John Walsh, 2 December 1770, in the Fowke Collection, OIOC Mss Eur D546/7, 135. For more on eighteenth-century perceptions of gamblers, see Raven, 183-190. 112 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. which meant that younger men like his son had to take greater care not to squander their fortunes. “Don’t be greedy,” he warned. Make a fortune in India, he advised, but “come away as fast as possible.”3 0 India seems to have had the potential to corrupt Britons as easily and as completely as it did other Europeans in South Asia and the native populations who had lived there for millennia, and this potential for transformation - the transition from Briton to nabob - did not go unnoticed either by domestic observers or by the nabobs themselves. Indeed, the behavior of EIC employees in South Asia was a critical feature of the British imperial project on the subcontinent precisely because the nabobs were the frontier at which the teleologies implied by the imagined relationships between India and Britain broke down. If nature had infantilized South Asian civilizations and South Asia’s native people as well as other European imperial settlers, there was no way of avoiding the obvious implications for Britons living in South Asia as well - short of pulling them out of South Asia altogether. But, this was a wholly objectionable solution considering the fact that British observers in South Asia had conjured the entire imagined system as a means of justifying, even necessitating, British imperial might in South Asia, over the native populations as well as over the imperial power of competing European nations. As such, there was no clear way of checking the behavior, the luxury, the extravagance, or the corruption of EIC employees in India or of protecting them fully from the dangers of the environmental degradation that was always imminent in South Asia. EIC employees, therefore, lived inside a nexus of imaginative fictions, fictitious representations of India and Britain, and their behavior constantly and simultaneously re enforced and undermined those representations. The figure of the returning EIC servant, the 5 0 Francis Fowke to his son Frank Fowke, 16 May 1781, OIOC Mss Eur K25. 113 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. nabob, in metropolitan Britain represented a complex intellectual challenge to the imagined teleology of Anglo-Indian power relationships because the questions facing the British imperial project in South Asia at the end of the eighteenth century all revolved around the employees of the EIC, the physical bodies of this class of men who became, while in India, nabobs, because their actions seemed to suggest that the British were no more resistant to the natural allurements of South Asia’s bounty than the long line of South Asians and Europeans that had gone before them. As such, they threatened the entire mental justification for British imperialism on the subcontinent. Could Britons serve in South Asia without being corrupted? Could they, in fact, help India? Or, would India overpower them? Could a Briton be an imperialist in South Asia without also becoming a nabob? If the answer was yes, then the mental map of empire that eighteenth-century British observers had charted could be sustained, and British imperialism in South Asia could continue. The delicate house of cards upon which British imperialism in South Asia was predicated - the illusion that India was a state of nature, a primitive setting retarded by its bounty, and the concomitant illusion that Britain was the metropolitan center of the world, something more than an island - maintained its precarious balance. If the answer was no, however, that mental project collapsed, threatening not only the course of British imperialism in South Asia but also the self-assured sense of national hubris that rested at the bottom of the fantasy. Robert Clive, as we have seen, was called before a public inquiry in 1763 to answer many of these same questions. His jaghir represented what some domestic critics saw as “Eastern Luxury” and hinted further at the possibility of “Eastern despotism” as well. Having narrowly escaped with his income intact in 1763, Clive again faced public scrutiny in 1772. At a moment when the EIC itself was facing a severe economic crisis, the 114 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Company’s directors deflected public attention by pointing their collective finger at the one man who most readily symbolized the entire corporation. The Clive inquiry of 1772-73, then, transformed the structure of the long-standing debate about the relationship between India and Britain by imbricating the Company’s public policies and the private behavior of its employees - focusing the nation’s attention directly on the actions and lives of the servants of the EIC rather than the company and its economic policies writ large. The inquiry aroused suspicion that the private behavior of Clive and other Company servants might be the root cause for both the Company’s pressing fiscal crisis and, more broadly, the long-debated negative effects of the Indian trade. As General Burgoyne charged in May 1773, “Robert Lord Clive [had] abused the power with which he was intrusted [sic] to the evil example of the servants of the public.”5 1 Charles James Fox agreed when he noted that Clive was “the origin of all plunders, the source of all robbery.”5 2 During the course of the inquiry, the arguments against Clive seemed to suggest that he had been corrupted in South Asia. For his part, Clive made a valiant effort to defend not only the lucrative jaghir upon which his retired life in Britain depended but also the memory of his service to his nation, the EIC, and the growing British empire in South Asia. “I was determined,” he told the inquiry, “ to do my duty to the public although I should incur the odium of the whole settlement The welfare of the Company required a vigorous exertion and I took the resolution of cleansing the Augean Stables.”5 3 For Clive, the inquiiy was an attack on his honor as well as his finances. “It was,” he declared, his committed conduct on behalf of his nation that had 5 1 The Clive Collection, OIOC Mss Eur G37/8, 2. See also Raven, 223. 5 2 Quoted in Christopher Rowell, “Clive of India and His Family: The Formation of the Collection,” in Treasures from India: The Clive Collection at Powis Castle, ed. Mildred Archer, Christopher Rowell, and Robert Skelton (New York: The Meredith Press, 1987), 22. 5 3 The Clive Collection, OIOC Mss Eur G37/4,5. 115 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. occasioned the public papers to team [sic] with scurrility and abuse against me.. .It was that conduct which occasioned these charges - but it was that conduct which enables me now when the day of judgment is come to look my judges in the face - It was that conduct which enables me to lay my hand upon my heart and most solemnly to declare to this House, to the Gallery, and to the whole world that I never in a single instance lost sight of what I thought the honour and true interest of my country and the Company.3 4 In his defense, Clive felt that he had only to contrast the position of British interests in India when he arrived in 1744 with the world that he had left behind when he retired in 1767. “I was in India,” he told the House, “when the Company was established for the purposes of trade only, when their fortifications scarce deserved that name, when their possessions were within very narrow bounds. The EIC are at this time,” Clive testified, sovereigns of a rich, populous, fruitful country in extent beyond France and Spain united; they are in possession of the labour, industry, and manufactures of twenty million of subjects; they are in actual receipt of between five and six million a year. They have an army of fifty thousand men. The revenues of Bengal are little short of four million sterling a year. Out of this revenue the EIC, clear of all expenses, receives £1,600,000 a year. That he had made a personal fortune in India, Clive conceded. That he lived a lavish life on the proceeds of his jaghir, he granted, but, relative to the sums of money in question in British India, he professed his own temperance. “By God!” he swore before the House, “At this moment, do I stand astonished at my own moderation.”3 6 Before storming from the House chambers, Clive, now in tears, cast down a gauntlet before Ms enemies, demanding that they “leave me my honour, take away my fortune!”5 7 5 4 Ibid., 6. 5 5 Quoted in H.V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The British Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757- 1773 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 15. 5 5 Lawson, ‘“Our Execrable Banditti’: Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Albion 16 (1984), 225. See also, Philip Lawson, “Robert Clive, the Black Jaghire, and British Politics,” in The Historical Journal 26 (1983), 801-829. 5 7 Peter Holt, In Clive’ s Footsteps (London: Butler and Tanner, 1990), 198. 116 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Clive’s dramatic performance before the House of Commons had immediate ramifications. On 21 May 1773, by a margin of 95 to 155, the House voted against revoking his jaghir and passed a bill declaring “That the said Lord Clive did.. .render great and meritorious services to this country.”5 8 In the long run, the inquiry into Clive’s personal behavior while in India transmuted the debate about Britain’s relationship to its growing possessions in India. As Clive had rightly noted, the Parliamentary inquiry fused with accounts in the printed news media to promote the notion that his actions had set the example for the EIC. The fact that Clive was not reprimanded did little to disassociate EIC employees from the insinuation of wrongdoing in the long term.® Horace Walpole, who had declared himself “impatient for the result of the inquiry, and to hear that the legislature has made amends in their power by condemning those harpies to regorge the gold and diamonds they have so infamously extorted,” was shocked that Clive escaped unpunished. Clive had been treated as if he were “as white as snow,” Walpole noted, adding that “Cortez and his captains were not more spotless heroes.”6 0 According to Walpole, the outcome of the inquiry seemed to legitimize Clive’s behavior, implicating the British Parliament in the crimes of East India Company servants. To the public more broadly, however, it was Clive’s suicide less than eighteen months after the end of the inquiry that suggested that the victor of Plassey was indeed connected to the fiscal troubles of the EIC and its deleterious effects on the metropolitan economy. Clive’s death on 22 November 1774 excited metropolitan gossip circles as the inquiry itself had never done. Eveiy parlor in the nation was buzzing with rumors about the peer’s death. In a letter to Lady Ossory, Horace Walpole wrote that 5 8 The Clive Collection, OIOC Mss Eur G37/8,2. ® The Clive Collection, OIOC Mss Eur G37/8,2. See also Raven, 223. 6 0 Quoted in Raven, 223. 117 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Lord H. has just been here and told me the manner of Lord Clive’s death. Whatever has happened, it had flung him into convulsions to which he was very subject. Dr. Fothergill gave him, as he had done on like occasions, a dose of laudanum, but the pain in his bowels was so violent that he asked for a second dose. Dr. Fothergill said if he took another, he would be dead in an hour. The moment Fothergill was gone, he swallowed another, for another it seems stood by him, and he is dead.6 1 To Horace Mann, Walpole wrote that “a great event happened two days ago - a political and moral event! The sudden death of that second Kouli Khan, Lord Clive. There was certainly illness in die case; the world thinks more than illness.”6 2 On 11 December of the same year, Lady Mary Coke speculated further that Clive’s suicide had been even more violent than Walpole supposed. “The method he took to deprive himself of life,” she wrote one correspondent, was, I believe, what nobody ever thought of before; he cut his throat with a little instrument that is bought at the stationers to scratch out anything upon paper. I don’t know what it is called, but ‘tis so small he must have been some time before he cou’d effect his purposes, & must have been very determined to proceed when he was giving himself such terrible pain.6 3 ‘“Tis reported,” Coke gossiped, “that Ly. Clive was the first person who found her Lord weltering in his blood.”6 4 In another letter, Lady Coke confirmed that the rumors about Clive’s death could be verified by the fact that “he was put into his coffin a few hours after his death.”6 5 So widespread were the rumors about Clive’s death that Horace Walpole reported wryly that Clive “has died eveiy death in the parish register; at present it is most fashionable 6 1 Horace Walpole, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’ s Correspondence, 48 vols., ed. W.S. Lewis etal. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937-83), xxxii, 218. ® Ibid., xxiv, 60. ® Lady Mary Coke, The Letters and Journals of Lady Mary Coke, 4 vols., ed. J.A. Home (Edinburgh, 1889-96), iv, 443. m Ibid., iv, 120 6 5 Ibid., iv, 435. 118 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to believe he cut Ms throat. That he is dead is certain.”6 6 Lady Coke may have added the only other bit of certainty to the story when she wrote that ‘ “tis certain that Ld. Clive kill’d himself, & the reason given for this unhappy action is the horrour of his mind.”6 7 Certain that Clive was dead, Coke and Walpole could only speculate on the manner in wMch he had died, but they could both say with some certainty that if Clive had taken his own life, he had done so with a heavy heart and a conscience burdened with Ms own actions in India. A year after Coke made her psychological assessment of Clive’s suicide, Thomas Paine echoed her conclusions in a small pampMet entitled Reflections on the Life and Death of Lord Clive that appeared in The Pennsylvania Magazine, wMch Paine himself edited. In the essay, Paine assumed Clive’s voice, asking “Can I but suffer when a beggar pities me?” Alone and unhappy, Clive laments that he ever allowed Mmself to be tempted by “fortune,” that “fair enchantress” who, “after lavishing her smiles upon me, tum[ed] my reproacher.” As had Macbeth before Mm, Clive finds Mmself unable to sleep at the thought of Ms former crimes.6 8 “O peace,” he begs, “thou sweet companion of the calm and innocent! Whither art thou fled? Here take my gold, and all the world calls mine, and come thou in exchange.” Taking up Ms knife in preparation for Ms final act, Paine’s Clive pleads the moral lesson of Ms life, “Could I unlearn what I’ve already learned - unact what I’ve already acted - or would some sacred power convey me back to youth and innocence, I’d act another part.” Unable to undo what has been done, however, Paine’s Clive takes Ms own life, “for what is life, when every passion of the soul’s at strife.”6 9 Published in colonial America, Paine’s 6 6 Walpole, vi, 154. 6 7 Coke, iv, 435. 6 8 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, in The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), II, ii, 35-41,983. 6 9 Thomas Paine, Reflections on the Life and Death of Lord Clive (London, 1820), 7-8. See also Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick, ed., The Thomas Paine Reader (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 57-63. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. account of G ive’s suicide brought the growing debate about Britain, India, and the EIC into sharp focus for British colonials who were themselves on the eve of a political revolution, even as rumors surrounding Clive’s death in London continued to grow. At a dinner party on 12 May 1778, no less an authority than Samuel Johnson labeled Clive as “a man who had acquired his fortune by such crimes, that his consciousness of them impelled him to cut his own throat.”7 0 Clive’s suicide cemented the connection between the individual employees of the EIC and the long-standing awareness that the expansion of British territorial holdings in South Asia was changing, perhaps negatively, the structures of the British economy. It affirmed the notion that there was guilt associated with a life spent in India and a fortune made in South Asia, and it legitimized the assumption that India was, as Horace Walpole would call it in 1784, a “nest of monsters., .and their spawn of nabobs.”7 1 By the time Walpole made his comment, domestic Britain was awash with stories of private nabobs who seemed to have been corrupted by India’s palpable temptations - by a land whose natural abundance generated religious and political institutions that degraded human relationships and corrupted all who came into contact with them. Reflecting on the banquet to which Admiral Lindsay had worn his diamond-studded waistcoat, George Patterson recalled that the admiral had enjoyed “a great number of dancing girls.” These women, Patterson wrote, were intended to entertain Sir John Lindsay and his host the nawab, and one particularly “handsome” woman attracted the commander-in-chief’s attention. The 7 0 James Boswell, The Life of Johnson, 3 vols., ed. G.B. Hill and L.F. Powell (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1934), iii, 350. 7 1 Raven, 224. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. local nawab “observed Sir John taking notice of her,” Patterson recorded, “and he asked if he like[d] her - and gave a broad hint that she should wait on him.”7 2 During his tenure in South Asia, Philip Stanhope admitted that he had come “to think the dazzling brightness of a copper-coloured face infinitely preferable to the pallid and sickly hue, which banishes the roses from the cheeks of the European fair, and reminds me of the death-struck countenance of Lazarus risen from the grave.”7 3 Employment in South Asia had transformed their very definition of physical beauty. English women were sickly, pallid, and pale. They wore a complexion of death. South Asian “damsels,” on the other hand, inspired them “with sentiments of desire and love.”7 4 For high-ranking Britons like Lindsay as for less significant figures, South Asia provided access to opulent fashion as well as commodified sexuality, but it also made it possible for powerful Britons like Lindsay to engage in open blackmail and bribery. The local nawab, Patterson remembered, made a present of a jeweled pendant in the shape of a star to Lindsay, but as the rear admiral noted to his secretary, “it was much too small and gave.. .no very favourable idea of the Nabob’s intentions.” As such, Lindsay sent Patterson to the nawab demanding a more fitting symbol of the goodwill that existed between Britain, the EIC, and the nawab’s territories. “I told him,” Patterson explained, “that Sir John could not wear any Star but one made both in [a] size and figure” that adequately represented the nawab’s goodwill. “His Highness must either give him such or none,” and the nawab quickly responded by fashioning a new pendant for the rear admiral.7 5 7 2 The Diary of George Patterson, Monday 11 March 1771, OIOC Mss Eur E379/2,212. 7 3 Stanhope, 52. 1 4 Ibid., 53. 7 5 The Diary of George Patterson, Monday 11 March 1771, OIOC Mss Eur E379/2,213-217. 121 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Lindsay’s boldness paled, Sir Alexander Cosby assured a small assembly of dinner guests at the home of Warren and Marian Hastings, next to that of Thomas Rumbold during Rumbold’s short tenure as the governor of Madras from 1778 to 1780. While at Madras, Rumbold’s wife gave birth to a son.7 6 The birth “caused considerable sensation, and everybody hastened to offer their congratulations, accompanied, as is the usage of the country, with presents of greater or less value.” As Cosby later remembered, “among the most forward to express congratulations was the Nawab of Areot, whom a long experience had convinced of his absolute dependence on the British Government.”7 7 According to Cosby and those who repeated his story, the nawab arrived at the governor’s house in Madras “arrayed in all the plenitude of Eastern magnificence and wearing on his finger the famous Arcot diamond.” The nawab joined the Rumbolds at the baptismal ceremony for their young son and was offered the place of honor at the governor’s right hand during the banquet that followed. “In the course of the conversation,” Cosby would later recount, “something was said about jewels, which naturally led the governor to expatiate on the uncommon size and luster of the stone which sparkled on the nawab’s finger.” Flattered by the governor’s compliments, the nawab readily agreed when Rumbold asked if he could have a closer look at the ring, and he was shocked when Rumbold, placed the ring “on his own finger, and in veiy courteous and impressive terms thanked his Highness for his magnificent present, which, he said far exceeded anything he could have expected even from his princely liberality.” Rumbold went on to “assure the nawab that he 7 6 The birth of Rumbold’s son and heir was a significant event in Madras, indeed throughout all of British South Asia, as it marked the first time that a sitting British governor and his wife had been blessed with a child while stationed in South Asia. 7 7 Thomas Herbert Lewin, ed., The Lewin Letters: A Selection from the Correspondence and Diaries of an English Family, 1756-1884,2 vols. (London, 1909), i, 17. 122 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. would never part with [the ring], but would preserve it to his dying day as a pledge of the union between them so happily cemented.”7 8 Flabbergasted at what had transpired, the nawab “protested, with much earnestness, that he had never had any idea of parting with the diamond, which was a family possession that had come down to him from his ancestors, and was indeed a sacred inheritance,” but the governor “adhered to his resolution and the nawab had to retire without his ring.” Cosby told the small party gathered around Hastings’ table that Rumbold had immediately transferred the ring to a strong box and “shortly afterwards conveyed [it] to England with the rest of his spoils.”7 9 No love was ever wasted between Thomas Rumbold and Alexander Cosby. Cosby told the story of Rumbold and the Arcot diamond frequently, and those who heard his tale continued to repeat it. As late as 1818, Sir James Lamb was still detailing Rumbold’s voracious appetite for diamonds and his bold theft of the Arcot Diamond in particular, but Lamb did not end the story there. Rather, he appended to it a critical postscript. Cosby, he recorded, was stationed as a colonel in Madras during Rumbold’s brief tenure as governor, and Cosby was no less outraged by the theft of the Arcot diamond than was the nawab Mmself. The young colonel, therefore, plotted with the wronged nawab, encouraging Mm to send a letter to London, specifically to Queen Charlotte. In the letter, the nawab told the queen of his diamond. More importantly, however, he informed the queen that he wanted her to have it as a symbol of Ms affection for her and her husband. The returning governor 7 8 Ibid., 19. 7 9 Ibid. 123 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of Madras, the nawab concluded, would have the diamond for her in his strong box when he arrived back in London.8 0 Cosby and the nawab5 s plan was a clever bit of gamesmanship. Their letter arrived in London before Rumbold, and the returning governor, as a result, arrived to find Queen Charlotte, hand out-stretched, waiting for her prize. Writing fondly of the aged Queen, gravely ill and only months away from her death, in September 1818, James Lamb noted that “the diamond in question was afterwards frequently worn by Her Majesty.”8 1 Even with Cosby’s help, the nawab of Arcot’s diamond ring was never restored to its rightful owner, but the stoiy of Rumbold’s theft and, to a lesser extent, Cosby’s involvement in the plan to double-cross the former governor both survived as popular and vivid examples of the dangers faced by Britons in South Asia. Luxurious wealth had tempted Rumbold and had driven him to act in ways that his own countrymen - indeed his subordinates - could not condone, and they had forced Cosby to engage in a plan to deceive his queen for the sake of restoring, if only partially, the honor of his country. The two men had been transformed in South Asia - one into a thief and the other into a liar. Defending the Illusion: Criminal not Corrupted Among the sizeable group of eighteenth-century British observers who contemplated the problematic lifestyles of British nabobs both in South Asia and back in domestic Britain, no individual surpassed Edmund Burke, who alone invested more time, more energy, more mental effort, and more political and personal capital into the effort to defend the process of British imperialism in South Asia from corruption, decadence, and decay than any other figure of the period. A long-time advocate for the reform of Britain’s administrative systems 8 0 Ibid., 20-21. 8 1 Ibid., 21. 124 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in South Asia and one of the leading prosecutors in the long impeachment trial against Governor-General Warren Hastings, Burke was acutely aware of the fact that the advent of British power in South Asia had brought significant dislocations to the people of the subcontinent. “Commerce,” he told the assembled court during the Hastings’ trial, “which enriches every other country in the world,” was “bringing Bengal to total ruin.”8 2 Commerce per se was not the root of the problem in British South Asia. Commerce was a good thing - when it was properly carried out In South Asia, Burke recognized that EIC employees seemed to complicate the course of Anglo-Indian imperial commerce. At the core of the problem, he argued, one found the nabobs. “These traders,” he suggested, “appeared everywhere; they sold at their own prices, and forced the people to sell to them at their own prices also.” They appeared “more like an army going to pillage the people under pretence of commerce than anything else.” The Company, in short, operated under standards that looked “more like robbery than trade.”8 3 As we have seen, eighteenth-century Britons had imagined India in such a way as to make even the shortest tenure on the subcontinent a justification for corrupt behavior, but such a conclusion was problematic - a conclusion with two simple yet equally unacceptable corollaries. The first conclusion had to be that the British were as prone to corruption in India as everyone else and, therefore, no more equipped to administer the subcontinent than anyone else. The second, likewise, suggested that the British could not save the subcontinent or its people, and, in order to save themselves, their only recourse was retreat. The very teleologies upon which British imperialism had been fashioned, therefore, destabilized the grounds upon which to base any systematic anti-imperial critique. 8 2 V.K. Saxena, ed., Speeches on the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, 2 vols. (Delhi: Discovery Publishers, 1987), i. 79. &Ibid., i. 79-80. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In Ms political attacks against the EIC and its employees, therefore, Edmund Burke had to dance very carefully between Scylla and Charybdis - between what he perceived to be the need for Anglo-Indian imperial reform on the one hand and the obviously anti imperial implications of attacking the nabobs on the other.8 4 The solution, as Burke found during the long years he led the impeachment against Warren Hastings, was not to suggest that India had infected the nabobs - which was to say that Britons could be corrupted - but rather to argue that the nabobs represented the basest and most defiled type of Briton even before they left for India. British imperialism, therefore, could be faulted but not because it was predicated on false assumptions about the superiority of Britons over the native populations of South Asia or other European imperial nations. British imperialism in South Asia, rather, had failed to weed out a wicked subset of Britons who were naturally corrupted from the start. Rather than sending out its best and brightest sons to reform South Asia and its people, the British imperial system had left the door open for a domestic criminal class that saw in South Asia a scene of infinite wealth and plunder rather than an honorable obligation charged to the British nation.8 5 That Britons in India seemed to have been transformed into nabobs was not an insuperable problem. If the right people were sent to India, the British could accomplish their mission. To Burke’s mind, no individual better exemplified the base elements of British society that had infiltrated the EIC than Warren Hastings, who had served as the British governor at Bengal from 1772 until Lord North’s Regulating Act of 1773 elevated Mm to the position of governor-general of all British India, a post he held until 1785.8 6 On the tMrd day 8 4 See Mehta, 157-158. 8 5 For more on the relationship between innate character flaws versus environmental degeneration, see Harrison, 125-126. 8 6 See Mehta, 138. 126 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of the Hastings impeachment trial before the House of Lords, 15 February 1788, Burke noted that the charges against the former governor-general were not charges of having been corrupted by India. Nor, he argued, were they charges of simple “errors or mistakes, such as wise and good men might possibly fall into.” They were “not lapses, defects, errors of common human frailty, which, as we know and feel, we can allow for.” No, he insisted, Hastings’ were “substantial crimes.” The House had charged Hastings with no crimes that have not arisen from passions which it is criminal to harbour; with no offences that have not their root in avarice, rapacity, pride, insolence, ferocity, treachery, cruelty, malignity of temper; in short, nothing that does not argue a total extinction of all moral principle, that does not manifest an inveterate blackness of heart, died in the grain with malice, vitiated, corrupted, gangrened to the very core.8 7 Unlike British observers in South Asia who had argued that it was South Asia that had wrought substantial changes in the native populations of the subcontinent and on Europeans like Mrs. Cooperus who stayed in South Asia for too long, Burke stressed a different point Hastings had never been an honorable British citizen. “He is a robber in gross, and a thief in detail,” Burke argued. Hastings had not been changed during a career in South Asia that spanned thirty-five years, from Hastings’ arrival in South Asia in 1750 at the age of seventeen until his retirement in 1785 at the age of fifty-two. “He is a robber,” Burke suggested. “He steals, he filches, he plunders, he oppresses, he extorts.” These were not the actions of a changed man but rather measures of a man’s character - the actions of one whose soul was, and always had been, “gangrened to the very core.”8 8 Hastings was more than a simple practitioner of crimes, Burke told the Lords. He was “a professor, a doctor upon the subject,” and India, in Burke’s estimation, was not to w Ibid., i. 13-14. *Ibid., i. 159. 127 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. blame.8 9 For more than three decades, Burke suggested to those assembled at the trial on 5 May 1789, Warren Hastings had lived in South Asia, not far from the banks of the river Ganges - a river, Burke noted ironically, “whose purifying water expiates the sins of the Gentoos, and which, one would think, would have washed Mr. Hastings’s hands a little clean.”9 0 The river, however, did not seem to have washed Hastings’ hands at all. Indeed, as Burke explained the situation, Hastings’ hands did little else than muddy the Ganges’ waters and threaten South Asia with further pollution. “Do we not know,” he asked the impeachment judges, “that there are many men who wait, and who indeed hardly wait, the event of this prosecution.” Britain was filled, he suggested, with other criminals like Hastings who would exploit Britain’s sacred trust in South Asia to extract “corrupt wealth.. .acquired by the oppression of that country.”9 1 For Burke, India presented a dangerous opportunity to Britain’s criminal populations - a chance to build a quick and debased fortune and return home to metropolitan Britain. As such, Burke saw the Hastings’ trial as a matter that was doubly significant. On the one hand, the trial was a quest to purify the ranks of the EIC’s service in South Asia to secure the noble purposes of the British imperial project on the subcontinent. At the same time, Burke saw himself as engaged in an heroic effort to save the “manners and virtues” of the British nation - the “national character.. .our liberties.”9 2 The behavior of EIC nabobs in general, therefore, was constructed, as we shall see in more detail in the next chapter, as a security threat to the fabric of the British nation itself as well as to the imagined honorability of British imperialism in South Asia. 8 9 Ibid., i. 361. 1 3 0 Ibid., i. 388. 9 1 Ibid., i. 449. 9 1 Ibid., i. 449-450. 128 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. More immediately, Burke strove to show that Hastings held British history, British law, British customs, and Britain’s obligations in South Asia in utter contempt. As such, he painted a picture of the governor-general in which Hastings became the leader of a pack of ravenous British wolves set loose in South Asia. “We have not chosen,” he addressed the House of Lords, “to bring before you a poor, puny, trembling delinquent, misled, perhaps, by those who ought to have taught him better...We have not brought before you an obscure offender.” Rather, he suggested, “we have brought before you the first man of India in rank, authority, and station.. .a captain-general of iniquity, under whom all the fraud, all the peculation, all the tyranny, in India are embodied, disciplined, arrayed, and paid.” Hastings, he went on, was a model to the other criminal servants of the EIC, and the managers for the prosecution against him had selected him specifically because a ruling against him set an example. “You strike at the whole corpse,” Burke argued, “if you strike at the head.”9 3 A criminal himself, Hastings was, therefore, also the elevated, albeit bad, example to the rest of the Company’s servants employed under him in South Asia, and the lessons he taught to his subordinates included the violation of nature “in its strongest principles,” the exercise of “unlimited and arbitrary” power without any “pretence of any law, rule, or any fixed mode.”9 4 His example encouraged Company employees to throw “off completely the authority of the Company” - the very institution that had been charged with managing and securing Britain’s obligations in South Asia.9 5 Hastings had trampled that charter. He had raised taxes and rents on the poorest people of the subcontinent, locking those who could not pay in cages and “in the dungeons of mud forts.”9 6 He had exploited the common people of 9 3 Ibid., 1 15. 9 4 Ibid., ii. 142. 9 5 Ibid., ii. 136 9 6 Ibid., ii. 141. 129 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. South Asia; he had “obliged [them] to sell their children through want of food to feed them.”9 7 In short, Hastings had acted the part of an Eastern despot and deserved to be considered alongside the likes of Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan. But, as Burke argued, Hastings’ behavior was no mere act. Nor was it a matter of corruption. Hastings’ soul, Burke suggested, actually lacked the capacity for human compassion and sympathy. “The love that God has implanted in the heart of parents towards their children,” he argued to the House of Lords, “is the first germ of that second conjunction which he has ordered to subsist between them and the rest of mankind. It is the first formation and the first bond of society.” Hastings’ behavior, simply stated, was pathological, anti-social, and amoral, but Burke’s charges did not stop there. “Next to the love of parents for their children,” he postulated, “the strongest instinct both natural and moral that exists in man is the love of his country - an instinct, indeed, which extends even to the brute creation.”9 8 Hastings lacked the capacity to generate even the most primitive feelings of patriotism, and this was why Hastings’ actions had demonstrated such contempt for British legal institutions and the honor of Britain’s purpose in South Asia. Every British citizen around the globe, Burke argued, was “bound by the laws of Great Britain,” but Hastings assumed for himself “absolute sovereignty” in South Asia - above and beyond any act of Parliament.9 9 In doing so, he empowered himself to administer British India to his own benefit, to the complete detriment of South Asia’s native populations, and to the eternal shame of the British nation. “We” in domestic Britain, Burke argued, “do not use torture or cruelties, even for the greatest crimes, but have banished them from our courts of justice; we never suffer them in any case.” Yet, he suggested, Hastings 9 7 Ibid., ii. 305. 9 8 Ibid., ii. 141. "Ibid., ii. 3-5. 130 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. had used torture as a daily tool while he held the post of governor-general in British South Asia, and he did so because he was, and had always been, a criminal.™ For Burke, then, the matter was a simple one. If administered by good and honorable Britons, the empire in South Asia would prove beneficial to Britain and the subcontinent alike. A young man who left Britain for India with “a just and laudable partiality for the laws, liberties, rights, and institutions of Ms own nation” would, Burke argued, endeavor to bring these virtues to the people of the subcontinent. If, on the other hand, the Britons who went out to India left with “an idea of the mean, degraded, state of the people that we are to govern,” the results would be disastrous. Not only would this group of men “despise” their South Asian wards, they would act in ways that tarnished the reputation of Britain’s legal system and sullied the nation’s obligations to South Asia, indeed, its obligations to Mstory.1 0 1 Having framed the Hastings Impeachment as the trial of a criminal rather than a corrupted Briton, Burke was able to make the case that the British subjects of South Asia, those child-like people of a veritable Eden, deserved the same paternalistic protection from society’s most criminally-minded elements as did British subjects in the metropolitan world. Burke’s argument did not detract from the commonly held belief that South Asia needed Britain’s assistance - that it merited colonization. True, he argued, India and Britain were inextricably bound together. “When...an English corporation became an integral part of the Mogul Empire,” he argued before the House of Lords, “Great Britain entered into a virtual act of union with that country, by which we bound ourselves as securities to preserve the people in all the rights, laws, and liberties wMch their natural original sovereign was bound 1 0 0 Ibid., ii. 202. ,0 i Ibid., i. 490-491. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to support, if he had been in condition to support them.”1 0 2 Indians, he suggested, merited the attention of the House of Common, the House of Lords, and the broader British public because - whether by a fortuitous stroke of fate or a terrible accident of history - India had become entangled in the British imperial system. The “attached dependants of this kingdom,” he argued, had a claim on the House of Lords for protection from men like Hastings, and thus it fell to the peers of the realm to validate not only the “honour of this nation” but also to vindicate the “mysterious providence” that had granted South Asia to Britain as an imperial ward.1 0 8 But, Burke was careful to remind the assembled peers at the Hastings impeachment, “India is not properly a branch of the British nation.” Barriers existed between the two. British India was part of a broader British imperium, but, he reminded his audience, it was very specifically the product of the EIC’s actions. It was, in short, “only a deputation of individuals.”1 1 * As such, Burke’s rhetorical strategy at the Hastings’ trial served two purposes. On the one hand, it affirmed the notion that India deserved to be, indeed needed to be, a part of the British imperial system. Only in this way could the subcontinent’s rights, laws, and liberties be assured when, as Burke was careful to note, the subcontinent’s “original sovereign” could no longer perform his duties. At the same time, such a move safeguarded Britons against the popular assumption that South Asia was a corrosive environment. Hastings had not been transformed by his years in South Asia. Rather, he was a bad person. “He is never corrupt,” Burke said of the former governor-general, “but he is cruel; he never dines with comfort, but where he is sure to create a famine. He never robs from the loose superfluity of standing greatness; he devours the fallen, the indigent, the 1 0 2 Ibid., i. 20. m Ibid.,I 16-17. 1 0 4 Ibid., i. 25. 132 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. necessitous.”1 0 5 Because British India was a noble cause that had been mistakenly left in the hands of men like Hastings, a group that proved unable to be “a proper check and control upon themselves,” Burke was able to explain what was increasingly an undeniable fact - the British imperial project in South Asia appeared much less the noble obligation that eighteenth-century observers had imagined than an exploitative power network from which Britain was reaping significantly more reward than were Britain’s South Asian charges.1 0 6 The India.fi j^efsnse. CZ-onfonxiing not C^oroijptecl Burke’s charges against Warren Hastings backed the former governor-general into a tight comer, but Hastings was not Burke’s only target As we have seen, Burke’s rhetorical strategy at Hastings’ trial was to make Hastings appear to be nothing more than the foremost among an entire corporation of miscreants. Burke challenged Hastings’ legal defenders on two fronts simultaneously. Hastings had to defend his own character directly. He was, after all, the defendant in what was about to become one of the most spectacular trials in eighteenth-century Britain and the longest impeachment trial in all of British history.1 0 7 Hastings had to justify his actions during his long tenure in South Asia, but he had to do so without admitting that he had been seduced by the despotic principles that British observers had found to predominate in South Asia.1 0 8 Placing the blame on India, as we have seen in our investigation of Burke’s charges, would have been an open assault on the imagined sense 1 0 5 Ibid., i. 148. 1 0 6 Ibid., i. 26. 1 0 7 During the Course of the Hastings impeachment, eighty-seven peers of the realm and forty-four bishops of the Church of England died. In the same period, forty-nine people were elevated to the peerage by descent, including two Dukes of Somerset, two Earls of Guildford, and two Viscounts Montague. The bishoprics of Asaph and Hereford had likewise seen two bishops nominated, ordained, and replaced during the trial’s long history. For more on the length of the trial, see Warren Hastings, The History of the Tried of Warren Hastings (London, 1796), viii. 273. 1 0 8 For more on the Hastings’ defense, see, Mia Carter, “Warren Hastings: Naughty Nabob or National Hero?,” in Archives of Empire, Volume I - From the East India Company to the Suez Canal, ed. Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 131-134. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of British national superiority upon which Britain’s imperialism in South Asia was predicated. Hastings had to defend his career and prove he had served honorably as the preeminent figure in British South Asia, but he had to do so without undermining the foundations of British imperialism in India in the process. Ironically, therefore, both Hastings and Burke faced the same handicap but from different angles. As Burke had been challenged to critique British imperialism in South Asia without suggesting that Britons fell victim to the Edenic primitivism of the subcontinent, Hastings had to prove before the House of Lords that his actions as governor-general were not those of a criminal and not those of one seduced by the despotism, luxury, and power available to a Company employee in South Asia. Because neither wanted to see British control of the subcontinent collapse, both had to negotiate carefully around a delicately balanced paradigm that contrasted a primitive but corrosive Eden in South Asia against the un-corruptible character of British civilization. Of the two men, Hastings, admittedly faced the greatest set of challenges. With his career and his reputation on trial, Hastings faced financial ruin, legal condemnation, and imprisonment, if not worse, were he to be convicted. As the painter Robert Home noted, Hastings’ trial, as had his career, placed the former governor-general “between the devil and the deep sea.”1 0 9 Hastings, Home argued, was an intelligent man, “deeply versed in Oriental knowledge,” but as the foremost man in all of British India, he was charged with contradictory responsibilities. “Goaded by the London Office of the EIC to augment their finances” on the one hand, he faced opposition both within the Company and from parliamentarians like Burke at home for his efforts to understand the “intriguing subtleties of the Eastern mind” and outright hostility when he “found it absolutely necessary to outwit the 1 0 9 Day, Without Permit, 139. 134 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. wit of the Orientals by their own dark and deep-seated methods.”1 1 0 As Home saw things, those who sat at home “ranting outrageously.. .against the late governor-general in Bengal” really knew “nothing about it, as they are entirely ignorant of the conditions in India and of the character of its people.” Only after “years of contact with all the different tribes of India,” he suggested, could one arrive at even “a skin deep knowledge of the subtlety, duplicity and intrigues of the Eastern mind.”1 1 1 For Home, knowing India was an experiential process. As we have seen, EIC employees often relied on European references when they described South Asia to domestic audiences. As Home’s observations on the Hastings impeachment suggest, however, referential descriptions had their limits because they only gave domestic audiences a vague image of India. They were limited representations, not concrete first-hand knowledge. Though he had spent more time studying South Asia than any other political figure of his day, Edmund Burke was ignorant on the subject, Home argued, compared with Hastings. Robert Home genuinely believed that reading about India was simply no substitute for being there, seeing the place, and witnessing the life cycle of the subcontinent.1 1 2 Hastings’ first-hand experience in and knowledge of South Asia relative to that of his accusers became the cornerstone of the former governor-general’s defensive strategy. In short, Hastings was no more a criminal than he was the victim of South Asia’s corrosive environment. Rather, his actions as governor-general simply reflected the exigencies and needs of life in South Asia, exigencies and needs that one could only understand fully after having experienced India first-hand. Thus, Hastings’ legal defense rested on the claim that 1 1 0 Ibid. 1 1 1 Ibid., 135-137. 1 1 2 See Said, Orientalism, 93. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. he had arrived in India to find “a bad system” of political administration.1 1 3 True, Hastings admitted, the system merited revision, but, he argued, that revision had to be carried out slowly, carefully, and incrementally. Hastings had, he argued, recognized indigenous law as a tool for securing British power in South Asia and by extension, to bind the native populations of British India to what Lauren Benton has called “the power of the colonial state.”1 1 4 As Burke mockingly noted before the House of Lords, Hastings wanted his judges to believe that he found a bad system that “was not of my making” and that he had been “obliged to act according to the spirit of it” at various moments during his long career in South Asia - a fact that one could only comprehend if one had been there with him.1 1 5 Had Hastings been alone in making this case, his arguments might not have carried any weight at all, and the former governor-general might have found himself convicted when the House of Lords pronounced its judgment in 1795. As Burke was quick to note, the Hastings’ defense was fraught with holes. According to Burke, India had not been plagued by a bad system of administration until Hastings arrived with his hoard of criminal accomplices and to suggest otherwise was to paint a picture of “a fairy land in which there is a perpetual masquerade, where no one thing appears as it really is.”1 1 6 Moreover, Burke suggested, Hastings’ arguments only sustained the prosecution’s claims that the governor- general was a dyed-in-the-wool scapegrace. “Every honest man,” Burke argued, 1 1 3 For more on Hastings’ defense that South Asian political systems were, by default, despotic, see Warren Hastings, The Defence of Warren Hastings (London, 1786), 106. 1 1 4 Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Culture: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900 (New York; Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 153. See also Kathryn S. Freeman, ‘“Beyond the Stretch of Labouring Thought Sublime’: Romanticism, Post-Colonial Theory and the Transmission of Sanskrit Texts,” in Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture, ed. Julie F. Codell and Dianne Sachko Macleod (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1998), 146. 1 1 5 Saxena, ii. 109. 1 1 6 Ibid., ii. 112. 136 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. would say, I came to a bad system; I had every facility of abusing my power; I had every temptation to peculate; I had every incitement to oppress; I had every means of concealment, by the defects of the system: but I corrected that evil system by the goodness of my administration, by the prudence, the energy, the virtue of my conduct This is what all the rest of the world would say: but what says Mr. Hastings? A bad system was made to my hands; I had nothing to do in making it. I was altogether an involuntary instrument and obliged to execute every evil, which that system contained.1 1 7 While Burke made the case that Hastings “and all governors upon earth” were bound by “a general good system upon which they ought to act,” Hastings wanted his judges to accept that India was indeed home to a corrupted and despotic political system and that the British could only adjust that system slowly and from the inside out.1 1 8 Edmund Burke’s charges against Warren Hastings did not go unanswered, but neither Burke’s concerns nor the legal defense that Hastings presented from 1785 until his acquittal in 1795 were novel. Robert Clive’s success at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 catapulted Britain’s relative power on the subcontinent to unprecedented levels vis-a-vis its competitors, both from Europe and among those indigenous to the subcontinent. At the same time, Clive’s victoiy placed the British on a new path in South Asia, a path away from private trade and towards imperial sovereignty. Throughout the 1760s, the repercussions of Plassey focused domestic attention on Britain’s power in South Asia more closely than ever before, and this scrutiny intensified in the 1770s as insubordination led to rebellion and independence in colonial British America. As we have seen, eighteenth-century Britons in South Asia crafted the world they saw on the subcontinent in such as way as to justify British power. They imagined an India in which British power was beneficial to the people of South Asia, often overlooking the fact that increased British imperial power in India also 1 1 7 Ibid., ii. 109-110. m Ibid., ii. 110. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. tended to safeguard Britain’s trading privileges on the subcontinent. The India they imaged, therefore, was a cunning imperial tool, but it failed to answer a simple yet increasingly persistent question: how was a trading company, charted at the dawn of the seventeenth century, adequate to administer a territorial empire that clearly exceeded its initial mandate? As William Bolts, himself a Calcutta merchant, noted in 1772, “the EIC was originally intended to be a merely trading company” mandated to oversee “the increase of navigation, and the advancement of trade and merchandize.. .for the increase of the Riches of the People and the Benefit of the Commonwealth.”1 1 9 It was, Bolts worried, “as unfit to exercise sovereign authority, as, by the Constitution of the kingdom, it must be unqualified either to acquire or possess it.”1 2 0 The only answer, Bolts argued, was to have the state step in and temper the authority of the Company in South Asia. India and Britain’s imperial project there both faced nothing short of ruin if “the legislature should longer with-hold their effectual protection and paternal care from the oppressed Asiatics,” and he warned that Lord North’s administration should be prepared to take bold steps “if the Proprietors of East India Stock should refuse their effectual and hearty concurrence in every salutary means for the relief of the native inhabitants.”1 2 1 By the time Bolts was writing in 1772, the EIC was on the verge of bankruptcy, apparently having ruined itself by over-extending its authority in South Asia beyond the scope of its initial charter. As such, Bolts was not alone in reflecting on the Company’s status in 1772, and Ms admonitions to the Company and Lord North’s administration did not go unheeded. Parliamentary concern over the Company’s insolvency eventually led to the passage of Lord North’s Regulating Act of 1773, the legislative action that established the 1 1 9 William Bolts, Considerations on India Affairs, 3 vols. (London, 1772), i. 209. m Ibid. 1 2 1 Ibid., i. 227. 138 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. position of governor-general at Calcutta. In addition to centralizing the administration of British power in South Asia in the hands of the governor-general, the Regulating Act restructured the Company’s domestic directorate and established a Supreme Court in Bengal to administer legal matters in South Asia. Lord North further persuaded the Parliament to loan the Company £1,400,000 to stave off bankruptcy.1 2 2 Lord North’s Regulating Act saved the EIC, but it did so, much to the pleasure of men like William Bolts, at a price - a complicated network of ties between London and Calcutta that bound the trading company directly to the power of the British nation. As such, the 1773 legislation marked a set back for those who had disagreed with Bolts’ arguments in 1772, those who felt that the success of British imperialism, British power, and British trade in South Asia depended upon the Company’s having a free-hand to administer the subcontinent as it saw fit based upon the first-hand impressions of its employees. Nathaniel Smith, whose The Measures to be Pursued in India for Permanency, and Augmenting the Commerce of the Company also appeared in 1772, argued that the only certain way to sustain the Company was to maintain order in South Asia. The only way to do this, he suggested, was to administer the subcontinent in ways that the native population could understand. “I am aware,” he wrote, “that.. .the natives are not capable of enjoying that degree of freedom our laws ensure to us; and that with them it would probably degenerate into licentiousness.” He concluded, “I see no necessity of changing their government entirely.”1 2 3 Writing in the same year, Alexander Dow agreed. ‘The despotic form of government is not,” he wrote, “so terrible in its nature, as men bom in free countries are apt to imagine.” Despotic regimes, Dow admitted, allowed princes full power over their 1 2 2 Lawson, The East India Company, 121-122. 1 2 3 Nathaniel Smith, The Measures to be Pursued in India for Ensuring Permanency and Augmenting the Commerce of the Company (London, 1772), 12. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. subjects, but, he contended, “the ideas of the man-king” were always limited by unspoken and unwritten laws of “right and wrong.. .When he becomes an assassin,” Dow argued, “he teaches others to use the knife against him.”1 2 4 Despotism, therefore, was not quite as bad as its critics made it seem. The Company, Dow insisted, was the author of its own “absolute conquest” in South Asia. No indigenous prince had granted it power; it had earned its power. “The sword,” he demanded, “is our tenure, and not the Firman of an unfortunate >?i25 prince. Neither Dow nor Smith objected to the EIC’s exercising sovereign power in South Asia. Certainly, neither was an advocate for despotism; they both shared a common belief that British merchants working for the Company would administer the subcontinent with temperance. If not for the benefit of South Asia itself then out of a self-interested concern for their own preservation, British administrators in South Asia would behave as honorable and enlightened despots in South Asia. For Smith and Dow, there was no other way. If power was the language of politics in South Asia, then the Company had to wield its power boldly or risk losing it. More than a decade after Dow and Smith made their defenses of the Company, Hastings made a similar case before the House of Lords in his own defense. His primary appeal before his judges was, as Burke labeled it, an appeal “to the custom and usage of the Mogul empire; and the constitution of that empire is, he says, arbitrary power.” Though Hastings admitted willingly that no act of Parliament had ever authorized him to wield absolute power, his goal was to prove that it was only in exercising such power in South 1 2 4 Dow, iii. xxii. 1 2 5 Ibid., iii.cxvi. 140 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Asia that he had saved Britain’s possessions on the subcontinent from the “mischievous and ruinous” forces that threatened them.1 2 6 To Burke and the other House managers of the Hastings’ prosecution, Hastings’ line of argument was maddening. “After having vomited out his vile, bilious stuff of arbitrary power, and afterwards denied it to be his,” Hastings returned, Burke announced with disgust, as a “dog retum[s] to his vomit,” for an illicit feast, proclaiming South Asia a despotic land that required despotic administration.1 2 7 “All Asia,” Burke proclaimed, “is by him disenfranchised at a stroke. Its inhabitants have no rights, no laws, no liberties; their state is mean and depraved.”1 2 8 While Burke was struggling, rather graphically, to “deny that there exists in all the human race a power to make the government of any state dependent upon individual will,” Hastings’ legal team maneuvered down the path of a dangerous but no less ambitious counter-argument1 2 9 Burke’s argument was about human rights per se. Pure absolutism was not a valid form of political administration, and it did not exist anywhere on earth. Hastings’ case assumed the opposite. Despotism did exist, and it was the political system in place when the British arrived in India, the by-product, as we have seen, of the very bounty of the subcontinent itself. The British had, Hastings admitted, been called to administer India and to raise it out of its state of nature, but that feat had to be accomplished in stages. Bribery, corruption, tyranny, violence, and fear, Hastings argued, were the customary features of political life in South Asia. With this fact in mind, Burke summarized 1 2 6 Saxena, i. 485. ™ Ibid., i. 488. 1 2 8 Ibid., i. 486. 1 2 9 Hastings’ legal team included many of the greatest legal minds of the day, including Edward Law, who was later named attorney-general and lord chief justice before being elevated as the first Lord Ellenborough; Thomas Plumber, who was later appointed to be solicitor-general and attorney-general; and Robert Dallas, who later served as the chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas. 141 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the governor-general ’ s line of reasoning. “I had an arbitrary power to exercise: I exercised it,” Burke began, Slaves I found the people; slaves they are, they are so by their constitution and if they are, I did not make it for them. I was unfortunately bound to exercise this arbitrary power, and accordingly I did exercise it. It was disagreeable to me, but I did exercise it, and no other power can be exercised in that country.1 3 0 For his part, Burke was dumbfounded that Hastings could be so audacious in his admissions. “Mr. Hastings comes before your Lordships not as a British governor answering to a British tribunal, but as a soubahdar.” He stood before the House of Lords, Burke noted, as a British subject “declaring that he governed on the principles of arbitrary power” and asking that his judges determine whether or not his behavior had maintained and corresponded to those principles. He asked, in short, that the peers of the realm judge him “by laws and institutions which” they did not know rather than “against those laws and institutions which you do know, and under whose power and authority Mr. Hastings went out to India.”1 3 1 Hastings, in reply, noted that the EIC had thanked him for his services.1 3 2 They did so, the former governor-general noted, not because he had succeeded in rendering India a model of British-style political administration as Burke was arguing it should be. Rather, he had been praised for sustaining a balance between the missionary-goals of Britain’s imagined calling in South Asia and the need to sustain British power, administrative control, and political stability in India - both for the sake of economic profit and the long-term prospects of any British imperial project on the subcontinent. Such a strategy allowed 1 3 0 Saxena, i. 94. m Ibid., i. 95-97. 1 3 2 Ibid., i. 123. For more on this line of Hastings’ defense, see Hastings, The Defense of Warren Hastings, 5 and 229. 142 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Hastings and his legal team to agree with Burke. His administration did resemble “in substance a government of the lowest, basest, and more flagitious of the native rabble,” but it did so only temporarily. Strident administrative control in the present was required to sustain British control in South Asia so that the native populations could be properly instructed in and guided towards more liberal political forms in the future.1 3 3 As Burke himself noted, Hastings cited “a long line of travelers” as the proof of his claims. “The people of India had no sense of honour, and were only sensible of the whip as far as it produced corporal pain.” Theirs “was a government of misrule productive of no happiness to the people” - a political system that continued in this miserable state “until subverted by the free government of Britain, namely the government that Mr. Hastings describes as having himself exercised there.”1 3 4 Hastings’ legal strategy, therefore, refocused the substantive debate of the impeachment trial. He, like Burke, could now be seen as a champion of the “integrity and honour of the Commons of Great Britain.”1 3 5 Both wanted to stabilize and preserve Britain’s mission in South Asia, but they disagreed on how that could best be accomplished. By framing his defense as he did, Hastings forced Burke into arguing that South Asians had the same rights as Britons themselves “in order to show in what manner and degree [those rights] have been violated,” and he forced Burke to argue that the observations of Britons in South Asia were nothing more than “the ridiculous relations of travelers. ..which ingenious men have thought proper to build on their authority” and less valuable than his own second-hand assessments of the situation on the subcontinent.1 3 6 1 3 3 Saxena, i. 178. m Ibid., i. 488. 1 3 5 Ibid., i. 487. 1 3 6 Ibid., i. 490. 143 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. At once, Hastings’ legal defense marginalized Burke’s case, even as it validated any actions that the governor-general might have taken while the supreme executive authority in British South Asia. Burke had never been to India; the travelers that Hastings cited as witnesses had. Direct experience not only buttressed their testimony, it also justified Hastings’ claims that acts which in Britain were termed illegal and corrupt were merely ceremonial customs in South Asia. As Clive had testified in 1772, corruption was an ingrained feature of political power in South Asia, and bribery was the foremost example. “From time immemorial,” Clive argued, “it has been the custom of that country for an inferior never to come into the presence of a superior without a present.” The Company had, he admitted, ordered its employees to refuse such presents, which in British terms amounted to nothing short of political bribes. What these and other such regulations failed to take into account, Clive postulated, was that “by progressive steps the Company have become sovereign of [an] empire” in South Asia, and that forbidding such gifts was both practically and politically impossible. On the one hand, regulating gifts in South Asia was tantamount to asking the Company’s servants to “refrain from the advantages so obviously resulting from their situation.” The “passion for gain,” he suggested, “is as strong as the passion of love.” Being offered gifts in South Asia was not unlike being tempted by the wife of a close friend. One could resist it for a while, but if the tempted man did not get away from the situation, “he must be seduced at last... In this manner is the attack carried on and the Company’s servant has no resource, for he cannot fly - in short, flesh and blood cannot bear it.”1 3 7 Clive’s argument, therefore, trod dangerously, almost admitting that Britons in South Asia could not resist the charms of luxury and graft that abounded there. But, Clive’s 1 3 7 Draft of Lord Clive’s Speech, 30 March 1772, OIOC Mss Eur G37/3,49-53. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. speech stopped just short of such a radical and damaging conclusion. Gift-giving and bribery were in the same family, he agreed, and neither was a sign of a healthy political system. Be that as it may, however, gift-taking was fundamental to the South Asian political system in the late-eighteenth century, and to forbid Company employees from receiving gifts while employed in British India was merely to render them ineffective leaders in the eyes of the native populations of South Asia or criminals in the eyes of their nation and their employer. In order to demonstrate their power over the people of South Asia, the British would have to participate in the staged interactions of political gift-giving and gift-taking that had persisted for millennia. Only then could the British be assured that their political supremacy had been acknowledged by their South Asian subjects, and only then could the British move to change the subcontinent’s political traditions and abolish bribery as a mechanism of governance.1 3 8 Clive’s, then, was not a condemnation of Britons, whom he acknowledged to be above both taking bribes and committing adultery. But, he argued, Britons set themselves up to be unduly tempted by the corrupted political traditions of South Asia if they demanded that gift-giving and gift-taking cease immediately. Only time could eradicate deep-seated political institutions. Not unlike the Jewish merchant who suggested that the English sailor pretend to be a Hindu in order to save himself from execution, Clive, therefore, recommended that the Company should begin its transformation of India not in revolutionary waves but rather in small steps. EIC servants could play the part; they could take gifts, even bribes, as part of an elaborately staged imperial demonstration of power so long as they did so without actually allowing the bribes to seduce them down the path of genuine despotism. 1 3 8 See Cohn, 106-162.. 145 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Henry Verelst, the former governor of Bengal, agreed. “Men well versed in history too often imbibe not the spirit of nations,” he wrote of those who were investigating Clive in 1772. This group of reformers, he noted, “would transplant in an instant a system of laws established in this country by the progressive experience of ages, and impose it on a distant people whose religion, whose customs, whose habits of thinking, and manner of life equally prohibit the attempt.” British laws too quickly transplanted to the nation’s South Asian possessions would be “destructive of the people” and would threaten the future of Britain’s imperial mission on the subcontinent.1 3 9 The British had to take care and move slowly in South Asia, he argued, lest they “deluge the country with blood.”1 4 0 More than a decade later, Hastings, faced with impeachment before the House of Lords, was still making the same arguments that Clive and Verelst had made in 1772. Gradual change - change rooted in the political traditions of the subcontinent but directed always towards those of metropolitan Britain - was critical to the success of British imperialism in South Asia. Major John Scott-Waring, a close political confidant of Warren Hastings, agreed with his friend’s defensive strategy, and, in an anonymous pamphlet published under the title An Appeal to the People o f England and Scotland, in Behalf of Warren Hastings, Esq. in 1787, Scott-Waring noted that Hastings had never done anything other than what his position as governor-general in British India called him to do, especially given the difficulties facing British imperialism globally in the last half of the eighteenth century. Hastings was no criminal, Scott-Waring insisted. Nor was he a fallen Englishman, drawn down a dark path by the temptations of South Asia. Hastings was, Scott-Waring argued, “the Genius of Britannia in the East, which was not smiling and soft, but 1 3 9 Harry Verelst, A View of the Rise, and Progress, and Present State of the English Government in Bengali London, 1772), 130-131. 1 4 0 Ibid., 141. 146 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. commanding and austere.”1 4 1 How else, Scott-Waring asked Ms readers, could Hastings have acted, having found India, as he did, “in times of infinite difficulty and danger?” The British in India, he suggested, had found it difficult to administer India in times of peace, but Hastings had come to power in India on the eve of the American Revolution. The native princes, he argued, perceived the “embarrassments of the English” as an opportunity to topple the novel institutions of British rule in South Asia. “All things seemed rapidly to revert to the Great Mogul,” Scott-Waring reflected.1 4 2 “If,” he confessed, “the truth must be told,” British power in South Asia under Hastings had been “purely despotic, and depended for its efficacy on the principle of fear. Should the pressure and weight of Government be lessened, the fire, wMch was smothered only by that weight and pressure, must break out with an explosion fatal to the oppressors.”1 4 3 Hastings had, he admitted, ruled as a despot, but he had not done so because he was a criminal. Nor had he done so because he had been defiled by the subcontinent’s environment. No. Hastings had acted in the best interest of the Company he served and in the interest of the British nation. Hastings had acted to keep the Company afloat when “fair trade was hardly able to support itself.” He had stemmed the tide of anti-British agitation among the native populations in South Asia, and, in doing so, he had preserved the British mission in South Asia and defended the people of the subcontinent from their own actions. He had defended the British political establishment against its own “mismanagement and disasters in the west” and the combined might of “the world against us.” Hastings had, in 1 4 1 John Scott-Waring, An Appeal to the People of England and Scotland, in Behalf of Warren Hastings, Esq. (London 1787), 50. 1 4 2 Ibid., 44-46. 1 4 3 Ibid., 45-46. 147 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. short, done all he could, “Ate best means in his power,” to preserve Ate British empire ia South Asia.5 4 4 The Empire Contes Home: The Dangers of CogiptiMIIty. John Scott-Waring was a close family friend to Warren Hastings and M s wife. He acted as an agent for the Hastings both in London and ia Bengal. He was a personal confidant and a political ally, bat it was not always easy to defend a nabob. In James Gilliay’s 1787 political satire, The Friendly Agent, we see Scott-Waring dressed as a South Asian potentate. Ever eager to assist his friend, Scot-Waring is pulling on a cord, struggling to raise the “Defence of W. Hast. Esq,” So intently is Scott-Waring focused on the defease, however, that he fails to notice that the cord has wrapped around the neck of Ms good friend the governor-general. With bags laden, with rupees and pgodas strung to Ms fed;, Hastings Illustration 6. The ■ - ■ . Agent, lames Gillray, 9 lane 1787.5 4 5 1 4 4 Ibid., 49-50. 1 4 5 Image scanned from a photograph courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. hangs in the air, stretched downward by the weight of Ms plunder and upwards by the efforts of Ms “friendly agent.” As those who would defend Mm hang Hastings, a bloated King George III and an anemic Queen Charlotte pass blindly by. Indeed, the only character who seems to take any notice of Hastings is the ghost of the Brahman Nandakumar, who had been executed at Hastings’ command in 1776 for violating the governor-general ’s rule in South Asia.1 4 6 Nandakumar beckons Hastings to follow Mm into the fires of Hell, and Scott- Waring seems bent on helping - even if unwittingly. Like Scott-Waring, William Hickey found it difficult, at times, to defend Ms friend William “Bob” Pott against the aspersions that he received as a long-time resident of South Asia. Aside from marveling at Bob Pott’s retinue of bodyguards and the size and grandeur of Ms house, William Hickey found little else that he could criticize in Ms friend’s lifestyle. Of Pott he once wrote, “one would hardly have thought that” Ms actions “could have been disapproved of by any man, or set of men, especially as [they were] so much witMn bounds and unostentatiously moderate.”1 4 7 But Hickey’s comments were made years after Ms arrival in South Asia, and he measured Pott’s “unostentatiously moderate” actions not against metropolitan standards but against the standards set by other expatriate Britons living in luxury on a subcontinent that was, by almost all accounts, a model of the garden of Eden. Hickey marveled when articles began appearing in the daily London newspapers in the 1780s criticizing the British population in South Asia “in the severest terms, reprobating the general propensity to folly and extravagance betrayed by every East Indian or Nabob, as they 1 4 6 Lawson, The East India Company, 113. 1 4 7 William Hickey, The Memoirs of William Hickey, ed. Alfred Spencer, iii. 284. 1 4 9 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. were designated, whose sole object the ill-natured writers observed, was to squander the enormous wealth acquired by plunder and extortion in every species of absurd profusion.”1 4 8 Hickey’s defense of his friend Bob Pott directs our attention to two critical points. First, it highlights the growing outlines of the nabob controversy as they were beginning to take shape in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, especially as they were taking rhetorical form in the printed media of domestic Britain and in London in particular, a phenomenon that we will take up more concretely in the next chapter. Second, however, his comment points to an almost total blindness to the dangers of the teleology inherent in the imagined India that had been shaped by British observers in the eighteenth century. India, such observers had argued, was at once a salubrious and malignant environment, simultaneously a new Eden and an historical morass. The Indian geography had shaped Indian history; it had made “Indians” as a people. Because the processes of making Indian history and of making Indians had been imagined as an environmental process, it was also possible that Europeans in India could become “Indians” themselves. This was not the same thing, to be sure, as the process of “going native” that would become the great imperial fear of later generations. Going native implied that Europeans took on innate characteristics of the native populations, but this process was different. It did not presuppose innate characteristics of South Asians. Rather, it argued that the people of South Asia had developed characteristics in response to environmental stimuli. This was a process in which the natives themselves could take, and had taken, part - a process not of “going native” but rather of “going natural” that was a clear and present peril to everyone who lived on the South Asian subcontinent for too long. m Ibid. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Too long a residence in South Asia, as men like Lennon and Pittman had noticed, turned polite Europeans like Mrs. Cooperus into betel-spitting shadows of their former selves, but many Britons took comfort in the fact that, as Major Scott-Waring noted in a letter to the editor of The Edinburgh Review, “the climate of India is of itself a sufficient security against emigration of any consequence from England.”1 4 9 British gentlemen in South Asia, Scott-Waring went on to argue, sent their “children to England at a very early age, because it is a well ascertained fact, that the climate enervates the children bom of European parents, in a still greater degree than it enervates the parents themselves.”1 5 0 Thus, Scott-Waring took some comfort, “no subject of the United Kingdom ever yet went to India, nor would any one I believe go there in future, except with a hope of returning to end his days at home.”1 5 1 Scott-Waring assumed, therefore, that most Britons in South Asia were more like Charles Smith, an EIC servant in Madras from 1753 to 1782 and Abraham Caldecott, a member of the Bengal Service from 1781 to 1802, than George Gray, a surgeon for the Company at Calcutta from 1738 to 1760. As we have seen, Charles Smith, writing from Madras to his sister in Britain, was not at all happy in South Asia. He felt trapped, forced to “broil” in the heat.1 5 2 Like Smith, Caldecott found India a miserable place to live. The climate, he wrote to his family, was by far the most uncomfortable part of the experience. Calcutta was ferociously hot and oppressively humid. “From the above account of the climate,” he wrote, in 1783, “you may easily conceive how happy I should be to return to my native land whenever my circumstances will admit.” Like Smith, however, Caldecott 1 4 9 John Scott-Waring, Letter to the Editor of the Edinburgh Review, in reply to the Critique of Lord Lauderdale’ s View of the Affairs of the EIC, Published in the 2 (f November of the Edinburgh Review (London ,1810), 25. 1 3 0 Ibid., 25-26. 1 5 1 Ibid., 25. 1 5 2 See Chapter One, 44. 151 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. lamented that the day of Ms departure from India was further off “than perhaps I may be aware of.”1 3 3 Unlike Smith or Caldecott, Dr. Gray, who retired from the service of the EIC in 1760 and returned home to settle at his country estate, Huntington, found that, after twenty- two years in South Asia, it and not Britain was home. “I know nothing,” he wrote Harry Verelst in December 1761, “that gives me greater pleasure than the hearing from my India friends and of their welfare.” Later that month, writing to Thomas Cooke, he noted that he was “glad to hear from my old friends at Calcutta. I wish I was among them, and there I would remain.” life away from South Asia was isolating, he wrote, and “the weather sadly pinches.” The heat of the tropics, so clearly the bane of Caldecott’s experience of the subcontinent, could become normalized across time - rendering the cold, grey, and foggy climate of Britain as incommodious upon Gray’s return to Europe as Indian heat had been upon Caldecott’s arrival in South Asia. Reflecting on the course of Ms life in a letter to another colleague from Calcutta, Gray argued that he would, were he asked to recall any portion of Ms life, immediately think about the years he spent in South Asia. “There,” he insisted, “I would remain, for I have not found in Europe the contentment I expected.”1 5 4 Scott-Waring, therefore, failed to account for the fact that there were countless Britons who were spending extended amounts of time in South Asia by the last half of the eighteenth century. Rather than focusing on the degree to wMcfa the Charles Smiths, the Abraham Caldecotts, and the George Grays of British India already lived lives in which Britain and India, Europe and South Asia, and metropole and empire all tangled into a single complex set of identities, Scott-Waring argued that the British model of empire was one 1 5 3 Abraham Caldecott to Miss Pettet, 14 September 1783, OIOC Mss Ear D778. 1 5 4 Dr. George Gray to Hany Verelst, 3 December 1761; to Thomas Cooke, 5 December 1761; and to Alexander Carvalhot, 15 December 1761, OIOC Mss Ear D691. 152 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. rooted in separation. “A large British society mixing with the natives, would,” he wrote, “ensure the destruction of our empire.” It was for this reason, he argued, “that missionaries have been represented as so dangerous” and “prudently confined” in their activities in British South Asia. For Scott-Waring a sharp and bright line of distinction existed between the Dutch settlers that Pittman and Lennon had observed and their British counterparts. Unlike the Dutch who stayed in South Asia and were enervated and changed by its climate, the British came and left; they participated in a circular imperial traffic that took them out to empire and brought them safely back to the metropolitan center. Or did it? Scott-Waring himself had cautioned that should Britons ever start to delay their stays in South Asia “the race of Britons bom and bred in India would degenerate.” Future generations of Britons who lived too long in South Asia would, even “supposing them all bom of European fathers and mothers... want the spirit, strength, and activity of men bom and bred in England, or North America, or a climate similar to our own.”1 5 5 What Scott- Waring seems to have missed is the fact that men such as Pott, Prinsep, and Lindsay were already enjoying the luxury and status offered to them in South Asia, and, in some cases, they were indulging in the bribery and corruption that British observers had found so rife on the subcontinent They had grown accustomed to the patterns of life in South Asia, at least the patterns of life as British observers understood them. Even Philip Stanhope, who, by Ms own admission, had grown to love South Asia, could only love it once he had “become familiarized to acts of cruelty and oppression.”1 5 6 Despite what Scott-Waring supposed to be a naturally British desire to “go home,” Britons in South Asia were no safer from South 1 5 5 John Scott-Waring, Letter to the Editor of the Edinburgh Review, 25. 1 5 6 Stanhope, 136. 153 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Asia’s treacherous environment than were the Dutch or Portuguese who lived there for decades or the South Asians who had lived there for millennia. Major Scott-Waring, therefore, falsely assumed that the British were safe - that they were a race apart But, for Scott-Waring, race in this instance was not the scientifically buttressed race of the nineteenth century, a race that could be measured on people’s skulls, determined by the color of their skin, or parceled out in droplets of ancestral blood. As we have seen, eighteenth-century British observers imagined the British South Asian races as something that emerged, quite literally, out of the earth itself. It was a system of difference rooted in an imagined history and justified by a teleological vision of the world that juxtaposed South Asian deviance against British normative standards, a system that relied on comparison. As a result, and as neither Hickey nor Scott-Waring could fully appreciate, the circular movement of Britons into and out of South Asia in the eighteenth century was more destabilizing and less beneficial than Scott-Waring might have hoped. Dutch settlers like Mrs. Cooperus certainly troubled Pittman and Lennon, and had she ever met Scott-Waring, he could have found in her a model of the dangers of long-term European settlement in South Asia. At the same time, Mrs. Cooperus posed no threat to the normative standards of her European homeland. Even Walter Lennon suggested that Mrs. Cooperus’ faults were innocuous. There was no danger, he wrote, in “a person never out of Malacca.”1 5 7 Eighteenth-century Britons like Prinsep, Pott, and Lindsay, however, did leave South Asia. They did go home, and it was precisely in going home that they posed the greatest danger to the stability both of their domestic homeland and the structure of its imperial world. If South Asia was the new Eden, luxury was its forbidden fruit, and one taste of it wrought destruction in the forms of indolence, despotism, self-interest, corruption, 1 5 7 Journal of Walter Canfield Lennon, 16. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. superstition, and degeneration.1 5 8 Returning Britons, transformed into nabobs by South Asia’s fertile yet dangerous soil, brought with them the hint of luxury that jeopardized Britain’s established order - the political securities of Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, the religious structures of the established Protestant church, and the sense of national vigor that had fought for and achieved them all. As one contributor to The Gentleman’ s Magazine noted in September 1786, “the EIC providentially brings home every year a sufficient number of a new sort of gentlemen, with new customs, manners, and principles,” and, he went on, “it is plain that our constitution, if not altered, is altering at a great rate.”1 5 9 Nabobs, therefore, exposed the potential dangers of the teleologies inherent in the very fibers of Britain’s imperial order. The nabob was a fallen Briton. He had been charmed by the serpent and tasted the forbidden fruit in South Asia’s Edenic garden. That a single Briton could be seduced by South Asia proved that Britons writ large could be as well, and the return of large numbers of Britons from South Asia in the last half of the eighteenth century threatened that Britain itself could be seduced by the luxury and opulence that nabobs imported into the metropolitan world with them and transplanted into the soil of the British nation. Nabobs, therefore, threatened to eradicate the normative standards in Britain that had justified imperial difference in the first place. They exposed the philosophical failure of the imagined India that had emerged from the minds of eighteenth-century British observers in South Asia. To those who had imagined India, it was a model of the past that required British imperial help to pull it forward into the present. The nabobs reversed the teleology. They made it equally possible that India’s present was a model for Britain’s future, rendering India 1 5 8 Wheeler, 15. 1 5 9 The Gentleman’ s Magazine and Historical Chronicle (September 1786), 750-751. 155 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. not the deviation from the norm but rather the norm itself and reducing Britain from a nation called to empire to a small nation that, as William Harwood failed to recognize, was nothing more than another in a chain of “continual islands” peppered across the face of the globe. 15 6 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter Three “Under the Publick Eye” Inventing an Imperial Peril Building the Public Case As we saw in the previous chapter, Edmund Burke wanted to build a case that Warren Hastings posed a threat to the stability of both the British imperial system in South Asia and to the British nation itself. He wanted to see Hastings brought before the House of Commons and impeached; he wanted to see him tried before the House of Lords and convicted. He dared not risk that Hastings might be acquitted as Clive had been in 1773. The former-govemor-general had to be punished not just as an individual but also as a representative of all the corruption that was undermining the British imperial project in India. Hastings’ punishment was to set the example for the rest of the company. As Burke instructed the peers, “you strike at the whole corpse, if you strike at the head.”1 His success, he was aware, hinged on his ability to capture the public’s attention. In a letter written to Henry Dundas on 1 November 1787, Burke suggested that, if we proceed under the publick [sic] eye, I have no more doubt than I entertain of my existence, that all the ability, influence and power that can accompany a decided partiality in that tribunal can [not] save our criminal from a condemnation followd [sic] by some ostensible measure of justice.2 As such, Burke’s rhetorical maneuvers before the House of Lords had to do more than simply demonstrate that Hastings was a common criminal. Rather, the trial itself had to be a spectacle of the first order, a legal drama, and a staged production that captured the public’s imagination to generate concern for the fate of British India and anxiety about the danger that allowing it to continue to wallow under Company management posed to metropolitan 1 Saxena, i, 15. 2 Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings, 71. 157 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. institutions as well. Rhetoric was central to Burke’s strategy on several levels. First, Burke had to prove that Hastings and other Company servants were not degraded while in South Asia by the same environmental forces that “enervated” South Asians, Dutch colonial settlers, and traders from France and Portugal. Rather, he had to show that they had been rotten to begin with - that it was not in the British character to be “enervated.” Second, he had to show that Hastings’ alleged crimes mattered not just in the imperial world but in the metropole as well. In short, Burke had to answer a question that had first been posed by the rather lengthy poem The Nabob, or Asiatic Plunderers in 1773: “Concerns it you who plunders in the east?”3 When it first appeared, The Nabob seemed to fit within the broader genre of satirical poetry that had been popular in England since the Restoration, if not before. The poem’s very title admitted that its author intended the piece to be “a satyrical [sic] poem,” but, by the last half of the eighteenth century, the question of “plunder in the east” was far from rhetorical, the EIC and its chartered monopoly over trade to the Indian subcontinent having long been controversial subjects. Adam Smith was specifically critical of the EIC, writing in his The Wealth o f Nations, that “such exclusive companies.. .are nuisances in every respect; always more or less inconvenient to the countries in which they are established, and destructive to those which have the misfortune to fall under their government”4 Debates about the management of British India were far from new by the time Edmund Burke set out the impeachment charges against Warren Hastings. This chapter will argue that, in his quest to capture public attention during the Hastings impeachment, Burke 3 Quoted in James M. Holzman, The Nabobs in England: A Study of the Returned Anglo-Indian, 1760- 1785 (New York, 1926). Officially listed as an anonymous work by the catalogue at OIOC, this play has been attributed to Richard Clarke in other locations. See, Raven, 229. 4 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of die Wealth of Nations, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 372-373. 158 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. drew on a longer historical debate about the relationship between the nation and the empire that centered on the EIC and used specific Company employees to personify the imperial relationship. Even as he was trying to characterize Hastings as an imperial criminal, therefore, Burke was drawing on a longer tradition of anti-Company criticism to represent Hastings as a recognizable and growing threat to the British nation. In doing so, Burke hoped to dramatize the former-govemor-general as a domestic threat. This strategy was heightened by Burke’s rhetorical genius and the dramatic inclinations of his fellow managers for the prosecution, including the famed actor, playwright, and orator Richard Brinsley Sheridan. By drawing on a tradition of English theatrics that dated back to Shakespeare and which had grown exponentially since the Restoration, Burke and the other managers for the prosecution assured that the Hastings impeachment was, as Anna Clark has recently argued, one of the eighteenth century’s most spectacular public scandals.3 As had been the case during the 1772-73 inquiry into Clive’s jaghir, the dramatic spectacle of the Hastings impeachment was picked up by the media and spread across the national landscape from London to Liverpool, Exeter to Edinburgh, Cardiff to Cambridge, and beyond. In tracing this progression from Parliament, to the press, and to the public, this chapter will explore how the nabob became a popular trope in the late eighteenth century. As we have seen thus far, EIC employees complicated the Ideological model that justified British imperialism in South Asia, a fact that was central to Burke’s arguments against Hastings. This chapter will demonstrate that Burke’s own efforts to publicize the threat Hastings posed to the British imperial venture in South Asia became the foundation for a much broader mythology of the nabob that further complicated the teleologies of imperial 5 Anna Clark, 84-112. For more on the history of English and British theater, see John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1997), 325-426. 159 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. power. In exploring the institutions that popularized this trope, this chapter will demonstrate how early criticisms of EIC employees like Clive and Hastings by men like Edmund Burke exceeded Burke’s initial purposes, allowing the nabob to become a lightning rod for anti imperial critiques of Britain’s growing empire in South Asia and the increasing relationship between Britain and India. The nabobs became a target because they represented the human manifestation of this relationship. Because they were able to eschew traditional patterns of social organization with their imperial wealth and through their imperial connections, nabobs became a clear sign that the boundaries between Britain and India, empire and nation, and us and them were more fluid than many domestic observers could comfortably accept. Spectacular Perils and the Specter of a Growing Evil Edmund Burke’s rhetorical strategy at the trial of Warren Hastings was to paint the governor-general as a common criminal, a base human, and a threat to the honor of the British imperial project in South Asia. Hastings, Burke noted before the House of Lords, threatened to subvert the entire stability of British South Asia by setting a bad example for EIC employees who looked to the person of the governor-general for their moral example. Burke’s rhetorical flourishes at the Hastings trial were always painted with wide brush strokes, depicting the former-govemor-general as “a captain-general of iniquity.”6 Burke acknowledged that there was a need for “other inquiries, other trials,” that the Company was full of criminals like Hastings, both within the “collusive clan abroad” and among “the directors at home,” but the Hastings’ trial had to set the example. It was the heir to the Clive inquiries of 1772-73, and it had to right the wrongs that that inquiry had left unpunished - to discipline criminals who had long gone undisciplined.7 As one observer noted during those 6 Saxena i, 15. 1 Ibid., i, 73. 160 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. earlier inquiries, “example has been the principal means of restraining the general rapaciousness and corruption which [has] brought our affairs so near the brink of rain.”8 The rhetorical effect of Burke’s extravagance and that of his fellow managers for the prosecution was to dramatize Hastings’ alleged crimes. It was not enough that Hastings was a criminal or that he had committed crimes. It was, rather, imperative that Hastings be seen to be the leader of a cabal of Britons in South Asia, who saw in him an example. Seen from this angle, Hastings was a criminal, but, more significantly, he was a threat to the honor of any Briton who went out to South Asia in the service of the imperial cause. Having devastated and despoiled South Asia, he now threatened to pollute Britain’s mission there as well. “Mr. Hastings,” Burke argued, sat “at the head of the service,” but rather than using his status to set a good example, he “fouled his hands and sullied his government with bribes.. .substituted oppression and tyranny in the place of legal government,” and replaced “honest emoluments” with “the unbounded license of power.”9 The relative youth of EIC employees in the eighteenth century was a central feature of Brake’s arguments against Hastings. The EIC was distinguished, Burke argued, by “the youth of the persons who are employed in the system of that service.” It was, he suggested, “almost universally” a fact that Company servants had been sent to South Asia “to begin their progress and career in active occupation and in the exercise of high authority, at that period of life which in all places has been employed in the course of rigid education.” EIC employees, that is to say, were nothing more than a group of schoolboys whose education had been interrupted by their employment in South Asia. India was their classroom and the Company their teacher. “To put matters in a few words,” Burke summarized, “they are 8 The Sutton Court Collection, OIOC Mss Eur F128/114, 49. 9 Saxena, i, 27. 161 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. transferred from slippery youth to perilous independence, from independence to inordinate expectations, from inordinate expectations to boundless power.” They were “school-boys without tutors, minors without guardians,” or, worse still, schoolboys with Hastings as their tutor and minors with only Hastings to watch over them. The result was a foregone conclusion.1 0 These young men had been “let loose upon the world, with all the powers that despotism involves” and with nobody there to enforce upon them the significance of their mission or to see that they tempered their behavior. Hastings, Burke feared, would surely tutor them in corruption.1 1 In pointing out that Company employees in late eighteenth-century South Asia were very young men, and in some cases still boys, Burke echoed the warnings of Robert Clive, who had made the case in 1772 that EIC employees were too young and too poor to escape being tempted by bribery and corruption in India.1 2 Robert Clive was, of course, defending his own claims to his lucrative jaghir, and his testimony was laden with self-interested motivations and arguments. Bribery and its less malignant cousin, gift-taking, Clive argued, were the symbolic gestures of power in South Asia, dramatic and performative representations of power hierarchies between individuals.1 3 In order to maximize their power in South Asia, Clive argued, the British had to be willing to act the part of the powerful by accepting gifts, even if they looked like bribes, from their South Asian subordinates. Making bribery and gift-taking illegal, after all, did not mean that South Asians would stop offering either bribes or gifts. 1 0 See Geoffrey Camall, “ Burke as Modern Cicero," in The Impeachment of Warren Hastings: Papers from a Bicentenary Commemoration, ed. Geoffrey Camall and Colin Nicholson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), 82. 1 1 See Mehta, 32-33. 1 2 See Chapter Two, 95 and 144. 1 3 Cohn, 106-162. 162 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The Company’s policies against emoluments, therefore, were counterproductive on two fronts. Foremost, they made it impossible for Company servants to demonstrate their power over South Asian subordinates. At the same time, making necessary political tools illegal only assured that Company employees would eventually break the law in South Asia, either out of need or temptation. For Clive, the difference was hardly perceptible. What on the surface looked like a defense of his own involvement in gift-taking and bribery became, as a result, an argument against the Company’s outright refusal to allow its employees to receive gifts while on the job in South Asia. For Burke, the orders of the Company were a bright line - clear, obvious, and absolute. ‘The Company,” he argued before the Hastings impeachment, “have forbidden their servants to take any extraneous emoluments. The act of parliament has fulminated against them.” These were, he demanded, “clear positive laws,” which applied to everyone without distinction “ quod majus et minus.” The law applied to everyone equally. “Everyone who offends against the law is liable to the law,” he argued, and therein he found the source of Hastings’ greatest crime against the British nation. Because Company policies and national laws prohibited gift taking and applied to every British citizen in South Asia equally, Burke argued that he who has deviated but an inch from the straight line, he who has taken but one penny of unlawful emolument, - does not dare to complain of the most abandoned extortion and cruel oppression in any of Ms fellow servants. He who has taken a trifle perhaps as the reward of a good action is obliged to be silent when he sees whole nations desolated around him.1 4 For Burke, the matter was simple. One did not throw stones if one lived in a glass house, and the former-govemor-general had lived in the grandest glass palace in all of South Asia. As a criminal in charge of the entire British imperial project in South Asia, Hastings 1 4 Saxena, i, 30-31. 163 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. could not have been in a position to defend either the honor of the project or the letter of its laws and policies without exposing his own peculations. “Mr. Hastings,” Burke suggested, “never dared, after the fact, to punish extortion in others, because he could not, without risking the discovery of bribery in himself.” Nor, Burke argued, could any other Company employee reform the system. ‘The same corruption, the same oppression, and the same impunity will reign through all the subordinate gradations.”1 5 As long as Hastings was in power in Bengal, the situation in British India was bleak under the best of circumstances. None but the worst of men would want to go out to India and none but the worst would win promotion. Under Hastings, he suggested, a “corruptly venal” system of advancement had formed that promoted “the very worst men.. .because none but those who do not scruple the use of any means are capable, consistently with profit, to discharge at once the rigid demands of a severe public revenue and the private bribes of a rapacious chief magistrate.” In such a system, Burke concluded, “not only the worst men will be thus chosen, but they will be restrained by no dread whatsoever in the execution of their worst oppressions. Their protection is sure.”1 6 Assuming that good men made their way into the service of the Company, Burke argued that Hastings’ administration would corrupt them. Hastings’ commission in South Asia had been to administer British possessions on the subcontinent according to the Regulating Act of 1773. He was named, Burke insisted, “to put an end to corruption,” but, according to Burke, Hastings had instead “knowingly and willingly connived” to perpetuate the same corruption he had been sent to extirpate. He allowed - even encouraged - 1 5 Ibid, i, 221. 1 6 Ibid. 164 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. criminals to act upon their criminal urges in South Asia. “I will show you,” Burke told the Lords, that he positively refused to obey the Company’s order to inquire into and to correct the corruptions that prevailed in that country. Next, that he established an avowed system of connivance, in order to gain over everything that was corrupt in the country. And that, lastly, to secure it, he gave up all the prosecutions against British corruption on the subcontinent. Hastings had “enervated” British efforts to govern the subcontinent and debased Britain’s missionary drive to pull India out of the state of nature in which it had been found. 17 Burke’s word choice here is particularly noteworthy. Hastings had “enervated” British imperial efforts in South Asia. As we have seen, it was far from uncommon for British observers in eighteenth-century South Asia to see indigenous civilizations as well as European settlements on the South Asian subcontinent as “enervated” - fallen either from a glorious South Asian past or an elevated European present. Britons were not always or necessarily immune from the process of “enervation,” but the dictates of imperial power required that this fact be hidden, if not forgotten. In arguing that Hastings was a criminal, Burke brought the question back to the fore. Britons were enervated in South Asia; their imperial mission was degraded. But, he made the case, it was not South Asia per se that caused this degradation, as it had on the indigenous populations of the subcontinent and on other European powers. In Burke’s account, if Britain fell victim to enervation in South Asia, the blame could be placed squarely at the feet of one man - Warren Hastings. Hastings not only encouraged Britons in South Asia to participate in illicit and illegal activities - to violate Company policy and national law - he also encouraged Company employees to place themsel ves in the most precarious and threatening positions 1 7 Ibid., i, 338. 165 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. possible in South Asia. Veiy often, Burke argued, Company employees arrived in South Asia without any immediate connections other than the Company itself. Frequently, these young men lacked lodging during their first days in South Asia, and it was not uncommon for them to have no ready cash or local currency with which to purchase meals or rent accommodations. Helpless, the typical Company employee turned to local secretaries or stewards, many of them merchants in their own right, known throughout South Asia as banyans. The banyan, Burke explained during the Hastings trial, is “by name of office, the steward of the household of the European gentleman: he has the management of his affairs [and] the ordering of his servants.” Hastings encouraged the practice of taking a banyan, known with no small degree of denunciation as banyanism}* The reasons behind Hastings’ support of banyanism were simple, Burke suggested. The banyans came “from that class of native who by being habituated to misery and subjection can submit to any orders, and are fit for any of the basest services.” They were, in short, the most lowly and most criminal class in all of South Asia. 1 9 By encouraging British men in the employ of the Company to mix their affairs with those of local banyans, Hastings was offering his official sanction of the banyans’ practices. On one level, banyanism made good sense. The banyans were often better versed in local affairs than their European masters, but Hastings’ logic, Burke argued, went deeper and was more sinister. 2 0 From the moment a Briton took money from a banyan, Burke insisted, the banyan held “that dreadful power over his master, which every creditor has over his debtor. 18 Earlier Britons had compared Indian banyans to European Jews as a way of expressing the contempt they felt for the banyans’ place in the imperial economy of South Asian imperialism. For more on these negative perceptions of the practice of banyanism, see Fryer, 193 and 263. 1 9 Saxena, i, 33. For more see, Sen, 131. 2 0 Saxena, i, 33-34. 166 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Actions the most abhorrent to his nature he must see done before his face: and thousands and thousands worse are done in his absence, and he dare not complain. ” 2 1 From the very outset, it was “not the Englishman” but “the black banyan that is the master. ” 2 2 Because he holds power over his master, the banyan “extorts, robs, plunders. ” 2 3 These were, Burke argued, the means by which he fed his master’s need for cash as well as his own taste for profit Hastings supported such a system, Burke postulated, because it was precisely this system that allowed him to sustain his own empire of peculation over British South Asia. “This is,” he declared, “the system of banyanism and of concealment which Mr. Hastings, instead of eradicating out of the service, has propagated by example and by support, and enlarged by converting even Europeans into that dark and insidious character. ” 2 4 South Asia could corrupt, Burke agreed, but the British mission - its stated goals and its legal mandate - was to extirpate the corrupting influences on the subcontinent. British national character, Burke had no doubt, had the wherewithal to see the job to its conclusion. Hastings, however, had abandoned that mandate, and, in doing so, he sunk the nobility of the British mission in South Asia in the historical morass of Indian decay. In his own defense, Hastings was quick to note that he had undertaken steps to elevate the native populations of South Asia. If the British were to spend time in South Asia, the native populations of the subcontinent would have to be made suitable neighbors, colleagues, and subjects of the British imperial nation. To that end, Hastings listed the many achievements of Ms administration. He had helped Sir William Jones establish the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, he had overseen the construction of the first printing press in 2 1 Ibid., i, 34. 7 2 Ibid., i, 33-34. 2 3 Ibid., i, 34. 7 4 Ibid., i, 36. 167 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Calcutta, he had encouraged the printers at the Calcutta press to publish the Bengal Gazette and Calcutta General Advertiser, and, in 1781, he had helped to found the Calcutta Muslim College, a madrassa that trained young South Asians for state service. 2 5 To Burke, on the other hand, the Muslim College was nothing short of a “shameful affair” and a “scene of iniquity. ” 2 6 Hastings, Burke told the peers, claimed to have founded the Calcutta Muslim College as a school “to breed theologians, magistrates, and molavies, that is to say, judges and doctors of law, who were to be something like our masters in chancery, the assessors of judges, to assist them in their judgments.”2 7 In reality, Burke argued, the college allowed Hastings to act as the “schoolmaster” to the entire criminal “gang” he administered in South Asia. 2 8 One visitor to the school, Burke quoted, argued that the madrassa was nothing more than a “sink of filth and misery.” It became not so much a place of learning as a “receptacle of every kind of abuse; not only filth and excrements, which made it stink in the natural nostrils, but of worse filth, which made it insufferably offensive to the moral nostrils of the inhabitants. ” 2 9 What Hastings called a college for the “respected, the learned, and the wise men” of India was, to Burke, a literal cesspool - a place where Hastings’ crimes and criminality were spread among the native populations of South Asia and propagated among the British there as well. Hastings, Burke suggested, chose to found a Muslim college because Islam allowed him to hide his own peculations and sins in ways that a Christian school might not have done; it allowed him a venue in which to market his perilous pedagogy. Hastings had, Burke 2 5 Lawson, The East India Company, 114. 2 6 Saxena, i, 409. * Ibid. ™ Ibid. 2 9 Ibid., i, 409-410. 168 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. hinted, abandoned his own nation and his own faith in the service of mammon, greed, and corruption. With no small amount of sarcasm, Burke praised Hastings’ choice before the Lords. “Heaven be praised,” he began, “that Mr. Hastings, when he was resolved to be pious and munificent, and to be a great founder, chose a Mahomedan rather than a Christian foundation; so that our religion was not disgraced by such a foundation. ” 3 0 In Burke’s formulation, Christianity belonged to the British; it was a marker of good political administration, proper educational systems, and honorable efforts by one nation on behalf of the other. Hastings was not a part of any of these things. Christianity, Burke argued, was “ our” religion, the religion of the British people. Hastings’ actions set him apart. Hastings sat before the House of Lords, Burke therefore argued, to be judged not as a British citizen. “Mr. Hastings comes before your lordships not as a British governor answering to a British tribunal,” Burke argued, “but as a soubahdar, as a beshaw of three tails. ” 3 1 Hastings, Burke insisted, wanted to be tried as an Indian and held to what he himself defined as Indian standards of justice. Everything - from his arguments that South Asia was a despotic place where he could only act as a despot to his support for Islam at the Calcutta Muslim College - suggested that Hastings did not merit the label “British.” A true Briton cherished his native homeland, the nobility of its imperial mission, and the Protestant faith and liberal political ideals that guided them both above the lure of absolute power and the temptation of untold wealth. Hastings, Burke argued, displayed none of these characteristics. Hastings was not a Briton. Nor, though, was he an Indian. He was a criminal - an identity that crossed national boundaries. Criminals existed in every nation, but they belonged to none. 3 0 Ibid., i, 409. 3 1 Ibid., 1,94. 169 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Hastings, then, had not been enervated in India. Rather, he had been a villain from the outset, and his own weak character was the source of further degradation in South Asia. Perhaps more threateningly, Burke argued, Hastings’ behavior as governor-general posed a clear and present danger to the British nation itself. The impeachment trial against Hastings, Burke suggested, was a struggle to salvage the “wreck and fragments of our cause.” In speaking of his “cause,” Burke had two themes in mind. First, he spoke to the British imperial cause, but his second cause was arguably more pressing and more present for, as he sought to vindicate the course of British imperialism in South Asia, Burke also sought to secure the domestic British political system as the bastion of honorable governance and uncorrupted liberty. Hastings, he insisted, demanded “not only an escape, but a triumph.” Should the former-govemor-general be acquitted, it would signal a condemnation of the House of Commons that had impeached him. Furthermore, acquittal from the peers of the realm would prove once and for all that the House of Lords stood for graft and corruption above law and order. It would make the Lords “instruments of his glory,” and of the “disgrace” of the collective British nation. 3 2 For Burke, Hastings was more than a criminal; he was a corrosive threat to the rights of the average British citizen. “The law,” Burke told the Lords, “is the security of the people of England, it is the security of the people of India, it is the security of every person that is governed, and of every person that governs. This is but one law for all.”3 3 To allow Hastings to violate the laws that governed Indians was not a matter of abrogating the rights of unknown people from unknown places far away. The laws that governed India had been written in Britain; they were part of the same structure that governed Britain. As Burke 3 2 Ibid., i, 455. 33 Ibid., i, 504. 170 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. often noted, “the spirit of the English constitution, which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, Invigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even down to the minutest member.”3 4 Allowing Hastings to govern as a despot ia Sooth Asia was the same as saying that despotism was acceptable in London, the home counties, and beyond. For Burke, the Hastings impe@chm.mt was as much a defease of the domestic British political system as it was a defense of the nation’s South Asian empire. James Gillray’s 1788 Impeachment Ticket represented the trial is much the same light. Giliray’s etching, which was itself a satirical replica of the actual admission tickets being issued for the proceedings, represented the faces of the three primary managers for the prosecution (Burke, Fox, and Sheridan) as the ends of royal maces emblazoned on a defensive shield. 3 4 Camall, 84. 3 5 Image scanned from Anthony Farrington, Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia, 1600- 1834 (London: The British library, 2002), 116. 3 6 Image scanned from a photograph courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London. IM P® 111 !! Illustration 7. Admission ticket for the trial o f Warren Hastings in Westminster Hall, 1788.3 5 Illustration 8 . Impeachment ticket for the trial ofW-rr-n H-st-ngs, James Gillray, February, 1788.3 6 171 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Above the shield, the mighty arm of justice waves a thick club with which to beat down the accused criminal. The empire, represented as a plaintive South Asia, and the nation, represented by Lord Thurlow, the resolute Lord Chancellor, sit to either side of the central shield, safely under the aegis of justice’s club. Burke’s arguments before the Lords, therefore, struck at the very core of Britain’s constitutional framework. To help secure Hastings’ conviction, Burke made the case that the Lords were the nation’s, and indeed the empire’s, last line of defense against the subversive machinations of the criminally inclined former-govemor-general. It was Burke’s hope that the peers would use Hastings’ case as an example, a means by which to “justify, as they have always justified, that provision in the constitution by which justice is made an hereditary office.”3 7 In Burke’s formulation, the Lords embodied all that was good and noble about the British nation and its empire - the tradition, the stability, the order, and the honor. Hastings, contrapuntally, represented nothing more than a quest for power and wealth. His history was not rooted in that of the nation. Like so many Company employees, Hastings had come from nothing. He was an orphan, “a creature of the bureau, raised by peculiar circumstances to the possession of a power. ” 3 8 While the House of Lords represented the honorable past and the traditional stability of the British political system and the House of Commons exemplified the legal authority of the nation, Hastings had fallen into power merely by an unfortunate accident of history. 3 9 3 7 Saxena, i, 230. 3 8 Ibid., 1,501. See also Macaulay, “Warren Hastings,” 249. 3 9 Clearly, the accusation that Hastings had risen above his birth was a charge rooted in class anxiety and fears that nabobs were reshaping the class hierarchies of the British nation. The charge was not new, though, as Clive had been subject to similar allegations during the earlier inquiries into his financial affairs. For more, see Hastings, The History of the Trkd of Warren Hastings, vi. 141. 172 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Throughout the trial, Burke frequently reminded the peers that their task included not only the punishment of Hastings but also the preservation of the British political system. When the House of Lords moved in 1794 to impose rules on the prosecution, with an eye to limiting the length of the trial, then in its sixth year, Burke claimed that they had gutted his case. The Hastings impeachment in the Commons, Burke reminded the Lords, had taken several years. If the case were to falter before the House of Lords, the members of the House of Commons could not “plead for ourselves that we have done this from a sudden gust of passion, which sometimes agitates and sometimes misleads the most grave popular assemblies.” The Commons’ case was either the fair result of years of deliberation or “nothing but malice. ” 4 0 The Commons had come before the Lords “to call for justice, not to solve a problem; and if justice be denied us, the accused is not acquitted, but the tribunal is condemned” because, as Burke noted, a Hastings acquittal was nothing short of proof positive that “the most minute, the most circumstantial, and the most cautious [Parliamentary inquiry] that ever was instituted” by the Commons had resulted in “a deliberate error.”4 1 History, he insisted, could not repeat itself; Hastings could not be acquitted as Clive had been. Thus, he demanded, it is not the culprit who is upon trial, it is the House of Commons that is upon its trial, it is the House of Lords that is upon its trial, it is the British nation that is upon its trial before all other nations, before the present generation, and before a long, long posterity. 4 2 At the center of Burke’s argument, he drew a less-than-subtle comparison between his own efforts in the Hastings impeachment and the actions of the Lords, almost daring them to do less than he did, feel less outraged than he felt, and be less convinced of 4 0 Saxena, i, 458. 4 1 Ibid., i, 457. 4 2 Ibid., i,456. 173 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Hastings’ guilt that he was. Nowhere did this strategy appear more obvious than in Ms closing arguments in 1795. “It is with a trembling solicitude [that] we consign this product of our long, long labours to your charge. Take it! Take it! It Is a sacred trust Never before was a cause of such magnitude submitted to any human tribunal.”4 3 The House of Commons had, he suggested, done its part; it was now the turn of the House of Lords to do its. The outcome of the trial, Burke argued, was critical. Great nations, he suggested, could collapse under the weight of mismanagement and corruption. They had done so, he pointed out, in recent historical memory - referring, of course, to the French Revolution, wMch itself so captured Burke’s imagination and which had swept away the structures of the ancien regime during the course of the Hastings impeachment. 4 4 “The parliament of Paris,” Burke reminded the Lords, had an origin very similar to that of the great court before which I stand.. .the parliament of Paris, my lords, WAS; it is gone! It has passed away; it has vanished like a dream ! 4 5 The French regime, Burke cautioned, was not unique; the British Parliamentary system was equally susceptible to revolution. “My lords,” he concluded, if you must fall, may you so fall! But, if you stand, and stand I trust you will, together with the ancient laws and liberties of this great and illustrious kingdom, may you stand as unimpeached in honour as in power; may you stand not as a substitute for virtue, but as an ornament of virtue, as a security for virtue; may you stand the refuge of afflicted nations; may you stand a sacred temple, for the perpetual residence of an inviolable justice. 4 6 The House of Lords was the last bastion of the British political system, its ultimate defender, and the great repository of its traditions, its history, and its stability, if only it would choose to live up to the burden of such responsibilities. In Burke’s mind, the fate of the British 4 3 Ibid., ii, 439. 4 4 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Francis Canavan (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999). 4 5 Saxena, ii, 440. 4 6 Ibid., ii, 441. 174 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. nation depended upon the Lords doing so; it was all that stood between Britain and revolution, enervation, and decay. Scripting the Drama and Staging the Spectacle Burke’s arguments at the Hastings impeachment were far from unemotional. They suggested, first, that Hastings was a common criminal who had been entrusted with the management of the British empire in South Asia and, second, that Hastings’ actions in India had brought the British political system to the brink of rain - both charges designed to attract popular attention and, as Burke had written to Dundas, keep the trial “under the publick eye.” Charging that Hastings was undermining the British political system gave every Briton a vested interest in the outcome of the trial, and, as Ann Clark has noted, “scandals had their greatest impact when activists were able to link personal problems with larger political issues.”4 7 If, as Burke was arguing, Hastings posed a threat to the stability of the British nation as well as to the British imperial mission in South Asia, it was critical that Burke and the other managers for the prosecution be able to convince as many Britons as possible of the threat confronting them. The Hastings trial was as much about public relations as it was about legal doctrines and criminal behavior - a fact that Burke knew all too well. Arguing that Hastings was a public threat was one thing; convincing the nation that he was a threat was quite another. The impeachment, then, had to be staged as a significant public event, something that viscerally captured the public’s Imagination. The impeachment before both the Commons and the Lords, therefore, had to be a public spectacle. As Sara Suleri has noted, “the impeachment at Westminster Hall became 4 7 Anna Clark, 4. 175 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the most spectacular stage in London, ” 4 8 Gilbert Elliot, one of Burke’s fellow managers for the prosecution, remembered that [the audience] will have to mob it at the door till nine, when the doors open, and then there will be a rush as there is at the pit of the playhouse when Garrick plays King Lear.. .The ladies are dressed and mobbing it in the Palace Yard by six or half after six, and they sit from nine till twelve before the business begins.. .Some people and, 1 believe even women - 1 mean ladies - have slept at the coffeehouses adjoining Westminster Hall, that they may be sure of getting to the door in time.4 9 For Burke and his fellow managers for the prosecution, the script of the Hastings trial had to be perfect. Their speeches were prolix and bombastic, often lasting for days. They were well rehearsed, filled with hyperbole, and spoken loudly to convey the enormity of Hastings’ crimes and the conviction of his efforts.5 0 That his speeches before the House of Lords on the matter of the Hastings impeachment seemed to last interminably was, Burke was quick to note, Hastings’ fault. “I have had,” he reported, “a great encyclopedia of crimes to deal with; I will get through them as soon as I can. ” 5 1 The length of the prosecution’s speeches was a public indicator of the scope of Hastings’ criminality.5 2 The spoken word was not, however, Burke’s only rhetorical tool during the years of the impeachment trial. Rather, the impeachment and the subsequent trial were staged productions that were carefully crafted to include dramatic gestures, well-timed fainting 4 8 Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 53. 4 9 Quoted in Suleri, 53. 5 0 For more on Burke’s rhetoric at the Hastings’ trial, see Conor Cruise O’Brien, “Warren Hastings in Burke’s Great Melody,” in The Impeachment of Warren Hastings: Papers from a Bicentenary Commemoration, ed. Geoffrey Camall and Colin Nicholson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), 58-75. For Burke’s early aesthetic views on size, scope, and volume as qualities that connote significance, see Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins o f our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Philips (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 6 6 . 51 Saxena, i, 381. 5 2 For more on the duration of the trial and Hastings’ complaints about his suffering, see Hastings, The Defence o f Warren Hastings, 7. See also, Hastings, The History o f the Trial o f Warren Hastings, i. 79, and iii. 26. 176 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. spells, feigned illnesses, and theatrical histrionics for the sake of drawing public attention to the case being made against the former-govemor-general. On 17 February 1788, five days into the trial before the Lords - and a day before he concluded his opening speech - Burke took ill while speaking in the House of Lords. During the course of the day, Burke had tried to paint for his audience a picture of life in India under the administration of Warren Hastings, using, as Anna Clark has shown, scandalous sexual imagery “in an attempt to appeal to a wider humanitarian public.”3 The images he conjured were protracted and graphic. “Virgins,” he began, who had never seen the sun, were dragged from the inmost sanctuaries of their houses; and in the open court of justice, in the very place where security was to be sought against all wrong and all violence.. .these virgins, vainly invoking heaven and earth, in the presence of their parents, and whilst their shrieks were mingled with the indignant cries and groans of all the people, publicly violated by the lowest and wickedest of the human race. Wives were tom from the arms of their husbands, and suffered the same flagitious wrongs, which were indeed hid in the bottoms of dungeons in which their honour and liberty were buried together. Often they were taken out of the refuge of this consoling gloom, stripped naked, and thus exposed to the world, and then cruelly scourged; and in order that cruelty might riot in all the circumstances that melt into tenderness the fiercest natures, the nipples of their breasts were put between the sharp and elastic sides of deft bamboos [to which]...growing from crime to crime, ripened by cruelty for cruelty, these fiends, at length outraging sex, decency, nature, applied lighted torches and slow fire.. .5 * Here, Burke paused for a breath. “I cannot proceed for shame and horror!,” he told the Lords, before returning to describe how these infernal furies planted death in the source of life, and where that modesty, which, more than reason, distinguishes men from beasts, retires from the view, and even shrinks from the expression, there they exercised and glutted the unnatural, monstrous, and nefarious cruelty, - there, where the reverence of nature, and the sanctity of justice, dares not to pursue, nor venture to describe their practices. 5 5 53 Anna Clark, p. 17. 5 4 Saxena,!, 189-90. 5 5 Ibid., i, 190. 177 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Hastings had allowed rape, rapine, and torture. He was a sadist, a man who would allow virgins to be despoiled, wives to be debauched, and mothers to be defiled. Within an hour of these descriptions Burke found himself unable to continue. He blanched and was obliged to return to his seat; his fellow managers for the prosecution called for a recess. Within the hour, Burke had again returned. Apologetically, he retook the floor and resumed speaking. “My lords,” he began, “I am sorry to break the attention of your lordships in such a way. It is a subject that agitates me. It is long, difficult, and arduous; but with the blessing of God, if I can, to save you, any further trouble, I will go through it this day. ” 5 6 Neither his own fortitude nor divine providence, it would seem, were enough to sustain Burke as he proceeded to speak for less than a quarter of an hour before he collapsed. At the urging of the Prince of Wales, the Lords moved to adjourn for the day for the sake of Burke’s health. 5 7 In the trial’s final months, Burke’s health continued to fail him at critical junctures when, as he continued to claim, the heinousness of the charges he was prosecuting overwhelmed his delicate constitution. Throughout the day on 3 June 1794, Burke paused to have others carry on his charges for him as he rested from fatigue. 3 8 When he resumed the floor, Burke explained to the peers that “these are crimes...for which the Commons of Great Britain knock at the breasts of your consciences, and call for justice. They would think themselves dishonoured for ever, if they had not brought these crimes before your lordships, and with the utmost energy.”3 9 These crimes were “the climax of degradation and suffering,” he demanded, before appearing to stumble slightly, but just enough that those in the gaileiy noticed. “I have not strength at present to proceed,” he told the assembly, his 5 6 Ibid., i, 197. 5 7 Ibid. 5 8 Ibid., ii, 54-55. 5 9 Ibid., ii, 79. 178 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. hand on a table to support Mm, “but I hope I shall soon be enabled to do so.. .1 have done the best, I can, and find myself incapable just at this moment of going any further.”® When the trial resumed two days later, Burke refused to let his audience forget that he was sacrificing Ms health for tMs cause. His “want of strength” had, he recalled, obliged him to conclude prematurely at the last session of the trial.6 1 Burke’s dramatic flare at the Hastings impeachment was augmented by that of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. By the time he appeared as a manager for the prosecution at the Hastings impeachment, Sheridan was widely known throughout London. His play, The Rivals, had been one of the most popular stage productions in the city since its second opening at Covent Garden on 28 January 1775. By the end of the following year, Sheridan had succeeded David Garrick as the manager of Druiy Lane Theatre, and it was as a well- known playwright and successful theater manager that Sheridan had stood for Parliament and been returned for Stafford in 1780. Burke admired Sheridan, noting that he showed “such an array of talent, such an exMbition of capacity, such a display of powers, as are unparalleled in the Mstoiy of oratory. ” 6 2 Indeed, as one biographer has noted, Sheridan was widely regarded as one of Parliament’s “most delightful speakers.”® Sheridan made Ms first speech in the Hastings impeachment during the proceedings before the House of Commons on 7 February 1787. He had been selected to explain the charges relative to the begums of Oude. Nearly six hours long, his speech was immediately recognized as one of the finest pieces of oratory ever delivered in the House of Commons. mIbid„ ii, 104-105. 6 1 Ibid., u, 105. 6 2 Quoted in Jack D. Durant, “Prudence and the Direct Road of Wrong Doing: The School for Scandal and Sheridan’s Westminster Hall Speech,” Studies in Burke and His Time 15:3 (1974), 242. 63 R. Crompton Rhodes. Harlequin Sheridan: The Man and the Legend (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1933), 92. Sheridan’s speeches often elicited laughter and other emotions from the crowds in attendance in Westminster Hall. For more, see Hastings, The History o f the Trial o f Warren Hastings, 1 64-66. 179 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. When he finished speaking, “the whole house - the members, peers, and strangers - involuntarily joined in a tumult of applause. 6 4 Sir Gilbert Elliot noted that it was by many degrees the most excellent and astonishing performance I ever heard, and surpasses all I ever imagined possible in eloquence and ability. This is the universal sense of all who heard it You will conceive how admirable it was when I tell you that he surpassed, I think, Pitt, Fox, and even Burke in his finest and most brilliant orations... [the audience was so] worked up into such paroxysm of passionate enthusiasm on the subject, and of admiration for him that the moment he sat down there was a universal shout, nay even clapping for half a second. 6 5 Sheridan reprised his speech during the trial before the Lords, and the anticipation of his speech was intense in the days before 3 June 1788, attracting even the attention of London’s most famous actress, Sarah Siddons. 6 6 Tickets for the day, Elliot later remembered, “were being sold for as much as fifty guineas.”6 7 The speech itself stretched across several days, and when he reached his conclusion on Friday 13 June, Sheridan swooned backwards, landing in Burke’s arms. Before fainting completely, he was heard to whisper “My lords, I have done. ” 6 8 The nineteenth-century historian, Thomas Macaulay may have elaborated on the scene when he noted that “Sheridan contrived with a knowledge of stage effect which his father might have envied, to sink back as if exhausted, into the arms of Burke, who hugged him with the energy of generous admiration,” but the immediate response to Sheridan’s performance was to appreciate the theatricality of the scene he had 6 4 Quoted in Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, ed., The Dictionary of National Biography, 21 vols. (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1908), xviii, 81. 6 5 Rhodes. 106 6 6 See Macaulay, “Warren Hastings,” 359. 6 7 Suleri, 53-54. Tickets for the impeachment would remain in high demand well into the extended trial. Horace Walpole admitted to having trouble securing tickets for a young lady in whom he had taken some interest in a letter to Lord Harcourt dated 5 June 1790. See Horace Walpole to Lord Hardcourt, 5 June 1790, in Walpole, xxxv, 541. 6 8 Quoted in DNB, xviii, 81. See also, E. A. Bond, ed., Speeches of the Managers and Counsel in the Trial of Warren Hastings (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1861), 626 and 656. 180 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. created.® “I believe there were few dry eyes in the assembly,” Elliot noted after the speech, “and as for myself, I never remembered to have cried so heartily and copiously on any public occasion. ” 7 0 Swooning, sometimes real and sometimes feigned, was a common stage device among the managers and their collaborators in the audience at Westminster Hall. After Burke’s opening speech to the gathering, “the ladies in the galleries unaccustomed to such displays of eloquence...were in a state of uncontrollable emotion. Handkerchiefs were pulled out; smelling-bottles were handed round; hysterical sobs and screams were heard; and Mrs. Sheridan was carried out in a fit. ” 7 1 Indeed, Mrs. Sheridan fainted during the course of several of Burke’s most significant speeches, including his discussion of the atrocities at Dinajpur, and Elliot himself, in a letter to his wife, later recalled fainting on several occasions. “I have myself enjoyed [Burke’s] embrace on such an occasion, and know its value. ” 7 2 To the wider public, the histrionics of the managers for the prosecution seemed to drive home the enormity of Hastings’ alleged crimes. They played the drama out on the stage of public opinion, using the great tribunal at Westminster Hall as their theater. Nabobs and Newspapers: Imperial Scandal and the National Media The Hastings impeachment was a process of theater as much as of law. Pageantry, pomp, drama, and spectacle, however, were not enough to sustain the public’s attention on Burke’s arguments forever. As Sara Suleri has suggested, “the eight years of Hastings impeachment before the House of Lords provided eighteenth-century England with a * Quoted in DNB, xviii, 81. 7 0 Suleri, p. 54. 7 1 Macaulay, “Warren Hastings,” 362. 7 2 See Geoffrey Camall and Colin Nicholson, “Introduction,” in The Impeachment of Warren Hastings: Papers from a Bicentenary Commemoration, ed. Geoffrey Camall and Colin Nicholson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), 3. Elliot quoted in DNB, xviii, 81. 181 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. spectacle first of political pageantry and then of boredom.”7 3 What had begun, Thomas Macaulay would later note, with “great displays of rhetoric” ended with “examinations and cross-examinations...statemenls of accounts.. .the reading of papers, filled with words unintelligible to English ears. ” 7 4 What had grabbed the public’s attention at first became stale after years and years of testimony, and, as Burke had predicted, the loss of the public’s interest and attention spelled the defeat of his case against Hastings. On 23 April 1795, Hastings was acquitted of all the charges against him. That the public’s attention to and interest in the Hastings impeachment flagged over the course of eight years did not, however, mean that it failed to win significant attention in the popular press of the period. Indeed, as Anna Clark has argued, “scandals had their greatest impact in opening up the press to public debate” in the eighteenth century. 7 5 In the case of the Hastings impeachment, the domestic news media helped to give the flagging trial a life that exceeded both Burke’s purposes as well as the scope of the proceeding itself. Out of the arguments presented against Hastings in Westminster Hall, the domestic news media generated a caricature of the nabob and the nabobish threat facing the British nation that did more to generate domestic concern, and in some cases hysteria, than any of Burke’s rhetorical stunts or theatrical maneuvers. Publicly distributed reporting from the Hastings impeachment trial expanded Burke’s audience beyond the already grand scope of Westminster Hail to encompass the entire British nation. If, as some have argued, increasing access to the structures of political society through such venues as the coffee house and periodical press promoted an 7 3 Suleri, 49. The ennui that set in as the trial progressed so slowly can be measured in the way the crowds in attendance shrank across the long duration of the proceedings. For more, see Hastings, The History of the Trial o f Warren Hastings, i. 27. 7 4 Quoted in Suleri, 64. 7 5 Anna Clark, 213. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. atmosphere in which eighteenth-century Britons could negotiate a national identity, parliamentary reporting in the same period served to amplify Burke’s political arguments in the Hastings trial within the public sphere. 7 6 Simultaneously, reports in the popular media demonstrated the disjunctures that were possible between the ideological purposes behind Burke’s aggressive crusade against Hastings and the broader British public’s concerns regarding empire, identity, and India in the last years of the century. Across the years of the Hastings trial, Burke sustained the public’s attention but lost control of the message, for, as his staged production made its way across the national landscape, Burke’s insistence that Hastings was a criminal and a threat to the nation as well as its imperial mission tapped into popular attitudes towards the figure of the nabob that had emerged during the Clive inquiries of the early 1770s and popularized the characterization as a visible and controversial national trope. The national attention focused on both the Clive inquires of the 1770s and the later Hastings trial would not have been possible in the earliest decades of the eighteenth century. Rather, the British national media of the late-eighteenth century owed much to the efforts of editors like Edward Cave who had fought for the right to print parliamentary debates in his The Gentleman’s Magazine throughout the first half of the century. 7 7 By 1760, Britain could claim thirty-five thriving provincial newspapers, a number that grew to nearly a hundred by 7 6 Jtirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation o f the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996). 7 7 For more on the history of publication and the printed media in eighteenth century, see Brewer, The Pleasures o f the Imagination,132-133. See also, Wilson, The Seme o f the People', Walter Graham, English Periodical Literature (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1930); Daniel N. Fader and George Bomstein, British Periodicals o f the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1972); and Dror Wahrman, “Virtual Representation: Parliamentary Reporting and Languages of Class in the 1790s,” in Past and Presentl 36 (August 1992) 83-113. 183 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1780.7 8 As it had in the field of parliamentary reporting writ large, The Gentleman’ s Magazine led the way in addressing questions about the relationship between empire and the nation. In a letter from February 1772, printed on the eve of the Clive inquiry, one correspondent noted that he hoped, “for the sake of my country, and for the honour of the English name,” that “a thick veil could be drawn over the methods of acquiring fortunes in India.. .as well as over the monstrous and unconstitutional powers, with which our nabobs in that country have been permitted to invest themselves.” Britain was in danger, the correspondent insisted. “Our Eastern nabobs possess the power of doing ill in a greater degree,” the letter continued, “than perhaps was ever known in the annals of time. ” 7 9 Nabobs posed, the letter explained, one of the most pressing threats to the British nation, but they were also a hazard to South Asia. “I have known Bengal,” the letter-whiter went on to claim, “I have traveled over that country.” As had so many other Britons who went to South Asia in the eighteenth century, the correspondent had found India to be “the garden of the world” when he first arrived there. When he returned some years later, he wrote, “the villages were become the habitations of foxes.. .the once fertile plains were become immeasurable wasted, inhabited only by the growling tyger [sic] and the howling jackal, and the half-starved manufacturers, whom rapine and avarice had left.”® Burke’s rhetorical dramatizations at the Hastings impeachment drew on an older line of argument, one that first appeared in the national debate on the eve of the Give inquiries. Nabobs, so the argument went, threatened Britain and despoiled South Asia. Rather than being threatened themselves by the enervating forces of the South Asian environment, the 7 8 See Jeremy Osborn, India, Parliament, and the Press Under George HI: A Study o f English Attitudes Towards the East India Company and Empire in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Oxford, 1999), 51. 7 9 The Gentleman’ s Magazine, February 1772,69. 8 0 Ibid. 184 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. nabobs were depraved men who posed a threat to the Edenic perfection of South Asia; they reversed the teleology of imperial power entirely. Newspapers seemed to challenge Burke’s claims, arguing in many cases that nabobs had, in fact, been corrupted in India. Robert Clive certainly thought that that the press was out to get him, and he noted during the course of his defensive efforts to save his jaghir in 1772 and 1773, that the news media were a key instrument in what he saw as a crusade to disgrace Mm. “The Press has, for some time past, teemed with so many reflections upon the servants of the East India Company, and particularly me,” he reflected in a letter of 4 April 1 7 7 2 8 1 j^s we jiayg seen; he argued that it was Ms conduct - the scope of the tasks he had faced in South Asia and the determination with which he had engaged them - that had “occasioned the public papers to teem with scurrility and abuse against me. ” 8 2 The Gentleman’ s Magazine was not the only periodical to attack Clive. Indeed, the same letter that appeared in the February 1772 edition of the magazine also appeared in the 19 February 1772 edition of The Public Advertiser?® Countless magazines and papers joined in the assault, printing letters, editorials, and news stories that challenged the argumentative line of Clive’s defense as well as Burke’s claims that nabobs were pure criminal-types from the outset Likewise, as Clive noted, the printed media were not always as concerned with the validity of their claims as with the substance of their charges; hyperbole, as often as not, was printed alongside fact without any distinction between the two. The Public Advertiser reported that the nabobs returned to Britain “with millions of acquired property” after having left for “that continent almost 81 Quoted in Osborn, India, Parliament, and the Press Under George III, 98. Hastings echoed Clive’s argument when he suggested that “every daily paper has teemed with reflections upon me and pamphlets, filled with the most scandalous and libelous abuse, have been written...to influence the public against me.” For more, see Hastings, The Defence o f Warren Hastings, 8 . 8 2 The Clive Collection, OIOC G37/4,6 . 83 The Public Advertiser, Wednesday 19 February 1772. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. without a shirt.”8 4 All nabobs, both in South Asia and at the Company’s headquarters on Leadenhall Street, were the sons of “Cheesemongers,” always eager to crush any inquiries into their own Conduct, to purchase Peerages, Houses, Equipages, more splendid than those of the first Prince of the Blood, or most wealthy Noblemen in England; and lastly, if they choose it, to purchase all the Boroughs in England, the EIC, and the Constitution and all.8 5 Such “reporting” fueled popular gossip - stories that told of nabobs who had left South Asia for London “with 150 thousand pounds in [their] pocket” - promoting a general atmosphere of fear and hostility towards EIC employees in Britain. 8 6 As one nabob would recall, “those who shoot in the dark, may fire boldly indeed, not being immediately liable to discovery. ” 8 7 Anonymous letters sent to the popular press during the inquiries of 1772-73 suggest that the public was deeply engaged in the debate about Clive’s jaghir and the criminality of his actions in South Asia. “It is with Pleasure that I observe the generous Spirit of the British Nation roused,” one letter writer wrote to The Public Advertiser in March 1772, “by the Cries of Oppression that proceed from the Banks of the Ganges. ” 8 8 These cries, the writer went on, convicted all Britons of complicity in the crimes of the nabobs. “There is not an Englishman untainted by the villainous Commerce of Change-Alley,” the letter went on, referring to the EIC and its headquarters on Leadenhall Street. The entire nation, it continued, “sfiudderfedj at the Accounts which are daily published of the Miseries of the Natives of Bengal, and execrate the inhuman Authors of such Rapine, Cruelty, and Devastation. ” 8 9 8 4 Quoted in Holzman, 26. 8 5 See The Public Advertiser, Wednesday 19 February 1772. 8 6 Quoted in Holzman, 27. 8 7 Harry Verelst, 6 . 8 8 The Public Advertiser, Monday 20 March 1772. 8 9 Ibid. 186 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. la May of the same year, another correspondent, under the pseudonym Candor, submitted a letter “To the Committee appointed to examine East India Affairs,” imploring that “the many enormous Villainies and Abuses committed both at home and abroad in the Management of India Affairs call aloud for Redress.” The letter went on to warn that “the Eyes of the Public are now fixed upon you, expecting yourselves in dragging the Guilty to Justice to be held up as Spectacles to others in Terrorem in Time coming. ” 9 0 The anonymous AX . echoed Candor’ s sentiments on 3 May 1773, insisting that the Nation has been long amused with Hopes of seeing some extraordinary Punishment inflicted on those degenerate Sons of Britain, the Plunderers of Asia, who, deaf to the cries of Distress, and void of the tender Feelings of Humanity, have rioted in Blood and Rapine and fattened on the Spoils of an innocent and defenseless People. 9 1 EIC employees, now fully transformed into nabobs were, thus, “degenerates.” They were no longer Britons in any true sense but rather had become nabobs who imperiled the nation as well as its ventures in South Asia. They had to be punished, as Candor had noted, as a permanent example to all such villains, in all places, and for all time. As The Public Advertiser suggested on 1 February 1772, “the sending, for life, to the East Indies convicted Felons, would be a salutary Scheme. As there are no CONVICTED Felons there, but a good store of Thieves. ” 9 2 That Company employees were thieves was no longer a legal question; gossip, rumor, innuendo, suggestion, and the validation of the news media had convicted them without a trial. Despite the generally hostile reports aimed at them in the popular press, EIC employees did enjoy a modicum of support in domestic Britain. On 26 April 1773, The Public Advertiser published a letter spanning two columns in which the author hoped to 9 0 Ibid., Thursday 7 May 1772. 91 Ibid., Monday 2 May 1773. 92 Ibid., Saturday 1 February 1772. 187 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. show that; a pervasive media Mas had blackened Clive’s name unfairly. ‘T o shew with what an evident Partiality every Circumstance respecting the Servants of the East India Company is laid before the Public,” the letter began, one needed only to note that while the media commonly printed rumors of the sizeable fortunes acquired by Company servants no mention was ever made of the “immense sums which the Company has received by their Acquisitions.” Any such comparison, the letter suggested, would show how “trifling” were the amounts earned by individual “nabobs.” Furthermore, the letter insisted, the media never argued the merit of the nabob class. ‘The fortune of Lord Clive, including the Jaghir, is undoubtedly immense,” the author confessed, “but is not his Merit great in Proportion?” Clive had served his nation honorably, he had secured vast territories for the EIC, and, as Clive himself was to note, Ms efforts had proven to be profitable for the Company across time. Such service, the letter-writer urged, certainly deserved substantial compensation. 9 3 Whether to attack or defend the actions of EIC employees, the printed media of the early 1770s reached one general consensus, agreeing that, as ArcMbald Keir noted in his 1772 treatise Thoughts on the Affairs of Bengal, “the affairs of India, and of Bengal, are the affairs of the [British] nation, and of consequence therefore to the nation that they be managed well.”9 * Nathaniel Smith concurred with Keir in Ms pampMet Observations on the Present State of the East India Company. “It might be better upon the whole, if we could return back to our commercial system; but that is impossible,” Smith argued against those who continued to question the compatibility of British economic interests and the Indian trade. 9 5 The EIC’s ventures in South Asia, he insisted, 93 Ibid., Monday 26 April 1773. 9 4 Archibald Keir, Thoughts on the Affairs in Bengal ( London, 1772), 4. 9 5 Ibid., 81. 188 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. must be maintained; for the politics, not only of Asia, but even of Europe, are now so interwoven with the affairs of our commerce there, that it will be absolutely impossible to return back to our former situation with any hopes of profit, or indeed security. 9 6 The questions raised by Daniel Defoe in 1720, therefore, were no longer valid" No longer was Europe a sick patient being bled to death by India; the two now lived in symbiosis. Now, the matter at hand was, as the poem The Nabob had asked, “Concerns it you who plunders in the East?” The British economy and the Indian trade were inseparably bound together, but the transformation of EIC employees into nabobs was complicating the union. Plunder in the east was important because it undermined the British imperial project in South Asia, but it was also a significant issue because eastern plunder was remaking the structures of the domestic economy as well. In many ways, the nabob controversy was, as James Raven has persuasively suggested, a challenge to new wealth. 9 8 Throughout the period of the Hastings impeachment, newspapers ran lists detailing the relative fortunes of EIC servants, a less than subtle suggestion that men like Hastings had to be guilty of accepting bribes. The Morning Chronicle ran a list on 30 May 1786 in which the fortunes of nabobs like Richard Barwell and Thomas Rumbold ranged from £300,000 to £100,000. Warren Hastings ranked near the top of the list with a fortune estimated at £200,000." The General Evening Post and The London Chronicle both ran similar, but longer, lists in their 8- 10 June 1786 editions. Again, Hastings’ fortune ranked among the largest on the list, but The General Evening Post and The London Chronicle both estimated Ms fortune to be more than £100,000 more than had The Morning Chronicle.m 9 6 Ibid., 5. 9 7 See Chapter Two, 106-107. 9 8 See Raven, 220-248. See also Holzman, 15-37. 9 9 The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, Tuesday 30 May 1786. 100 The General Evening Post, Thursday 8 June to Saturday 10 June, 1786. See also The London Chronicle, Thursday 8 June to Saturday 10 June 1786. 189 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. As Burke made clear in his impeachment speeches, the single greatest fear held by those who attacked the nabobs was that the latter would use their newfound economic strength to purchase power within the domestic political establishment. In the April 1785 edition of The Lounger, an Edinburgh-based political journal, one correspondent protested that a newly-returned nabob had robbed him of a chance to stand for a parliamentary seat A self-styled “descendant of an ancient and respectable family,” he wrote to explain how his fortunes were trivial next to those of his neighbor, “a man new and unknown in the country, but who had lately purchased an estate in it, and had brought home an immense fortune from India, which, it is said, gave him considerable influence in the direction of affairs.”1 0 1 This new neighbor, Sir Thomas Booty, had, the letter argued, usurped traditional hierarchies of wealth, prestige, status, and power. “In a word,” the author lamented, Booty’s “fortune and interest at Court” was greater than his own and the private networks of friendship and patronage that had operated to promote members of his family for generations “had been found light in the balance” against Booty’s new standing as a nabob. 1 0 2 The author of the piece was likely Henry Mackenzie, The Lounger's editor. As with his earlier publication, The Mirror, Mackenzie created in The Lounger a cast of characters whose letters reflected his own social concerns and critiques, who allowed him to address what he saw as pressing social issues to a broader public through conventional mechanisms of satire and humor. In both journals, Mackenzie addressed his readers anonymously. In the first Issue of The Mirror, published 23 January 1770, he adopted the title of “mirror” both for the publication and himself. 1 0 3 In The Lounger, which began publication in 1785, Mackenzie assumed an even less active role. No longer was he society’s “mirror” but rather 101 The Lounger, Saturday 2 April 1785,70-74. “ Ibid., 76. 103 The Mirror (London, 1786), 3. 190 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. an observer who, by a certain train of “incidents in his life” had been “thrown out of the number of the professionally busy” and who, as a result, had the time to edit a magazine of social observations and criticisms.1 0 4 For Mackenzie, the central crisis posed by the return of nabobs to Scottish boroughs was that they marginalized the traditional aristocracy with their new money, new social connections, and new prestige. For others, the problem was just the opposite. That impoverished Scots who formerly lacked social clout could make good in the empire was less disconcerting to some than the threat that the sheer appeal of life in the empire might reduce the Scottish population altogether. One “gentleman of veiy considerable property in the West Isles, in Scotland” wrote to Prescott’ s Manchester Journal on 19 September 1772 that “the people who have emigrated from this poor comer of Scotland since the year 1768, have carried with them at least ten thousand pounds in specie.” Compounding the fiscal threat, the letter continued, was the “great loss to us yet [from] depopulation.. .Unless some speedy remedy is fallen upon.. .the consequences must prove very fatal. ” 1 0 5 That Mackenzie and the anonymous author from the West Isles should turn their attentions to the nabob class and its influence in the metropolitan world is not surprising. Edinburgh, indeed all of Scotland, was central to British imperial ventures in the last half of the eighteenth century, and the demography of how the news media reported on nabobs and on empire reflected the diversity of national opinion about the topics from city to city in late eighteenth-century Britain. As many scholars have noted, empire was a central feature of the eighteenth-century popularity of the Act of Union of 1707 in Scotland. Empire provided Scots with jobs and trading opportunities and also with a sense of belonging and parity vis-h- 104 The Lounger, i, 2. 105 Prescott’ s Manchester Journal or Manchester Journal, 19 September 1772. 191 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. vis their English neighbors. “If Britain’s primary identity was to be an imperial one,” Linda Colley has argued, then the English were put firmly and forever in their place, reduced to a component part of a much greater whole, exactly like the Scots...A British imperium, in other words, enabled Scots to feel themselves peers of the English in a way still denied them in an island kingdom. 1 0 6 On the ground, however, it was the networks of material connections that the Scots felt most palpably, and the empire was a clear conduit to jobs, wealth, and economic success for Scots in the eighteenth century. Nowhere was this trend more pronounced, John Riddy has suggested, than in South Asia, where 47% of the writers, 56% of the officers in the Bengal army, and 60% of those who lived in Bengal as free merchants were Scottish in the last years of Warren Hastings’ administration. 1 0 7 Soon after the Act of Union, Scots had begun to seize upon employment opportunities with the EIC. As T. M. Devine has noted, Scottish banking families such as the Hopes and the Drummonds were active in the Company by the 1730s, and a number of other Scots had risen to its directorate. 1 0 8 This trend became only more pronounced after the rise of a Scot, Henry Dundas, to the Presidency of the EIC’s Board of Control in 1784. At the Board of Control, Dundas became for many the epitomizing symbol of Scottish influence within the late eighteenth-centuiy imperial world, especially in South Asia. In James Gillray’s 1788 etching Dun-Shaw, Dundas bestrode the imperial world like a colossus, both as a powerful political figure in his own right and as the apotheosis of Scottish 106 Colley, Britons, 130. 107 See John Riddy, “Warren Hastings: Scotland’s Benefactor'?,’ ’ in The Impeachment o f Warren Hastings: Papers from a Bicentenary Commemoration, ed. Geoffrey Camall and Colin Nicholson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), 42. Andrew McKillop has, likewise, shown that, by 1767, there were 220 Scottish writers working for the Company, some ten per cent compared with the Company’s Irish and Welsh writers who together constituted less than five per cent of the Company’s writer cadre. See, T.M. Devine, The Scottish Nation, 1700-2000 (London, Penguin, 1999), 26. 108 The Company’s first Scottish director, John Drummond of Quarrel, was appointed in 1722. 192 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. power. For many ia eighteenth-century Britain, it was the kilted figure of the Scotsman that linked India and Britain, just as Dundas, Ms left foot in India and Ms right on the Company’s Leadenhall Street headquarters, does in the cartoon. For those in England, ambivalence towards the participation of Scots in the imperial project in India fed into what Colley has called the “runaway Scottophobia” that was a by product of the Scottish uprisings of 1715 and 1745, the anti-Scottish rhetoric of John Wilkes, and the fears feat Scotts were increasingly seizing control of the reigns of British power through such channels as the empire.1 1 0 Dundas himself was aware of the dangers of such negative public attention. In a letter to Sir Archibald Campbell, who had been nominated to the post of governor of Madras, Dundas cautioned that it is said that with a Scotchman at the Board of Oraitroi aod a Scot at the Government of Madras, all India will be soon ia their hands.. .These kinds of whispers are to be neither noticed nor regardedL.at the same time, when I recollect that Mr. Wilkes by such nonsense almost created 1 0 9 Image scanned from a photograph courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Loadoa. 1 1 0 See Colley, Britons, 105-117. if Illustration 9. Dm-Shaw, James Gillray, 7 March 1788.1 0 9 193 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. an insurrection in this countiy, I do not think that even nonsense is at all time to be disregarded111 Dundas was, therefore, both an advocate for Scottish involvement in the imperial project in India and cautious about how far that participation could safely go, as a matter of public opinion. Accounts in the Scottish media reflected this ambivalence. As one letter to The Edinburgh Review noted enthusiastically in 1810, “India is the most important of all our foreign possessions.. .The nation has derived very great advantages from its Indian empire.” Particularly beneficial, the piece noted, were private fortunes. Formerly the wealth brought from India by individuals was represented as a serious evil, instead of an advantage to the nation. The men were represented, not as the editor of the Review truly represented them, but as insolent upstarts, who raised the price of provisions wherever they resided, and who elbowed out the old established gentlemen of the country. 1 1 2 The author of the letter in The Edinburgh Review, then, could not have disagreed more with the letter that appeared in The Lounger in April 1785. Private wealth, the author insisted, was always beneficial to the British nation, but, as Colley has argued, this reality was particularly acute in the Scottish context. Editorials in The Caledonian Mercury, an Edinburgh paper, had long argued for local interests. The paper was an enthusiastic supporter of Dundas. In March 1784, a report announced proudly that “Mr. Dundas’ influence is great at St. James. It is evident that this Gentleman also gains more and more on the confidence and favour of Mr. Pitt.” Not only did Pitt “profess a great esteem for him in his public speeches, he often takes him to the gallery, or to a retired comer of the House to converse with him.” Rumor even had it that Pitt was so attached to Dundas that he always 111 Quoted in Riddy, 40. 112 John Scott-Waring, Letter to the Editor, 4-9. 194 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. arranged to sit himself “on whatever part of the Treasury Bench Mr. Dundas happens to sit.”1 1 3 In January 1784, a lengthy editorial in the paper fulminated against the various plans then under consideration in London for re-structuring the EIC’s control in South Asia. “No person can seriously doubt that it is the intention of the present Minister,” the letter demanded on 12 January 1784, “to renew this bill in such a manner as to preserve the full power of Indian patronage in [his] own hands.”1 1 4 The 1784 Regulating Act would, the writer argued, centralize control of British South Asia in London, allowing one political faction to control the reigns of patronage and potentially marginalize Scotland from having any say in the British imperial system. Several months later, the paper reported, a group of 167 men from Aberdeen drafted a petition to the King, which they sent to Dundas, that begged royal help on what they saw to bea “perilous occasion.” The new regulating act, they posited, would “encroach on the just rights of the Crown.. .annihilate the charter of the EIC, and.. .establish a new power abhorrent to the constitution,” a power “in the highest degree dangerous” to the safety of “your Majesty’s faithful subjects.”1 1 5 For the 167 merchants from Aberdeen, as for many Scots, private interest was very much a positive thing, as India had, in fact, proven to bea profitable reserve for many Britons - be they Scottish, Welsh, or English - throughout the eighteenth century. India was the path to wealth, advancement, power, and prestige. Outside of Scotland, patterns of wealth, status, and power were more traditionally entrenched, and the changes brought about by Indian wealth were seen less ambiguously. As an essay in The Gentleman’ s Magazine reported in September 1786, “the EIC providentially brings home every year a sufficient 1 1 3 The Caledonian Mercury, Monday 1 March 1784. 1 1 4 The Edinburgh Caledonian Mercury, Monday 12 January1784. 1 1 5 Ibid., Monday 1 March 1784. 195 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. number of a new sort of gentlemen, with new customs, manners, and principles, who fill the offices of the old country gentlemen.'’ The danger, the essay reported was that these new men would re-make Britain. “It is plain that ouur constitution, if not altered, is altering at a great rate.”1 1 6 The concern, as The London Chronicle detailed it in July 1784, was that nabobs would not only upset the social order but that they would buy their way into the nation’s political institutions and refashion them, upsetting the gains assured by Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, and the Act of Settlement. Despite Lewis Namier’s detailed evidence to the contrary, The London Chronicle remained convinced that nabobs had swarmed the floor of the House of Commons in 1784, as it listed the names of twenty-nine members of the new parliament with Indian connections.1 1 7 The great danger was that the nabobs, accustomed to wielding “arbitrary power” in India, would seek to wield it at home as well, echoing the fears of the Earl of Chatham, who, as early as 1770, had suggested that “the riches of Asia have been poured in upon us, and have brought with them not only Asiatic luxury, but I fear, Asiatic principles of government”1 1 8 The Ear! of Chatham, whose family fortunes had originally been predicated on the value of an Indian gemstone so large and distinguished that it had its own name, “the Pitt Diamond,” may not have been the most logical figure to lead the charge against the nabobs’ new money. His point, though, was widely appreciated. Burke’s hope was that he could connect his case against Hastings to these long- persistent concerns. “Bribes,” he argued, were little known in Britain prior to Hastings’ 1 1 6 See The Gentleman’ s Magazine, September 1786,750-751. 1 1 7 See Sir Lewis Namier, The Structures o f Politics at the Accession o f George III (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1957). See also The London Chronicle for Tuesday 6 July to Thursday 8 July 1784. 1 1 8 Saxena, i, 128. See also Chatham quoted in Lawson, “Our Execrable Banditti,” 238. 196 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. administration in India. Hastings’ actions, however, had occasioned the need to develop different categories of bribes - some were gifts, others presents, and others still loans. “The conduct of Mr. Hastings,” Burke noted wryly, would be instructive to the British nation. It “will improve our Law Vocabulary.”1 1 9 As we shall see in the succeeding chapter, Burke’s accusations were rooted not only in Hastings’ actions in South Asia but in incidents in domestic Britain as well. Hastings, like other nabobs before and after him, returned to Britain wealthy, and his money preceded him in the best circles. By implication, Burke suggested, the public could assume that the former-govemor-general was bribing his way through domestic society. He bought his way to an audience with the royal family, he purchased the attention of the Prime Minister, and he sought to procure an acquittal from Lord Thurlow as the chief magistrate of the justice system. James Gillray echoed all of these accusations in two satirical etchings from 1788. In the first image, published on 1 March, Gillray shows Hastings, dressed in a stylized Eastern costume and carrying two large bags of his Indian wealth, riding on the shoulders of Lord Thurlow, the Lord Chancellor. In the image, entitled Blood on Thunder Fording the Red Sea, Thurlow is depicted as Hastings’ pack-mule. Burdened by the load of Hastings and his heavy fortunes, the Lord Chancellor struggles to cross a raging sea filled by the bodies of South Asians - the victims of Hastings’ rapacious administration. Hastings’ only concern, meanwhile, seems to be that his fanciful slippers do not get wet in the crossing. He need not worry about the dead bodies around him, the image hints. He has, after all, paid Lord Thurlow to cany him safely through the storm. 1 1 9 Verbatim Report of the Second Session, 21 April-8 July 1789 (36! h -54th days of the Trial of Warren Hastings, OIOC Mss Eur F19/A-B, 5. 197 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 'w m «* 'iM l'M k u £ /pnfa?M*/rAt.' ,\KA . Illustration 10. Blood on Thunder Fording the Red Sea, James Gillray, London, 1 March 1788.1 2 0 In May 1788, Gillray again published an etching that suggested that Hastings was guilty of bribery. The Bow to the Throne appeared on 6 May 1788. Unlike Gillray’s Blood on Thunder, The Bow to the Throne implicated not only Lord Thtiriow in Hastings’ crimes but the entire British political structure as well. In the etching, Hastings - not the King - sits on the British throne. Nabobs have succeeded ia supplanting the royal family. Rather than wearing the King’s robes of state or M s regal crown, Hastings wears the same orientalized robes that lie wore in Gillray’s Blood on Thunder, and the same large turban site alop Ms head. As in Blood on Thunder, Thurlow again appears in The Bow to the Throne. In the scene, the Lard Chancellor bows, Ms hands outstretched to receive Ms bribe, before the former-govemor-general. Prime Minster Pitt joins Thurlow in reverencing Hastings’ imperial generosity. The gaunt Queen Charlotte, her passion for diamonds well-known, fully genuflects before Hastings’ throne out of gratitude for the bag of precious stones she ’ Image scanned from a photograph courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London. 198 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. has received.1 2 1 Behind the three primary courtiers, the hands of the nation reach oat to Hastings to accept his munificence. Badges of honor, ribbons, titles, and other decorations fly into the scene, thrown at Hastings to grab Ms attention and, perhaps, a claim to Ms largesse. Most pathetically of all, King George appears in the image as a grasping fool, crawling on fee floor behind Hastings’ throne in search of a few small shiny coins or a sparkling diamond. Illustration 11. The Bow to the Throne, James Gillray, London, 6 May 1788.1 2 2 The nabob was a new and corrosive figure In domestic British society. He was a criminal, and he was unstable. One need only look to the nature of the political settlements in South Asia for verification. As John Gross wrote to Ms brother, Nash, in January 1766, party factionalism ran very high at Fort St. William. So intense was the in-fighting among fee Council, lie wrote, that service to fee Company had been “rendered...so very 1 2 1 For more on Queen Charlotte’ s predilection for diamonds and the public’s response to her extravagance, see Morris, “ftiacdy Debt, Public Credit, and Commercial Values in Late Georgias Britain,” 35 7 .. 1 2 2 Image scanned from a photograph courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery’ , London. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. disagreeable that some have resigned.”1 2 3 Almost a decade later, the Council at Madias deposed and arrested Governor Pigot who later died in custody.1 2 4 EIC employees were ambitious, they were greedy, and they were upstarts. Even those who wanted to defend the nabobs admitted their ambition. Captain Joseph Price, in his 1783 A Vindication o f General Richard Smith, conceded that Smith was the embodiment of the nabobs’ general desire for upward mobility. As a child, Price noted, Smith “felt his rising ambition” and could not help but to “look down on the narrow limits of [his father’s] cheesemonger’s shop.” Smith’s soul, Price argued, was “indignant and ambitious,” and it “soared into the clouds in search after fame.”1 2 5 The nabobs were guilty of too much pride. They exuded hubris and ambition, and, as had been evidenced in India, they were willing to despoil nations and inspire constant political turmoil to further their own causes. Their guilt, it was assumed, could be read in their character and that guilt frequently coupled with bad character to drive nabobs to suicide. As we have seen, Clive’s suicide attracted more attention than did the political arguments of the 1772-73 inquiries. It confirmed what the inquiry had failed to prove, namely that Clive was guilty of crimes committed in South Asia. If Britain’s political institutions refused to convict him of rapine, bribery, and plunder and to strip him of his jaghir, his own conscience, the argument insisted, had done so. Clive himself had once, during the course of the inquiries, predicted in a letter to Lord Pigot that, should he die a quiet death at home, the public would suspect suicide. “The Baboon will say of me.. .that I 1 2 3 John Gross to his brother, Nash, 31 January 1766, OIOC Mss Eur E284. m Three Political Letter Books of Claud Russell, OIOC Mss Eur E276,3. See also DNB, xv, 1164- 1167. 1 2 5 Captain Joseph Price, A Vindication o f General Richard Smith (London, 1783), 18. 200 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. died under the crushing Burthen of mine own Inquity; that my Sins were too great for me to bear. May they find Comfort & Satisfaction in this Pharisaick Sneer.”1 2 6 Clive’s suicide was, in fact, a satisfactory conversation-starter at the gossip tables of such imminent figures as Horace Walpole, Mary Coke, Thomas Paine and Samuel Johnson, but The Public Advertiser was the first to revisit the idea that nabobs were inclined to suicide in the months leading up to the Hastings impeachment before the House of Commons. Late in October 1783, the paper published two stories that linked a nabobish fortune to rash and greedy actions. The first story, printed on 21 October, simply reported that “Friday last a Gentleman, who some Time since arrived from India, cut his throat at his lodgings in Chancery-Lane; the cause of this rash action is owning to the late unexpected Fall of Stocks, in which he had been speculating.”1 2 7 The second stoiy sought to show conclusively that suicide was less common in Britain than in France, excepting, of course, in the case of British nabobs. “A gentleman of my acquaintance,” the author noted, “who attends the Hotel-Dieu, where there are constantly at least 3000 patients, assured me, that scarce a day passes over, in which he does not see some unfortunate wretches brought to the hospital, who had made an attempt upon their lives.” The French, the piece continues, were inclined to suicide “in moments of despair, or in paroxysms of love or jealousy.”1 2 8 In contradiction to the main argument of the story, the author next moves to tell the tale of an Englishman whose recent suicide attempt was “committed from far different motives than those of despair of love, or jealousy.” Rather, the piece continued, the young Englishman had made an attempt on his own life out of purely religious reasons. The young 1 2 6 Allen Edwardes, The Rape o f India: A Biography of Robert Clive and a Sexual History o f the Conquest o f Hindustan (New York: The Milan Press, 1966), 332. 1 2 7 The Public Advertiser, Tuesday 21 October 1783. 1 2 8 Ibid., Friday 31 October 1783. 201 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. suicide victim, the article went on, was “an officer of distinction in the British East India Company’s service, where he held the rank of Major.” According to the report in The Public Advertiser the young officer was not known to any of the medical staff who attended Mm in Ms final three days, so there was no concrete account of why he had committed suicide. All that could be said for certain came from Ms servant who had been awakened at almost five o’clock in the morning on the day in question when he heard a crash come from Ms master’s bedroom, followed by groaning. The servant entered to find that Ms master had thrown Mmself on Ms own sword. Devotional materials were scattered about the room suggesting that the young man had been at prayer just prior to Ms suicide attempt The young EIC major lingered three days before dying. In that time, Ms doctors reported that he repeatedly murmured to Mmself - insisting that Ms actions were the only path that he could have taken to repent of Ms sins and win a place among “the Mansions of the Blessed.” Suicide was the only propitiation he could make for Ms past sins - the only means by wMch to assure that the angels would rejoice as he made “Ms triumphant entry into Paradise.”1 2 9 The Public Advertiser’ s interest in the young EIC officer continued. Four days after it published the initial report on the suicide, the paper published a correction. The young man had not thrown Mmself on a sword but rather had, rather implausibly, shot Mmself with two pistols and cut his throat with a pen-knife. He was not English, but, rather, he was an Irishman - identified as a Mr. Gredie, a rather fitting name for a nabob. He had not been driven to suicide by repentance but rather because of a failed love affair with a young English woman then resident in Paris.1 3 0 Seven days later, the paper ran yet another 1 1 9 Ibid., 31 October 1783. 1 3 0 Ibid., 4 November 1783. 202 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. correction. The previous article had been predicated on bad information. A Major Greddy was indeed a resident in Paris, but he was alive and well. The young officer who had killed himself, now identified as Major T-, had taken his own life by throwing himself upon his sword in a moment of religious self-reflection.1 3 1 From the first account of the suicide patient at the Hotel-Dieu to the last, the only detail that remained consistent was that the young man in question had been a major in the service of the EIC. He was a nabob. Nabobs could kill themselves to ameliorate the sheer weight of their guilt as had Clive or they could kill themselves in moments of passion as the French were wont to do. They could slice their throats with pen-knives, dive onto their own swords, shoot themselves in the breast with pistols, or commit complex and unlikely combinations of the three. What they could not do was expiate their guilty consciences of the crimes they had committed in India. This theme became increasingly common in printed reports of nabobs as the eighteenth century wore on. The two suicides of late-Qctober 1783, were not the only ones reported in the public press in the late eighteenth century. In December 1784, The Public Advertiser reported that “a young man of character and distinction, lately returned from the East Indies, where he had acquired a genteel competency” had “shot himself in his lodgings at one of the hotels in Covent Gardens.”1 3 2 In April 1786, The General Evening Post reported that, “in a fit of insanity,” one Colonel L had “flung Mmself overboard from a ship in Calcutta and was drowned.”1 3 3 As had Clive’s death, the death of these young officers answered fewer questions than they left open, and, in doing so, they allowed the public to link the suicides to Clive’s deaths. All of the men were EIC servants, so all were implicated m Ibid., Tuesday 11 November 1783. 1 3 2 Ibid., Friday December 31,1784. See also Holzman, 73. 1 3 3 The General Evening Post, Saturday April 1 to Tuesday April 4,1786. 203 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in the corruption of Company employees in South Asia. All of them had taken their own lives, and they could all, it could be assumed, had done so rather than live to face the horrors of their own careers. Religion, The Public Advertiser concluded, had driven the young men to suicide. Religion offered salvation for most sinners, but not nabobs. As the young officer who had either shot himself or flung himself on his sword (depending on which account we believe) had insisted in his final days, “a divine impulse” had driven him to his rash act, but he had not been forgiven.1 3 4 There was no salvation for a nabob, only destruction. The common thread to all the stories was that a nabob was a rash character and an unstable figure. He was impetuous and violent He could not be trusted either to live up to a common moral code or to face moral justice for his crimes. Most significantly of all, he was not the right sort of person in whom to entrust the fate of a sacred imperial trust because all indications suggested he was a person of bad character. From Bad Character to Caricatures: The Literary Nabob In 1783, just as the Hastings impeachment before the House of Commons was about to get underway, Joseph Price published his brief text, The Saddle Put on the Right Horse. In this slim volume, Price sought to detail what might, in contemporary circles, be called a sociological phenomenon - the rise of the nabob class in eighteenth-century Britain. The entire controversy surrounding nabobs, Price argued, puzzled him because, as he noted often in the text, there was only one true nabob, Robert Lord Clive. As Kate Teltscher has noted, Joseph Price was himself in danger of being labeled a nabob in some circles. Though he ended his life in bankruptcy, itself a sign of nabobery, he was, at the pinnacle of his career, a wealthy Free Merchant in British India and one of the most influential ship-owners in Bengal. He was an avid supporter of Warren Hastings, and 1 3 4 The Public Advertiser, 31 October 1783. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Ms writings all argued that Hastings and the other nabobs were not the guilty villains of popular imagination.5 3 5 Strictly speaking, Price argued, “the appellation of Nabob is certainly an Asiatic title.” Of all the nabobs, only Clive had been honored by the Mughal emperor, only Clive claimed the right to a jaghir, only Clive merited an “Asiatic title” because he alone actually held power under an “Asiatic” administrative system. All the other “nabobs” were merely employees of the EIC, and it was nothing but otiose name- calling to label the entire company as a cabal of nabobs.1 3 6 To advance his argument, Price proposed a taxonomy of sorts, a classification system with which the domestic public could more property label and identify EIC servants. Rather than “tedious, dull, conjectural narration,” his argument was, Price insisted, a critical step in helping to distinguish who among the EIC’s employees posed a threat to the British nation and who was a benign civil servant1 3 7 After the one true nabob, Clive, Price suggested, came Hastings, whom he labeled as the sole simple nabob. A simple nabob, Price argued, was unlike a genuine nabob because he refused to accept remuneration and titles for his efforts on behalf of those around Mm. “So silly and girlish is the man’s desire to relieve the distress of all Ms fellow creatures, that he cannot keep a rupee.”1 3 8 Because he would never be wealthy, Hastings could never become a true nabob - never be truly powerful. He was a nabob of simple means, hence a simple nabob. The broadest category in Price’s nabobical taxonomy was the reputed nabobs. TMs order Price defined as such gentlemen, who have served in different parts of Asia, from twenty to thirty years, and being content with a moderate, honestly acquired fortune, 1 3 5 See Teltscher, 161. 1 3 6 Joseph Price, The Saddle Put on the Right Horse (London, 1783), 7-10. I owe a debt of gratitude to Andrew Macldllop for pointing me towards Price’s invaluable pamphlet 1 3 7 Ibid., 15. m Ibid., 60. 205 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. have returned to their native country, and generally to their native place, whether England, Scotland, Wales, or Ireland, to spend amongst their friends the remainder of their days.1 3 9 Since, as Price reminded his readers, “not ten in the hundred” Company servants who went to India lived to return, the number of nabobs could not be as high as either the printed media or popular gossip suggested. Considering that many of those who did return were only reputed nabobs, who settled quietly into domestic society, he insisted, other subcategories of nabobs had to account for both the volume and the intensity of the anti nabob rhetoric that marked the British social and political landscapes in the last decades of the eighteenth century.1 4 0 This more nefarious category of nabobs Price called spurious nabobs. A spurious nabob, he argued, was an EIC employee who had gone to India, made a sizable fortune, squandered his money, been forced to return to South Asia to make a second fortune, and returned again to Britain where his “ridiculous and ostentatious display of wealth, first disgusted the nation. ..[and] by [his] extravagance of behaviour...turned the appellation of Nabob.. .into a term of reproach, and even contempt.”1 4 1 Spurious nabobs, Price insisted, were a small subset of the Company’s employees, but they were principally responsible for the widespread attacks against the wider cadre of Company servants.1 4 2 At the same time, Price sought to argue that there was an additional group that had to be included in his taxonomic system of nabobery: the reputed or mushroom nabob. This category of nabobs were, Price suggested, truly the heirs - in both behavior and name - of the group of men The Town and Country Magazine had called the “fungus’s of Asia” in 1 3 9 Ibid., 22-23. 1 4 0 Ibid., 23. 1 4 1 Ibid., 29. ™ Ibid.,22. 206 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1771.1 4 3 They were swindlers who had only lived in South Asia for a few years. They had made vast fortunes quickly at the expense and to the ruination of others, and they returned to Britain ready to continue plundering honest merchants and people of good character.1 4 4 Price’s The Saddle Put on the Right Horse was a propagandists treatise in support of Warren Hastings. That Hastings should be labeled as the sole simple nabob and the unassuming victim of spurious nabobs, reputed nabobs, and mushroom nabobs - the chief amongst whom was Philip Francis, one of Hastings’ most vehement critics - marked Price’s politics very clearly. Still, Price makes a clever point. Not all EIC employees were nabobs, and not all of them who were nabobs acted nabobishly to the same degree. Very few who were writing on the subject took the time, as did Price, to separate “the wheat from the chaff.”1 4 5 While high-minded politicians like Edmund Burke may have sought out only Hastings, respected newspapers, political journals, the tabloid press, and gossip circles around the nation all had more use for spurious, reputed, and mushroom nabobs than they did for true or simple nabobs. There was little call to distinguish between the categories because any assault on the character and behavior of the EIC and its employees was best predicated on the very worst examples of both. Price hoped to show that the nabob controversy had been converted into a public scandal that far surpassed any real danger. Itself rooted in stereotypes and caricatures, Price’s careful arguments in favor of EIC employees sought to countermand die popular image of the nabob as a criminal and a social arriviste of bad character, which had been generated by the print media of the late eighteenth century. It was not the news media alone, however, that Price was fighting against. The homogenized figure of the nabob became an equally popular literary trope in the period as 1 4 3 The Town and Country Magazine (London, 1771), 69. 1 4 4 Prince, The Saddle Put on the Right Horse, 76. 1 4 5 Ibid., 77. 207 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. well. The Nabob; Or, Asiatic Plunderers ( 1773) was one of many poems that appeared in the last quarter of the eighteenth century which invoked the figure of the nabob as a means to debate the relationships between Britain and India and nation and empire; its anonymous author was not the only poet to lament that the rise of nabobs had “o’er Stars and Garters” thrown “dark disgrace.”1 4 6 The authors of The Rolliad argued that Hastings was “like some Angel, sent to scourge mankind” and “deal forth plagues,” all the while avoiding punishment by bribing the royal family.1 4 7 The 1788 poem, The Tribunal, Addressed to the Peers of Great-Britain, About to Sit in Judgment on Warren Hastings, suggested that Hastings was a “man of crimes” and “worse than a Borgia.” He was “England’s false friend, and Asia’s direct foe,” a “stain of nature and the nation’s woe.”1 4 8 On the stage, Samuel Foote’s The Nabob, first performed at the Haymarket Theatre in 1772, told the story of Sir Matthew Mite, who dressed in South Asian fashions and was eager to buy his way into the British political system. In the play, Mite is said to have risen up from nowhere to demand the hand of John Oldham’s daughter.1 4 9 As such, the production told a story in which an established, country family is invaded by a nabob because the nabob’s Indian fortunes gave him the means to push his way into a society that would not otherwise have accepted him. Isaac Reed, by profession a lawyer, journalist, editor, and biographer, saw The Nabob performed four times, first in 1772, twice in 1774, and then again in 1781.1 5 0 For Reed, as for other Britons, the fascination with India and nabobs was a 1 4 6 The Nabob; Or, Asiatic Plunderers (London, 1773), 33. 1 4 7 The Rolliad {hondon, 1795). 1 4 8 The Tribunal, Addressed to the Peers o f Great Britain, About to Sit in Judgment on Warren Hastings (London, 1788), 29. 1 4 9 Samuel Foote, The Nabob: A Comedy in Three Acts (London, 1795). 1 5 0 Isaac Reed, The Isaac Reed Diaries, ed. Claude E. Jones (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1946), 77, 85,86, and 110. 208 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. result of “their mystery and imaginative possibilities. India, source of pillage and ill-gained riches, was that ‘mine of exhaustless wealth’ or ‘that region of gaiety and pleasure’.”1 5 1 For Foote, nabobs were a moral threat, but they were also a challenge to the social order of the domestic nation, but his The Nabob was hardly unique on the British stage or in British literature in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Foote Mmself followed up on the success of The Nabob with Ms 1773 The Bankrupt, wMch parodied Clive’s speech before the committee investigating Ms jaghir.isl In 1781, Richard Tickell produced a play, The Carnival of Venice, wMch mimicked Foote’s The Nabob, and Tickell’s Sir Peter Pagoda was immediately recognized as a copy of Sir Matthew Mite.1 ® Fanny Burney’s 1801 play, A Busy Day; or, An Arrival From India, Mnged on the return of nabobs to the metropolitan world.1 5 4 Likewise, the young heroine of Burney’s final novel, The Wanderer (1814) is saved from public disgrace in the novel’s denouement only by the discovery of a long-lost uncle whom she never met because of Ms long years of service in India. Fortunately for both of them, the young wanderer’s uncle has saved a small slip of paper, the codicil to her mother’s will, a document that verifies both the young girl’s identity and her claim to a fortune. When she tells her uncle how grateful she is to Mm for having kept the record for so long, he explains that he would not have disposed of it for “all the diamonds, and all the pearls and all the shawls of the nabobs of all Asia.”1 5 5 1 5 1 Raven, 231. 1 3 2 Samuel Foote, The Bankrupt (London, 1776). See also, Raven, 229. 1 5 3 Richard Tickell, The Carnival of Venice (London, 1781). See also, Raven, 229. 1 5 4 See Fanny Burney, A Busy Day; or, An Arrival from India, ed. T.G. Wallace (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984). See also, Jeremy Osborn, “India and the East India Company in the Public Sphere of Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in The Worlds o f the East India Company, ed. H.V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer Inc., 2002), 202- 203. 1 5 5 Fanny Burney, The Wanderer, ed. Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack, and Peter Sartor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 840. 209 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Similarly, the plot of M.G. Lewis’s The East Indian: A Comedy, which premiered in 1800, hinged on the fact that its three main characters Mr. Beauchamp, Mr. Rivers, and the young heroine Zorayda all adopt new identities for themselves in India. As the play opens, the audience learns that Mr. Beauchamp has sailed for India under the assumed name Dormant, leaving a wife behind him. In India he saves the life of a wealthy Company servant by the name of Mortimer. The two develop a close friendship, and Dorimant is welcomed at Mortimer’s house until the day when Dorimant professes his love for Mortimer’s daughter, Zorayda. Having disgraced himself in his friend’s home, Dorimant returns to Britain, where he learns that his wife sailed for South Asia two years after he left her and was lost at sea. Free now to marry Zorayda, he considers returning to South Asia. In the meantime, Zorayda has followed Dorimant to London under the assumed name Miss Mandeville. Her father has followed her, assuming for himself the character of Mr. Rivers, a once-wealthy nabob whose fortune was lost at sea. The play sorts itself out when Dorimant/Beauchamp and Mortimer/Rivers meet and recognize one another. Soon, they find Zorayda/Miss Mandeville as well, and the young couple wins leave of Zorayda’s father to marry.1 3 6 like The East Indian, the 1772 play Cross Purposes also pivoted around a case of mistaken identity. The play tells the story of Mrs. and Mr. Grub, two parents who have decided to many their daughter Emily to Mr. Bevil. Emily, however, claims that she cannot marry because she has “already disposed of my heart.”1 5 7 The man she is to marry, she tells them, is also named Bevil. Emily and her parents proceed to have a lengthy conversation about the two Mr. Bevils. Emily insists that her Mr. Bevil is a handsome man with white 1 3 6 See M.G. Lewis, The East Indian: A Comedy in Five Acts (London, 1800). 1 5 7 Cross Purposes: A Farce in Two Acts (London, 1772), 28. 210 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. skin. Her father’s Mr. Bevil, though, is “as handsome a black naan, I think, as ever I saw.”1 5 8 Clearly, Emily and her parents have their sights set on different men. A family feud looms likely. Only when both Mr. Bevils are revealed to be members of Parliament do the Grubs begin to suspect that both Bevils might be the same man, and such proves to be the case when Mr. Bevil arrives at the play’s end. He is, it is revealed, a white Briton, but, as Emily’s father noted, his skin has been darkly tanned by years spent in South Asia. As his name implies, Mr. Bevil is able to be two things at the same time. India has changed him, leaving his identity uncertain, oblique, and beveled. Representations of nabobs on the late-eighteenth-century stage and in fiction of the same period, then, suggested that EIC employees and those with connections to India were slippery; their identities were unstable, made fluid by the distance - both geographic and temporal - that came of the long passage to India. Fluid identities destabilized the social order at home. As did Britons who moved into other colonial settings around the world, nabobs complicated society, confused plotlines, and suggested that older and more- established patterns of social hierarchy could be breached. The passage to India offered the prospect of re-invention and transformation. Beauchamp could become Dorimant, Mr. Bevil could go from white to black, a cheesemonger’s son could rise to social prominence and political power. As such, literary accounts of nabobs that emerged in the last half of the eighteenth century, rooted, as they were, in ferocious attacks on nabobs printed in the popular press, were much more anti-imperial in their tone than had been Burke’s theatrical production at Westminster Hall. The figure of the nabob became a caricature in the last half of the eighteenth century, a mythological monster from the imperial world. Rhetorical attacks on 1 5 8 Ibid., 44. 211 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. specific EIC employees for specific crimes were presented in such a way as to sensationalize them. These sensationalized critiques, in turn, ballooned into a public scandal that filled the public press, novels, and the stages of countless theaters in the last decades of the eighteenth century. However, the question of Britain’s growing empire in South Asia and the conventions of the public stage did not, as this chapter has shown, meet for the first time in London theaters or even in the pages of Fanny Burney’s novels. Rather, the entire rhetorical structure of the nabob controversy was intrinsically theatrical, designed, as Burke had confessed, for “the publick eye.” Framed as a piece of drama from the outset by Burke as a way of publicizing and popularizing the dangers that men like Hastings posed to the British imperial mission in South Asia, the rhetoric of the nabob controversy drew on the long-controversial status of the EIC itself, but, as it swept the nation, the nabob controversy exceeded Burke’s initial purposes. What he and his fellow managers for the prosecution saw as an argument for reform was quickly picked up by the relatively new institutions of print journalism in the late eighteenth century and adopted within the expanding public sphere to articulate persistent and growing concerns about the increasing interactions and interdependencies between the British nation and the British empire in South Asia. Isaac Reed noted in his diary on Thursday 22 May 1794, “Went to Westmr. Hall to the Tryal [sic] of Mr. Hastings.” Later that evening, he took in a play at Covent Garden, where he saw Marian Hastings, the former-govemor-genetal’s wife, in the audience.1 3 9 From the spectacle in Westminster Hall to the staged production at Covent Garden, Reed’s day was filled with drama, from a political trial to a piece of stage-theater. Though the moral arguments at the two spectacles might have been different, the style and form of both 1 5 9 Reed, 159. 212 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. were nearly identical, filled with rhetoric, long speeches, theatrics, histrionics, and larger than-Iife characterizations of nabobs. As Marian Hastings’ presence in both settings suggested, even the actors were the same. 2 1 3 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter Four Imperial Clutter Nabobs and the Artifacts of Empire in Metropolitan Britain A M osul Tale: The Perils of Trading Places As the late-aftemoon sun faded into a warm summer’s night on Tuesday 6 July 1784, Isaac Reed queued at the theater to purchase a ticket for a new drama, a show called The Mogul Tale, or. The Descent of the Balloon. For Reed, the title of the play would have been enough to suggest that the work had connections to South Asia, and those connections may have been what appealed to him. As we have seen, Reed had a voracious appetite for dramatic spectacle, and spectacles with connections to the British empire in South Asia were among his favorites. No records survive to tell us exactly what Reed thought of The Mogul Tale. If he was like those who reviewed the play in the popular press, he liked it but did not care for it as much as he had Foote’s more popular farces. The Nabob was widely thought to be superior to The Mogul Tale. But, as we have seen, Reed’s was a regular face in late eighteenth-century theater audiences, and, by any measure, he cared enough for the play to see it two more times, once in late June 1790 and once again in mid June 1791.1 The Mogul Tale itself tells a rather simple story. The curtains open to reveal three British travelers - a cobbler named Johnny, his wife Fanny, and their friend, a doctor. The three have set out from the English countryside for a day of hot air ballooning, a relatively neoteric pastime in eighteenth-century Europe that was, at the time the play premiered in July 1784, still unavailable in Britain.2 Johnny, Fanny, and the doctor have lost their 1 Isaac Reed, 77,85, 86. 2 The first manned flight in British history would take place three months later when Vincenzi Lunardi, the secretary to the Neapolitan ambassador, successfully flew from London to Standon in 214 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. bearings, been blown off course, and crashed their balloon in a strange courtyard where they find a group of women debating who among them is the Mogul’s favorite wife. The topic marvels the three travelers. Can it be that they have been blown all the way to India in a single day? The answer, it would seem, is yes, and, rather quickly, the Mogul’s eunuch guards arrest the three intruders for violating the sanctuary of the harem. To escape their rather prickly confinement, Johnny claims he is the Pope, traveling with his doctor and a nun. “I am Pope Johnny the twelfth,” he informs the Mogul’s guards. Concerned by events, Fanny turns to Johnny and asks him how her children will survive in Britain without her. The guards immediately seize upon the fact that a nun, as Fanny is supposed to be, should not have children. The doctor quickly responds that he and the “Pope” had been transporting this particular nun into her banishment for just such reasons. Assuring Johnny and the doctor that they will tend to the errant nun, the Mogul’s guards order Fanny to be taken to the seraglio. “Oh, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny,” Fanny begs as she is carried off the stage, “will you leave me here in a strange land, amongst tigers, land monsters, and sea monsters?”3 When we next see the three lost Britons, Fanny is dressed like the other women of the harem. Johnny, still playing the part of the Pope, and the doctor have entered the seraglio as the guests of the Mogul. Johnny, in particular, has been favored with the Mogul’s handkerchief, which, he is told, allows him access to any of the Mogul’s wives. He need only toss the handkerchief at the feet of a woman in order to have her for his own. Not Hertfordshire. Already the subject of enormous popular interest, balloon navigation became an immediate craze in Britain, and Lunardi became an instant hero, the Charles Lindbergh of Ms day. Interestingly, Lunardi spent the early years of his life in South Asia. The Salisbury and Winchester Journal and General Advertiser reported on 27 September 1784 that Lunardi remained in India “for some time without benefiting from the plunder practiced in the East.” It would not do, it would seem, for a hero tobea nabob as well. See The Salisbury and Winchester Journal and General Advertiser, 27 September 1784. 3 The Mogul Tale: or, The Descent of the Balloon - A Farce, (London, 1796), 13. 215 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. knowing that Ms wife Fanny is among the women in the room, Johnny drops the handkercMef at the feet of the woman he finds to be the most attractive and is shocked when Fanny raises her veil to reveal her familiar, if angry, face. “What the devil,” Johnny remarks, “My own Fan - why, who the devil would have thought of seeing you here, dizen’d out in that fine gown, with a sack around your waist - and a long petticoat trailing on the ground - and a turbot [sic] on your head.”4 Immediately, the Mogul intervenes, informing Johnny that he cannot have this particular woman as she is his own favorite. “You are not to lay violent hands upon her,” Johnny jealously replies, “for look’ye master Wacky, if you was in a certain comer of the world called Old England, you would know you dog you - that if the first Prince of the Blood was to attempt the wife of a poor cobbler, against her will and good liking - he had better take up the whole island by main force, and dash it into the sea again.”5 Outraged to be verbally abused by his guest, even if he happens to be the Pope, the Mogul orders his guards to prepare for three executions. “Are the racks ready,” he demands, “the cauldrons of boiling oil - the cages of hot iron, and the trampling elephants?”6 Trapped once more, the doctor confesses to the Mogul that the threesome has lied, telling him of their strange day - how they set out from England, were blown off course only to crash, so it would seem, in South Asia. Such things happen, he explains, when simple English folk trust their fates to a balloon. After all, the hot air balloon, he reflects, is “a macMne of French invention.”7 Before the doctor can go on, the Mogul interrupts Mm. “I am an Indian Mahometan,” he begins, explaining that Ms “laws are cruel and my nature 4 Ibid., 18. 5 mid., 19. 6 Ibid., 20. 1 Ibid.,21. 216 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. savage.” The three Britons, he continues, “have imposed on me and attempted to defraud me.” Such crimes merit harsh punishment. But, the Mogul concludes, I have been taught mercy and compassion for the sufferings of human nature; however differing in laws, temper, and colour from myself. Yes from you Christians whose laws teach charity to all the world, have I Seam’d these virtues. For your countrymen’s cruelty to the poor Gentoos, has shewn [sic] me tyranny in so foul a light, that I was determined henceforth to be only mild, just, and merciful. You have done wrong, but you are strangers, you are destitute -Y ou are too much in my power to treat you with severity - all three may freely depart.8 The Mogul Tale ends happily for the three British travelers, but not completely. They escape with their lives but not before being chastised by the Mogul both for having lied to and deceived him and for the broader crimes of the British empire against the native populations of South Asia - for the severity of British rule on the subcontinent, a rule that has become a negative example for the Mogul’s own conduct. It is no wonder that The Mogul Tale failed to be as successful as The Nabob. Rather than criticizing a singular set of Britons and their actions in South Asia, as had Foote’s play, The Mogul Tale implicated the entire nation in the EIC’s management - or rather mismanagement - of South Asia. If a simple cobbler were guilty, so too was everyone else. As such, The Mogul Tale suggested a world turned on its head to its British audiences. Indians were kinder than Europeans; Muslims instructed Christians on morality. Perhaps most implausibly of all, three Britons who set out from the English countryside for a simple day of hot air ballooning, found themselves stranded in a South Asian setting, held prisoner by the Mogul, tempted by Ms harem, and guarded by Ms eunuch soldiers. Very quickly, scenes from a faraway empire had overwhelmed the safe landscapes of home. The Mogul Tale suggested that the boundaries between metropole and empire were uncomfortably close to one another. *lbid., 21-22. 217 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. This chapter will argue that EIC employees-tumed-nabobs, like The Mogul Tale, uncomfortably reduced the distance between empire and metropole. As we have already seen, the nabobs complicated imperial teleologies - teleologies that they themselves helped formulate - during their tenure in South Asia. They lived in the same environments that had “enervated” indigenous South Asian populations and Dutch, Portuguese, and French imperial settlers alike, begging questions about British enervation as a result. Recognizing that the nabobs were a problematic social group in metropolitan Britain in the late eighteenth century, this chapter will suggest that the domestic response to the nabobs is best traced through concrete channels of material culture rather than via abstract and theoretical teleologies. This is not to say, of course, that such teleologies were not critical to understanding the backlash against nabobs that began in the 1770s and continued through the end of the century. Indeed, as we have seen, the fact that nabobs posed a complex challenge to the intellectual justifications of Britain’s growing empire in South Asia was fundamental to the attacks the group sustained when they returned home. But, domestic critiques of the nabobs most often centered on their material lives, their homes, their clothing, and the vast array of material artifacts that they brought with them from South Asia. Martin Daunton and Rick Halpem are right to note that historians must be attentive to the material and capitalist developments as well as to the theoretical patterns of history, and this chapter will argue that these material and capitalist developments manifested themselves in the daily lives of eighteenth-century Britons in the form of material objects, which explains why domestic critics of the nabobs latched onto concrete objects from South Asia as the most tangible representations of the larger intellectual problems posed by Britain’s growing prominence as 218 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. an imperial power.9 Artifacts from the imperial world, in short, made empire real in domestic settings; they were tangible connections between here and there. Clearly, the nabobs were not the first group to import goods from the empire into domestic Britain. By the late eighteenth century, tea, an imperial commodity, was a staple grocery in Britain and its colonies around the globe. Cotton too, as we have seen, had been a significant - if problematic - import good since the late seventeenth century. Imperial imports were veritably omnipresent in eighteenth-century British society. This is not to say that every eighteenth-century Briton who drank tea or wore cotton drew connections between these commodities and imperial geographies around the globe, but, for those Britons who did make the connection, the inter-relationships between metropole and empire were not always comfortable ones. As Rebecca Prune wrote to Henry MacKenzie’s The Mirror in March 1779, households around the nation were in danger of being overrun with what she saw as imperial clutter. Her husband, Prune protested, had become “a Man of Taste” and had taken to collecting paraphernalia from around the world. “Our house,” she lamented, “would now be equally vain to attempt cleaning as the ark of Noah. The children’s bed is supplied by an Indian canoe; and the poor little creatures sleep.. .between a stuffed crocodile and the skeleton of a calf with two heads.” Their house was filled, she continued, with “kites, owls, and bats.. .and it was but yesterday, that, putting my hand into a glass jar that used to contain pickles, I laid hold of a large tarantula.”1 0 Poor Mrs. Prune found herself and her family inundated with her husband’s global collection. Boats from North America replaced beds, exotic reptiles and the skeletal remains 9 Daunton and Halpem, “British Identities,” 11. 1 0 The Mirror, 123-125. 219 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. of a sacred cow filled her living room, and a threatening arachnid lived in her pickle jar. Her house was no museum; it was not the proper place to put the world on display. Rather, what might have been treasures elsewhere were junk to her - hard to keep clean, inconvenient, and even dangerous. They marginalized the comfortable world she had known - a world of beds, sofas, and pickles. As had The Mogul Tale, Mr. Rune’s collection of artifacts from around the world brought every place else just a little too close to home. The material lives of the nabob class, this chapter will argue, acted in much the same way as Mr. Prune’s collection, if only metaphorically. Nabobs had been to South Asia, exposing themselves to the “enervating” environments of the subcontinent If such exposure did act to enervate them, the hope always remained that by returning to domestic settings they could restore themselves to their previous state. A nabob, it was hoped, could settle back in at home, rest back up, and become a Briton again. This process of environmental rejuvenation, as we will see, was complicated by the fact that nabobs brought material artifacts from India home with them, surrounding themselves with the accoutrements of the pernicious environment they had left behind. In short, they made for themselves micro- Indias within the British landscape. In doing so, they jeopardized their own recovery and threatened the sanctity of the British nation itself; they eradicated the boundaries between empire and nation as well as the distinctions that marked India apart from Britain. As we shall see, not every nabob was guilty of bringing empire home with him. Indeed, the majority of nabobs wanted nothing more than to retire back to Britain and establish themselves in Georgian estates as country squires; however, the few who did return to Britain to build houses in the South Asian style, decorate them with South Asian art and other reminders of their lives in India, dress in South Asian fashions, speak in South Asian languages, and eat South Asian foods became the more public face of the nabob class. This 220 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. smaller second group of nabobs, therefore, set the standards by which all East India Company employees would be judged. All nabobs were rapacious, all were rich, all were greedy, all were luxurious, all lived in opulence, and all polluted the British nation with their enervating symbols of South Asian decay. Because they moved fluidly between empire and nation, center and periphery, here and there, the nabobs were blind to the boundaries that divided all of these dualities. Britons who never left their island nation could sip tea in the afternoon behind the rigid barrier of “the nation” that kept Britain distant from its empire. Nabobs, on the other hand, animated imperial commodities, suggesting the fluid interplay - the back and forth movement - that existed in material and human terms between Britain and India. Because they had traveled out into the empire, the nabobs connected imperial commodities to other landscapes in ways that bound empire and nation together. They became the permeable human frontier between the domestic and the foreign, and they made that boundary visible through their use of imperial goods. At a time when empire and nation were both still fluid, the appearance of nabobs and their souvenirs of empire seemed, as Mrs. Prune had complained, to clutter the landscape of here, of the nation, and of Britain with all the untidy markers of there, of the empire, and of India, rendering her British “home” an unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and foreign place to be for a woman who had never left it. As we have seen in previous chapters, the Indian subcontinent was a unique landscape within the British imperial world. South Asia was filled with great civilizations, dotted with evidence of architectural splendor, and governed by emperors, kings, and princes who often challenged the supremacy of European power. Moreover, South Asia was never intended to be a settlement colony as were so many other imperial settings. As Linda Colley 221 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. has noted, “the official intention was never that substantial numbers of Britons should settle there and reproduce themselves by sexual congress with their own kind.” Colley has rightly suggested that a significant justification for the East India Company’s non-settlement policies in South Asia throughout the eighteenth century was the simple fact that few Britons surv ived life on the subcontinent for any considerable period of time. “Many who made the passage to India,” she has written, “did not survive long enough to reproduce themselves at all.”1 1 Colley has estimated that 60 per cent of the 645 white male civilians who settled in Bengal on behalf of the Company between 1707 and 1775 died there - many within just a few years of their arrival. “Even at the end of the century, one in four British soldiers stationed in India perished every year.”1 2 In July 1784, John Scott-Waring published records in The Public Advertiser that suggested, in fact, that between 1762 and 1784, less than eight percent (only 37 of 508) of the EIC employees who had been appointed to serve in and been shipped out to India had returned to Britain. Of the 508 men who had gone to India between those years, Scott-Waring counted 150 who were dead. The surviving 321 remained in India as a small British population carved into a series of isolated enclaves hugging the coastlines of the massive subcontinent1 3 Eighteenth-century British India was a compressed setting and, in many cases, a poisonous environment The dramatic illusion that hordes of nabobs would overrun the British nation was, as we saw in the previous chapter, commonly re iterated, but it was, simply stated, more myth than fact Tropical diseases thinned the invading armies before they could launch their assault 1 1 Colley, Captives, 251. 1 2 Ibid. 1 3 See The Public Advertiser, 19-21 July 1784. See also Holzman, 29-30. 222 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. The ever-present threat of disease and death in South Asia did make the subcontinent even more foreign to newly arriving Britons. Writing from Delhi to Henry Stewart, in September 1808, Archibald Seton explained that India was a barren landscape - deadly, haunting, and threatening. Treeless, flat, and brown, India made Archibald Seton homesick for his native estate at Touch, for Scotland, and for Britain. The subcontinent was a landscape that suggested infertility, solitude, and vacancy to the young Scot. He missed the green expanses of his native homeland and of his family’s estate most particularly. Seton was like many other Company employees in South Asia. He was homesick for Britain, not unlike Richard Smith, who noted in August 1768 that he was “extremely solicitous to leave India.”1 4 For Seton, homesickness expressed itself in the contrasts that the young Scot drew between the landscapes surrounding Delhi and those he had left behind in Britain. The trees at Touch “are all well known to me,” he wrote, explaining that it was his “anxious heartfelt wish that the greatest care may be taken o f’ them.1 5 For Seton, the greenness of the land - its ability to sustain vegetation, and trees in particular - made it home. Green reminded him of his childhood, in contrast to the expanse of brown that filled the landscapes around Delhi, which inspired in him a passion for the life he had once known, an appreciation for planting, and a hunger for the life of the Georgian gentleman living on a verdant country estate. “Of Touch I have only to say that I conjure you to plant, plant, plant with all you have,” Seton ordered Stewart in October 1812, “until the whole of the estate to the Southward South Westward and Westward, as far as our boundary extends, be completely clothed.” This was, he explained, no mere velleity but rather “the wish of my 1 4 The Papers of Robert Orme, QIOC Mss Eur Orme/OV37,153. 1 5 Archibald Seton to Henry Stewart, 20 September 1808, OIOCIOR Neg 11664, T/T.64. 223 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. heart.”1 6 If Touch had to change wMle he was away, the only changes he wanted to see were more trees, more greenery. Touch was to be even less like India when he returned to it than it had been when he last saw it “I cannot express,” he wrote Stewart, “how disappointed I should be at my return if I missed any of [the trees].”1 7 Touch would not be home without them. “I should feel as if I had lost so many old friends,” he explained to Stewart1 8 To return and find the trees missing would be to find Touch changed - altered to look more like India than the place he had known as a child, the place he called home. As Archibald Seton discovered during his years in South Asia, India was an isolating location. Even Samuel Johnson was quick to note that “a man had better have ten thousand pounds at the end of ten years passed in England, than twenty thousand pounds at the end of ten years passed in India.” The reason, Johnson explained, was that “you must compute what you give for money; and a man who has lived ten years in India, has given ten years of social comfort and all those advantages which arise from living in England.”1 9 Being in India transformed a man; it exposed him to foreign locations and dangerous novelties. An imperial career marginalized a man from his family, his friends, and his home geographically, temporally, and socially as well. It was a price, Johnson argued, not worth paying. At the same time, the confined nature of life in South Asia bound the British residents of the subcontinent into a close-knit community. As we have seen, many EIC employees counted their Company colleagues as close personal friends.2 0 Writing from London in November 1786, Nathaniel Wraxall sent Paul Benfield, then in South Asia, news 1 6 Archibald Seton to Henry Stewart, 19 October 1812, OIOC IOR Neg 11664, T/T.71. 1 7 Archibald Seton to Henry Stewart, 20 September 1808, OIOC IOR Neg 11664, T/T.64. 1 9 Ibid. 1 9 Quoted in Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2003), 48. 2 0 See Chapter Two above, 152-154. 224 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. of his old friends who had retired home to Britain before him. “Lady James is at Bath, in a feeble, and most precarious state of Health.. .As to Plumer, he has buried himself in Yorkshire. Lord Macartney is forgotten. Hastings lives principally down at Beaumont Lodge, near Old Windsor.”2 1 Though distance separated them, those who had been together in India stayed in touch. George Gray, after having retired as a Company surgeon at Calcutta in 1760, continued to write letters to friends in South Asia, noting frequently how much pleasure he drew from “the goings-on in India.”2 2 Only Britons in India, he suggested, could fully understand his points of view. To some extent, then, Dr. Gray was a clear example of the fears Johnson had expressed. He felt out of place when he returned to Britain after having spent more than two decades in Calcutta - homesick though he was home. When he longed for Mango Punch, Gray wrote to his friends in South Asia to send some.2 3 When he found he was not as comfortable in domestically produced woolen garments as he was in shirts from India, he knew his EIC colleagues would understand.2 4 And, when he wanted a Rosewood cot from Bengal to replace his European bed, a piece of furniture upon which he no longer found it comfortable to sleep, he begged that his friend Captain Glover would send it personally rather than through the India House since, as they both knew, the provincially- minded dockworkers would separate the pieces of the cot while unpacking it and “some of it will be lost.”2 5 2 1 Nathaniel Wraxall to Paul Benfield, 23 November 1786, OIOC IOC C.307/3,163. 2 2 George Gray to Harry Verelst, 11 May 1763, OIOC Mss Eur D691. 2 3 George Gray to Hugh Watts, 24 April 1764, OIOC Mss Eur D691. For more on the social life in British South Asia in the eighteenth century, see Percivai Spear, The Nabobs: A Study o f the Social Life o f the English in Eighteenth Century India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 2 4 George Gray to Harry Verelst, 13 January 1768, OIOC Mss Eur D691. 2 5 George Gray to Captain A. Glover, 13 November 1762, OIOC Mss Eur C439. 225 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. The experience of India was something that was integral to the lives of EIC employees who went to the subcontinent, in many cases for decades. It marked a significant segment of their lives, but it was also a segment that only others with similar experiences could fully understand. As Mildred Archer has suggested, portraiture proved to be a critical tool among EIC servants for “recording a stay in India.”2 6 Not only, as Archer has detailed, did portraits fill the empty walls of newly-built British houses in South Asia - houses that, as William Hickey noted, had to be furnished “at one blow” - they also became a subtle yet clear statement that a person had been to South Asia.2 7 Archer’s work cataloguing the portraits now held by the Oriental and India Office Collections (OIOC) at the British library (BL) suggest just how often EIC employees and their families, appear in explicitly Indian settings or with explicitly Indian symbols in their portraits - clear indications that Company employees were eager to memorialize the time they spent in India and to commemorate that portion of their life in the public display of a portrait2 8 Arthur William Devis’ portrait of a civilian, very likely William Hickey, shows the British subject reclining on a chair in a large newly-constructed European accommodation in South Asia. Waited upon by a South Asian servant, the relaxed Briton indulges in a hookah pipe.® Thomas Seton’s portrait of an unknown British gentleman likewise shows a British subject smoking a water-pipe while seated on an exterior verandah writing a letter. Company employees were not shy about having themselves represented engaging in cultural practices indigenous to the Indian subcontinent nor were they hesitant to be seen in portraits that connected them to the religious traditions and fashions of South Asia. The portraitist Charles Smith, who himself toured India and painted the portraits of many Company 2 6 Mildred Archer, India and British Portraiture, 1770-1825 (New York: Philip Watson, 1979), 57. 2 7 Quoted in Ibid., 56. 2 8 See Ibid., 487-519. 2 9 For more on the hookah, see Chapter Two, 108-109. 226 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Illustration 12. A Civilian, perhaps William Hickey .Arthur William Devis, Calcutta, circa 1785.3 0 Illustration 13. Unknown Gentleman with a Hookah,John Seton, Calcutta, circa 1778.3 1 Illustration 14. Self Portrait o f Charles Illustration 15. Sir William Jones, Arthur Smith, Charles Smith, London, 1795.3 2 Wiliam Devis, Calcutta, I793.3 3 employees from 1783 to 1787 and again from 1800 to 1811, painted himself wearing a turban. The famed Orientalist, Sir William Jones, commissioned a portrait of himself seated 3 0 Image scanned from Mildred Archer, India, in British Portraiture, 245. 3 1 Image scanned from Ibid., plate HI. 3 2 Image scanned from Ibid., 183. 3 3 Image scanned from Ibid., 250. in R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. at a desk upon which sits a large statue of the elephant-headed Hindu deity Gaiieslta, symbolic of Jones’ life’s work translating South Asia’s religious, linguistic, and legal traditions into English. It was not only as individual sitters, however, that dghteraft-cmtuiy Company employees in India had themselves painted with symbols of their Indian connections. Groups of Company employees, including whole families and grasps of families commissioned conversation pieces that reflected not only the fact that they had spent time in India but also the close-knit relationship within the Anglo-Indian community in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Johann Zoffany’s portrait of Warren Hastings and M s wife, Marian, for example, shows the couple and their South Asian servant at the edge of a grove of trees in front of their Georgian manor house near Calcutta. Not dissimilarly, Johans Zoffany's p in in g of the Auiiol and Dashwood families shows die two families seated beneath a massive tree enjoying an afternoon of conversation and imperial Illustration 16. Mr. and Mrs. Hastings, Johann Zoffany, Calcutta, 1783-7.3 4 3 4 Image scanned from Ibid., plate IV. For more on landscape portraits in the eighteenth century, see, Ann Bermiaghaat, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 228 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. commodities, including tea and a hookah pipe. While one of the five South Asian servants in the painting prepares the water-pipe for a group of three men, two other Indian servants pour tea for two British women in the center of the painting. For the Auriol and Dashwood families who commissioned the painting, the portrait is a clear representation of the close- knit social network of Britons who lived within the confined British imperial world in late- dghteeath-centory South Asia. It is also a clear demonstration of the Auriol and Dashwood families’ connections to empire, to India, to the products r f empire that can be had in India, and to the people of India themselves. Indeed, the painting makes the subtle but interesting case that it is, in fact, the commodities of empire - the tea and the hookah - that fuse the two communities in the scene, binding the South Asians and the Britons in the painting together through the act of serving and consuming imperial groceries. Illustration 17. The Auriol and Dashwood Families, Johann Zoffany, Calcutta, 1183-7^ 3 5 Image scanned from Ibid., piste V. 229 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Britons who went to South Asia were not silent about their connections to India, but they do seem to have been aware that being a Briton in South Asia could be problematic back in domestic settings. Writing to his brother, Wriotheseley Digby, from India in June 1784, Kenelm Digby noted that his longing for Britain had become unbearable. “I languish to return [home],” he wrote, “to obliterate every remembrance of India and all things Indian.” At the same time, Digby was cautious to remember that he would have to act in such as way as to “steer me clear of the odious appellation of a Nabob” when he returned. “I flatter myself,” he continued, “that the only trait that will discover my residence in this country will be found in my complexion.”3 6 Company employees like Digby were aware that their presence in India rendered them suspicious figures at home in Britain. The uproarious reporting in the domestic press, the gossip from the card tables, tea rooms, and coffee houses across the British nation, and the stereotypical image of the nabob popularized on the London stage by playwrights like Samuel Foote all made their way to the ears of those employed by the Company in South Asia. Linda Colley has recently suggested that such a rhetoric was possible “because, to those on the home front, Britons in India still seemed a long way away, the agents of a greedy, grasping Company rather than of the nation at large, alien in terms of their reputed behaviour, and altogether unworthy of much sympathy.”3 7 In part, Colley is correct. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the term nabob had become a ubiquitous insult in Britain. The nabob was an “Oriental despot,” wrote the English radical Richard Price in 1776. He was responsible for “cruelties unheard-of, and devastations almost without name.” There was “no species of peculation from which” a nabob would not refrain, and the 3 6 Kenelm Digby to Wriotheseley Digby, 14 June 1784, quoted in Osborn, India Parliament and the Press Under George III, 84. * Ibid., 256. 230 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Company for which the nabobs worked was “one of the most corrupt and destructive tyrannies that probably ever existed.” Facing the outbreak of rebellion and revolution in North America, Price was quick to note that the people of Britain should “turn [their] eyes to India. There,” he wrote, has m esne been done than is now attempted in America. There Englishmen, actuated by the love of plunder and the spirit of conquest, have depopulated whole kingdoms and ruined millions of innocent people by the most infamous oppression and rapacity.3 8 The Public Advertiser agreed with Price’s assessment, comparing nabobs with petty thieves. It was common, among pick-pockets, to blind their victims by throwing dust in their eyes. Nabobs did the same thing, only, the paper concluded, “theirs is dust of Gold!”3 9 Being labeled as a nabob was so common an insult, that it did not apply only to those who worked for the Company or those who had been to South Asia. Horace Walpole, writing to Lord Hertford in April 1764, noted that the public spotlight was focused wholly on Robert Clive and his allies in South Asia and at Leadenhall Street “Mir Jaffeir and Cossim Aly Cawn and their deputies Clive and Sullivan,” he suggested, “employ the public attention.” As such, he argued, Britain’s political leaders, men like “Mogul Pitt and Nabob Bute,” could remain hidden from public view at a safe distance from any political controversy.4 0 Likewise, amid the furor caused by the debates on the Fox-North Coalition’s India Bill in 1783, political cartoons appeared that labeled Charles James Fox, the bill’s chief advocate, “Carlo Khan” and depicted him as an Asian potentate. As the debates on the bill destabilized and then pulled apart the ruling coalition, Fox found himself increasingly the target of public criticism. On several occasions, he was greeted at Westminster by 3 8 Quoted in Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires: Europeans and the Rest o f the World - From Antiquity to the Present (London: Phoenix Press, 2002), 101-103. 3 9 The Public Advertiser 20 May 1773. 4 0 Walpole, xxxviii, 368. 231 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. crowds of protestors shouting slogans like “No Usurper,” “No Turn Coat,” “No Grand Mogul,” and “No India Tyrant”4 1 Nabob, then, was a slanderous label with a series of concomitant slurs that could be thrown at EIC employees and domestic politicians alike. Anti-nabob rhetoric was, in a way, unexceptional; it was a ready-made insult, available to everyone and applicable to anyone. No wonder, then, that newspapers like The Public Advertiser could report that nabobs had overrun entire segments of the national landscape. In November 1784, the paper testified that “the country about Guildford [has] become the ROOKERY of NABOBS - all the simplicity of country manners is now extinct in that quarter - and the homely rustic and blushing maid - are now supplanted by old French-women, Swiss valets de chambre, Black boys, Gentoo coachmen, Mulatto footmen, and Negro butlers.”4 2 The French and the Swiss, Hindus and Muslims, black men and boys, and the European employees of the East India Company - they all alike were nabobs; they all merited the slanderous appellation. We must take caution when noting how widely applicable the term “nabob” was as a late eighteenth-century verbal insult. Certainly, the term was used freely and with abandon, and it was used by a wide cross-section of accusers to malign an equally wide cross-section of accused, but the fact remains that much of the anti-nabob rhetoric was not targeted at unidentified nabobs or anonymous accomplices of the Company. Rather, in many instances, attacks on nabobs were directed at specific targets; they were pointed, and they were personal. The earliest and the most famous of the nabobs was, of course, Robert Lord Clive. From the time word of Clive’s success at the Battle of Plassey arrived in London, his name 4 1 Quoted in Michael Duffy, The Younger Pitt (New York: Longman, 2000), 17-27. 4 2 The Public Advertiser, 3 November 1784. 232 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. was synonymous with British India as well as with the excesses that were thought to characterize the nabob class. These connections were further strengthened when Clive was promoted to an Irish peerage in December 1761, as Robert Lord Clive of Plassey. The wealth he had extracted from the subcontinent was something of a minor legend. In 1760, The Annual Register reported that “it is supposed that the General can realize £1,200,000 in cash, bills, and jewels; that his lady has a casket of jewels which are estimated at least £200,000. So that he may with propriety be said to be the richest subject in the three kingdoms.”® Horace Walpole echoed the paper’s estimates in a letter to Horace Mann in July 1767. “Lord d iv e is arrived,” he announced, “[and] has brought a million for himself, two diamonds drops worth twelve thousand pounds for the Queen, a scimitar, dagger, and other matters covered with brilliants for the King, and worth twenty-four thousand more.”4 4 As we have seen, the desire to emulate Clive’s fortune was only one aspect of the luxurious lifestyle that tempted Company employees in South Asia. Thomas Rumbold was so tempted by the large Arcot Diamond that he stole it directly from the finger of the Nawab of Arcot4 5 In March 1781, Horace Walpole reported to William Mason that the antics of men like Rumbold, “whose babe will be rocked in a cradle of gems,” were bringing the foundations of British power in South Asia to the edge of destruction. After having been so poorly treated by Rumbold, “the Nabob of Arcot,” he reported, “will have no more members of Parliament for retainers.”4 6 Company employees were abusing their power in South Asia, Walpole argued, but that was not the only problem facing the Indian empire. Even as tire British struggled to 4 3 Quoted in Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Clive of India: A Political and Psychological Essay (Bombay: South Asia Books, 1977), 327. 4 4 Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 14 July 1767, quoted in Ibid., 435. 4 3 See Chapter Two above, 122-124. See also Lewin, i, 17-21. 4 6 Horace Walpole to William Mason, 30 March 1781, in Walpole, xxix, 122. 233 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. fight off open rebellion in North America, South Asian kingdoms like Mysore seized the opportunity to challenge British forces that were already stretched thin. “Hyder Ally, an Indian potentate,” Walpole explained to Horace Mann, had moved against Company holdings in 1781 under the assumption that “he has as much right to the diamonds of his own country as the Rumbolds.. .who were originally waiters in a tavern.”4 7 As was the case in colonial North America, British power in South Asia was on unstable ground. “Cargoes of bad news” were arriving from all directions, he claimed, as “India and America.. .alike [were] escaping out of the talons of the Scotch.”4 8 The story of Rumbold’s theft of the Arcot diamond was not a secret in late eighteenth-century Britain. Rather, as Walpole’s letters demonstrate, it was widely known, and it was evidence, Walpole argued, that Company employees were nabobs. They were thieves. They could not be trusted to wield their newfound power properly. Such stories were common in late eighteenth-century Britain. On Monday 31 July 1786, The Gloucester Journal reported the death of a local gentleman, “who had received his education at the Charity School at Wapping” but who “had accumulated a very considerable fortune” in India.4 9 Not dissimilarly, The Nottingham Journal reported that “a Major O , in the service of the East India Company, and lately returned to England with a very affluent fortune” had written to General D asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Major O , had enclosed “a schedule of his property, to the amount of eighty thousand pounds” as a testimonial of his devotion to his future bride.5 0 Major O and the unspecified gentleman from the Charity School in Wapping mirrored the antics of better-known nabobs like Rumbold and Clive, and they also seemed to 4 7 Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 30 March 1781, in Walpole, xxv, 141. 4 8 Horace Walpole to William Mason, 30 March 1781, in Walpole, xxix, 122. 4 9 The Gloucester Journal, 31 July 1786. 5 0 The Nottingham Journal, 12 February 1785. 234 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. verify the validity of popular stereotypes of nabobs, like the caricature that Samuel Foote had popularized in The Nabob. As we saw in the previous chapter, Foote’s The Nabob revolves around the efforts of Sir Matthew Mite, an archetypical nabob, to many the young daughter of Sir John Oldham, a member of Parliament and an established country gentleman. Oldham, of course, refuses to allow his daughter to marry a nabob, arguing that Mite is of low origins and a gamble. When he finds that his Indian wealth will not open new doors for Mm in metropolitan Britain, Mite grows both angty and vindictive. For most who saw The Nabob on the late eighteenth-century stage, Matthew Mite was not an abstract form, a symbol, or a character meant to satirize a broader social group. Rather, audiences poured from the theater after performances of The Nabob guessing wMch real nabob had been the model for Foote’s Mite. As one review noted, “the character of the Nabob has, for some time, been a subject of so much animadversion, as well within, as without doors, that Mr. Foote judiciously thought he would be a proper personage for dramatic satire.”5 1 Matthew Mite was the embodiment of real people, and both The London Chronicle and The Town and Country Magazine noted in their reviews of the play that Foote had captured the essence of the nabobs. The Nabob, they wrote, “seems to have the presence, for whilst it abounds with wit and observation, the fable is regularly carried on, the satire sufficiently general, and the follies and vices of the times marked with all the glare of folly and deformity.”5 2 Everyone tried to link one real nabob to the stage character of Matthew Mite. Sir Matthew White was suggested because of the obvious connections between his name and Mite’s. Lord Clive, Thomas Rumbold, and George Gray were also commonly suggested, 5 1 See also The Town and Country Magazine (July 1772), 373. 5 2 The London Chronicle, 30 June-2 July, 1772. See also The Town and Country Magazine (July, 1772), 373. 235 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. but no figure drew as much attention as General Richard Smith.3 3 lik e Mite, Richard Smith had experienced a meteoric career in India and had accumulated a massive fortune at the same time. In only six years in Bengal, Smith amassed a fortune said to be worth between £200,000 and £300,000 and rose to the rank of commander-in-chief.5 4 Smith, like Mite, returned to Britain and flaunted his successes. He gambled, ran for political office, and lived extravagantly. Even in accounts written by his supporters, Smith comes across as an unsavory character. Most agreed that he fit the stereotypical image of a nabob, having been bom the son of a cheesemonger. He had been bom, Joseph Price argued, “a son of Mars” who was shackled to a lowly profession. Many who disliked him, Price went on to suggest, missed the fact that Smith was not “proud, insolent, and irascible.” He exhibited, rather, an “indignant, ambitious soul” that looked proud and insolent only to “that ignorant and ill natured people, who could not discover the future general in a cheesemonger’s boy.”5 5 To most, though, Smith was the archetypical nabob. He was, as Macaulay would later write, an Anglo-Indian chief, dissolute, ungenerous, and tyrannical, ashamed of the humble friends of his youth, hating the aristocracy, yet childishly eager to be numbered among them, squandering Ms wealth on pandars [sic] and flatterers, tricking out Ms chairman with the most costly hothouse flowers, and astounding the ignorant with jargon about rupees, lacs, and jagMres.5 6 Smith was the very model of the nabob. He began remitting Ms fortune home to Britain long before he returned himself, sending diamond commissions to colleagues and agents like Robert Orme and James Alexander. Along with these remissions, he sent word of his political ambitions, asking Ms agents in Britain to endeavor to secure a seat in Parliament for Mm if it was at all possible. Winning a seat, he wrote to Robert Orme, was 5 3 For more on the debate surrounding Foote’s models for Matthew Mite’s character, see Holzman, 96. 5 4 See Michael Edwardes, The Nabobs at Home (London: Constable, 1991), 31. 5 5 Joseph Price, A Vindication of General Richard Smith, 17-18. 5 6 Quoted in Sydney C. Grier, ed., The Letters o f Warren Hastings to his Wife (London, 1905), 259. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. “my utmost ambition” and “my favourite pursuit”5 7 Upon his return to Britain, Smith did make his way into the Commons where he became a close follower of Charles James Fox. Outside of Westminster, Smith made few friends, even among his EIC colleagues. In October 1773, Smith made an elaborate show of loaning the Company £50,000 to ease its financial troubles. He was, the public papers noted, “one of the servants who had made a fortune in India,” and he wanted to demonstrate his gratitude to the EIC. He “called upon several other opulent servants to follow his example, as a grateful method of extricating their masters from their present difficulties,” but “not an individual.. .adopted his spirit.”5 8 As the only nabob willing to part with his money for the sake of the Company, Smith outshone his colleagues. It was a clever move that won him immediate public praise, but it isolated him from the broader community of EIC employees. Smith’s actions set him at odds even with his fellow nabobs, but it was his gambling that caused him the most personal grief. Rumor held that Smith lost as much as £180,000 to Charles Fox in one sitting alone, and by 1783, Smith was widely reported to be a “ruined man.”5 9 The Public Advertiser followed Smith’s rapid decline, openly linking him to Foote’s stage character. “It is extremely singular,” the paper reported on 5 August 1784, “that General Sir Matthew Mite should remain non inventas. - Not one of his numerous Creditors at least can tell where to catch him.” Two days later, the paper reported that “General Smith is at last announced to be in France.” On 12 August of the same year, the paper recorded that “General Matthew Mite remain[ed] incog[nito],” affirming that “the report of Ms being in France is not ascertained to have been founded.” One month later, in September 1784, reports advertised that “General S is now selling off house furniture, carriages, and 5 7 See Robert Orme to James Alexander, 30 May 1770, OIOC Mss Eur Grme/OV 202,36. See also Richard Smith to Robert Orme, 1767, OIOC Mss Eur Qrme/OV 37,59-60. 5 8 Prescott’ s Manchester Journal, 3 October 1772. 5 9 See Holzman, 74-75. m R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. horses; preparatory to a trip, merely for pleasure, to the Continent. That he might be in the better condition of traveling. His good friend and political ally Mr. F-x has disencumbered him of 180,0001. sterling!” Following the sale of Smith’s estate and effects, the paper quickly reported on 30 September 1784, that “General Smith, who has been absent ever since the Dissolution, is returned incogfnito] to England.”6 0 His debts paid, Smith had slunk home to Britain where he seems to have lived quietly until his death. A small pamphlet of 1792 records that General Smith, having “sunk into his original insignificance,” was a proper example of the perils of the life of a nabob.6 1 He had come from nothing and had risen like a meteor. He had been powerful but disdained; he had been influential but marginalized. Once, he was wealthy and opulent, and his opulence brought him down in the end. Throughout the entire process, Smith’s name was never sheltered, not even slightly, from public abuse. He was the model nabob, the perfect prototype for Foote’s Matthew Mite, and the apotheosis of nabob-like behavior. The nabob controversy of the late eighteenth century posed a significant personal dilemma for EIC employees upon their return to Britain. It generated a hostile social and political atmosphere, and it promoted a situation in which Company servants had either to forget their pasts in India or risk becoming nabobs. Major-General Thomas Munro began grappling with this conundrum before he returned home. In a letter written near Cuddalore to his sister, dated 17 July 1783, he explained, “I have heard it frequently observed that most men by a few years absence from their native country become estranged from their old acquaintances and look back with indifference on the friends of their earlier years.” This, Munro insisted, was not his own experience. ® See The Public Advertiser, 5 August 1784,7 August 1784,12 August 1784,25 September 1784, and 30 September 1784. For more on Smith’s debts, see Marilyn Morris, 346-347. 6 1 See Holzman, p. 75. 238 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. I have yet been able to divest myself of partiality for home, nor can I now reflect without regret on the careless indolent life in my father’s house when time fled away undisturbed by those anxious thoughts which possess every one who seeks earnestly for advancement in the world.6 2 Archibald Seton, likewise, felt that he had to justify his actions to his family back home at Touch and to clarify for them that the much-mythologized life of the nabob had nothing in common with his own experiences in South Asia. “It is evident,” he wrote Henry Stewart in September 1808, “from several parts of your letter that you have received a most erroneous notion of my income.” Stewart, writing from Scotland, supposed that Seton was paid an annual salary of £1,200 with all of his living expenses paid by the Company. He assumed the young Seton was well on his way to making a nabob’s fortune. “Now the real fact,” Seton responded, is that in common with all political and diplomatic residents in this country, I receive two descriptions of allowances; viz. a personal salary and a sum for public expences [sic]...My private salary is 3200 rupees or 40001. perannum, and it may be supposed that 60,000 Rs. perannum must cover all public disbursements whatever. Seton made a substantial salary, he admitted, but a great deal of his income went to paying for expenses and other public obligations that came with his post® “I cannot sufficiently regret the busy officiousness of ignorant people,” Seton wrote to Stewart, “who, upon this as upon many other occasions have misled you by fallacious accounts.” The size of an EIC salary was not the only false assumption that Stewart made about Seton’s life in India, and Seton was eager to clear matters up. “I have,” he wrote, “not the smallest desire to be secret or mysterious about my affairs.” To the rumors that he preferred India to Britain, Seton swore “by the sacred memory of my loved parents that my anxiety to return is eager and feverish, and that some part of every day is passed in fond anticipation of ® Major-General Thomas Munro to his sister, Erskine, 17 July 1783, OIOC Mss Eur F151/140,44. 6 3 Archibald Seton to Henry Stewart, 20 September 1808, OIOC IOR Neg 11664, T/T.64. 239 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. the happy time when I shall be restored to my family and home.” To the “strange report” that he was giving his money away recklessly in India and that his “expenses are needlessly great,” Seton protested the charges to be “completely false.. .1 have not a carriage of any kind - not even a cabriolet - and only one single riding horse,” Seton protested. “Can an establishment be more simple and unassuming?”6 4 Company employees in South Asia found that they had to defend themselves against charges of nabobery even to their closest friends and family members. The threat of being labeled as a nabob, Nathaniel Wraxall wrote to Paul Benfield in 1786, was perilous indeed. Not only, Wraxall noted, had Edmund Burke charged the political atmosphere by pushing forward with the impeachment hearings against Warren Hastings, “the curs’d Paddy,” as Wraxall described Burke, attacked any Company servant he could find.6 5 Wraxall was eager to see Burke’s assaults ended, and he predicted that by attacking Hastings, Burke would discredit himself and end his own political career. ‘The damn’d Paddy is to attack Hastings,” he wrote Benfield, “Let him! So much the better. He will bite upon a fite [sic].”6 6 As eager as Wraxall was to see Burke launch his charge against Hastings, he cautioned his friend Benfield to be wary of returning to Britain in the charged atmosphere. “In a private view,” he told Benfield, “and from personal feelings, no event could be more agreeable to me than your return to this Country.” But, Wraxall went on to explain, “I feel that it is my Duty to you, to say, fairly and plainly, that in my opinion, your coining here at “ Ibid. 6 5 Nathaniel Wraxall to Paul Benfield, 27 January 1786, OIOC IOR C.307/3,27. 6 6 Nathaniel Wraxall to Paul Benfield, 26 January 1786, OIOC IOR C.307/3,26. 240 Reproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. this time could not be advantageous and most probably would be very injurious to your greatest objects and interests.”6 7 It was more, though., than the Hastings impeachment and Burke’s bombast and lofty fustion that drove Wraxall to suggest that Benfield should not return to Britain in the middle months of 1786. “You know what numerous and violent enemies your talents, your political connexions [sic], and supposed ample fortune excited, when you were in England the last time. Those enmities are dormant, but, by no means extinct,” Wraxall argued.6 8 If, as Wraxall was certain he would do, Benfield insisted on returning to Britain immediately, Wraxall and Benfield’s other agents in London had specific counsel for him. Should Benfield choose to return, Wraxall wrote, “what...we ask of you to renounce. ..[is] at most, a little external shew [sic] or estate; surely not necessary to elegance, comfort, enjoyment, or Happiness.” Wraxall’s plan for Benfield, then, was that he should come over; live elegantly but quietly; be introduced gradually into good company, avoid active political or Parliamentary exertions, make friends and acquaintances; and when the town empties, by and by in M y, I should have propos’d to you to go with Mrs. W. and me to several of the watering places for a couple of months. There you would see a number of elegant and accomplished women, among whom you may select such a one as your judgment and affections will equally approve. You will gradually domesticate in England, and find many sources of private comfort, which now you cannot possibly see.6 9 Wraxall cautioned Benfield to “conceal rather than avow [his] own consequence,” and he urged him to “disarm enmity and malevolence, by a quiet, unassuming entry into this great circle.” It was better, he suggested to “imitate Barwell who is rising to eminence by silence and gradual acquisition of power and consideration than Hastings or Gen. Smith; one of whom found his way to the King’s Bench and the other is plagued with an Impeachment.” 6 7 Nathaniel Wraxall to Paul Benfield, 28 May 1786, OIOC IOR C.307/3,108. 6 8 Ibid. ® Nathaniel Wraxall to Paul Benfield, 29 March 1790, OIOC IOR C.307/4, 11-12. 241 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. In a London charged by the political fervor of the Hastings impeachment, it was best that Benfield “advance slowly. Leave the contemptible abuse of newspapers.. .to expire as it will soon do in its own weakness. Hold on your way, steady, compos’ d, easy, and you will attain everything by and by, which a well regulated ambition can desire.”7 0 Benfield could return to Britain as a wealthy nabob, but, Wraxall demanded, he should by no means look the part. He had to domesticate as an Englishman, to re- acclimatize himself to being British, to rejuvenate himself on the soil of his native homeland after years of exposure to the “enervating” climate of South Asia. “You will gain infinitely by it,” he explained to Benfield. Indeed, Wraxall had offered the same advice to Colonel Popham and a number of other EIC servants, and “they followed it. They have found the benefit of their prudence.”7 1 For Benfield, the key to re-establishing himself in Britain was “avoidfing] all unnecessary display or expence [sic].”7 2 Indian wealth made for an easy target in metropolitan Britain. As C.D. Barber wrote to a member of his family in 1780, very few seemed to return from India “whose character will stand the test of enquiry and not even all the wealth of India which they have been at so much pain to accumulate; can secure them from the contempt of their countrymen.”7 3 Where Kenelm Digby had been concerned that his complexion would mark him out and earn him “the odious appellation of a Nabob,” Wraxall seems to suggest that it was Benfield’s money and the opulent material life that he could afford to live with that money that made him a likely target of anti-nabob rhetoric.7 4 The Indian sun could tan a man’s skin, but Nabobs 7 0 Nathaniel Wraxall to Paul Benfield, 30 March 1790, OIOC IOR C.307/4,13. 7 1 Nathaniel Wraxall to Paul Benfield, 29 March 1790, OIOC IOR C.307/4,11-12. 7 2 Nathaniel Wraxall to Paul Benfield, 30 March 1790, OIOC IOR C.307/4,13. 7 5 C.D. Barber to Miss Bather, 10 May 1780, OIOC Mss Eur K25,47. 7 4 Kenelm Digby to Wriotheseley Digby, 14 June 1784, quoted in Osborn, India Parliament and the Press Under George III, 84. 242 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. were marked as nabobs by the way they chose to live, by their wealth, and by the extravagance of the world they built around them once they returned to metropolitan Britain. EIC employees were aware that the charged political atmosphere of late eighteenth- century Britain was treacherous. They responded by protesting against the mythologized image of the nabob that Burke’s political rhetoric, Foote’s dramatic work, the news media, and gossip circles had generated, and they engaged in the art of tergiversation. Though they were wealthy, they appeared otherwise. Though they had been in South Asia, they cultivated a purely British appearance. They walked a fine line, trying always to mask their Indian connections without fully renouncing that part of their lives. To domestic audiences, such obfuscation did not always work; nabobs, as Edmund Burke continued to insist before the Hastings impeachment, were a direct threat to the British nation, and many agreed. The nabobs displayed predilections to luxury and extravagance. They were models of the hedonism that John Wesley denounced in his popular sermons. They enjoyed a life of ease. As Wesley argued in one sermon, such ease made “men more and more soft and delicate, more unwilling, and indeed more unable, to ‘take up’ their ‘cross daily’, to ‘endure hardship as good soldiers of Jesus Christ’.”7 5 Nabobs dressed extravagantly, wearing gold, jewels, and other fine apparel that increased their pride. “It is scarce possible,” Wesley demanded, “for a man to wear costly apparel without in some measure valuing himself upon i t ” Such apparel tended to “breed and increase vanity,” to “beget anger, and every turbulent and uneasy passion,” and to “create and inflame lust.” The fact of the matter, he concluded, was “plain and undeniable,” the effect of elaborate dress 7 5 See John Wesley, The Works of John Wesley, 9 vols., ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1984-1989), ill, 227-235. 243 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. was pernicious “on the wearer and on the beholder.”7 6 Fancy dress and elaborate behavior transformed a person, not just on the surface, but at the very core. As this dissertation has argued, the possibility that India brought about transformations in people was one of the dangers of the subcontinent. Any suggestion that Britons were subject to transformation in South Asia imperiled the ideological arguments that justified British imperial power on the subcontinent in the first place. Transformations were destabilizing. For domestic Britons like Wesley, who never went to India, who never left their island homeland, the transformations wrought by empire were almost unthinkable. Stories of transformations in the news media and scenes of mistaken identity on the stage might have suggested that empire wrought chaos, but stories in the printed press suggested much worse. The German-born portraitist and founding member of Britain’s Royal Academy of Art, Johann Zoffany, who lived in South Asia for six years beginning in 1783 had been forced, it was widely rumored, to resort to cannibalism while in South Asia. While sailing for Britain in 1789, Zoffany was shipwrecked off the Andaman Islands. Facing starvation, those who survived the disaster were said to have drawn lots among themselves. A young sailor drew the shortest straw and was slaughtered and eaten by his shipmates - making Zoffany the only academician in history to be linked to the horrific practice of cannibalism.7 7 The voyage to India had converted him - stripping him of his civility, replacing it with barbarity.7 8 1 6 See Ibid., iii, 247-252. 7 7 See Dalrymple, 268. See also Lady Victoria Manners and Dr. G.C. Williamson, John Zoffany, RA.: His life and Works, 1735-1810 (London, 1920), 116-117. 7 8 For more on naval travelers who were forced to convert to cannibalism, see A. W. Brian Simpson, Cannibalism and the Common Law: The Story o f the Tragic Last Voyage of the Mignonette and the Strange Legal Proceedings to which it Gave Rise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 147- 160. R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. The nabob controversy of the late eighteenth century suggested that Company employees were changed in and by India. The Zoffanys, the Smiths, the Clives, and the Rumbolds all complicated life for EIC employees who returned from South Asia in the late eighteenth century. India was a substantial part of the lived experience of these men and their families. It occupied, in many cases, decades of their lives; it separated them from friends, family, and home both while they were away and once they returned. It marked out a community of similarity - other people who had “been there” - and there were, as the portraits of EIC employees and their families and the letters of retired EIC servants like George Gray suggest, strong emotional reasons for wanting to stake out a claim as part of this community. At the same time, there were profound reasons for not doing so. To belong to the EIC, to have been to India, and to claim an imperial identity was to be likened to Clive, to Rumbdd, and to Smith. To belong was to be a nabob, and to b e a nabob was to subject oneself to public attacks on the stage, in the papers, and throughout all levels of society. The process of going to empire, traveling to India, and serving with the EIC left most Company employees in a space between nation and empire. While in India men like Archibald Seton had longed for home, but once home, men like George Gray longed for India. Newly- appointed EIC servants were, not unpredictably, haunted by homesickness during their first days in South Asia. So too, however, were newly-retired EIC servants who settled back in Britain. After a career in India, men like Seton and Gray, found both spaces familiar but neither of them comfortable. A nabob had no home. A Jewel in the Crown?: Indian Wealth in Domestic Britain There was no shortage of stories, tales, rumors, and myths about nabobs in late eighteenth-century Britain. Stories like that of Johann Zoffany that hinted of Company 245 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. employees-tamed-cannibals, though, were far from common. Much more common were stories of men who were greedy and who had used their Indian connections to rise above their birth. Nabobs, it was widely believed, were social, political, and economic upstarts. As Thomas Macaulay would later reflect, the nabobs “had sprung from obscurity...they acquired great wealth.. .they exhibited it insolently...they spent it extravagantly.” They lived, he went on, with all the “awkwardness and some of the pomposity of upstarts.” Their spending habits raised the price of everything in their neighbourhoods, from fresh eggs to rotten boroughs...their lives outshone those of dukes., .their coaches were finer than that of the Lord Mayor.. .the examples of their large and ill-governed households corrupted half the servants of the country.. .but, in spite of the stud and the crowd of menials, of the plate and the Dresden china, of the venison and Burgandy, [they] were still low men.7 9 India was a profitable location; it made men like Clive and Rumbold wealthy beyond the imaginations of most eighteenth-century Britons. That same wealth did not improve a man’s standing in society. It only seemed to fuel an insatiable greed. As early as 1711, Jonathan Swift reported that acquisitiveness ran wild within the Company. “Here has been a fellow discovered going out of the East India House,” he recorded on 1 November 1711, ‘with sixteen thousand pounds in money and bills; he would have escaped, if he had not been so uneasy with thirst, that he stole out before his time, and was caught.”8 0 In 1787, seven members of the crew of The Ranger, one of the Company’s ships, hatched a conspiracy to take the ship and seize its cargo - a payload estimated to include £26,000 in cash.8 1 7 9 Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Lord Clive,” in The Historical Essays o f Macaulay, ed. Samuel Thurber (Boston: Allym and Bacon, 1892), 229-231. 8 0 Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella (Gloucester: Sutton, 1984), 271. 8 1 The Sheffield Register, 7 July 1787. See also The Nottingham Journal, 7 July 1787. 246 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Despite the desperate attempts at mutiny on The Ranger, by the end of the century India was a sure path to more honest wealth. As one domestic correspondent wrote to his friend serving in South Asia with the EIC, “I am no friend to greedy avarice or plundering rapacity, but you may and ought to come home with such a stock of well gotten wealth, as will insure your ease and independence for the rest of your life.”8 2 Richard Barwell admitted to his father in 1765 that “India is a sure path to competency. A moderate share of attention, and your being not quite an idiot are (in the present situation of things) ample qualities for the attainment of riches.”8 3 India was also a good place to send young sons who seemed lost in the metropolitan world - unable to find their way to security, stability, and wealth in Britain. William Hickey’s father sent him off to India, after a young adulthood wasted on “loose women” and “excessive drink,” admonishing him to “cut off half a dozen rich fellow’s heads.. .and so return a nabob myself to England.”8 4 Not all nabobs were sent to India to make a fortune, though. Some were sent to restore them. Robert Clive’s father, Richard, followed his son’s career in India closely, recognizing that the family’s fortunes hinged on Indian wealth. “As your conduct and bravery is become the publick [sic] talk of the nation,” he wrote on 15 December 1752, “this is the time to increase your fortune, make use of the present opportunity before you quit the Country.”8 5 Likewise, Archibald Seton’s passage to India was a matter of hope for his entire family. Even as he straggled with homesickness in South Asia, his father, Hugh Seton, remained at the family’s estate at Touch where life was bleak. Hugh Seton’s financial advisor, D. Stewart Moncrieffe, wrote to him on 9 December 1788 that “the anguish of mind 8 2 S. Russel to an unspecified friend, 22 January 1780, OIOC Mss Eur K25,40. 8 3 Quoted in Holzman, 27-28. 8 4 Quoted in Ibid., 19. 8 5 Richard Clive to Robert Clive, 15 December 1752, OIOC Mss Eur G37/3. 247 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. I suffer from the gloomy prospect I have of the ruin of the family of Touch, is above my powers to express.”8 6 Hugh Seton had himself been imprisoned for debts between 1785 and 1786, and it was the family’s debt that eventually drove Archibald Seton to India in search of money. Writing to Henry Stewart in September 1808, Seton explained that he needed to save £25,000 to clear the family of its debts. “To accomplish this will certainly keep me in India somewhat longer than I intended,” he explained, adding that he appreciated Stewart’s kind help with the arrangements for his stay in India and for his sympathetic understanding “of my family affairs in particular.”8 7 Like Seton, Richard Jenkins spent twenty years in India beginning in 1807, and it was the interests of his family that drove his decision. Unlike Seton, Jenkins’ family was left destitute when his father died, not long after Jenkins’ birth. Since then, his two uncles, Jenkins and Ravenscroft, had cared for Jenkins and his mother. By December 1813, the young Jenkins found himself caught between the financial counsel of his two protectors. He wrote to his mother that his Uncle Ravenscroft “recommends one to remit money to pay off the debts on the Estate and first of all to pay the purchase money of the fields near Biston.” Uncle Jenkins, Ravenscroft intimated, wanted only to squander the family’s remaining assets. Despite their feud, neither uncle doubted that India was the path to restoring the Jenkins’ fortune.8 8 India funded social nobodies and bankrupt families - raising them from debt and obscurity to wealth. The stereotypical image of the nabob as the son of a cheesemonger, a linen draper, or in the case of Thomas Rumbold, a fiddler at the opera, a waiter, and a shoeblack (his father was a busy man, indeed), meant that when a nabob came back to 8 5 D. Stewart Moncrieffe to Hugh Seton, 9 December 1788, OIOC IOR Neg 11663, T/S.32. 8 7 Archibald Seton to Henry Stewart, 20 September 1808, IOR Neg 11696, T/T.64. 8 8 Richard Jenkins to his mother, 28 December 1813, OIOC Mss Eur El 11,209-212. 248 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Britain as a wealthy man, he was instantly branded an upstart.® Nabobs were, as one editorial in The Gentleman’ s Magazine argued, “a new sort of gentlemen, with new customs, manners, and principles.” As the editorial feared, these “new men” threatened to “fill the offices of the old country gentlemen, both in town and country.”9 0 As Macaulay would mention later, the nabob’s newfound wealth did have a significant impact in domestic Britain. Prices for consumer goods soared in metropolitan settings in the last half of the eighteenth century, and nabobs’ wealth made a perfect scapegoat Horace Walpole wrote to Horace Mann in September 1766 that “the dearness of everything is enormous and intolerable.” Commercial and imperial wealth, he went on to argue, were to blame. “The country is so rich that it makes everybody poor,” he explained to Mann. “Unless the mob will turn reformers and rise, or my Lord Clive send over diamonds enough for current coin, I do not see how one shall be soon able to purchase necessaries.”9 1 Britain, Walpole argued, “beat Rome in eloquence and extravagance; and Spain in avarice and cruelty.” The proof, he wrote, was everywhere. Here was Lord Clive’s diamond house; this is Leadenhail Street, and this broken column was part of the palace of a company of merchants who were sovereigns of Bengal! They starved millions in India by monopolies and plunder, and almost raised a famine at home by the luxury occasioned by their opulence, and by that opulence raising the prices of everything, till the poor could not purchase bread!9 2 Nabobs’ wealth threatened to inflate domestic prices and starve the common Briton, but it was not only the cost of “necessaries” that worried Walpole. He wrote to Lady Qssory in December 1771, that she should move quickly in purchasing an art piece in which she was 8 9 Holzman, 39. 9 0 The Gentleman’ s Magazine (September 1786), 750. 9 1 Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 25 September 1766, in Walpole, xxii, 455. 9 2 Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 9 April 1772, in Walpole, xxiii, 400. 249 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. interested, lest “Lord Clive, or some nabob...give fifty thousand pounds for the collection, though the picture may be as yet had for three thousand and the antiquities for eight.”9 3 Nabobish wealth threatened the economic stability of the nation, but nabobs themselves seemed to be pushing domestic Britons aside across the country. Horace Walpole complained in 1761 that “conquerors, nabobs, and victorious admirals attack every borough.”9 * The newly wealthy did desire to win political influence in late eighteenth- century Britain, and they even went so far as to advertise their aims in the daily press. One ad in The Public Advertiser offered £2,500 for an “Honourable seat.”9 5 Other ads targeted nabobs and other upstarts directly. One called to all “gentlemen desirous of the Purchase of Places at Court, or in the Public Office,” and promised successful results to anyone with a thousand pounds to spend on the venture.9 6 But buying up the nation’s rotten boroughs was not enough. As Richard Smith noted to Robert Orme, in order to qualify for a seat in Parliament, one had to have an estate.9 7 Ads in the daily press helped fill this need as well. On 17 January and again on 24 January 1774, The Public Advertiser ran listings offering landed estates for sale to those with the means to purchase them.9 8 That nabobs were purchasing landed estates in Britain was important to their domestic critics. Land was a traditional measure of wealth, power, and prestige. The land was the nation, and it was the strength of the nation’s people. Those who owned land had a stake in it and in the fate of the country writ large. As always, Robert d iv e was the first nabob to raise eyebrows when he purchased Claremont estate from the Duchess of Newcastle in 1760 for £25,(X X ). He also purchased a large house at Esher and several tracts 9 3 Horace Walpole to Lady Ossory, 14 December 1771, in Walpole, xxxii, 71. 9 4 Quoted in Holzman, 7. 9 5 The Public Advertiser, 10 October 1774. 9 6 Ibid., 17 February 1774. 9 7 Richard Smith to Robert Orme, 1767, OIOC Mss Eur 0rme/0¥V37,59. 9 8 See The Public Advertiser, 17 January 1774 and The Public Advertiser, 24 January 1774. 250 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. of land surrounding it for £2,000. He then improved the combined estates for an additional £43,000." Other nabobs followed Clive’s example. George Gray retired to Britain where he purchased a country estate called Huntington.1 0 0 Colonel Robert Brooke returned from India after having made a fortune and redeemed Ms family’s fortunes from the brink of bankruptcy. He built a new family home called Longfield, and he quickly began draining the bogs surrounding his property as experiments in new forms of industrial land use.1 0 1 Richard Smith purchased an estate in Berkshire where he was appointed the High Sheriff. Shortly thereafter, he called a meeting of tire county’s elite to argue in favor of a proposed new road that would allow him to “arrive at his magnificent seat of Chilton Lodge, without the necessity of passing through the little stinking town of Hungerford.”1 0 2 Major Charles Marsac purchased his estate of Caversham from Lord Cadogan, and unlike the former owner who “suffered any persons to pass through his park,” Marsac demanded that people pay for the right to pass or turn back.1 0 3 Richard Barwell, a member of Warren Hastings Supreme Council in Bengal, returned to Britain and purchased an estate from one of Britain’s traditional families. Major Scott-Waring reported that, shortly after his return to Britain in 1780, Barwell purchased an “estate of about 2,000 a year for One Hundred Thousand Pounds” from Lord Halifax. The estate was, Scott-Waring claimed, “one of the best houses in England.”1 0 4 Unlike Lord Halifax, though, Barwell lived a retired life behind the walls of his new house. Indeed, The 9 9 A Particular o f Claremont, the Seat o f the Right Horible. Lord Clive, OIOC Mss Eur D546/34,1. 1 0 0 George Gray to Harry Verelst, 3 December 1761, OIOC Mss Eur D691. 1 0 1 See Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 156. 1 0 2 Holzman, 25. m Ibid. 1 0 4 Ibid., 24-25. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Public Advertiser reported in December 1784 that Barwell planned to improve the estate and surround “the whole demesne” with thickly planted evergreens.1 0 5 Scott-Waring insisted that “his house is an excellent one, and he lives elegantly,” but he reported, Barwell “says he dislikes the people and the country.” Indeed, when Barwell passed through the town outside of his estate, the local people “hissed and hooted as he passed.” Things continued in this state for some time before Barwell appeased them and re-instated Lord Halifax’s policy of opening the house to the local citizenry for “splendid dinners.”1 0 5 Nabobs tried to settle back into domestic patterns of gentility and wealth when they returned to domestic Britain, but their efforts often failed. They were attacked for changing the patterns of life in their local communities, or they were denounced simply for purchasing their way in the world with Indian wealth. Though they were wealthy, they remained social pariahs. Interestingly, the nabobs and their new wealth were received with hostility in sharp contrast to the receptions given to West Indian planters and their new-money in late- eighteenth-century Britain. As James Raven has argued, nabobs received “by far the greatest attention.” They were insulted, slandered, and vilified while the more familiar character, the West Indian planter, was received less harshly.1 0 7 Certainly, as Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy has noted, it would be a mistake to suggest that the West Indian planter escaped being caricatured completely. Samuel Foote balanced his satirical image of the nabob, Sir Matthew Mite, with a farcical portrait of the West Indian planter, Sir Peter Pepperpot in his The Patron of 1764. Like Foote’s Matthew Mite, Pepperpot was a fool and a man “of an overgrown fortune,” who spent most of his time dreaming of women as “sweet as sugar cane, strait as bamboo, and with teeth as white 1 0 5 The Public Advertiser, 4 December 1784. 1 0 5 Holzman, 24-25. 1 0 7 Raven, 221-222. 252 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. as a negro’s.”1 0 8 In the last half of the eighteenth century, West Indian planters did fall increasingly under domestic scrutiny, and concerns about the place of West Indian planters in domestic society increased as the anti-slavery movement gained steam in the first decades of the nineteenth century. As Kathleen Wilson has argued, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were difficult times for West Indian planters - a moment when they “began to be castigated as potent sources of parliamentary corruption and mismanagement.” They were seen as a group who, “being bred the tyrants of their slavish blacks, may endeavour to reduce the whites to the same condition by an aristocracy.”1 0 9 Though they fell under domestic scrutiny, West Indian planters still stood a better chance of gaining a place of social honor in domestic Britain than did British colonists from any other part of the empire. As O’Shaughnessy has shown, West Indian planters were almost seven times more likely to go back to Britain for their education than were colonists from the continental North American colonies, and they were over six times more likely to be elevated to a baronetcy than their colonial cousins to the North.1 1 0 In part, these connections stemmed from the fact that West Indians had to be more concerned about replicating the world they had left behind in Britain because, in many cases, they planned to settle permanently in the West Indies.1 1 1 India, on the other hand, was not a settler world, and the nabobs who arrived there filtered back home. Because they did not plan on staying in India, nabobs did not have to be concerned with making India a new British home.1 1 2 Nowhere was this more evidenced than in the forms o f economic activity in which they engaged. While West Indian planters built plantations in the Caribbean, nabobs speculated 1 0 8 See O’Shaughnessy, 12-15. 1 0 9 Wilson, The Sense o f the People, 274-275. 1 1 0 See O’Shaughnessy, 14-21. 1 1 1 For more on how and why West Indian settlements mimicked British institutions, see Wilson, The Island Race, 147-148. 1 1 2 See Sen, 134. 253 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. on diamonds in South Asia. As James Raven has argued, “West Indian fortunes were familiar to English society by the mid-eighteenth century.” The “commercial worth of [their] plantations was the subject of continued congratulation.”1 1 3 More important than the familiarity of West Indian money, then, was the source of i t West Indian money came from the land. West Indian planters made sense to the domestic aristocracy. Indian money, on the other hand, had obscure origins. As James Holzman argued, “the precise methods by which [nabobs] had enriched themselves were somewhat mysterious.”1 1 4 Nothing EIC servants could do could clarify for their domestic critics the murky genesis of their newfound wealth. As Holzman has shown, they built ties with the significant and the powerful in Britain, with the legal community, with the religious hierarchy, with the nobility, and with the royal family itself. Still they were attacked as outsiders and invaders.1 1 5 Nabobs even became significant members of Britain’s growing philanthropic community in the late eighteenth century. Newspaper subscriptions show that Company employees were substantial donors to charities like the Society for the Discharge and Relief of Persons Imprisoned for Small Debts, the Marine Society, the Magdalen House, and St. George’s Hospital.1 1 6 The fact remained that the nabobs’ wealth was not an organic product of the land but rather something different, something foreign. The nabob’s wealth threatened to naturalize this foreign form of wealth in Britain at a time when marking out 1 1 3 Raven, 221-222. 1 1 4 Holzman, 17. 1 1 5 Ibid., 40-46. 1 1 6 See The Public Advertiser, 6 December 1780, The Public Advertiser, 8 March 1783, The Public Advertiser, 9 August 1783, The Public Advertiser, 6 January 1768, and The Public Advertiser, 17 July 1784. See also, The Public Advertiser, 21 May 1773, The Public Advertiser, 8 March 1773, The Public Advertiser, 28 December 1772, The Public Advertiser, 12 August 1772, The Public Advertiser, 13 August 1773, and The Public Advertiser, 7 July 1772. 254 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. difference - between Britain and India, between nation and empire, between here and there, and between us and them - was increasingly important to domestic audiences. If domestic audiences could not quite comprehend the origins of nabobish wealth, they did understand that nabobs imported their wealth home to Britain in a concrete form - diamonds. Perhaps the earliest Company employee to make Indian diamonds a familiar imperial trope in domestic Britain was Thomas Pitt, Governor of Madras, who in March 1702 purchased a diamond said to be “the finest jewel in the world and worth an immense sum” for £24,000.1 1 7 Pitt had the 400-carat gem shipped back to Britain, referring to it in his diaries and letters as the “grand affair,” “my greatest concern,” and “my all.”1 1 8 Thomas Pitt followed his diamond back to Britain where he purchased an estate near Swallowfield as well as a Parliamentary seat As John Keay has written, “wild rumours” quickly surrounded Pitt and his diamond. Stories began to “circulate about the provenance” of the diamond in particular. It had, some reported, been “snatched from the eye socket of a Hindu deity or smuggled from the mines by a slave who hid it in a self-inflicted gash in his thigh.”1 1 9 Like the stolen title jewel in Wilkie Collins’ 1868 novel The Moonstone, the Pitt Diamond became a legend.1 2 0 It represented the wealth to be had in India, Britain’s power to extract wealth from the subcontinent, and the opulent luxury of the ruling classes in South Asia - be they indigenous or European. If land equaled wealth in British economic models, the Pitt Diamond represented a new paradigm.1 2 1 1 1 7 Quoted in Keay, 214. m Ibid, 1 1 9 Ibid., 214-215. 1 2 0 See Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (New York: Signet Classics, 2002). 1 2 1 Wealthy diamonds families from eighteenth-century British India spread their influence across the imperial world. Thomas Pitt’s good friend Elihu Yale was bom in Boston, traveled to India as an EIC writer, rose to become the Governor of Madras, and made a huge fortune as a gemstone dealer. He continued to deal in diamonds after he retired to Wales in the 1690s, and he used the proceeds of ventures to endow the university that bears his name. See Bruce P. Lenman, “The East India 255 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. More importantly, the Pitt Diamond was a concrete reminder that Indian wealth was changing the national landscape in domestic Britain. Fifteen years after he had purchased the famous gem, Pitt sold it to the Regent of France for £135,000. The Pitt Diamond, a simple stone pulled from the Golconda mines, thus formed the basis of a British fortune - the dynastic fortune of a family that would later produce two prime ministers.1 2 2 By the late eighteenth century, the wild stories that surrounded the Pitt Diamond had become much more than mere innuendo. As we have seen, William Pitt the elder, Thomas Pitt’s grandson, noted in a parliamentary speech that “the riches of Asia have been poured in upon us, and brought with them not only Asiatic luxury, but, I fear Asiatic principles of government.”1 2 3 Apparently without sensing any conflict of interest, Pitt went on to add that “the importers of foreign gold have forced their way into Parliament, by such a torrent of private corruption, as no private hereditary fortune could resist.”1 2 4 Importers of gold he could openly attack, but Pitt had to b e a bit more careful about nabobs and their gemstones. Indian wealth had become a problem in domestic settings, and that wealth assumed the concrete form of diamonds. It is easy to take for granted, from the vantage point of the present, the ease with which currency exchange can be carried out. Today, it seems as if every port, bus terminal, train station, airport, and most major cities have exchange offices ready and on-hand twenty- four hours a day. Despite monetary policies that restrict certain transactions, exchanging Company and the Trade in Non-Metallic Precious Materials from Sir Thomas Roe to Diamonds Pitt,” in The Worlds o f the East India Company, ed. H.V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2002), 108. 1 2 2 See Keay, 214-215. 1 2 3 See Chapter Three, 1%. 1 2 4 Quoted in Fergusson, Empire, 48. 256 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. currency is the least of the modem traveler’s worries.1 2 5 Eighteenth-century Britons traveling to or from South Asia faced a much more substantial task when they set out to change their currency from sterling to rupees or from rupees to sterling. In most cases, the Company could facilitate the exchange, charging, as do modem brokerages, a fee. The Company’s fee represented a financial pinch for its servants, but it posed another problem. For those who wanted to remit their money through the Company, they had to declare their net worth to the Company to do so, which meant disclosing to the Company every penny earned in India. The Company knew, of course, the salaries of its employees, and, as we have seen in the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the Company forbade its employees to take additional emoluments, gifts, presents, or bribes while in India. For those who had made vast fortunes on the side, remitting money through the Company also meant exposing oneself to potential prosecution for malfeasance and wrong doing in office. Those who doubted that such a thing could happen had only to look to Hastings to see how wrong they were. Trading in diamonds avoided the Company’s remittance system and all its shortcomings completely. The diamond trade became a vehicle by which nabobs could send huge fortunes back to Britain and circumvent the Company’s regulations, if not the Company’s panoptic surveillance altogether. The process was a simple one. Indian rupees were used to purchase diamonds, and the diamonds were shipped to Britain where they were sold for pounds sterling on the domestic gem market. Massive amounts of money could be transferred back to Britain through the diamond trade. Receipts suggest that Clive was remitting amounts as large as 50,(X X ) rupees at a time as early as 1753.1 2 6 By the 1760s, 1 2 5 Indian policy still forbids the exportation of Rupees, making it possible to exchange other currencies into Rupees only in India itself. 1 2 6 See the Clive Collection, OIOC Mss Eur G37/10, Miscellaneous Documents #2. 257 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Company employees had devised an elaborate knowledge of the diamond trade, and they used that knowledge to maximize the profits they could make when sending their Indian fortunes back to Britain.1 2 7 As one trader noted in 1768, stones that could be cut into round shapes “are to be preferred.” Stones with flaws, on the other hand, were to be avoided, and, he wrote, “it is taken for granted that care will be taken that the waters be fine - that is to say exempt of a suspicion of yellow, brown, or blue.”1 2 8 Knowledge of the diamond trade made sense; it was a sign of good financial planning. But the diamond trade was not universally accepted. During the debate of the 1773 Regulating Act, the diamond trade raised more than a few eyebrows. Diamond trading, some critics argued, was nothing more than another form of private trade, and, those same critics demanded, private trade was detrimental to the Company’s larger interests. Both, they insisted, had to be stopped. To Clive, this suggestion verged on the criminal. “Should not Diamonds be excepted,” he asked, “for the sake of remittances?” The Company might be right to force its employees out of the diamond trading business, but it could not bar them from privately buying diamonds without making it impossible for them to send money home securely.1 2 9 Trading in diamonds was a means by which Company servants could translate their South Asian salaries into a usable monetary form in domestic Britain. To domestic audiences, however, the diamond trade was a speculative way to make money; it was an industry dominated by another marginal group in eighteenth-century society - Britain’s 127 For early estimates n the values of diamonds, see John Fryer, 214. 1 2 8 Mr. Duval’ s Instructions for purchasing diamonds, 18 January 1768 in the Clive Collection, OIOC Mss Eur G37/12. 1 2 9 A Bill.. fo r the Better Management o f the Affairs o f the East India Company, 1773 in the Clive Collection, OIOC Mss Eur G37/10,16. 258 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Jewish population.1 3 0 As Gedelia Yogev has shown, the diamond trade was the most significant part of the Jewish economy in late eighteenth century Britain.1 3 1 As India continued to dominate, even monopolize, the world’s diamond markets throughout the eighteenth century, even after the discovery of diamonds in Brazil in the 1720s, Britain’s Jewish population relied on their connections to the Indian market for a large part of their economic stability in the period.1 3 2 In addition to connecting nabobs to the ostracized community of British Jews and to channels of speculative and suspicious economic activity, diamonds were also a way for nabobs to flaunt their wealth. Nabobs’ estates were said to be filled with diamonds. When Thomas Rumbold’s estate was sold off after his death in 1793, the listing from Christie’s auction house, included “a cameo ring set with brilliants,” “an emerald cameo ring set with brilliants,” “a brilliant sipher [sic] cameo,” “a large single stone rose diamond,” and “a ditto brilliant with 11 rubies.”1 3 3 Samuel Johnson was able to offer a similar report in 1779. The Clives, he insisted, were a very wealth family. “The ingenious Mr. Brown, distinguished by the name of Capability,” he told a dinner party, “told me, that he was once at the seat of Lord 1 3 0 1 thank Lisa Cody for pointing out to me that the diamond trade marked a significant connection between nabobs and eighteenth-century British Jews. For more on the Jewish population in eighteenth-century Britain, see Stephen Aris, But There are No Jews in England (New York: Stein and Day, 1971). See also, Lucy Sutherland, “Samson Gideon: Eighteenth Century Jewish Financier,” in Politics and Finance in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Aubrey Newman (London: The Hambledon Dress, 1984), 387-398. See also Lucy Sutherland, “Samson Gideon and the Reduction of Interest, 1749-50,” in Politics and Finance in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Aubrey Newman (London: The Hambledon Press, 1984), 399-413. 1 3 1 See Gedelia Yogev, Diamonds and Cored: Anglo-Dutch Jews and Eighteenth-Century Trade (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1978), 67-70. For more on Jews and the diamond trade, see John Fryer, 88-89. 1 3 2 Jewish diamond merchants had, in fact, established connections with the Indian gem-trading world as early as the 1660s. These connections continued to be profitable well into the eighteenth century. For more, see Harold Pollins, Economic History o f the Jews in England (East Brunswick, NJ: Associate University Press, 1982), 45-49. See also, Lenman, 98-106. See also, Dm Prakash, “The English East India Company and India,” in The Worlds o f the East India Company, ed. H.V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), 4-5. m Property o f the Late Sir Thomas Rumbold, Bart, carried out by Mr. Christie on Tuesday 29 January 1793 at 1PM, BL 7805.C.5. 259 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Clive, who had relumed from India with great wealth; and that he shewed [sic] Mm at the door of his bedchamber a large chest, which he said he had once had full of gold.”1 3 4 Nabobs’ houses were filled with Indian wealth, so rumor suggested, and it was not only their homes that were filled with diamonds. Nabobs themselves flaunted their jewels. Even as he protested rumors of his extravagant wealth, Robert d iv e spent a fortune giving “his Lady a new set of jewels,” Lady Mary Coke wrote in her journal on 11 February 1768.1 3 5 Warren Hastings’ wife appeared at a party in Tunbridge Wells in October 1784 wearing diamonds worth an estimated £20,000.1 3 6 Company servants who could not send money home to their friends and relatives as gifts, sent diamonds instead. The diamond trader John Walsh included an “additional diamond from me” to his niece in a shipment in mid-February 1781.1 3 7 Even the Company was in on the game. When the Court of Directors decided to reward Clive for his service in 1754, they presented him with a “sword set with diamonds to the value of £500. ..as a token of their esteem for him and sense of his singular services to the Company.”1 3 8 To those who could see what was happening, Horace Walpole suggested to Lady Ailesbury in September 1761, the brilliance of the nabobs’ Indian wealth was remaking Britain. Nabobs came from nowhere; they were nobodies. And yet, they had come to assume places of honor alongside Britain’s great heroes. “If you have a mind to be well with the mob of England,” Walpole complained, “[you have only to] be knocked on the head like 1 3 4 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. Rodney Shewan (London: The Folio Society, 1968), 313. 1 3 5 Coke, iii, 189. 1 3 6 The Public Advertiser, 12 October 1784 1 3 7 John Walsh to Francis Fowke 10 February 1781, OIOC Mss Eur K25. 1 3 8 See the Clive Collection, OIOC Mss Eur G37/10, Papers relating to the Proceedings of the Court of Directors. 260 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Wolfe, or bring home as many diamonds as C live”1 3 9 Nabobs won national fame, and they did so without making the great sacrifices that other heroes made. General James Wolfe was killed taking Quebec during the Seven Years’ War; Clive made a fortune seizing land in South Asia for the Company during the same international conflict. Nabobs had no connection to British honor, no sense of obligation to the nation. They were stingy with their diamonds. As Horace Walpole noted to Horace Mann, “General Clive is arrived, all over estates and diamonds. If a beggar asks charity, he says, ‘Friend, I have no small brilliants about me’.”1 4 0 For domestic audiences, the problem with Indian wealth and the nabobs’ diamonds was more than the simple fact that the nabobs were miserly with their fortunes. Diamonds posed a dear and present danger to the integrity of the British nation - to its political institutions as well as its moral center. If nabobs were upstarts with vast, easily-won fortunes, one could only expect that they would employ their money to advance their sodal and political influence. Horace Walpole suggested as much to Horace Mann in May 1760 when he wrote that “General Clive’s father has been with Mr. Pitt, to notify, that if the government will send his son £400,000 and a certain number of ships, the heaven-born general knows of a part of India where such treasures are buried that he will engage to send over enough to pay the national debt.”1 4 1 The wealth of India won one the ear of the Prime Minister and had the potential to shape national policy as well. Indian wealth also bought one the attention of the royal family. As Walpole wrote to Mann in the summer of 1767, Lord Clive “was returned from the East Indies, and had 1 3 9 Horace Walpole to Lady Ailesbury, 27 September 1761, in Walpole, xxxviii, 128. 1 4 0 Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 1 August 1760, in Ibid., xxi, 429. 1 4 1 Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 7 May 1760, in Ibid., xxi, 404. 261 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. brought two great diamonds for the Queen.”1 4 2 For her own part, Queen Charlotte was known to love diamonds. Lady Mary Coke witnessed as much in June 1769 when she attended a royal birthday party where the Queen made her appearance in a rich display of jewelry. “The queen’s diamonds seem to have surprised every body,” Coke reported. Many of them we have all seen, but she has so many additional ones & of so extraordinary a size that the Princess Amelia said (in which the Lady’s [sic] agreed) that the description sounded like a Faiiy Tale; She wore some of those in her hair that the Nabob sent the King as a present.. .She had another of a surprising magnitude which was placed in the middle of a nosegay of jewels.1 4 3 Two gentlemen at the event agreed that the jewels had to be fake, for “were they real diamonds I don’t think the whole Kingdom wou’d be able to purchase them.” Even the Queen, Coke noted, thought the display was extravagant, noting to those in attendance that “the weight of them was a great fatigue.”1 4 4 The Public Advertiser made journalistic hay of Clive’s presents to the queen, reporting in May 1773 that Lord Clive’s honour is pawned. A flaw has been discovered in the Diamond given by Lord C—e to a great Lady. This accident may possibly produce a very different effect from what his Lordship intended; instead of Royal favour to spread a veil over his crimes, and to bury his Indian spoils in an English peerage.1 4 5 The piece appeared, of course, as public inquiries into Clive’s jaghir were threatening to bankrupt him. When those same inquiries appeared to turn in his favor, The Public Advertiser ran a correction. “We are assured,” the second article began that no flaw has been found in the diamonds which were presented to a great Lady by a certain English Nabob. They have on the contrary reflected so great a luster upon the donor, that not one Hack spot is to be 1 4 2 Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 8 August 1767, in Ibid., xxii, 547. 1 4 3 Coke, iii, 83. 1 4 4 Coke, iii, 83. 1 4 5 The Public Advertiser, 20 May 1773. 262 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. seen in any part of Mm. The King’s friends in a certain assembly, appeared, on a late occasion, to be perfectly convinced of tMs.”1 4 6 In using his diamonds to bribe his way through domestic society, Clive set a standard for other nabobs. WMIe still governor-general, Warren Hastings, facing increasing hostility from members of Parliament, sent “munificent presents” with his wife, who returned to Britain ahead of Mm, to be delivered to the royal family.1 4 7 The English Chronicle ran a satirical poem entitled A Full and True Account of the Wonderful Diamond on 15 July 1786 that mocked the gifts.1 4 8 For the poem’s author, Hastings was guilty, not only of the charges against him, but also of trying to bribe his way out of impeachment. As we saw in chapter three, the satirist James Gillray implicated Warren Hastings in domestic bribery only two years after the appearance of A Full and True Account o f the Wonderful Diamond. In both The Bow to the Throne and Blood on Thunder Fording the Red Sea, Gillray suggested that Hastings was guilty of using M s Indian wealth to bribe M s way into British society and out of the perils of Parliamentary impeachment1 4 9 Simpler than either of the Gillray etchings, the anonymous cartoon Court Cards, the Best to Deal With makes the case against Hastings most clearly. In the image, Hastings, costumed, as he had been in both Gillray etcMngs, in eastern dress, genuflects between Lord Thurlow and King George, represented on suit-less playing cards as a jack and a king respectively. Ever the faithful imperial servant, Hastings supplies the two un-identified 1 4 6 Ibid., 24 May 1773. 1 4 7 Anna Clark has recently reminded us that diamonds were not neutral gifts to members of royal families in the last decades of the eighteenth century. The “Diamond Necklace Affair” was central to the downfall of Marie Antoinette in France, and Queen Charlotte herself was not immune to charges of being opulent in her jewelry selections. See Anna Clark, Scandal, 114. 1 4 8 See Osborn, India, Parliament, and the Press Under George III, 300-302. See also The English Chronicle, 15 July 1786. See also, Anna Clark, Scandal, 95. 1 4 9 See Chapter Three above, 197-199. 263 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. cards with their appropriate sail - diamonds, of coarse. Hastings appeals In the etching as a supplicant subject, but the imagery of the scene twists his loyalty. Hastings’ is a poker-face. Illustration 18. Court Cards, the Best to Deal With, Anonymous, London, 1788.1 5 0 He is playing a game. Court cards, the cartoon faints, can be bought with diamonds; influence can be won. Hastings will not be impeached, the illustration seems to suggest, because the former-govemor-geaeral holds all the right cards, .and at the critical juncture, lie will play his ace - or in this instance, Ms Lord Chancellor and his King. linages of Hastings in the popular media echoed long-standing rumors that nabobs bribed their way through domestic society. They popularized Burke’s rhetorical strategies within Westminster Hall and linked those strategies to diamonds as the concrete mamfesiatkffl of Indian wealth. “Innocence does not pave its way with diamonds, nor has a quarry of them on its estate,” Horace Walpole quipped in April 1786.1 5 1 Walpole, like Burke, was certain of Hastings’ crimes, and he was equally sure that Hastings would find a way to avoid punishment Indeed, Walpole was so convinced that Hastings would successfully bribe M s way out of being impeached that he was shocked when William Pitt 1 5 9 Image scanned from a photograph courtesy of fee British library, L o a c k M i. 1 5 1 See Osborn, India, Parliament, and the Press Under George 1 1 1 , 170. 264 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. voted to convict the former-govemor-general. That the rest of the House of Commons voted with Pitt rather than Hastings proved, Walpole wryly noted, “that Mr. Pitt has more weight (at present) in that House too, than - the diamonds of Bengal.”1 5 2 Diamonds were a tainted material artifact from South Asia. They were markers of new wealth, signs that becoming an imperial power was reshaping the British nation. They were not to be touched by good Britons who were dedicated to their national heritage. As Horace Walpole wrote to Mary Beny in October of 1790, Britain was a powerful nation, with a fleet “mighty enough to take, ay, and bring home Peru and Mexico and deposit them in a West India Warehouse." But, Walpole hoped, the nation would resist the temptation to use its naval strength around the globe or at least that the nation would endeavor to act “more honestly” than the nabobs did in bringing home “the diamonds of Bengal.”1 5 3 Indeed, for Horace Walpole, the nabobs’ diamonds became a rhetorical measure of adamant refusal, the eighteenth-century equivalent of the proverbial “ten foot pole.” He would not, he wrote to Henry Seymour Conway in October 1774, act against his own interests “for all Lord Clive’s diamonds.”1 5 4 To Walpole and his contemporaries, wealth rooted in the land made sense. It was honorable. It was British. Indian wealth was not rooted in the land. It was extracted from the diamond mines of India. Diamonds were of the land, but they were not the land. They were material artifacts of a far-away place, and they became the first sign that nabobs were bringing India back to Britain in concrete terms, generating domestic concerns that the material world surrounding nabobs was polluting the British landscape with tangible symbols of South Asia. Nabobs had built British settlements in South Asia; now they 1 5 2 Horace Walpole to Mary Berry, 19 May 1791, in Walpole, xi, 269. m Horace Walpole to Mary Beny, 22 October 1790, in Walpole, xi, 124. 1 5 4 Horace Walpole to Heniy Seymour Conway, 16 October 1774, in Walpole, xxxix, 199. 265 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. seemed to be building South Asian settlements in Britain. As they had threatened to reverse the teleological justifications for British imperialism in South Asia, they now threatened to reverse the actual process of colonial settlement itself. The Indian subcontinent seemed to be colonizing the British nation, cluttering the homes of simple British families like Mrs. Prune with bits and pieces of a far-away empire. Importing Empire: Indian Commodities in anlmperial Natipn Nabobs were not the first British subjects to own, wear, and display diamonds, to be certain. They were, however, among the first to do so who had been to South Asia, who had earned their fortunes in South Asia, and who had bought their diamonds there. They were British subjects whose lives and fortunes literally bound the nation to the empire in South Asia, and their diamonds animated these connections in a material form in domestic society. Wraxall, as we have seen, hoped that Benfield might take time upon his return from South Asia, to “domesticate” himself - to reacelimatize himself to being in Britain and to being British. Indian diamonds, he advised, could be made to fit into the British landscape with a little care. The problem for men like Paul Benfield was that diamonds were but one of the many concrete markers of India that the nabobs brought home with them. Little pieces of India, it seemed to late eighteenth-century domestic audiences, were springing up across the nation, and, in many instances, this invasion of imperial paraphernalia could be linked to the servants of the East India Company. Company servants were suspected of having been exposed to transforming environmental conditions while in South Asia. To domestic audiences, the fact that some nabobs adopted South Asian cultural ways while on the subcontinent was only confirmation that India had changed them - rendered them less British than a Briton who never left the three kingdoms. As William Dalrymple has recently noted, and as some of the portraits we 266 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. saw earlier in this chapter indicated, smoking a hookah pipe was “the height of fashion” among British residents of South Asia by the 1780s. Even some of Calcutta’s female residents adopted the practice.1 5 5 In domestic Britain, the foreign pipe marked nabobs as alien. Those who continued to smoke upon their return were thought to be addicted to South Asia. Though they were home, they could not let go of India. One did not have to smoke the hookah, though, to be marked as alien by the water-pipe. Many Company servants brought pipes home with them as decorative reminders - literally souvenirs of their time in India - and more than a few nabobs commissioned portraits that showed them indulging in the habit of smoking a hookah.1 5 6 The hookah pipe was but one of the many cultural practices that marked Company servants as alien in domestic Britain. Dalrymple has suggested that many of the Britons who survived their stay in South Asia adopted hygienic practices indigenous to the subcontinent - a fact that may, in part, have contributed to their survival. “Those who returned home and continued to bathe and shampoo themselves” with the same regularity that was customary among the people of the subcontinent “found themselves scoffed at by their less hygienic compatriots.”1 5 7 As Michael Fisher has noted, the very word shampoo came into use in Europe from the Hindi charnpi, “meaning to knead the flesh in therapeutic massage.”1 5 8 Britons who adopted the practice of bathing and shampooing were viewed askance by domestic observers, thought, so the cliche held, to have become “effeminate.”1 5 9 Some nabobs went so far as to consent to circumcision for the sake of hygiene, though, to 1 5 5 Dalrymple, 33. 1 5 6 See Chapter Two, 107-108. 1 5 7 Ibid., 36. For more on the practice of bathing in British South Asia, see John Fryer, 200. 1 5 8 Michael Fisher, The First Indian Author (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 173. See also Michael Fisher, The Travels o f Dean Mahomet (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 148. See also, Harrison, 84-86. 1 5 9 See Dalrymple, 36. 267 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. metropolitan Britons, the act was fraught with connotations of conversion and renunciation.1 6 0 Religiously, a circumcised nabob had turned his back on Christianity in favor of Islam. Sexually, he had allowed his masculinity to be mutilated in favor of luxury and cleanliness. He was less a man than his domestic compatriots. Not only were nabobs rumored to be effete, they were also, as James Holzman has written, “famous for bad manners.”1 6 1 Richard Barwell shut his doors and closed his dinning room to the locals who lived near his estate, Charles Marsac would not let the people who lived around his estate pass through his park, and Richard Smith believed he was above even riding past the homes of the impoverished people of “Hungerford.”1 ® Nabobs were “trespassers on the privileges of the old ruling class.”1 ® They were, quite literally, buying the homes right out from under Britain’s traditional elite. Worse still, they refused to honor the unwritten social contracts that had long existed between the nation’s aristocracy and the broader population. Life in India seemed to have made nabobs rude; they were no longer familiar with their own nation, with its people, and with its customs. Upon his arrival in South Asia to assume a seat on the Supreme Council of Bengal after the passage of the 1773 Regulating Act, Philip Francis described Richard Barwell, who had been bom in India and who had spent a large part of his life on the subcontinent, as a man who had “all the bad qualities common to this climate and country, of which he is in every sense a native.”1 6 4 Another observer noted of nabobs more generally that they were simply different after years in South Asia - altered by exposure to “the religion of their servants, the heat of the climate, 1 6 0 Ibid. See also Colley, Captives. 1 6 1 Holzman, 23. 1 6 2 See Chapter Four, 251-252. 1 6 3 Ibid., 32. 1 6 4 Quoted in Ibid., 38. 268 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. and other circumstances so extraordinary, that I can scarcely believe myself amongst English people.”1 6 5 If cultural practices tinged nabobs with a hint of foreignness to domestic Britons, material artifacts from South Asia made this air of difference plainly visible. Fashions from the subcontinent were clearly the foremost visible means of identifying difference. As Roxann Wheeler has argued, clothing and religion were the two most powerful categories of difference in the early modem period, and they persisted as categories into the eighteenth century.1 6 6 Clothes, quite literally, made the man. South Asians wore turbans; Britons did not And yet, as we have seen, nabobs were not above being seen in turbans, experiencing what Wheeler has called a cultural, if not a completely racial, “makeover.”1 6 7 Charles Smith painted himself in a turban, and he was not alone in making the turban visible in eighteenth- centuiy Britain.1 6 8 One Company employee openly bragged about the scope of his collection. “I have,” he wrote, “a turban of this manufacture 15 feet long and 1/2 in breadth which is more bulky on the head than the common cloth ones, and is by no means so fine as some they manufacture.” He had, he continued, spent 9 rupees on the turban, certain that “the man had a handsome profit on it.”1 6 9 Warren and Marian Hastings were avid collectors of South Asian shawls. After his wife left India in 1784, Hastings continued to help her order new shawls from the best vendors across the subcontinent. On 11 October 1784, he wrote to her that “the shawl commission which you gave to Johnson is executed.” The shawls, he reported, “are beautiful beyond imagination.”1 7 0 1 6 5 Quoted in Ibid., 23. 1 6 6 Wheeler, 17. 1 6 7 Ibid., 289. 1 6 8 See Chapter Four, 227-228. 1 6 9 Memoir o f a Tract o f India, OIOC Mss Eur D635,10. 1 7 0 Warren Hastings to Marian Hastings, 11 October 1784, in Grier, 336. 269 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Mildred Archer has rightly argued that most Company servants who retired back to Britain in the late eighteenth century refrained from wearing South Asian fashions in metropolitan settings.1 7 1 At the same time, nabobs did make Indian fashions more present in domestic Britain. Eastern clothing styles became the metaphoric means by which to represent a nabob. Diamonds were the sign of an Indian fortune; turbans marked a nabob himself. On the late eighteenth-century stage, nabobs were always costumed in orientalized fashions. Governor Anderson of Mrs. Griffith’s 1772 A Wife in the Right appeared in a “loose Indian Habit.”1 7 2 When his family asked him to change into proper dinner attire, the governor protested. “Dress!,” he exclaimed, “what silly fops you Europeans are! - Why can’t a man sit down and eat his victuals, in a comfortably easy habit, instead of being cased up in a strait waistcoat, like a mad-mad?” Indeed, the former-govemor of Coromandel demanded that once he had a seat in Parliament, “I will endeavour to have an act passed, that.. .there shan’t be a button worn in all England.”1 7 3 It was not only on the stage that Eastern costumes came to symbolize nabobs and the dangers they posed to domestic British society. Political cartoons and satirical etchings used South Asian dress as an indicator. Clothes made the man, and Indian fashion made him a nabob. Gillray’s cartoons always showed Hastings dressed in Indian styles. He always wore a turban. He always dressed in loose-fitting pajamas. He always had fanciful shoes with curled toes. He always wore a flowing cape. Though Warren Hastings never clothed himself in any of this apparel - he always appeared at Westminster Hall for his impeachment in a simple suit and a silk waistcoat - the costume of an Eastern prince became the public 1 7 1 Archer, India and British Portraiture, 412-413. 1 7 2 Mrs. Griffith, A Wife in the Right (London, 1772), 11. m Ibid„ 13. 270 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. means of representing Mm, Ms Indian career, and the decadence, indolence, and rapacity of his administration in British South Asia. Nabobs imported new styles with them, they were symbolized by those styles, and, the danger remained, they threatened to make those styles naturally British - to “domesticate” them, as Nathaniel Wraxall might have put it. For domestic critics of the nabobs like Horace Walpole, the threat was palpable. Though Indian fashion was not quickly replacing traditional European sartorial styles, turbans and other markers of Indian dress were becoming more common in Britain in the late eighteenth century - popping up at masquerade parties with increasing frequency. In February 1772, The Public Advertiser reported on a ball near Soho at which one nobleman had dressed “in the character of an Eastern prince.” The costume was “one of the most splendid dresses that was ever worn at a Masquerade.”1 7 4 In May 1786, The London Chronicle reported that an entire group of revelers had costumed themselves in the dress of Indian Brahmins.1 7 5 If South Asian costumes marked the bodies of Company servants as different than their domestic compatriots, exposure to the extravagant flavors of the subcontinent’s cuisine marked the nabob’s palette as no longer British as well. As we saw in chapter two, the most favorable memory that the young William Harwood had of his passage to India was the time he first sampled grilled whale meat, but, at the same time, Harwood found himself unable to describe the flavor to his friends, family, and employers back in Britain. Whale meat, he suggested, tasted a bit like corned beef.1 7 6 As Harwood experienced, the imperial world offered culinary possibilities that far exceeded the domestic table. Tea, for example, had long been a British staple - so much so, in fact, that domestic consumers could overlook the 1 7 4 The Public Advertiser, 1 February 1772. 1 7 5 The London Chronicle, 2-4 May 1786. 1 7 6 See Chapter One, 29-30. 271 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. drink’s imperial connections. As William Bolts noted in Ms 1772 Considerations on India Affairs, the EIC, the India trade, and the British imperial system writ large had made tea an “almost universal” commodity, “not only fin] tMs kingdom, but likewise [in] its dependent dominions.”1 7 7 In South Asia, Company servants discovered new imperial flavors. Newspaper advertisements of the late eighteenth century sought to capitalize on nabobs’ newfound tastes for South Asian foods. On 6 December 1773, The Public Advertiser listed an ad for a “ True Indian Curey [sic] Paste” that was “so well compounded with rare and choise [sic] ingredients, that purchasers have no other Trouble than to mix a piece the size of a walnut of the paste with the gravy intended making a curey [sic].” The paste was available, the ad continued, for the rather expensive price of two sMllings and sixpence per pot at the Norris Street Coffee House, Haymarket. For those who could not be bothered to mix the simple curry paste with their home-cooked gravy, the mistress of the Norris Street Coffee House would send “ready dressed curey [sic] and rice, also Indian pilaws [sic], to any part of the town” at “the shortest notice.”1 7 8 On 4 May 1784, The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser ran a listing that specifically targeted nabobs as the prime purchasers of Indian foods. Curry powder “brought from the East Indies,” the ad began, was available at Sortie’s Perfumery Warehouse at Piccadilly “to persons of Rank, Traders to all Nabobs, and Servants.” For others who were unfamiliar with curry powder, the ad went on to explain that the powder was instrumental in making “celebrated East-India Dishes, and most sumptuous sauces.” It was “exceeding pleasant and healthful - renders the stomach active in digestion - the blood 1 7 7 Bolts, 69. 1 7 8 The Public Advertiser, 6 December 1773. 272 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. naturally free in circulation - the mind vigorous, and contributes most of any food to an increase of the human race.”1 7 9 The ad, thus, listed nabobs as the primary target audience for curry. It labeled them as the community to blame for curry’s presence in Britain, but it also encouraged other Britons to sample the powder, to enjoy its medicinal qualities, to savor its dynamic flavor, and to indulge in its sexual side-effects. Curry was not just a food. It was an experience that shaped a person’s health and a person’s sexual behavior. It changed a person, the ad argued, and nabobs were responsible for introducing it to their nation and their compatriots. As had been the case with South Asian fashions, Indian culinary tastes became a symbol for nabobs at large. Governor Anderson, who refused to dress for dinner in proper English fashions in Mrs. Griffith’s A Wife in the Right, also objected to the traditionally bland English meal that he faced when he reached the dinner table. Not only, he exclaimed, would he pass a law banning buttons once he won a seat in Parliament, he would also push through legislation that would make “curry and pellow [sic] ...the common food” of Great Britain.1 8 0 As the authors of The Rolliad feared, nabobs’ predilections for South Asian cuisine was replacing Britain’s traditional fare. “Mighty beef, bedew’d with potent ale,” the poem suggested, had once “rous’d” the Saxons “at early dawn.” A diet of beef had made the Saxons a race of champions. It had made them “a sturdy, bold, rebellious race, strength in the frame, and spirit in the face.” Such ancestors, the poem’s authors feared would “sicken at the very sight” of “Chocolate’s rich froth, o’er coffee’s fume, or tea’s hot tide.” Imperial foodstuffs were making the nation a collective population of weaklings who indulged in luxurious novelties beneath “gilded roofs” and on “polish’d tables.” So long as there were 1 7 9 The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, 4 May 1784. 1 8 0 Mrs. Griffith, A Wife in the Right, 13. 273 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. not taxes levied on their addictive new imperial groceries, modem Britons, The Rolliad argued, were content to “boil their peaceful kettles, gentle souls!”1 8 1 To the authors of The Rolliad, imperial foods were responsible for a change in the British nation and its people’s character. Britons were no longer worthy of “the British meal.” Rather, they only merited an Indian’s diet - “ten cups of purest Padrae.” Tea, as the metonymic symbol of all imperial foods brought to Britain by the EIC and its employees, was the only food that could properly be fed to late eighteenth-century Britons.1 8 2 The diarist Thomas Turner agreed. Imperial groceries, he protested in 1763, were too much in fashion, and, Turner insisted, Britain’s growth as an imperial nation was to blame. Even tea, he demanded, should be abandoned as a non-British commodity. “By the frequent and continual use” of tea and other imperial foods, Turner argued, “we increase our expenses, bring on idleness and render ourselves less capable to struggle with the world and above all hurt our health and.. .entail a weakness upon our progeny.”1 ® For Britons like Turner who connected tea with the imperial world, it, like other imperial foods, was a threat to the nation’s culinary traditions, its finances, and its bodily well-being. Nabobs were responsible for bringing material artifacts from South Asia back to Britain in the late eighteenth century - items like clothing, hookah pipes, and exotic foods. If, as Homi Bhabha has argued, the process of imperialism resulted in hybrid cultures in the colonized world, nabobs turned the paradigm on its head.1 8 4 They offered the possibility of a second hybrid identity within the imperial system - a hybrid identity located at the very heart of empire, Britain itself. Because Britain was developing as an imperial nation, hookah m The Rolliad, 56-58. m Ibid., 59. 1 8 3 Thomas Turner, The Diary of Thomas Turner, ed. David Vaisey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 280. 1 8 4 See Bhabha, 102-122. 274 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. pipes, turbans, and curry powder were as much a part of the national landscape as were traditional European clothing and the roast-beef dinners of old England. It was not inanimate objects alone, though, that made the connection between empire and nation evident in the late eighteenth century. Increasingly, scientific exploration in the imperial world meant that botanical and zoological specimens from around the globe began to flood into London and other metropolitan centers. Animals from around the globe had existed in London well before the eighteenth century. As Daniel Hahn has shown in his history of the Royal Menagerie at the Tower of London, Henry III was the first English monarch to keep wild animals at the Tower. Having received three wild cats from Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, in 1235, the King set aside a tract of land within the Tower’s walls to serve as a royal zoo.1 8 5 Hahn has suggested that “for most of its existence, the Tower.. .housed the Royal Menagerie, the collection of wild and not-so-wild animals that the country’s kings and queens found themselves lumbered with following acts of misplaced generosity by well-intentioned foreign potentates.”1 8 5 By the late eighteenth century, the Tower Menagerie had been opened to the public as an early zoo and was the chief means by which the citizens of Britain, and London in particular, familiarized themselves with exotic animals from around the world. Lady Mary Coke went to the Tower for just such a purpose on 9 March 1768. In her diary, Lady Coke recorded that she, Lord and Lady Stafford, and Lord Bessborough all ventured to the Tower. For Lady Coke, who had been previously, nothing was new. The menagerie, though, impressed her companions.1 8 7 Like Lady Coke, Reverend James Woodford recorded in his 1 8 5 Daniel Hahn, The Tower Menagerie (London: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 7. 1 8 6 Ibid., xvii. 1 8 7 Coke, ii, 208. 275 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. diary that he and his family went to the Tower on 31 May 1782. “Nancy, myself, and Will,” he recorded, “took a coach and went to the Tower and saw the Horse Armory, the small Armory, the Artillery, the Regalia, and the wild beasts.”1 8 8 As the Royal Menagerie became an increasingly profitable tourist destination in the late eighteenth century, the nation’s growing empire became a logical resource for filling the zoo’s pens, cages, and stalls. As Hahn has written, “the constant to-ing and fro-ing of traders meant that for a time the Tower seemed to have a white fleet of procurers of animals for His Majesty’s collection.”1 8 9 The activity of the EIC in this period and the Company’s concomitant interest in the natural sciences resulted in what Hahn has called “a shift in the kinds of animals represented in the Tower collection, a sharp bias towards those to be found on the Indian subcontinent.” This shift “served a purpose too, as the collection itself came to symbolize empire, the strange lands conquered and trophies won.” Among the animals at the Tower were an elephant given to the king by the Company, “a rhino, antelope, tigers (from Bengal), the strange ‘Warwoven’ bird described in the children’s guidebook; and these were just the ones that survived the journey.”1 9 0 In addition to the imperial animals that domestic audiences could see at the Tower of London, the India House on Leadenhall Street itself housed a remarkable collection of South Asian animals and other oddities. The Company’s headquarters were, one observer noted, ‘Tull of rare and curious things.. .birds of paradise, a serpent whose size is most remarkable.. .and many other animals and curiosities which came from India and are being kept there to gratify the curiosity of the public.”1 9 1 Opening their doors to the public and 1 8 8 James Woodford, The Diary o f a Country Parson: The Reverend James Woodford, 5 vols., ed. John Beiesford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924-1931), ii, 31 May 1782. 1 8 9 Hahn, 182-183. 1 9 0 Ibid. 1 9 1 Quoted in Ibid., 140. 276 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. displaying examples of the growing Indian empire to domestic Britons was a clever move on the Company’s part on two fronts. First, as Hahn has argued, it showed the Company to be a responsible manager of the Indian empire, concerned enough to learn about and study the subcontinent and its inhabitants. Secondly, the Company’s directors “saw the practical benefit of harnessing scientific knowledge for massive potential gain (scientists could help them transplant Chinese tea to India, Himalayan cashmere goats to Scotland, and so on).”1 9 2 By the end of the century, the EIC was actively funding numerous expeditions, each with full-time botanists “to help with the transportation and transplantation of exotic plants to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and hiring naturalists to keep its traders company on their long sea voyages between home and the empire.” These scientists’ expertise made it easy for the Company to include animals in their scientific explorations of the imperial world - meaning that the Company was responsible for bringing increasing numbers of South Asian animals back to Britain at the end of the century. Most of these animals, Hahn has demonstrated, ended up at the Royal Menagerie as gifts to the King. “With Parliament threatening to regulate the Company out of existence,” the Company courted the King as “a crucial potential ally.”1 9 3 By the end of the eighteenth century, there were multiple opportunities for British citizens in London to see and study living specimens from South Asia. As a 1773 guidebook of the city proclaimed, London had “lions, Tygers, Elephants, &c. in every street in town.”1 9 4 Though the 1773 guidebook undoubtedly exaggerated the prevalence of Indian animals in London, the fact remained that such animals were increasingly more common in this period. Because they were indigenous to India, these animals appeared in Britain as 1 9 2 Ibid., 185. m Ibid. 1 9 4 Quoted in Ibid., 224. 277 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. physical manifestations of South Asia, and, because the EIC and its servants had imported them, they increasingly became symbolic of the Company’s role as a link between the nation and the empire. The first such animal to gain wide-spread fame in the late eighteenth century was the so-called “Shah Ghost.” The animal, which had been a gift to Lord Clive from the Nawab of Bengal, had been shipped to London by Clive as a gift for William Pitt. Pitt, who seems to have wanted the beast about as much as Clive did, re-gifted it to King George in 1759. As with so many of the animals at the Tower, the “Shah Ghost” proved to be “too fierce and ungovernable” to be a pet and was sent to the Tower to be locked in a cage.1 9 5 The strange beast, most probably a caracal, was immediately celebrated. In November 1759, The London Magazine noted that a very beautiful and uncommon animal... is lodg’d in the Tower... It is called, in the Indostan language a Shah Goest [sic], and is even in that country esteemed an extraordinary rarity, there having been never known more than five in those parts.1 9 6 In its December 1759 issue, The London Magazine again highlighted the “Shah Ghost,” providing the nation with its first description of the strange creature. It is about 18 inches high, of the cat kind, but the legs and feet stronger in proportion than the body, being very large and broad, with strong talons; the head somewhat resembles a hare, with long fine ears extremely black, from whence issue hairs, like those of a horse. He has very lively eyes... The body is the colour of the deer, but the belly and breast are white. They feed it with raw mutton. It seems to be a beast of prey; yet very docile, and so tame, any one may touch it. The keeper is an Indian, and servant of the Nabob of Bengal: When he speaks to it in the Indian language, it will do any thing he bids it...In short, it is a very beautiful beast.1 9 7 1 9 5 Ibid., 182-3 and 205-6. 1 9 6 The London Magazine (November 1759), 603. 1 9 7 Ibid., (December 1759), 664. 278 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. The animal's name, the magazine added, was an adaptation of the phrase “fine ears” in “the Indian language.”1 9 8 The London Magazine's lengthy description of the “Shah Ghost” included an etching of the beast with his Indian keeper. Rather than quenching the public’s interest in T i m S j s a b g « s t Illustration 19. The Shah Ghost, from The London Magazine, December 1759.1 ® the animal, the series of articles and the engraving only drew greater public attention to the Mag’s new p et The lime 1761 issue of The Gentleman's Magazine included a letter from lames Parsons that detailed his visit to see and study the Shah G host Parsons had visited the animal, he began, at the request of Reverend Dr. Littleton, Dean of Exeter. “I went to observe the creature, in order to find what class of animals he belonged to,” he explained, and to make a sketch of the creature for the Royal Society.3 0 6 Indian animals, it would seem, had attracted the attention of Britain’s leading scientists. In giving the animal a scientific classification, Parsons wrote that he was “Inclined to rank Has animal m am g A s eats; .and join with Linnaeus, who in his Ord. Second, has a fifth species of Fells, which agrees well m Ibid. m Image scanned from Ibid. 2 0 0 The Gentleman’ s Magazine (June 1761), 271 279 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. with the principal characters of the animal before us.”* 1 Not everyone thought the Shah Ghost was worth their attention. In March 1760, Horace Walpole, ever the curmudgeon, quipped in a letter to Horace Mann that “there is some big news from the East Indies. I don’t know what, except that the hero Clive has taken Mazulipatam and the great Mogul’s grandmother. I suppose,” he continued, “she will be brought over and put in the Tower with the Shahgoest [sic], the strange Indian beast that Mr. Pitt gave to the King this winter.”2 0 2 Many years after Clive’s initial present to the King, the Shah Ghost continued to capture public attention. The Sheffield Register celebrated the fact that Sir John Macpherson gave a second such animal to the king on 30 August 1788. Macpherson’s gift, the paper reported, “is similar to that presented many years since by the late Lord Clive to his Majesty, and the second of the kind ever brought into Great Britain.” The animal’s appearance stirred new interest in learning about the Shah Ghost, and, as such, the paper reported that the animal “was reckoned in India a very valuable present among the Princes of the country, as the animal is very fearce [sic], and used in hunting of hares and birds, in which it shews [sic] extraordinary dexterity. It is gentle, and remarkably obedient to its keeper.”*3 As in so many other ways, Clive set the example when it came to importing animals from India back to Britain. In September 1763, Captain Sampson of the EIC followed Clive’s example when he brought an elephant home and gave it as a present to the King.2 0 4 Sampson’s elephant was not the first to arrive in London. The Gentleman’ s Magazine followed up on their September 1763 report about the elephant in October, noting that “the 2 0 1 The Gentleman’ s Magazine (June 1761), 273. 2 0 2 Quoted in Chaudhuri, 323-324. 2 0 3 The Sheffield Register, 30 August 1788. 2 0 4 The Gentleman’ s Magazine (September 1763), 464. 280 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. elephant here exhibited Is an exact representation of that lately presented to Ms majesty; and is the more curious, as travelers differ in their description of this animal.”2 0 5 As the Shah Ghost had among the members of the Royal Society, other Indian animals fuelled the interests of curious British minds across the nation. In 1765, Sir George Pigot, the former-Govemor of Madras, ordered a painting of m Indian cheetah he had brought from South Asia, a stag, and the cheetah’s two Indian keepers from the painter Illustration 20. Cheetah with Two Indian Attendants, George Stubbs, London, 1764-1765.2 0 6 George Stubbs. The cheetah was later given as a gift to George III, who handed the difficult animal off to his Mother, the Duke of Cumberland. Stubbs’ painting was exhibited ia London at the Society of Artists, and it marked the painter’s first successful venture into painting representations of the empire’s exotic animals. Throughout the rest of Ms career, Stubbs would paint many of the animals imported to Britain from South Asia. As Andrew Graham-Kxoa has argued, many of the animals which Stubbs painted were tropMes of a newly powerful and growing British empire. They were the symbols of the spread of British influence overseas, of the new worlds opening before the 2 0 5 Ibid., (October 1763), 506. 2 0 5 Image scanned from a photograph courtesy of the City Art Gallery, Manchester. 281 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. gaze of explorers and colonizers such as Captain Cook or Sir Joseph Banks.2 0 7 Not unlike Noah, Stubbs waited at the foot of the Company’s ships and chronicled the animals that passed onto its docks. His works include a monkey and a rhinoceros as well as a yak that Warren Hastings allowed to graze on his estate at Daylesford and a zebra that the Company had given to Queen Charlotte as a gift.2 0 8 As Stubbs’ paintings suggest, animals from around the empire were appearing more and more often in domestic Britain in the last half of the eighteenth century. Domestic curiosity was aroused by a desire to see these fabled beasts, in the case of some species, for the first time. The London Chronicle reported that the Indiaman Ponsbom brought “a most beautiful tyger [sic], a curious hyena, and a civit cat” back from India in June 1772.2 0 9 In June 1784, The Public Advertiser wrote of the arrival of a “remarkable fine young lion,” and, in July of that year, the paper reported on the ceremony at which the king received the lion as a present from William Homby, the former-Govemor of Bombay 2 1 0 On 12 July 1784, the Queen received a bull from India as a gift from Lord Southampton. The creature was, The Public Advertiser noted, “a great curiosity, not being bigger than an Ass. Her Majesty expressed great satisfaction at this animal, and ordered great care to be taken of it.”2 1 1 In January 1786, The Nottingham Journal celebrated the arrival of a “hart-beast, or gazle [sic]” from India, noting that the animal, with its “fine cinnamon colour,” its “pair of beautiful black twisted horns,” its yellow hoofs, and its black stripes, “occasioned many disputes 2 0 7 Andrew Graham-Dixon, A History o f British Art (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 122. 2 0 8 See Osborn, India, Parliament, and the Press under George III, 32. 2 0 9 The London Chronicle 9-11 June 1772. 2 1 0 The Public Advertiser, 28 June 1784, and The Public Advertiser, 14 July 1784. 2 1 1 Ibid., 12 July 1784. 282 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. among the writers of natural history” who tried to classify it2 1 2 The Edinburgh-based Caledonian Mercury likewise celebrated the arrival of a new elephant in London in March 1795. The paper trumpeted the beast as “a most wonderful” surprise, and crowds flocked to see the new arrival for the price of one shilling. Many, the paper noted, would not have seen a living elephant at the Tower as the one presented by Captain Sampson in 1763 had died some twenty years before 2 1 3 From London to Nottingham and from Nottingham to Edinburgh, Indian animals imported to Britain by the EIC and its agents, caused nothing short of a minor sensation in late eighteenth-century Britain. These animals marked the presence of India as part of the British imperial world, but they also marked the presence of India within the British national landscape. Because they were linked to the EIC, these animals also exposed the Company’s role in promoting the growing relationship between the nation and the empire, and Company employees were seen to be the prime-movers behind this growing imperial presence in domestic Britain. Company servants could be accused of being addicted to India, and there was no reason to suspect that they were not equally partial to its exotic animals. Robert Clive’s granddaughter, Charlotte Florentia Clive, later the Duchess of Northumberland, confessed that she was deeply in love with an Indian gazelle she had received as a gift while living in India during her father’s tenure as the governor of Madras. The “beautiful gazelle,” she reported in her journal, “became attached to me, traveled in my palaquin, and slept by my bed-side,” and Clive felt “a sad grief” the day her beloved pet, eager to graze on the front lawn of the Madras Governor’s Mansion, plunged to his death from her third-floor balcony.2 1 4 2 1 2 The Nottingham Journal, 7 January 1786. 20 The Caledonian Mercury, 28 March 1795. 2 1 4 Voyages to the East, OIOC WD.4235,185. 283 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. If nabobs felt partial to South Asia and a partiality for its animal inhabitants, domestic critics did not always view that partiality as benign. The non-human inhabitants of Britain’s overseas empire were not always docile, caged, and safe. Mrs. Prune, as we have seen, objected to the tarantulas, the cows, and the crocodiles. She was overwhelmed by the influx of foreign animals into her home. Like the female subject of Thomas Rowlandson’s Lady Surrounded by Her Peis, Mrs. Prune was mired in a kennel of imperial creatures. Illustration 21. LadySur - -'.on, London, undated.2 1 5 The Sheffield Register gave its readers even more reason to fear imperial animals on 12 July 1793, when it published the story of the death of Sir Hector Monro’s son. The young Munro, along with his friends Mr. Downey and lieutenant Pyeflncfa, had been hunting tigers on Saugur Island in December 1792 when “an immense royal tyger [sic] sprang upon the unfortunate Munro, who was sitting down; in a moment,” the article continued, “Ms head was in the beast’s mouth, and he rushed into the jungle with Mm, with as much ease as I could lift a kitten; tearing Mm through the thicket bushes and trees, every thing yielding to his monstrous strength.” Muuro survived the attack and “lived for twenty-four hours in the 2 1 5 Image scanned from a photograph courtesy of The Courtauld Gallery, London. 284 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. extreme of torture; Ms head and skull were all tom and broke to pieces, and he was wounded by the claws, all over Ms neck and shoulders.” His friends could only be thankful that they had been able to recover their unfortunate colleague’s body at all rather “than leave Mm to be devoured limb by limb.”2 1 6 News of Munro’s death must have raised the public’s curiosity towards the animals at the Tower and also their suspicions and fears. It was not unknown for the wild beasts at the Tower to escape into the streets of London. Rumors and cMldren’s storybooks alike told of a leopard that had escaped the tower and roamed the streets of London.2 1 7 Such stories gained credence when The Reading Mercury and Oxford Gazette reported on 13 June 1785 that a keeper of the King’s wild animals at the Tower had forgotten to latch one of the cages properly. As a result, the “lion got out and continued banging about the yard for upwards of an hour, and tearing a table and stool to pieces.”2 1 8 Animals from India had the potential to be a pestilence in domestic Britain. They were not unlike the “large swarm of rats” that infested the city of Petersborough in the summer of 1784. The rats, it was supposed, had “come from India in some of the steps.” They plagued the town and its inhabitants, burrowing into the walls of people’s homes, destroying supplies of grain, fruits, and poultry. “They get into peoples [sic] houses,” The Public Advertiser reported, “and do much mischief.”2 1 9 More significantly, these threatening animals from South Asia came to represent the potential threats posed to the nation by the nabobs themselves. In some instances, Horace Walpole argued, nabobs were more dangerous. Reflecting on the rapacity of Company nabobs, Walpole marveled at their cruelty. “Voltaire,” he noted, “says learning, arts, and 2 1 6 The Sheffield Register, 12 July 1793. See also The Sheffield Register, 1 1 July 1793. 2 1 7 See Hahn, 158. 2 1 8 The Reading Mercury and Oxford Gazette, 13 June 1785. 2 1 9 The Public Advertiser, 5 August 1784. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. philosophy have softened the manners of mankind; when tigers can read they may possibly grow tame - but man!”2 2 0 Imported South Asian animals could reflect a nabob’s greed and rapacity, but they also served as the tools of his bribery. As we have seen, Warren Hastings sent diamonds to the Queen as a means of escaping impeachment In 1786, he gave six tropical birds to the king and a hyena to the Prince of Wales. The English Chronicle suggested that bribery was his motive. “It is rather remarkable,” the paper noted, “that of all the voracious animals, and strange creatures brought over from India, the poor Hyaena [sic] is the only one which has been sent to the Tower.”2 2 1 The young hyena that Hastings gave to the Prince, thus, became a symbol of the former-govemor-general ’ s crimes. It was a bestial reflection of the man who brought it to Britain. Both The General Evening Post and The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser reported that “no words can give an adequate idea of this animal’s deformity and fierceness.” It was, they wrote, “more savage and untameable than any other quadruped.” Both papers testified that the hyena was “an obscene and solitary animal, to be found chiefly in the most desolate and uncultivated parts of the torrid zone, of which it is a native.” Like Richard Barwell, Charles Marsac, Richard Smith, and other nabobs who purchased country estates only to shut themselves behind the doors of their new homes, the hyena did not value company. Instead, it lived “in the caverns of mountains, in the cliffs of rocks, or in dens that it has formed for itself under the earth.” It was a subterranean creature. It could not be “domesticated;” it lived “by depredation.” Hyenas attacked men, “canie[dj off cattle, followfed] the flock, [broke] open the sheep-bots by night, and ravage[d] with insatiable 2 2 0 Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 2 March 1772, quoted in Chaudhuri, 455. 2 2 1 The English Chronicle, 8 July 1786. 286 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. voracity.” Perhaps most hauntingly of all, “when destitute of other provisions, it scraped up the graves; and devours the dead bodies.”2 2 2 Like desperate survivors of the shipwrecked vessel that was transporting Johann Zoffany home to London in 1789, hyenas would eat the flesh of dead humans when they were starving. They were the worst kind of scavengers. Like the hyena, then, Hastings and his fellow nabobs were scavengers, but, unlike the caged animals they left with the royal family at the Tower, nabobs roamed loose on the streets of the nation. They were wild and untamed, and they were free to ravage as they pleased. In his 1788 etching The Westminster Hunt, James Gillray showed Hastings Illustration 22. The Westminster Hunt, James Gillray, London, 27 April 1788.2 2 3 as a menacing threat to the people of Britain. In the image, Hastings is represented as the prey for a pack of foxhounds, whose faces show them to be Burke, Sheridan, Fox, and the other members of the prosecution at the Hastings impeachment. The leader of the hunt, Lord Thurlow rides on a mule with King George’s face. Together, the King and the Lord Chancellor trample over their own hounds, allowing the errant Hastings to escape through a gate guarded Mindly by Prime Minister Pitt and Henry Dandas. Hastings is portrayed as the 2 2 2 The General Evening Post, 11-13 July 1786, and The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 14 July 1786. 2 2 3 Image scanned from a photograph courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London. 287 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. fox in the scene, wearing a turban on his head. His tail is swollen thick with rupees, diamonds, and gold, and, upon closer inspection, he wears a golden collar that labels Mm - not as a fox, the noble prey of the English gentility -b u t as an ignominious “hyena.” As Gillray’s etching suggested, nabobs not only brought zoological specimens from South Asia but also embodied all the wild and untamed tendencies of those animals. TMs was not the stuff of Rudyard Kipling’s nineteenth-century Jungle Book stories in wMch the safe relationships between humans and animals were fables that justified the superiority of humans, representing the British, over the animals of the jungle, representing the diverse populations of South Asia.2 2 4 TMs was a picture that more closely resembled Jonathan Illustration 23. The Westminster Hunt (Detail), James Gillray, London, 27 April 1788.2 2 5 Swift’s account of Gulliver’s strange trip to the land of the Houyhuhnms in Gulliver’ s Travels (1726). It was a story in which a European had traveled to a new land where the categorical differences between man and beast were not as clear as they ought to have been.2 2 6 The nabobs represented the total transformation of Britons into the animals of South Asia and of the British political system to the bestial order that predominated on the subcontinent 2 3 4 See SUidyard Kipling, The Jungle Books (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 2 2 5 Image scanned from a photograph courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London. 2 2 6 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’ s Travels, ed. Robert Demaria, Ir. (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 203-271. 1 ; 1 288 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Laura Brown has suggested that the imperial animal and the imperial servant or slave are connected together through the fashion of the collar - a marker of captivity to European imperialism. “Animals,” she has written, “helped Europeans imagine Africans, Native Americans, and themselves.” Imperial animals and people from the empire functioned in similar ways in the European imagination. “The many figurative lines of connection between our cohort of nonhuman beings and the non-European human beings who had become vividly present to the European experience in the eighteenth century,” Brown has argued, “suggest that the fable of the nonhuman being served as a powerful and common resource for structuring the encounter with cultural difference.”2 2 7 As they were with respect to South Asian animals, nabobs were also held responsible for the increasing influx of South Asians into Britain in the last half of the eighteenth century. Nabobs often employed South Asians as servants while they were in India. When they returned to Britain, it was not uncommon for them to bring their domestic help with them. Some South Asians, as we saw in George Stubbs’ painting of Pigot’s cheetah, came to tend to South Asian animals. In February 1765, John Morgan, one of the two men shown with the animal in the Stubb’s painting, testified at the Old Bailey trial of John Ryan after having accused Ryan, Ryan’s wife, and their son of a conspiracy to rob him while he was a guest at their dwelling-house. In his testimony, Morgan identified himself as “a Mahometan,” and his testimony was sworn using the Koran rather than the Bible. When asked his profession, Morgan testified that he had been to Britain twice before, but that, on this trip, he had only been in Britain for seven months. He had come over “with a tyger [sic] 2 2 7 Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 260-262. See also Jeremy Osborn, “India and the East India Company in the Public Sphere of Eighteenth-Century Britain,” 208. 289 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. for Sir George Pigot” and “attendfed] upon it for him now,” while living, he testified, at Pigot’s house in Soho.2 2 8 Other nabobs, like William Hickey employed South Asians as footmen, valets, and butlers. Hickey himself left India in 1808 after twenty-seven years on the subcontinent, and he convinced his servant Munnoo, whom Hickey claimed he could not live without, to return with him.2 2 9 That nabobs brought Indian servants back to Britain with them was not, in and of itself, a major problem. Difficulties emerged, though, when these same nabobs released their attendants from service, leaving a population of unconnected South Asians unemployed on the streets of Britain’s dries, exposing the metropolis to an ethnographic spectacle from the imperial world.2 3 0 In July 1773, an unnamed “East Indian” ran an ad in The Public Advertiser looking for a job “as Footman” to either a single gentleman or a family.2 3 1 In May 1784, a South Asian describing himself as “a middle aged Man, an East-India Black” advertised that he was looking for a similar job, and another “young man, a native of India,” advertised for employment in August of the same year.2 3 2 Not all South Asians in late eighteenth century Britain were jobless. Dean Mahomet, a former sepoy with the Company’s army in Bengal, sailed for Britain in 1784, and arrived in Cork later that year. While in Britain, Mahomet wrote an account of his experiences in the Company’s army, opened a series of Indian bath-houses in places like London and 2 2 8 1 owe a very special debt of gratitude to Michael Fisher for sharing this information with me. The trial of the three members of the Ryan family can be found in The Proceedings o f the Old Bailey, ref. T17650227-5,27 February 1765,154-156. 2 2 9 See William Hickey, William Hickey: Memoirs o f a Georgian Rake, ed. Rodger Hudson (London: The Folio Society, 1995), 402. 2 3 0 This spectacle was not unlike that caused by the visit to Britain of Qmai in 1774 except that, as newspaper reports suggest, many of the nabob’s Indian servants did not return home to South Asia after a short stay in Britain. Rather, as the media coverage suggests, they tended to stay on in Britain, where they came to be perceived as a domestic problem. 2 3 1 The Public Advertiser, 17 July 1773. 2 3 2 The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, 20 May 1784, and The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, 2 August 1784. 290 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Brighton, and he even ran a successful coffee shop, known as the Hindostanee Coffee House, in London from 1809 to 1812.2 3 3 Unemployed South Asian servants, though, seemed more common, and to the domestic public, they appeared to be a social problem resulting directly from Britain’s growth as an imperial power. Social critics of the Company and the empire viewed this Indian population as a group of vagrants and criminals. In March 1772, The Public Advertiser supported this belief by running the story of a South Asian by the name of John Black. Black, a native of Bombay who had arrived in London courtesy of the Company in 1768, stood accused, the paper reported, of having run off after “feloniously committing an act of bestiality with a mare.”2 3 4 Thomas Homsey, a native of the Malabar coast, was reported on the lam in May 1772.2 3 5 In April 1780, Reverend Robert Purcell of Shepton-Mallet advertised in The Bath Journal that his Indian servant, “called Adam, who now takes upon himself the name of James, sometimes George,” had fled to escape charges of being “a drunkard, a lyar [sic], and a thief.”2 3 6 South Asians, these instances suggested, were thieves, perverts, and criminals. They were not the sort of people that domestic Britons wanted to have roaming the kingdom, but, as The Sheffield Register noted in June 1787, Company employees kept bringing them into Britain. Sadi, the paper reported, was but one of the many Indian servants who had recently been imported to Britain by the Company and its employees. Sadi had been brought to Britain from the East Indies as a servant to the son of Mr. Stephen Sullivan, Esq., and, like so many other East Indian servants, was not a respectable character. A legal inquiry 2 3 3 See Fisher, The First Indian Author, 250-260,276-282, and Fisher, The Travels o f Dean Mahomet, 144-165. 2 3 4 The Public Advertiser, 16 March 1772. 2 3 5 Ibid., 29 May 1772. 2 3 6 The Bath Journal, 3 April 1780. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. determined that he was guilty of having plundered local houses around Sheffield “of whatever property he could get at, such as muslins, silks, calicoes, linen, pearls, wearing apparel, &c. to a very considerable amount.” He had, the inquiry proclaimed, even stolen a £1000 note from his master’s strongbox.2 3 7 On 22 March 1786, The Morning Chronicle attacked the Company and its employees for filling the streets with Indian lascars.2 3 8 These poor figures, the paper suggested, were more pitiable than the victims of the Bengal famine itself, and they populated London “with wretched objects naked and starving imploring our charity in silent attitudes and gestures more eloquent than language.”2 3 9 In December of the same year, the paper again raised the issue of Indian lascars, asking whether or not the British Parliament should act to prevent the H C “from landing their crews of lascars in this country after navigating their ships home.” The paper’s publishers lamented the “wretched case.. .of these forlorn wretches - i n a strange land, cold, hungry, naked, friendless.”2 ® The management of The Morning Chronicle supported legislation like that passed in France that forbade “the importation of black men and women.” The Public Advertiser went so far as to suggest that such an act was “a matter equally wise, and which we ought to follow, as they are certainly a lower link of the human chain.” It was, the paper insisted, a matter of national urgency that the legislature deal with the Indian population then in Britain, 37 The Sheffield Register, 9 June 1787. For more on servants and slaves from South Asia in eighteenth-century Britain, see Sudipta Sen, 17. 2 3 8 For more, see Rozina Visram, Ayas, Lascars, and Princes: The History of Indians in Britain, 1700- 1947 (London: Pluto Press, 1986). See also, Moira Ferguson, Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1780-1900: Patriots, Nation, and Empire (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998), 20- 21. See also, Shompa Lahiri, “ Contested Relations: The East India Company and Lascars in London” in The Worlds o f the East India Company, ed. H.V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), 174-175. 2 3 9 The Morning Chronicle, 30 May 1786, quoted in Osborn, India, Parliament, and the Press Under George III, 202. 2 4 0 The Morning Chronicle, 22 December 1786. 292 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. which the paper suggested, was “not.. .less than 10,T O O ” by ordering the EIC to prevent the importation of South Asians into British ports.2 4 1 If the Company was responsible for changing the make-up of the population of Great Britain, it was also guilty of re-making the physical landscape of the nation in the late eighteenth century. As The Salisbury and Winchester Journal reported on 27 September 1784, the Company funded a monument “raised to the memory of General Sir Eyre Coote” in Westminster Abbey as well as a statue of the late general outside their headquarters on Leadenhall Street.2 4 2 The hallowed halls of Westminster Abbey and the streets of the nation’s capital had once been filled with monuments to and statues of the nation’s monarchs and its great heroes - those who had died on behalf of their nation. Coote was a great general, that the paper did not dispute, but his services had been to the Company and not the nation writ large. More important than the example of monuments to fallen Company heroes, though, were the houses built by returning nabobs. As we have seen, many nabobs returned to Britain and purchased landed estates for themselves. Many of them believed that an estate was their only sure path to political power in the domestic world. Most of these men purchased and lived in typical country homes, Georgian estates with neo-classical or Palladian facades. A select group of returning nabobs followed a different path, constructing homes using eastern architectural flourishes that quickly earned the opprobrious appellation “the Indian style.” In 1767, Captain John Gould built a home for himself at Margate that was designed “in imitation of a house in Calcutta.” William Hornby, the former-govemor of Bombay who 2 4 1 The Public Advertiser, 4 November 1783. 2 4 2 The Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 27 September 1784. 293 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. gave the King a lion in the summer of 1784, likewise modeled his home on the Government House at Bombay.2 4 3 Sir Hector Monro, whose son would later be eaten by a tiger, built a Hindu temple on Ms estate at Novar in ITT?.2 4 4 As well, on the summit just above the estate, he built faux rains replicating the ancient gates of the city of Negapatam where he had won a celebrated battle daring Ms career in India.2 4 5 In 1784, lames Forbes, “an assiduous student of Indian life, retired after twenty years in the East to Great Stamnore in Middlesex.”2 4 6 In 1793, Forbes contracted an order for an octagonal temple that he had placed in the estate’s gardens. Surrounding the temple, he placed a group of statues he had brought back from South Asia which “were said to be the only specimens of Hindoo sculpture in England.”2 4 7 John Osbourne constructed a similar temple in the park surrounding his estate, Melchet Park, in Wiltshire in 1800. The temple’s exterior was decorated with religious figures representing the principal incarnations of Vishnu. Rather than filling the temple with Illustration 24. The Hindu Temple at Melchet Park, William Daniel!, London, c. 1800.2 4 8 2 4 3 See R aym ond Head, Sezincote: A Paradigm o f the Indian Style (Unpublished MA Thesis, Royal College of Art, London, 1982), 7. m I thank Andrew Mackillop for suggesting M ura® , M s family, and his estate at Novar to me as key Scottish components of this dissertation. 2 4 5 See, Raymond Head, 1 0 . 2 4 6 Patrick Conner, Oriental Architecture in the West (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 119. 2 4 7 Ibid. 2 4 8 Image scanned from a photograph courtesy of the British Library, L ondon. 294 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Indian gods, though, Osbourne placed a bust of Ms mentor, Warren Hastings, inside the edifice. The bust sat atop a lotus flower, and Hastings and the flower both sat on a marble plinth on which an inscription read; SACRED TO THE GENII OF INDIA WHO FROM TIME TO TIME, ASSUME MATERIAL FORMS TO PROTECT ITS NATIONS AND ITS LAW, PARTICULARLY TO THE IMMORTAL WARREN HASTINGS WHO, IN THESE OUR DAYS, HAS APPEARED THE SAVIOUR OF THOSE REGIONS TO THE BRITISH EMPIRE, THIS FANE WAS RAISED BY JOHN OSBOURNE, IN RESPECT TO HIS PREEMINENT VIRTUES IN THE YEAR MDCCC. Illustration 25. Bust of Hastings at Melchet Park, Anonymous, c. 1800.2 4 9 m Image scanned from a photograph courtesy of the British library, London. 295 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. In 1787, Warren Hastings Mmself purchased Ms family’s ancestral estate at Dayiesford and commissioned the architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell, the architect to the EIC, to design a new main house. Cockerell’s design for the new building incorporated a large dome, derived from Islamic architectural influences, over the central entry hall of the home. The house had a conservatory with eastern-styled windows, and, in the park surrounding the estate, Cockerell peppered the landscape with Hindu temples and other garden follies based on South Asian themes. Illustration 26, Dayiesford House.2 ® Samuel Cockerell also designed Sezincote House for Ms brother Charles Cockerell, who returned from Calcutta in 1800. Though Samuel Cockerell was better known for Ms “fundamentally classical if idiosyncratic designs,” he worked with his brother to construct one of the most elaborately South Asian homes in Britain to tM s day.2 5 1 Sezincote, like Hastings’ neighboring estate at Dayiesford, was fitted with arched windows and an eastern onion dome. Charles Cockerell’s bedroom was distanced from the main house by a long colonnade designed to give the bedroom the effect of a tented Islamic palace. Its exterior ** Image scanned from Nicholas Kingsley, The Country Houses o/Giouchestershire, 2 vols., (Chichester: PMIlimore and Co., 1992), ii, 114. 2 5 5 See Head, 21. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. landscaping was designed to reflect an Islamic garden, and Cockerell commissioned Humphrey Repton, who would later work with the Prince Regent on the designs for the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, to design a series of garden follies that included a Hindu temple, a bridge guarded by two sacred cows, and a mock-ruin designed to replicate a snake pool,2 3 2 It was not just facades and parks that nabobs decorated in the “Indian style.” Rather, the interiors of their homes were often filled with markers of their lives in South Asia. As we have already seen, portraits were a common way of representing time spent in India, and hookah pipes were frequent souvenirs from South Asia as well. Is South Asia, nabobs were Illustration 28. The Bedroom Pavilion, Horner Sezincote.2 3 4 2 5 2 Head, 39-47. 2 5 3 Image scanned from Sezincote; A Visitors Guide (Cheltenham: Adpriat Limited, 2002), courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. David Peake. 2 5 4 Image scanned from Ibid. 297 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Illustration 29. The Cow Bridge and Snake llasteatioa 30. The Hindu Temple, Sezincot®.2 5 5 Pod, Sezincote.2 5 5 known to spend lavishly decorating their homes. William Hickey recorded that he and his wife Charlotte spent more flsaa 12,000 rupees decorating their first home in Calcutta.2 5 7 When he returned to Britain more than two decades later, Hickey, now a widower, brought most of this furniture home with Mm. It was thus possible for even those nabobs who lived in typically Georgian estates in domestic Britain to surround themselves with the accoutrements of life in South Asia. Nathaniel Middleton, for example, built a classical home at Town Hill Park in South Stoneham, Hampshire where he kept his collections of Indian miniatures and Persian manuscripts.2 ® At Dayiesford, Hastings commissioned architects and artists to fill the estate with reminders of his past in India. He had George Stubbs paint a picture of the Indian yak that grazed on the lawn outside Dayiesford House, and he proudly hung the image in his private office. Hastings called in the sculptor Thomas Banks to design a fireplace for Mm. The result, which still exists in the house today, is a marble mantle balanced on the heads of two South Asian women between whom Banks carved a series of scenes representing Hastings’ accomplishments as governor-general. The house was filled with other paraphernalia and 2 3 5 Image scanned from Ibid. m Image scanned from Ibid. 2 5 7 Hickey, The Memoirs o f William Hickey, ed. Peter Quenadi, 435. 2 3 3 Head, 8. 298 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. memorabilia from Warren and Marian Hastings’ travel across the subcontinent The reminders served as a comfort to Hastings as he endured the final years of his long impeachment trial and perhaps even as a retreat from the world after his acquittal in 1795. Both Warren and Marian Hastings lived on at Dayiesford until their respective deaths in 1818 and 1853, after which the house and its continents were auctioned off. As the catalogue from the estate’s sale in 1853 suggest, the Hastings spent their retirement surrounded by reminders - including ivory furniture, alabaster figures, drawings front Egypt, Persia, and India, and a number of portraits and paintings - of the time they had spent in South Asia.2 ® Illustration 31. Mantle at Dayiesford, Thomas Banks, c. 1790.2 6 0 To the Hastings, living with such reminders must have seemed natural and fitting. They had met on their way to India and Hastings had spent three decades of Ms life - from Ms teen-age years to his mid-life - there. For domestic British critics, though, Dayiesford and other nabobish homes in the “Indian style” posed a significant problem on several levels. First, these homes reversed the process of imperial colonization by building what appeared 2 3 9 See Catalogue of the Valuable Contents of Dayiesford House, Worckestershire, The Seat of the Late Right Hon. Warren Hastings (1853), BL RB.23.b.4295. See also, Amin Jaffer, Furniture from British India and Ceylon: A Catalogue o f the Collections in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum, 2001), 238. 2 6 0 Image scanned from Kingsley, ii, 115. 299 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. to be Indian settlements across the British nation - from Sezincote and Dayiesford in WoFchestersMre to Novar in Scotland. Second, they served as the nabobs’ bold refusal to te- domesticate themselves to living in Britain; they were an insistent declaration that the process of empire made Britain and India equally home to Company servants. For domestic audiences, these homes were unsettling statements of the newly emerging relationship between Britain and its imperial holdings in South Asia. As James Maiton suggested in 17%, these buildings suggested that Britain was being invaded. The nabobs were convinced, he wrote, that “the rude ornaments of Indostan supersede those of Greece; and the returned Nabob, heated in Ms pursuit of wealth, imagines he imports the chaleur of the East with its riches.”2 6 1 Illustration 32. Ivory Table and Four Ivory Chairs, Illustration 33. Maid Ivory Table, formerly owned by Warren Hastings.2 6 2 formerly owned by Warren Hastings.2 ® m Conner, 119. 2 6 2 Image scanned from laffer, 245. m Image scanned from Ibid., 247. 300 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Illustration 34 Ivory Couch, a gift to Warren Hastings from Muni Begum.*4 Nabobs made the Indian empire visible in late eigfateentfa-centtixy Britain. They brought home fashions, foals, animals, architectural styles, and Indians themselves, all of which forced domestic audiences to come face to face with South Asia. Moreover, the imperial project in India forced the domestic population to come to intellectual terms with the subcontinent of India In order to prepare Company employees for their lives and careers in South Asia, domestic booksellers began printing and selling manuals on India and its languages, customs, and history. The Public Advertiser advertised the publication of a new collection of memoirs by Company servants in India, for sale for only two shillings six ducats, on 6 December 1773.*® The Morning Chronicle likewise advertised a new edition of George Hadley’s A Grammar o f the Current Dialect qflndostan on 12 May 1784.2 6 6 And, in April 1784,1. Murray of Fleet-Street ran an advertisement that offered a special price to all “Gentlemen going to India” if they purchased a full set of all the volumes that were recommended reading “by the Honourable the Court of Directors to their Governors, Councils, and other Servants abroad”2 8 7 2 6 4 Image scanned from Ibid., 243. m The Public Advertiser, 6 December 1773. m The Morning Chronicle, 12 May 1784. 2 8 7 The General Evening Post, 30 March-1 April, 1784. 301 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Such texts were, of course, the products of the Company’s employees; they were the intellectual products of empire. Company servants like Charles Wilkins, Nathaniel Halhed, Matthew Lumsden, and Sir William Jones all worked in the final decades of the eighteenth century to master the indigenous languages of the subcontinent and record them for the Company’s use.2 6 8 As Thomas Munro wrote to his mother in the summer of 1783, “I am learning Moors only with the design of making Persian easy, for it is in this language that all letters and publick [sic] papers are [kept] and it is that which is spoken at all the Courts in India.”2 6 9 Munro’s library consisted of more than forty texts written in South Asian languages as well as sixteen South Asian language dictionaries, eight South Asian language grammar books, and eight guidebooks to the subcontinent itself.2 7 0 Knowledge of India, as Bernard Cohn has argued, was tantamount to power over the subcontinent ‘ The conquest of India,” he has written, “was a conquest of knowledge.”2 7 1 Knowledge of South Asia was directly useful to EIC employees, and it was this same group that generated the knowledge. As governor-general, Warren Hastings was particularly known to have encouraged those who studied the subcontinent. By encouraging such scholarship, he declared that it was his policy to reconcile “the people of England to the natives of Hindustan.”2 7 2 The two populations, he insisted, had to be made to understand one another if they were to exist within the same imperial framework. This, of course, was not to say that Hastings doubted for a moment that it would be the British who ruled and the South Asians who were ruled, but the structures of the system did require that both sides have a minimal comprehension of the other. To that end, Hastings helped Sir William Jones 2 6 8 See Edward Said, Orientalism, 78-79. See also, Cohn, 23-24, 31-33, and 50. 2 6 9 Thomas Munro to his mother, 21 August 1783, OIOC Mss Eur F151/140. 2 7 0 Register o f List o f Books Belonging to Thomas Munro (1814), Munro Collection, OIOC Mss Eur F151/54,44. 2 7 1 Cohn, 16. 2 7 2 Quoted in Keay, 422. 302 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. establish the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta in 1784, just before he resigned as the governor-general. The society quickly became an association of the brightest Company minds and a community that produced significant studies of the history, linguistic traditions, religious theologies, and intellectual movements of the subcontinent, all of which were exported back to Leadenhall Street to be passed on to future generations of Company servants. As early as 1786, newspaper accounts of the Asiatic Society appeared in London that told of the society’s achievements. “By all accounts from Calcutta,” the stories read, “the Society lately established by Sir William Jones and others for the encouragement of Oriental literature, was in a very thriving state.”2 7 3 Hastings went further, though, than founding the Asiatic Society in Bengal. As Peter Marshall has noted, Hastings “made an attempt to spread his interest in Muslim culture at home.” To accomplish this goal, Hastings, “apparently acting in conjunction with Henry Vansittart, the former Governor of Bengal,., .drafted A Proposal for Establishing a Professorship of the Persian Language in the University of Oxford." As Hastings and Vansittart planned the position, “the professor would both teach Persian to young men going to India and do his best to interest educated Englishmen in general in a civilization still largely unknown to them.”2 7 4 Some in domestic society approved of Hastings’ plans. Samuel Johnson wrote to him to praise his “attention [to] and patronage [of]” learning, but, as there was little other domestic interest in his plan, the idea came to nothing. Oxford did not establish a chair in Persian.2 7 5 2 7 3 The General Evening Post, 2 November 1786. The Morning Chronicle 3 November 1786. The Gentleman’ s Magazine (November 1786), 987. 2 7 4 P.J. Marshall, “Warren Hastings as Scholar and Patron,” in Statesmen, Scholars, and Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth-Century History Presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland, ed. Anne Whiteman, J. S. Bromley, and P.G. Dickson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 245. See also A Proposal for Establishing a Professorship of the Persian Language in the University of Oxford (London, undated). 2 7 5 PJ. Marshall, “Warren Hastings as Scholar and Patron,” 247. 303 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Though Ms plan failed, Hastings’ efforts to import the study of Persian and other fields of study from South Asia to Britain was yet another example of the ways in wMch nabobs appeared to be colonizing the British cultural landscape. Empire seemed to be coming home, and by the late eighteenth century, it seemed to be doing so at a rapidly increasing pace. As one correspondent to The Gentleman’ s Magazine wrote in 1786, India was moving into the metropolitan world in a series of “dangerous encroachments.” The Company’s servants in the East Indies, the article continued, were responsible for these encroachments; they were responsible for bringing India - piece by concrete piece - back to Britain. “It is plain,” the writer insisted, that Britain would be changed by its imperial experience - a hybrid nation was in the process of being bom. “Our constitution, if not altered, is altering,” the letter concluded, “at a great rate.”2 7 6 To domestic observers, EIC employees left Britain as Britons, but they returned as nabobs. Something happened in the process of living in South Asia that made them different - that converted them. Domestic attacks against the nabobs centered on the concrete representations of India that nabobs brought home with them because it was tMs channel of material culture that rendered India most visible and most tangible in domestic Britain. It was the things, the ammals, and the places associated with nabobs that domestic observers most easily saw as evidence that the tide of Indian imperialism was wasMng up on Britain’s shores. It was tMs channel of material culture that most plainly suggested that the British nation itself, like the nabobs, could be - and perhaps was being - transformed by becoming an imperial power. Nabobs were feared for having converted. They were ostracized and insulted. Unlike West Indian planters whose money was understandable and rooted in the land, 2 7 6 The Gentleman’ s Magazine (September 1786), 749-750. 304 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. nabobs made fortunes through murky speculation. Theirs was a different kind of wealth that belonged more to a world of diamonds and luxury than it did to Britain. The various artifacts of empire we have explored in this chapter further marginalized the nabobs. If the West Indian planter lived the life of a typical country aristocrat, the mythologized nabob refused to settle into a lifestyle that was domesticated and British. Instead, he surrounded himself with the very materials that had been used to measure the difference between India and Britain and between Indians and Britons. He surrounded himself with products from the empire that were not, to use Beth Fowkes Tobin’s phrase, “ideologically neutral.”2 7 7 Nabobs were feared for having converted. David Hare, a Scottish watchmaker and a founding member of the Hindu College at Calcutta, was, William Dalrymple has recently noted, “denied a Christian burial when he died of cholera, on the grounds that he had become more Hindu than Christian.” Francis Gillanders, a Company tax-collector at Bihar, was chastised for “administering heathen rites” when he donated a bell to a Hindu temple in 1798.2 7 8 Nabobs were feared for having converted, and they caused public concern because they suggested that Britain itself might be converted as well. 2 7 7 See Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Identity in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 33. See also, Louis Lauda, “Of Silkworms and Farthingales and the Will of God,” in Studies in the Eighteenth century, ed. R. F. Brissenden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 259-277. See also, J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). See also, David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 2 7 8 Dalrymple, 49. 305 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Chapter Five Nabobinas Gender, Luxury, and Empire Ambivalent Iconography: From India House to the India Office When it opened in 18®, the new India Office building at Whitehall was meant to make a statement. Connected to the new Foreign Office, the Home Office, and, after 1875, the new Colonial Office as well, the India Office building was an architectural reminder that the administration of Britain’s South Asian possessions now fell under the direct supervision of the government - that the government of British India, while distinct from the administration of domestic and diplomatic affairs and likewise separate from the administration of other colonial territories, now properly belonged alongside other departments of the central government in administrative as well as architectural and geographic terms. In the wake of the Indian uprisings of 1857 and 1858, the government revoked the EIC’s charter and abolished the company itself. But, it was not enough merely to co-opt the company, moving government workers to the corridors, offices, and desks of the Company’s headquarters on Leadenhall Street. The old India House was too small, some said, to accommodate the new government of India. It was too far removed from Westminster and Whitehall, others argued. And others still objected to the government’s use of India House because of the location’s centuries-old associations with a commercial company that had, by almost universal consensus, miserably failed to manage the nation’s South Asian interests. And so it was agreed that the EIC had to be abolished. The India House had to be abandoned, even destroyed. Indian administration had to be relocated closer to the seat of government at Westminster, and a new building had to be raised to accommodate it. The 306 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. new building was to be a markedly symbolic edifice, and the new location proclaimed a new era in British Indian administration. George Gilbert Scott’s exterior designs, unveiled in 1859, blended the architecture of the India Office into the other administrative buildings at Whitehall. Inside Scott’s shell, Matthew Digby Wyatt, Surveyor to the India Office, oversaw the design of new office space for the government of India. At the heart of Wyatt’s design is the India Office Council Chamber. Located on the first floor of the building, the Council Chamber is a grand and impressive space. Illuminated with natural light from a bank of windows that open onto the Durbar Court, the Council Chamber has high vaulted ceilings, ornamental plaster-work and gilding on the walls, and a richly-patterned carpet on the floor. The Council Chamber replaced a myriad of meeting rooms at the India House on Leadenhall Street, serving, from 1868 until 1947, as the centerpiece of the offices of the Secretary of State for India, the head of the new administrative structure in British India and a member of the Prime Minister’s cabinet. Four mahogany tables, arranged in a square, are the focal point of the room. Ironically, at the head of the tables sits an upholstered chair, embroidered with a rampant lion within a medallion, the crest of the EIC. Once the Chairman’s Seat at the Director’s Court Room at India House, this chair became, by Wyatt’s design, the chair from which the Secretary of State for India would administer the government of India - a connection between the past, the present, and the future expressed through the furnishings of the room. Wyatt’s point is even more strikingly made by three full-length, life-sized portraits hung around the room. Directly opposite the room’s massive fireplace, hangs a portrait of Sir Eyre Coote (1726-1783). To the right of the fireplace, hangs a portrait of Major-General 307 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Stringer Lawrence (1697-1775), and to the left, one of Warren Hastings.1 All three portraits, like the Chairman’s seat, were taken from India House at Leadenhall Street, and, like all three were placed in the Council Chamber to symbolize the continuity of British power in South Asia, from the period of company rule to that of state raj. The three portraits demonstrated Britain’s military power and its administrative control over the subcontinent, and like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, they continue to loom over the Council Chamber even to the present, demanding to be noticed as they must have done during countless meetings of the Council of India.2 In placing the three portraits in the chamber, Wyatt signaled a link between British India’s past under the EIC and Britain’s ongoing presence in and administration of India - perhaps even a problematic connection considered against the symbolic purposes of the new administrative structures and the new building itself. The three portraits dominate the Council Chamber; they overshadow the room. The portraits were not, however, the only decorative pieces from India House that Wyatt imported into the Council Chamber at the new India Office. From across the room, the portrait of Eyre Coote stares down the length of the Council Chamber, as the various Secretaries of State for India must have done, at a grand fireplace.3 Standing nearly the full 1 Having been appointed commander of the Company’s forces in South Asia in 1748, Stringer Lawrence had organized Britain’s irregular troops on the subcontinent into a formidable fighting force, earning for himself the moniker “Father of the Indian Army.” Following in Lawrence’s footsteps, Eyre Coote was placed in charge of British forces in Bengal from 1761 to 1762, after his singular victory over the French in the Carnatic at the Battle of Wandiwash on 22 January 1760. He returned to South Asia as the lieutenant general commander-in-chief from 1779 to 1783, serving under Governor-General Warren Hastings. 2 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, v, 1-180 and HI, iv, 92-105, in The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (New York; Oxford University Press, 1988). 3 Contemporary tours of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are quick to note that the Coote portrait, in addition to drawing connections to the EIC, marks a connection between the British imperial past and present-day American politics as the American Secretary of State, Colin Powell, traces his ancestry back to one of Eyre Coote’s nephew and a Jamaican slave. This connection, the tour guides like to note, was not lost on Secretary Powell who himself commented proudly on his relationship to Eyre Coote on his first official visit to the FCO after becoming Secretary of State in 2001. 308 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. height of the wall, the mantel rests on two marble plinths topped with bearded figures who support the mantelpiece itself, a bas-relief marble scene adorns the space above the mantel, and the relief is itself topped by a classical Grecian pediment. The significance of the fireplace, a utilitarian feature in the room, could easily go unnoticed were it not for the fact that the bas-relief marble scene forms the end of a visual line - from the Coote portrait through the Chairman’s seat - that bisects the room. As he had the chair and the portraits, Wyatt removed the fireplace from the Director’s Court Room in India House before it was demolished in 1861, and, by placing it in the Council Chamber with the Coote, Lawrence, and Hastings portraits and the seat of the Secretary of State for India, lie drew a connection between the days of Company rule in British South Asia and the new system of state control in British India. Illustration 35. H e India Office Council Chamber, FCO.4 4 Photograph scanned from Foreign and Commonwealth Office (London: The Stationery Office, 2000), plate 20. 3 09 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. The imagery of the fireplace is telling. Commissioned of the Flemish sculptor Michael Rysbrack by the Company in 1730, the central relief-panel shows Britannia, a seated female figure in classical dress.3 She holds a trident as evidence of her mastery of the seas. At Britannia's feet, along the bottom of the scene, reclines a naked, male river god representing the Thames. Along the visual path defined by the Thames, two additional, bare-breasted female figures - Africa and Asia, escorted by a lion and a camel respectively - approach the enthroned Britannia to present her with the wealth of the imperial world. In Illustration 36. Fireplace Bas-Relief, Michael Rysbrack Fireplace, India Office Council Chamber, FCO.6 Asia’s hands, a treasure box, over-flowing with jewels, represents the treasures of the east, and two naked infants, protected in the folds of Britannia’s robes, play innocently with strings of jewels and pearls that have already accumulated at her feet. In the background of 5 For more on the relationship between fee EIC and eighteenth-century artists, see Geoff Quilley, “Signs of Commerce: The East India Company and the Patronage of Eighteenth-Century British Ait,” in The Worlds of the East India Company, ed. H.V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), 184-187. 6 Photograph scanned from Mildred Archer, The India Office Collection o f Paintings and Sculpture. (London: The British Library, 1986), 13. 310 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. the scene, two European ships set sail across the ocean to bring further wealth and imperial splendor back to Britannia’s throne. Rysbrack’s bas-relief is a potent addition to Wyatt’s Council Chamber. Located across from the Coote portrait and the Secretary of State for India’s place at the Council table, the fireplace commanded the attention of the new British Raj as it had commanded the attention of the EIC’s directors at Leadenhall Street. Rysbrack’s scene serves as an admission that empire was profitable for Britain, and its continued prominence at India House and the India Office seems to implicate both the state and the company in the rapacious accumulation of wealth that was a central feature of British imperialism. In the scene, the wealth of empire flows unproblematically back to Britannia’s feet where it is enjoyed without question by the purest and most innocent of her subjects. There is no hint here that luxury might be a corrupting influence. Perhaps even more strikingly still, Rysbrack’s sculpture marks out gendered economies of empire that were never fully represented either by the structures of company rule or by the sinews of state raj. In the bas-relief, the profitability of empire is not limited to wealth alone. Asia and Africa come before Britannia bearing pearls, jewels, and other traditional markers of wealth as well as the animals and resources of their lands. Indeed, the two figures seem themselves to be offerings to Britannia, their exposed breasts suggesting an erotically charged offering to accompany the camels, lions, diamonds, and pearls. The colonized female body becomes as much a sacrifice to the forces of colonization as do the riches they are presenting to Britannia. Subjected to Britannia’s gaze, Asia and Africa have also earned the almost lascivious attention of the river god Thames whose head is lifted over Ms shoulder and whose eyes are upturned to stare at the exposed bodies of the colonized women. 311 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Through Rysbrack’s relief-scene, first the men who directed the EIC and then the men who oversaw the Government of India, saw British imperialism in South Asia as a profitable venture. Ships sailed out; profits flowed in. Britannia sat dominant on her throne; the imperial world kow-towed in supplication. Using Rysbrack’s scene as its point of departure, this chapter will explore alternate perspectives from those of the men whose work, either in the Council Chamber or the Director’s Court Room, physically centered on the fireplace and its iconography. In doing so, it will demonstrate the ways in which Rysbrack’s relief could be at once a paean to British imperialism and the riches, spoils, and grandeur it brought to Britain and an iconographic representation of some of the tensions wrought by empire in the metropolitan world. When we move beyond the iconographic representation of the female figure of Britannia to explore the lives and experiences of those British women who were exposed to Britain’s South Asian empire in the last half of the eighteenth century, either directly or through their connections to men who were involved in the project of colonizing South Asia, Rysbrack’s representation of Asia and Africa becomes more complex. The unquestioned benefit of the flow of imperial profit into metropolitan Britain falters. It was after all women, the wives and daughters of the nabob class, who wore the much-mythologized diamonds of India, animating the luxury of empire in domestic settings, and they, like the naked children playing with strings of pearls in Britannia’s robes, became more visibly the target of anti-imperial critiques even than did their husbands, fathers, and brothers who built the British empire in South Asia. In addition to charging the domestic scene around Britannia’s throne with the threat of luxury, Asia and Africa also carve out a sexualized space between Britannia and Thames, distracting the attention of the European pair away from one another. For the river god 312 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Thames, the female representatives of Asia and Africa and not Britannia become Ms fantasy, and, for Britannia, they become a radical, erotic, and liberating alternative to her own classical femininity expressed in the robes which fully veil her body, from just above her ankles to the base of her neck. Britannia has received the riches of Asia and Africa, opening the possibility that she might likewise adopt their sexual mores - an act that would, by the nineteenth century, come to threaten what was seen as the racial purity of British progeny in South Asia. Asia and Africa tempt the European male and threaten the normative models established for the European female; they are a gendered and a dangerous presence in Rysbrack’s representation of Britannia’s kingdom. Rysbrack’s bas-relief offers an ambiguous iconographic message and, through its continued prominence first in the India House at Leadenhall Street and later at the India Office, which is now itself incoiporated into the ECO, an enduring visual text from which to begin the exploration of gendered relationships within the British imperial context. By studying the reception given to women who themselves went to South Asia in the last half of the eighteenth century alongside women who were related to men who did so, this chapter will show that women were profoundly capable of representing the changes wrought by empire within domestic society. Indeed, because they so tightly bound questions of empire, luxury, and sexuality, women became disproportionately the target of anti-imperial criticism. If the figure of the nabob was widely known as a rapacious villain, a burglar and a thief, it was his female counterpart, the nabobina, who drew the sharpest criticism in domestic settings because it was she who most concretely exposed the domestic economic implications of Britain’s imperial presence in South Asia. It was she who exposed the charged relationships, both sexual and increasingly, racial, between South Asians and Europeans, and it was she who defined the changes wrought in the social and economic 313 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. structure of domestic British society by the influx of imperial wealth and luxury from South Asia. U nsettled Seas: Gender Relations and the Passage to India Historians of the eighteenth century have rightly noted that western women were not readily invited to participate in the exploration, settlement, and conquest of the imperial world. Ann Laura Stoler’s work has made much of the cultural transition that was wrought in the fabric of western imperial settlements in South, Southeast, and East Asia upon the arrival of western women at the invitation of the various European East India companies beginning in the late eighteenth century.7 This fact should not blind us to the presence of small numbers of western women in the imperial world throughout the eighteenth century and the significant role they played in that world.8 Though difficult, it is not impossible to find examples of women sailing onboard British East Indiamen as early as the first quarter of the eighteenth century. One example, Judith Weston, later Mrs. John Fullerton, sailed from London to Madras on board the Stretham under Captain George Westcott in 1724, and she recorded in her travel log that “there was [sic] four women passengers beside myself’ onboard.9 Thirty-one years later, in 1753, the son of a country vicar whose “father’s finances were too much deranged to support [him] at the university,” was pleased rather than surprised to find that “we had two ladies on board” the East Indiaman that was taking Mm to 7 See Ann Laura Staler, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia,” in Feminism and History, ed. Joan Wallaeh Scott (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 220-225. See also, Sen, 123-129. See also, Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 176-179. 8 For more on women and travel in the eighteenth century, see Brian Dolan, Ladies o f die Grand Tour: British Women in Pursuit o f Enlightenment and Adventure in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Harper Collins, 2001). 9 Judith Weston, Account o f a Voyage to Madras, OIOC Mss Eur B162,1. 314 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. assume his position with the Bengal Army. Possessed of “piety enough, and faith enough to have become one of the most distinguished sons of the church,” the new recruit to the EIC’s Bengal army, found good company in the two women. His “zeal for religion” won him the favor of Mrs. Jewel, the eldest, who was “about fifty, precise, formal, splenetic, and a devotee,” and he wrote of his desire to win the same of the younger traveler, her niece, who was “about twenty, gay, rompish, a little of the Coquette, and by no means destitute of w it”1 0 Mrs. Jewel and her niece, therefore, reflect the small population of British women who found themselves bound for South Asia in the eighteenth century. As we shall see, there were many reasons that a woman might leave Europe for the imperial world in this period, but the diary of Mr. Harvey, the vicar’s son, does not provide us with the Jewels’ exact justification. It does expose the fluid nature of the gendered social networks that were possible during the long voyage from London to South Asia onboard an East Indiaman in the late eighteenth century. As Laura Brown has argued, the ocean “was a foreground topic of national and cultural contemplation in this period.”1 1 It represented commerce, trade, and empire, but it also represented instability. Seafaring, as Philip Morgan has suggested, was an unstable activity; it “not only linked the different parts of the world together. ..but also stood as a world apart.”1 2 In the eighteenth century, the passage to India was a long and arduous one. Travel, as we must always recall, was not the romantic adventure that it has become in the modem world. It was hard work, and those who traveled to India would have looked more like 1 0 Mr. Harvey, The Fortunate Englishman, QIOC Mss Eur B 248,1-9. 1 1 Brown, Fables of Modernity, 57. 1 2 Philip D. Morgan, 58-59. See also Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh’ s Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theater on the Bounty (New York: Cambridge University press, 1994), 142-153. 315 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. doughty pioneers than vacationing travelers to twenty-first century observers. Life onboard a ship was boring, cold, damp, and tedious, and the behavior of travelers onboard East Indiamsn was widely known to be uproarious. Writing home in February 1771, Philip Pittman remembered that “drinking and gaming prevailed too much” onboard the East Indiaman that had carried him to South Asia. “My ill state of health and natural aversion to any excess totally prevented my being what they termed an honest fellow ," he confessed.1 3 For women onboard an East Indiaman, the voyage, which could take the better part of a year, was complicated by lopsided gender ratios. If we assume that Mrs. and Miss Jewel were the only two women onboard the East Indiaman with Mr. Harvey, and we have no reason to believe that Mr. Harvey, who took such a keen interest in the Jewels, would have failed to notice other women onboard as well, the male to female ratio would easily have approached fifty to one. As Kathleen Wilson has correctly noted, the last half of the eighteenth century saw a flurry of new legislation in Britain dealing with acts of sexual impropriety, and acts of sexual aggression onboard commercial and naval ships were a particular concern to authorities. Acts of sodomy onboard were, Wilson has argued, particularly destabilizing because of their implications in domestic settings and because such acts positioned British men as “womanly” vis-a-vis colonized populations around the globe.1 4 A documented and seriously debated concern of the day, the sexual frustrations of male sailors onboard naval and merchant ships could only, as Mr. Harvey admits, have been stirred to a frenzy by the presence of women onboard ship.1 5 Harvey himself noted that he “was extremely disposed to fall in love with” the young Miss Jewel, and he lamented that she kept him “at a distance with the most mortifying contempt.” It is not hard to imagine 1 3 Philip Pittman to his parents, 27 February 1771, OIOC Mss Eur E 334/5. 1 4 Wilson, The Island Race, 169-200. 1 5 See Ibid., 98. 316 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. that Miss Jewel, the only young, single female on board an East Indiaman that could easily have carried more than an hundred young male sailors, could have earned the similar affections of many of the men on board. For a young woman in Miss Jewel’s position, the passage from London to Calcutta was a threatening journey. For the duration of the trip, she would have been a veritable captive onboard, subject to the gaze and the advances of men like Mr. Harvey. At the same time, the long journey had the potential to be bewitching, if not empowering, for the young Miss Jewel. Mr. Harvey admitted to the privacy of his journal that her presence onboard the ship and her persistent refusal to accept his advances literally turned his world on its head. It was, he noted, Miss Jewel who controlled the fate of the couple’s non-existent relationship. Harvey wrote that he spent a great deal of time during the passage trying to win her attention and affection and to reclaim his place as the dominant figure in the relationship. To do so, Harvey decided to win the attention and confidence of Miss Jewel’s aunt and guardian. “I spent,” he wrote, “the greatest part of my time in the cabin of this good lady, occupied only in spirituals.” As such, both Mrs. Jewel’s devotion to faith and her status as her niece’s guardian cast her within a more traditionally feminine role - one that seemed more familiar to Harvey than his relationship with the younger Miss Jewel - and he was not ashamed to admit that he exploited that understanding to win access to the younger lady. Miss Jewel further complicated Harvey’s preconceived notions of femininity because she seems not to have been swayed by her aunt’s devotion or by the close relationship he was able to cultivate with the older woman. “Miss Jewel,” he noted, “had little taste for divine love, and, when the aunt and I began to glow with the holy fervour, 3 1 7 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. would generally seek a less celestial edification on the quarter deck with” the other men.1 6 Miss Jewel was, after all, the sole eligible female onboard. She could, as Harvey learned, easily afford to spum the attentions of a single suitor, and she could do so time and time again with impunity. Onboard ship, Mrs. and Miss Jewel represented a precarious presence twice over. Miss Jewel was always the object of potentially uncontrolled male sexual attention even as she held power over the men of the ship to whom she could parcel out or deny her affections. Even Mrs. Jewel, whose sole purpose on board seems to have been the traditionally feminine role of the elder female chaperone to her young, innocent, and unmarried niece, became a tool to be manipulated by travelers on board like Harvey. Indeed, Mrs. Jewel found, as the passage continued, that she herself was not safe while en route to India. As the ship entered warmer waters, Harvey wrote that Mrs. Jewel wore “a light sundress” that made her appear “more than usually attractive.” Furthermore, the tropical heat threw “an extraordinary degree of languor into her features.” The heat seems also to have increased the devotion of the couple’s prayers, which, as Harvey wrote, became both spiritual and physical exercises. On one particularly heated day, in the privacy of the lady’s cabin, Harvey wrote that he drew his “chair close to hers and had even taken possession of her hand, which,” he noted, “I pressed or relaxed in proportion to my zeal.” The couple was, in fact, so intent upon our divine beatitude, that we did not hear the boatswain’s whistle giving notice that the ship’s tack was going to be changed. In consequence of this inattention to worldly concerns, we were thrown with some violence to the contrary side of the cabin.. .It was my unhappy fate to M l directly upon the Lady, and the first thing I noticed was a certain disorder in her dress which I endeavoured to compose. Whether Mrs. Jewel mistook my intentions, or whether the poor lady’s fright had given a shock to her senses, I know not; but certain it is, we got still worse entangled, and how we should have got out of it is uncertain if Miss Jewel had not at that 1 6 Mr. Harvey, The Fortunate Englishman, 16-17. 318 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. instant entered the cabin, and by a pious ejaculation of ‘Lord ha’ mercy’ restored Mrs. Jewel to the use of her senses in a moment1 7 The arrival of Miss Jewel compromised both her aunt and Mr. Harvey. Harvey quickly moved to try to explain to the younger lady that he had not attacked his religious companion but that, as the ship had changed tack, he had been thrown on top of Mrs. Jewel. He was not shocked when “the good lady saw the horror of her situation in it’s [sic] true light, and began to defend her virtue with prodigious agility,” but he was flummoxed to find that her defense failed to match his own. It had not, Mrs. Jewel declared, been a change in the ship’s tack that had caused the scene. ‘ Tack, me to tacks,” she exclaimed. “It was you. You wanted to ravish me.” Harvey tried to defend himself against the charges, noting that Mrs. Jewel, “in her delirium, had only breathed out a few imploring sighs.” But, Harvey’s efforts to turn aspersions against aspersions were met by those of Mrs. Jewel who continued to “cuss, kick, and tear,” insisting that “You wanted to ravish me, you know you did but the Lord delivered me.”1 8 There but for the grace of God, it seems, Mrs. Jewel felt herself to have been threatened physically by Mr. Harvey even as he had, by his own admission, been using their shared religiosity to win access to Miss Jewel. Having been exposed by this incident with Mrs. Jewel, Mr. Harvey did not long dwell on his defeat. He discovered “at the house of a jolly Dutch widow” at the Cape of Good Hope “two fair daughters whom it was impossible not to love. They were so plump and short, and round, and had a carriage so engaging and free.”1 9 Whether British or Dutch, Harvey seems to have viewed women within the imperial 1 1 Ibid., 17-18. 1 9 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 28-29. 319 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. world as targets for his sexual appetite,2 ® At the same time, his encounters with Mrs. and Miss Jewel are demonstrative of the ways in which the stable and gendered social patterns on shore in the metropolitan world were destabilized during the long passage to empire. Throughout the whole of the eighteenth century, no story of sexual impropriety and transgression at sea en route to India more profoundly shocked domestic sensibilities or had more far reaching political ramifications in imperial and domestic affairs, however, than did the illicit love affair between Warren Hastings and Anna Maria Appolonla von Imhoff (nde Chapusettin). Anna von Imhoff was, by birth, a German, having been bom in 1747, as N.W. Wraxall was later to recall, “in his Britannic Majesty’s electoral dominions.”2 1 Married to a struggling portrait and historical painter, the Baron Carl von Imhoff, from her native country, Anna von Imhoff had championed the cause of her husband and their mutual finances with her childhood friend Juliana Schwellenberg, who had left her native homeland to serve as one of the two official keepers of the robes to Queen Charlotte, consort to King George III. Through Schwellenberg, the Imhoffs won influence at court but, as Mildred Archer has shown, “the prospects for many painters in Britain were dull” in the middle years of the eighteenth century. At a time when portraiture was devalued as an artistic form and when the market of portrait painters was, simply stated, glutted, a portrait painter was hard pressed to earn a living in eighteenth-century London. Many portraitists looked to the imperial world to make their fortunes.2 2 This hope then, that he could acquire “by his pencil a more rapid fortune in Asia than he could probably expect to gain in Europe,” induced von Imhoff to petition for permission to leave for India, and, with the assistance of Queen 2 0 See Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). 2 1 N. W. Wraxall, Posthumous Memoirs, 3 vols. (London, 1884), i, 168. 2 2 Archer, India in British Portraiture, 35-36. 320 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Charlotte, Imhoff, his wife, and their young son left London for Madras in the winter of 1768.2 3 Like the Jewels, Anna von Imhoff was one of the few women sailing for South Asia onboard the Duke o f Grafton. She and her family reserved a small stateroom just one deck down from the roundhouse, the most luxurious quarters on board. Typically reserved for the highest-ranking official on board ship, the roundhouse on the Duke o f Grafton was the temporary home of Warren Hastings who had only recently been named the second to the council at Fort Saint George. Hastings and Anna von Imhoff, whom he called Marian, had never met prior to their encounters onboard the Duke o f Grafton, but, as had been the case for Mr. Harvey and the women of the Jewel family, the voyage to South Asia onboard an East Indiaman proved to be a social crucible in which relationships were forged more quickly than they might have been on land and with far fewer constraints. Thomas Babington Macaulay, writing more than half a century later, identified the situation as nothing short of “perilous.” He wrote that there are very few people who do not find a voyage which lasts several months insupportably dull. Anything is welcome which may break that long monotony, a sail, a shark, an albatross, a man overboard. Most passengers find resource in eating twice as many meals as on land. But the great devices for killing time are quarrelling and flirting. The facilities for both these exciting pursuits are great...Under such circumstances met Warren Hastings and the Baroness von Imhoff, two persons whose accomplishments would have attracted notice in any court of Europe.. .An attachment sprang up, which was soon strengthened by events such as could hardly have occurred on land.2 4 By all accounts, the attraction between Hastings and Marian von Imhoff was instantaneous. “In the course of their voyage,” wrote N.W. Wraxall, “Hastings formed a 2 3 Wraxall, i, 169. 2 4 Macaulay, “Warren Hastings,” 258-259. 321 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. very strong attachment to her.”2 5 This attachment was only solidified, Macaulay noted, when von Imhoff nursed Hastings back to health from a serious fever that he contracted en route. “Long before the Duke o f Grafton reached Madras,” Macaulay wrote, “Hastings was in love.”2 6 Upon their arrival in Madras, the Imhoffs arranged to reside with Hastings at Ms residence, but Baron von Imhoff was not to remain long in South Asia. By all accounts, the von Imhoffs mutually favored dissolving their marriage, wMch “having been originally celebrated in Germany, was asserted to be capable of dissolution by mutual consent.”2 7 That Hastings had come between the von Imhoffs was shocking enough, but the story did not end there. Carl von Imhoff left British India without his wife but with rougMy ten thousand pounds in cash paid to Mm by Hastings. The failed painter returned to Europe where he “bought an estate out of the produce of Ms wife’s attractions.”2 8 Warren Hastings and Marian von Imhoff remained in Madras together until 1772, the year in wMch Hastings was promoted from the council at Fort S t George to head the government of Bengal at Calcutta and the year in wMch the von Imhoff divorce was finalized. As Wraxall noted, “Mrs. Imhoff followed her lover to Calcutta, and as soon as her former husband had transmitted authentic intelligence that the divorce was obtained, the new governor-general of India legalized Ms connection by the solemnities of wedlock.”2 9 As the Jewels had discovered, the voyage to empire was, quite literally, a fluid space in wMch the social boundaries of the metropolitan world disintegrated. For Harvey and the women of the Jewel family, gendered MerarcMes were turned on their head, set right, and then turned over once more. For Hastings and the von Imhoffs, marriage itself became a 2 5 Wraxall, i, 170. 2 6 Macaulay, “Warren Hastings,” 258-259. See also Bernstein, 59. 2 7 Wraxall, i, 170. 2 8 Ibid. 2 9 Ibid., i, 170-171. 322 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. permeable barrier that was breached first in the confined social space of the ship and later transmuted from a spiritual to an economic bond in which Marian von Imhoff became a sexualized commodity. But, Marian von Imhoff was no pawn in the relationship. Rather, it was she who was understood to have been a prime mover in the illicit love triangle. For Macaulay, Marian von Imhoff, now Hastings, emerged from the affair as a domineering figure. She had, he wrote, “been bom under the Artie Circle,” but she was destined now to “play the part of a Queen under the tropic of Cancer.”3 0 Wraxall noted that most of the charges that were laid against Hastings during his long impeachment could be explained through his wife’s behavior as she was both “rich and rapacious.’0 1 It was not mid-nineteenth-century historians and social commentators alone who noted the vaguely tawdry associations that accrued to Marian Hastings. William Macintosh noted in 1779 that Hastings governed in South Asia with an “avowed contempt” for the will of the Court of Directors and his employers at the EIC’s headquarters on Leadenhalt Street because he was spellbound - held captive and under the influence of “a foreign lady.” 3 2 The novelist Fanny Burney, who served Queen Charlotte alongside Juliana Schwellenberg as the Second Keeper of the Queen’s robes, noted that “those accounts about Mrs. Hastings and the history of her divorce are very unpleasant anecdotes in the public newspapers.” When Marian Hastings visited court upon her return to London in 1784, Burney furthermore lamented that any stain should wear off on the royal family. “I am sorry,” she wrote, “that [such reports] should be told in the same paragraph that mentions her being received by the Queen.”3 3 3 0 Macaulay, “Warren Hastings,” 258-259. 3 1 Wraxall, i, 171. 3 2 Macintosh, i, 156. 3 3 Frances Burney, The Diary and Letters o f Frances Burney, Madam D ’ Arblay, 2 vols., ed. Sarah Chauncey Woolsey (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1910), i, 264. 323 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Despite tier worry for the Queen’s reputation, Fanny Bumey found a great deal to like in Marian Hastings. She wrote that she found her “a lively and very pleasing wife” to Warren Hastings, and she often dined with the Hastings at their Beaumont Lodge home in Old Windsor in the summer of 1786. For Bumey, Marian Hastings’ table was sumptuous and educational. The dining room was filled with pictures of Indian landscapes, the table conversation revolved around the Hastings’ life in South Asia, two Indian men waited on the table, the meal was served on fine Indian porcelain and included items like steamed Indian rice that the young novelist had never before tasted.3 4 At the same time, Bumey “disliked the kind of showy dressing and ostentatious display of oriental gems with which Marian Hastings was associated, and which had proved a gift to satirists.”3 5 And, the fact remained that Marian Hastings was a divorcee, and that fact alone was enough to make Bumey uncomfortable. Fanny Bumey was not alone in criticizing divorcees in eighteenth-century British society. The Female Spectator had lambasted second marriages nearly forty years before Queen Charlotte received Marian Hastings. “There have been,” the magazine had noted, “fewer happy second marriages than blazing stars.”3 6 Marian Hastings was not unique in British society in the late eighteenth century. What distinguished her from other divorcees was the fact that her husband was the governor-general of all British possessions in South Asia, and her connection to him, as Macaulay had noted, earned her the veritable status of “Queen” in British India. The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser had announced as 3 4 Hester Davenport, Faithful Handmaid: Fanny Bumey at the Court o f George M L (Thrapp, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2000), 150. 3 5 Davenport, 150. 3 6 The Female Spectator (London, 1748), 178. Reproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. much in October of 1784 when it reported on the titles that Warren and Marian Hastings had assumed in India. Mr. Hastings, the paper noted, had a seal that, when translated, read Nabob Governor General Hastings, sm b Pillar of the Empire, The Fortunate in War and Hero, The most Princely of Offspring of the Loins, Of the King of the Universe, The Defender of the Mahomedaa Faith, And Asylum of the World, &c, &c, &c, &c. Mrs. Hastings, the paper added, possessed a large ruby on which was inscribed: Royal and Imperial Governess, The Elegance of the Age, The most exalted BilMss, The Zobaide of the Palaces, The most Hercick Princess, Ruby Marian Hastings, Sauby, &c, &c. According to the report, the ruby listed those “titles either given to, or assumed by Mrs. Hastings.” The report further explained the titles to the reading public, noting that “Bilkiss Illustration 37. Mrs. Hastings, John Zoffany, Calcutta, I783-4.3 7 3 7 Portrait Scanned from A rcher, India and British Portraiture, plate 82. 325 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. signifies the person called in the Bible history the Queen of Sheba; and Zobaide was a favourite wife of Mahomed.” To compare a woman to either, the report added, was to “pay the highest compliments” to her and to suggest that she “possessed the most exalted beauty, and perfection of every kind.”3 8 It was Hastings’ connection to empire that elevated her above other divorcees in domestic Britain in the last half of the eighteenth centuiy and earned her a reception at court. Burney’s criticism of Marian Hastings’ marital history and her concerns about the royal family’s connections with the former-Baroness von Imhoff are particularly compelling when considered alongside the young novelist’s sympathies for Warren Hastings during the many years of his impeachment. Bumey was not, it is clear, one to be critical of empire per se. At the same time, Marian Hastings represented the human realities of the social instabilities in the imperial world, and, from Burney’s vantage point, she did so at the very feet of the British throne itself. That the voyage to empire allowed for certain social transgressions was one thing. To flaunt those transgressions at the very center of metropolitan power was quite another thing all together. An astute social observer, Bumey recognized that Marian Hastings posed a serious threat to the moral reputation of the court. The Threats of Empire: British W omen in Eighteenth-Century.South Asia The instability of domestic gender relationships did not end when an East Indiaman docked in South Asia. Rather, as the voyage to empire turned travelers’ worlds on their heads, it also changed the travelers themselves. As Fanny Bumey had recognized and, indeed, feared when the Queen received Marian Hastings, the experience of empire rendered people different to metropolitan observers. Those who went out to empire crossed the dark waters, experienced ways of life that were not like the metropolitan world, and were branded 3 8 The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, Tuesday October 7,1784. 326 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. by the experience - marked as different in metropolitan circles. For women like Marian Hastings, this transformation was the result of a confluence of experiences that began in the fluid social settings of the voyage out to empire and which continued in the imperial world not only within the context of European communities and settlements but also through encounters at the frontiers of the imperial world between colonizing Europeans and native populations. Life in the three EIC presidency towns in South Asia remained confined in the last half of the eighteenth century. While all three cities expanded considerably in the period, the European populations of each remained relatively small, and the geographic scope of each was limited. Life on shore in South Asia reflected the same confining social atmosphere that had prevailed onboard the ship en route to the subcontinent Elizabeth Davidson, wife of Alexander Davidson, a member of the Madras Council and the acting governor of Madras from 1785 to 1786, noted that the society of women in that town was particularly suffocating. “Than Madras,” she wrote on 2 April 1788, “Hell’s not worse.”3 9 What inspired Davidson to ruminate on her life in Madras was the eminent departure from the city of a Mrs. G , and she recorded her thoughts in a ballad dedicated to “the melancholy event” of Mrs. G ’s departure. Mrs. G , as Davidson describes her, was the “terror of women” in Madras society, and she gave thanks that, with Mrs. G------- gone, Each lady divine, In turband [sic] may shine, Or with brown more tempting than faster; May dress at her ease, and say what she please.4 0 3 9 Family Correspondences of Alexander Davidson and his wife, Elizabeth (nde Pigou), OIOC Mss Eur E30G/5-6, p. 51. 4 0 Ibid. 327 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Confined in a small, tightly packed, and isolated community of Europeans, Elizabeth Davidson found that she and the other western women of Madras were dominated by the strong-willed personality of Mrs. G , but it was not Mrs. G alone that Davidson found objectionable. Her ballad complained of Mrs. Strange and her extravagance. And, as for Mrs. Lurein, Davidson wrote, What would best suit you, If you had but your due, O could I but give it! Is whipping!4 1 Indeed, there was little that Davidson found pleasing about living in Madras. “That I quickly depart,” she wrote, brought “great joy to my heart, instead of it’s [sic] being distressing.”4 2 Davidson’s ballad highlighted the constricted nature of colonial society in British South Asia at the end of the eighteenth century - a society that, in many ways, reflected the confined, closed in, and unstable world of the passage to empire itself. But, to a metropolitan audience, it was not so much that Madras was filled with overbearing personalities in a closed-in social setting that would have attracted attention. Rather, it was Davidson’s almost passing reference to British women’s dressing in South Asian fashions. “Each lady divine,” she had written, could, after the departure of Mrs. G , “shine” in her “turband.” To domestic eyes and ears then, Mrs. G would have seemed the enforcer of stable norms of social etiquette and decorum - a regulator without whom the rest of the women in Madras seem, if Mrs. Davidson’s ballad is to be believed, to have crossed cultural boundaries that divided British society from that of Britain’s South Asian colonies. 4 1 Ibid. ^ Ibid. 3 2 8 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Davidson’s mention of British women in turbans is admittedly only a passing reference in her ballad, but hers is not the only evidence of British women in late eighteenth- century South Asia who were tempted by the dress of the Indian subcontinent. Indeed, only five years before Davidson sat to write her ballad, Mrs. Elizabeth Sophia Plowden, wife of Richard Chictieley Plowden, a future director of the East India Company, wrote from Calcutta to her sister Lucy in London of a masquerade that had recently taken place at Fort St. William. “I think,” wrote Elizabeth Plowden to her sister, “an account of the Character I was in may entertain you” because “I had long had this idea that of an Indostani or Cashmiri Singer would make an excellent group at masquerade.’*3 Unlike Davidson, who has left no record of why or under what circumstances the women of Madras in 1788 might have worn turbans, Plowden has made it quite clear that her costume was less an act of cultural admiration for South Asian dress than it was a more traditional cultural appropriation by a highly-placed and influential British woman in Calcutta society. At the same time, Plowden also makes it clear that her costume for the masquerade was culturally rooted and authentic in ways that it could not have been had it not been for her own connections to and contacts with the colonized populations of Bengal. The authenticity of her costume was certified by “a boy who had dark hair and eyes and look’d Cashmiri.” His claims were verified, not to mention translated, by Mrs. Graham, “who is perfect master of the Persian and Indostani languages.”4 4 “Mine,” wrote Plowden, “was a very elegant dress.” The body of the gown, she told her sister, was made of silver gauze, a “pattern of banded Muslim messages banded all round 4 3 Elizabeth Sophia Plowden to her sister, Lucy, 4 April 1783, OIOC Mss Eur B 187,9. 4 4 Ibid., 10. 329 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. on the inside with more colours.” Over the gown, she wore a long-sleeved drape with a “waist so shamely short that it terminated at the pit of my stomach.” Beneath it all, she wrote, “my Pie Jammas were of dark green silk with gold small flowers fastind [sic] with a more clever firing [sic] and green and gold tasels [sic].” On her feet, Plowden wore slippers that “were according to the fashion of the Country work’d richly in gold and silver.” On her head, she wore a “turban.. .of more colour Muslin with a silver Tasel [sic] and a band of silver embroidery around it which fastened in front with a Clasp of jewels composed of Rubies, Diamonds, and Emeralds.” Her “hair was of course out of powder and plaited in a broad plait which came up loosely on one side over the Turban and fasten’d in at the top of the Turban.” Topping off the entire costume, Plowden wrote, were her Indian jewels. In my ear I had gold earrings. On my neck a locket of jewels fasten’d with a Mack twist and below this a gold necklace, and the prodigious long wreath of gold beads that went over my Shoulder and hung down below my waist in front and the same behind fasten’d with a clasp of jewels at the breast and. ..at the back. I had bracelets of jewels on my arms, and some on my wrists, a ring on my finger and one on my thumb the size of a guinea and a looking glass set in gold which is quite in stile. My nails and insides of my hands were colour’d red which is the custom with eastern ladies. I had bells on my feet and a gold ring ornament with beads thro’ the nose of my mask which gave me a compleat [sic] Industani appearance.4 5 Elizabeth Plowden was not alone in praising her performance as a South Asian singer. “I had,” she wrote, “an infinite number of fine compliments on my appearance” throughout the party - though she admits that she was relieved when she was able to remove her mask and once more “speak in my own Language.”4 6 Likewise, Plowden was not the only British woman in Calcutta to dress in South Asian fashions for the masquerade. A visiting group of her friends from Lucknow humored her plans for the masquerade and dressed in similar costumes to hers while acting the part of her band of musicians. Together 4 5 ibid., 9-11. 4 6 Ibid., 1 1 . 330 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. the group caused quite a stir as they played and danced around the masquerade party “with a wonderful deal of grimaces and twisting” of their faces “into all kinds of forms.”4 7 But, lest her sister think that she did not shine fully, Plowden noted at the end of the letter that the others were “not so fine in jewels as I was, nor was it necessary. ..[as] I was the head of the set, I had forgot to tell you.”4 8 Clearly, Plowden was eager not only to share with her sister the fact that she had dared to dress as a South Asian dancing girl but also to boast of the triumph of her display. By placing a turban on her head, henna tattoos on her hands, a sari over her torso, and a ring in her nose, Plowden had not, to use the vocabulary of nineteenth-century observers of the raj, “gone native,” but she had - even if only as a masquerade - tip-toed at the very boundaries of cultural identity that separated Britons and their South Asian subjects. In a world where clothing was one of the most significant markers of human difference, she had converted herself into an imperial hybrid - a British body in an Indian costume. She made herself a living pastiche of the imperial experience, and, as her letter to Lucy demonstrates, she had relished every moment of the performance.4 9 As Mildred Archer has rightly noted, very few British subjects in South Asia actually wore Indian dress while they lived on the subcontinent, and fewer still moved about metropolitan communities in South Asian fashions once they returned home.® Plowden’s letter, however, is evidence that these same Britons did not attribute any shame to adopting * Ibid., 9. 4 8 Ibid., 11. 4 9 See Tobin, 85-96. See also, Wheeler, 17-25. See also Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross- Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 37. For further thoughts on the cultural appropriation of imperial “cross-dressing,” see Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions o f Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 141. See also, Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (New York: Atheneum, 1985). 5 0 Archer, India in British Portraiture, 412-413, 331 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. South Asian fashions in particular contexts. Rather, they felt fully comfortable sharing such episodes with metropolitan friends and family. Plowden is a particularly striking example. Just five years after writing her 1783 letter to Lucy, Plowden received a sanad from the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam. The sanad granted her the title “Begum” as well as naming her “the Bilkiss” of the age.5 ’ Like Marian Hastings, Plowden’s associations with British South Asia won her attention, praise, and stature, and, like Hastings, Plowden sought to celebrate her imperial personality in metropolitan settings as well. In 1797, having returned to Britain from South Asia, Plowden commissioned the London portraitist John Russell to paint a portrait of her and her children. The result is a portrait that shows Plowden, standing off to the right of the canvas, in an interior scene that opens onto a tropical garden of palm trees. Illustration 38. Mrs. Elizabeth Sophia Plowden and her Children, Iota Russell, London 1797.5 2 5 1 Ibid. s Portrait Scanned from a photograph courtesy of The Birla Museum, Pilani, Rajasthan, India. 332 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. In the painting, Plowden is dressed in a costume that bears remarkable similarities to the one she described to Lucy in the letter of 1783. If Plowden had not brought the actual dress home to London with her, then she most certainly provided Russell with a detailed description of it as she commissioned him to paint her portrait. To the left and rear of the image, a South Asian fan-bearer fans the family, and one of the three Plowden children reaches for his mother’s hand while the other two sit placidly in front of the South Asian servant All three, like their mother, are dressed in South Asian styles.3 3 Elizabeth Plowden’s experimentation with South Asian fashion was more than a fanciful way of enjoying a single masquerade in Calcutta. Rather, it became a significant statement about her own connections to South Asia that repeated itself at the 1783 masquerade, in the letter home to Lucy in London, and then in the Russell portrait of 1797. Not only does Plowden seem to have relished her connections to South Asia, she seems also to have been quite willing to have brought those connections to the fore - to have integrated them into her own perceptions of her self as expressed in the portrait she commissioned. She may not have worn South Asian fashions on a daily basis or as part of her routine life, but it does seem clear that Plowden was open about her experimentation with South Asian dress in both South Asian and metropolitan settings. Without, perhaps, meaning to do so, Elizabeth Plowden identified herself with South Asia, and most specifically, with the women of South Asia, by occasionally dressing as a South Asian dancing girt and by celebrating her own 3 Plowden’s description of herself, the portrait, and the pride she seems to have displayed in them both echo the famous portraits of Mary Wortley Montagu in Turkish dress following her trip to the East in the first decades of the eighteenth century. For more on Montagu’s “cross-dressing,” see Dianne Sachko MacLeod, “Cross-Dressing: Class, Gender, and Modernist Sexual Identity,” in Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture, ed. Julie Codell and Dianne Sachko MacLeod, 69-70 and 81-82. It was also possible for men to participate in this sort of cultural cross-dressing. Jean-Etienne dotard painted a portrait of Lord Sandwich in Turkish after the Earle's trip to the Middle East in 1739. For a copy of this portrait, see, John Brewer, A Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004), 226. 333 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. history in South Asia in the Russell portrait, this despite the fact that associations with South Asian women were often negative ones.5 4 Though she was at pains to assure Lucy that the costume she wore was “perfectly decent," Plowden does little else in her 1783 letter to distance herself from the popular associations of South Asian dancing women with prostitution and licentiousness, for, as Ann Staler’s work has shown, throughout the period in question more common than the western woman who had taken to wearing South Asian fashion was the western male who had taken a non-westem concubine.5 5 As such, South Asian concubines were, in this period, one of the most accessible sources of information about the native populations, and the native female populations in particular. As the memoirs of William Hickey demonstrate, the relationship between a European male in the imperial world with a non-westem concubine could be both profound and mutually edifying. Hickey, who traveled to South Asia with his wife Charlotte, was left a widower in 1783. Thirteen years later, he lost his concubine Jendanee in childbirth, and his record of her death is more emotive than had been that o f the death of his first wife. Jendanee was, he wrote, “as gentle and affectionately attached a girl as ever man was blessed with.” She was, he confessed, “my partner.”5 6 Between his marriage to Charlotte and his relationship with Jendanee, however, Hickey had taken as a concubine “a very pretty native girl” named Kiraun, and it was Kirann, rather than Jendanee, who most closely resembled the picture of the native women of South Asia that was popularized in late eighteenth-century metropolitan Britain. Kiraun, Hickey wrote, gave birth to a “young gentleman” twelve months after the couple met “I 5 4 For more on the perception of South Asian dancing girls, see John Fryer, 267. 5 5 See Staler, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Rower,” 220-225. See also, Sen, 123-129. See also, Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, 176-179. 5 6 Hickey, Memoirs of a Georgian Rake, 395. 334 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. certainly imagined,” he recorded in his diary later, that the child was “of my own begetting, though somewhat surprised at the darkness of my sone [sic] and heir’s complexion.” Mahogany, as the boy was named, lived with Kiraun and Hickey for many months until one afternoon when Hickey returned from a ride in the country unexpectedly to find Kiraun “closely locked in the arms of a handsome lad, one of my Kitmuddars with the infant by her side, all three being in a deep sleep.” After some questioning, Hickey “ascertained that this young man had partaken of Kiruan’s personal favours jointly with me from the first month of her residing in my house, and that my friend Mahogany was fully entitled to the deep tinge of skin he came into the world with, being the produce of their continued amour.”5 7 Hickey threw Kiraun and her lover out of his house, but he continued to tend to Mahogany’s expenses. Indeed, as a result of her disreputable behavior, Kiraun fell into no small amount of distress and, as Hickey recorded, “became a monthly pensioner of mine, and continued so during the many years I remained in Bengal.”5 8 It was not uncommon, therefore, for British males in South Asia to live with South Asian women, sharing their houses with them, their beds with them, and having children with them as a result, and, as Ann Stoler’s work has shown, it was only in this period that a backlash began to pick up steam against the practice of concubinage. The stain of the practice, however, accrued unequally to the British men and the non-western women who partook of it, and it served to promote the idea that South Asian women lived by moral codes that were lax compared with those of Europe. The London Chronicle offered a typical report of women in the Mysore court of Tipu Sultan in August 1784. The paper noted that “the comedians of the Court are all women.” A directress “purchases young girls at the age of 5 7 Hickey, Memoirs of William Hickey, ed. Alfred Spencer, iii, 267. * Ibid., 267-268. 335 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. four or five years who are chosen on account of their beauty.” These young gills were then taught “every accomplishment that can inspire the Prince and his Court with the love of pleasure; and their success is such that they delight and seduce the most sensible of men.” According to the Chronicle, these young girls first appeared in public, fully adorned with “painting” on their faces “in the same manner as the French women,” at the age of ten or eleven. Not unlike Mrs. Plowden at the masquerade, they would dress in “a fine gauze, very richly embroidered with gold.. .covered with jewels; their head, their neck, their ears, their breasts, their arms, fingers, legs, towes [sic] have their jewels; and even their nose is ornamented with a small diamond.” The overall effect, the paper had to acknowledge, was ‘Tar from being unpleasing,” but it was, at the same time, far from respectable. ‘T he directress of this company is paid by the Prince,” the paper reported, “but her emoluments are not known.”9 9 The figure of the South Asian female had, therefore, distinctive connotations in late eighteenth-century Britain. She was the concubine, the unfaithful lover, the dancing girl, the seducer, and, perhaps even, the prostitute, and these associations would have complicated attempts, like that of Elizabeth Plowden, to connect her own identity to her personal history in South Asia through the fashion of the South Asian female. It was not domestic perceptions of South Asian women alone that would have thwarted Plowden’s attempts. Western women returning from the imperial world, as Fanny Burney had noted when Queen Charlotte received Marian Hastings, were also viewed with some degree of suspicion. Marian Hastings was not, as has been noted, the only divorcee in late eighteenth- century Britain, but she was, as Fanny Burney’s commentary noted, the most prominent example of the lax moral codes that were made possible for western men and women alike in 5 9 The London Chronicle, Saturday August 14 to Tuesday August 17,1784. 336 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. imperial settings. Hastings had been the “Queen” of British India, and the example of her four-year affair, divorce, and remarriage seem to have epitomized the low standard of morality prevalent in British South Asia. Such certainly was the lesson of Henry Thompson’s small book, The Intrigues o f a Nabob: or, Bengal, the Fittest Soil fo r the Growth o f Lust, Injustice, and Dishonesty, that was published in London in 1780 and which was dedicated to the Directors of the EIC. From the age of 16, Henry Fred Thompson had served as a low-ranking employee of the company in Bengal. Sailing as the first mate on the East Indiaman Fox under Captain Hume, Thompson had, by 1764, made several passages between Bombay and China. While in Britain in 1767, Thompson met Sarah Bonner. She was, he reported in his text, the daughter of a small vessel master who had died leaving her mother to raise their young daughter. Bonner’s mother had quickly remarried, this time to a tailor by the name of Downing who had even more quickly spent the scant savings of the two women, forcing Sarah’s mother to send her daughter to live in service at the home of a Mr. Valentine. As Thompson narrated Bonner’s biography, she was repeatedly raped by Mr. Valentine, who eventually decided she was not fit for service in his house and turned her over to Fanny Herbert in Bow-Street where she was “introduced to several gentlemen.”6 0 Thompson first met Bonner, he recalled, outside a tavern at Covent Gardens, where local authorities had detained the young lady, along with several other residents of Herbert’s house, after the group had engaged in a public quarrel and caused a scene. Thompson was taken by Bonner’s beauty, and he approached her, noting that when she was free of “this very disagreeable business,” he would enjoy getting to know her better. He gave her a silver 6 0 Henry F. Thompson, The Intrigues o f a Nabob: or, Bengal, the Fittest Soil for the Growth of Lust, Injustice, and Dishonesty (London 1780), 21-22. 337 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. pencil case with his name engraved on it as a token of his intentions, and the two parted when Sarah and the other women were taken away to Herbert’s.6 1 A week later, Thompson wrote, he again happened to meet the young Miss Bonner. This time, she and her mother were on their way to Westminster Hall to register accusations of rape against Mr. Valentine. Promising Bonner a new life, Thompson convinced the 16- year-old girl to slip away from her mother with him, and the two of them, he noted, never saw her mother again. He took Bonner to buy a new wardrobe, let a small suite of rooms for them to live in, and set up house with her, but Thompson’s dreams of turning Bonner’s life around with his love did not shape up as smoothly as he might have hoped. “I soon discovered,” he wrote, “that our intercourse ha[d] impaired my health; in a word, I soon found the assistance of a surgeon absolutely necessary.”6 2 Having contracted venereal disease from the new-found love of his life, Thompson was “provoked beyond description,” but “instead of seeking my vengeance.. .1 felt myself so melted by her tears, so bewitched by her beauty in distress, that I could not think of revenge.” Indeed, Thompson thought only of deepening his relationship with Bonner. “I began to entertain some notion of making her my wife,” he recorded, “and was prevented only by a desire to be acquainted with her heart, and more fully satisfied of her constancy and attachment.”® Thompson’s work, however, came between him and his plans, as he was recommended by Governor Verelst of Bengal for a post in Calcutta in 1768. As he “intended to make India the constant place of [his] residence,” Thompson sent Sarah Bonner to live with his mother under the auspices that the couple had married, and “left direction 6 1 Ibid., 21-26. 6 2 Ibid., 26. ® Ibid., 27. 338 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. with my mother, to send my (supposed) wife, whom 1 shall henceforward call Mrs. Thompson, together with my sister, after me to the Indies.”6 4 In February 1770, two years after he had returned to Calcutta, Thompson learned that his “wife” had arrived in South Asia. To his shock, he learned that she had arrived onboard the Duke o f Grafton late in 1769, some five months earlier. At the time, Thompson had not met Warren Hastings and had not heard of his affair with Marian von Imhoff onboard the same ship that had brought the supposed-Mrs. Thompson to South Asia, but he nonetheless had serious doubts as to why his bride-to-be had not contacted him immediately upon her arrival in British India. The atmosphere of British society in South Asia was too compressed, however, for Thompson to act on his suspicions. “It is necessary to inform my readers,” he begged of his metropolitan audience, “that on account of the small number of European ladies in India, a constant intercourse between families is more encouraged there than in any other part of the world.”6 5 As had the Jewels, the von Imhoffs, and Elizabeth Davidson before him, Thompson soon discovered that simple demographics were enough to make life in British South Asia markedly different than life in metropolitan Britain. “Society is peculiarly cultivated,” he wrote of British South Asia. “Every house is open in the evening for the reception of such visitors, as wish to court the acquaintance of their neighbours. The Europeans all mutually receive and pay visits; and from this practice they all become personally acquainted.” In order to make “Mrs. Thompson’s” life as pleasant as possible and in order to avoid any “ Ibid., 28. 6 5 Ibid., 32. 3 3 9 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. scandal that might impair Ms own career, Thompson “readily conformed to fthisj custom wMch served to banish solitude, and enliven the hours.”6 6 By 1773, life in Calcutta had changed rather dramatically. Governor Verelst had stepped aside and been replaced by Warren Hastings, who had been followed to Calcutta, of course, by Marian von Imhoff. During the course of the year, the Regulating Act passed by Lord North’s administration reorganized the administration of British South Asia, placing the governor of Bengal above the governors of the other two presidencies at Madras and Bombay. Hastings became the governor-general of British India, and the various members of Ms council, including General John Clavering, Colonel George Monson, and Philip Francis, were dispatched from Britain onboard the Indiaman Ashburnham to assume their place alongside Hastings at Fort S t William. The fourth and final councilor, Richard Barwell, was already a resident in Calcutta. The son of a former governor of Bengal, Barwell, in fact, had been bom in Calcutta. Educated at Westminster School in Britain, he returned to South Asia afterwards where he served as a junior member of the Bengal council prior to the reforms of 1773. Amid the political transitions in Bengal in the early 1770s, Henry Thompson was pleased to count Richard Barwell as one of his benefactors. “I felt,” he wrote, “the greatest happiness in the acquisition of a friend, who promised me the whole weight of his influence and protection; nor did he confine himself to bare promises.”6 7 Barwell found the Thompsons a house in Calcutta and even pulled some strings to get Thompson an office that, wMle it required Thompson to be away from Calcutta a great deal, came with a £700 per 6 6 Ibid, 6 1 Ibid., 35. 3 4 0 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. year salary. Barwell further promised Us younger client that he would look after Mrs. Thompson and her sister-in-law while Henry Thompson was away on business. During all this time, Henry Thompson gave a great deal of thought to marrying Sarah Bonner, but the prospect presented a significant problem. In order to marry, the couple would require the permission of the governor, Warren Hastings. Asking for permission to marry would serve as an admission that Henry Thompson and Sarah Bonner were not married, indeed that they had perpetrated a substantial fraud on Calcutta society. Assured that Hastings, perhaps in part because of his own illicit relationship with the von Imhoffs, would not look favorably on such a revelation, Henry and Sarah “Thompson” continued to live fraudulently as man and wife in Calcutta well into the 1770s.6 8 Like so many others who had fled to South Asia for the sake of its anonymity, Thompson had used the imperial world to hide a secret, and he found himself trapped as a result.® He could not seek the permission of the governor; nor could he seek the advice of his patron, Barwell, who was quickly becoming Hastings’ only advocate on the council at Bengal and who would have been particularly sensitive to such a scandal. Any impediments to his marrying Sarah Bonner were only the beginning of Thompson’s woes. Upon returning to Calcutta from business outside of town one day, Thompson saw a messenger delivering a letter to his “wife.” When she refused to tell him who had sent her the letter, he began to suspect that he was not the singular object of her affection. He searched their home and found a trove of love letters written to his wife by the person he least expected, Richard Barwell.’ ® “It is now a matter of surprise to me, that I could remain as long as I did unsuspicious of my wife’s fidelity,” Thompson wrote in his m Ibid., 55. ® See Ellis, 84. 7 0 Thompson, The Intrigues o f a Nabob, 56-57. 341 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. small book to the EIC directors. “Nothing but the Mind confidence I reposed in her gratitude and attachment, and the high opinion I had of Mr. Barwell’s honour, could have prevented me from seeing, that I had long been the dupe of two designing persons.”7’ Thompson was shocked at the correspondence he had found. In one poem, The Dreams, and A Prayer to Love, to Make it True, Barwell had written, Mrs. Thompson, Thou lovely cause of all my pain, Of thee I boast, o f thee complain! By day thou art my darling theme, By night my wish’d-for, dearest dream; Then fancy gives what fate denies, And every recent joy supplies; Restores thee back with all thy charms, Incircled in my youthful arms; Then, how my heart exulting beats! In haze, I ravish all thy sweets; My busy hand all parts explore, I feel and feel thee o’er and o‘er. Instant my lips to thine I press, And please thee with the fond excess. Till Kindling with your lover’s fires, You bum with equal, fond desires, And yielding in love’s dear contest, You strive, by blessing to be blest. .. Then, then, in sobs which touch the heart, Ten thousand joys we each impart; Then closer clasp, as if we’d be One body, soul, eternally; Till lost in rapt’rous agony, We palpitate with extacy. And all convuls’d, the minn’ring sighs, The heart felt shudder, turn’d up eyes, Close the sweet act, and pleasure dies.7 2 Thompson wondered, “how could I gratify either [my resentment or my indignation] on a man who was possessed of sufficient power to crush me.”7 3 The answer, he decided, was to 7 1 Ibid., 53-54. 7 1 Ibid., 62. 7} Ibid., 97. 342 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. distance his “wife” from South Asia, the atmosphere in which she had teen so completely corrupted. “I felt a strong advocate for her in my breast,” he wrote, and “I had brought myself to think that she never would have listened to the addresses of Mr. Barwell, if he had not taught her to think despicably of me.”7 4 Despite Bonner’s past in Britain and the fact that he had not trusted her enough there to marry her before he left for India, Thompson seems to have been convinced that it was the influences of South Asia, and the lax moral world that promoted men like Barwell, that had led her astray. Thompson, therefore, offered her an income of £200 a year if she would return to London and wait there for him at the house of his mother. Bonner, however, was wont to distance herself from Barwell, who was, after all one of the five most powerful men in Calcutta and, as such, in all of British South Asia. Rather than leave herself, she suggested that Thompson should quit Calcutta. Barwell would, she suggested, bestow an annuity on him; he could leave Calcutta, and she would be free to live with his patron and her lover. Thompson was “stunned by the offer,” and, after he had recovered his senses, he plainly told her “how I despised her and her offer.” In response, Bonner threatened that she would not leave India and, with equal, clarity, announced that she would live no more in Thompson’s house. Sarah Bonner had won. There was little Thompson could do. He could not risk her telling Barwell of their fraudulent marriage, nor could he risk their story reaching the ears of Hastings or the rest of Calcutta society. The discovery, he noted, would have rendered every lady and gentleman in the settlements implacable against me, for having imposed on their acquaintance a harlot as my wife. Their indignation would have banished me from society, and not a perse® who had any reputation would have been seen in my company. My employment of course would either be taken from me, or I should have been 7 4 Ibid. 343 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. obliged to resign it, to starve in a strange country, where I could not find a friend, and where every countenance would be armed against me.7 5 Feeling not unlike Carl von Imhoff must have felt, Henry Thompson agreed to leave South Asia. He registered a deed of trust to Warren Hastings for £10,<000 to be paid to Sarah Thompson and the two children to whom she had given birth since her arrival in South Asia. Barwell and Bonner, in return, agreed that an annuity of £300 should be settled on Thompson, on condition that he never trouble the couple again. “As soon as this business was concluded,” Thompson wrote, “I quitted India, and with it all my hopes of fortune, and sailed for China” Such a route was necessary for had Thompson “resigned my employment at Calcutta, and sailed from thence for England, I must necessarily have taken Mrs. Thompson with me.”7 6 As such, Thompson sailed for China as if on business, leaving behind him a letter of resignation addressed to Barwell that asked his former patron to care for Mrs. Thompson who was now, by all appearances, an abandoned wife left alone in South Asia with only Barwell as her savior. The scheme would have worked according to plan but for the fact that, as Elizabeth Davidson had complained, society in British South Asia was relentlessly suffocating. Barwell hardly had time to be “charmed” with Mrs. Thompson as his life’s companion before “he found himself obliged to part with her,” for, “the whole settlement [at Calcutta] took offence at his living publicly as they thought, in adultery.” The council, headed by Hastings, ordered Barwell “that he must send her away, or such steps should be taken against him, as could not fail to injure both Ms reputation and fortune.”7 7 Barwell wrote to Thompson demanding that he return to Calcutta “to make the appearance of taking” Mrs. 1 5 Ibid.,99. 7 6 Ibid., 101-106. 7 7 Ibid., 125. 344 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Thompson home or forfeit Ws annual bond of £300. Thompson, accordingly, landed in Calcutta in September of 1775, only to learn that the council had ordered Barwell to put Sarah Bonner onboard an East indiaman bound for Britain some months earlier. ‘This,” he wrote, “I deemed an ill omen, and though I was happy at being rid of the necessity of seeing her, yet I could not but apprehend that I had been ensnared, and tempted to make a long voyage at great expence [sic], which in the end would probably sink me deeper in distress than I had been before.”7 8 Indeed, when Barwell and Thompson met, the former informed the latter that there was little else that could be done. Thompson had resigned his position previously, and he had done so in a distinctively dishonorable manner. He had been recalled to India to take his abandoned wife home with him. Now that she had gone, all that was left for him to do was, Barwell informed him, follow her back to London. T was,” Thompson lamented, “a mere shuttlecock bandied back from Europe to Asia and from Asia to Europe” by a man who “seemed to think no more of a voyage from Calcutta to London, and back again, than from Westminster-bridge to Chelsea.”7 9 Shortly before his departure, Thompson, eager to gain something of his long journey, asked Barwell to re-affirm the terms of their previous agreement, especially Thompson’s £300 annuity. Barwell, noting that there was nothing now to bind him to the former agreement, agreed to continue paying Thompson £300 per year in EIC stock so long as Thompson would remit one third of the value to his wife, Sarah Thompson. Henry Thompson left India for the last time late in 1775 with his life in tatters. He had been cheated by his former friend and patron once more, and, in order to save what little 78/M i, 126-128. 7 9 Ibid., 128. 345 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. he had had of his annuity, he had agreed to pay £100 a year of it to the woman who had cost him everything. Worse still, when he arrived in London and moved to collect his annuity, Thompson was halted by Barwell’s brother and his lawyers who insisted that, since the terms of the new arrangement called for Thompson to share one third of his annuity with his “wife,” they would need to see some proof that Sarah Thompson was indeed his lawful spouse. Thompson’s defeat was now absolute. He had been “robbed of his employment in Asia, and deprived of every advantage that my situation gave me room to hope for; and the paltry consideration I had received in return for my losses was now going to be taken from me for want of a certificate.”8 0 Thompson’s hope, in publishing The Intrigues o f a Nabob in London in 1780, was that he could popularize his case and win advocates to his cause. “I now stand before the bar of my country,” he concluded, “where a Nabob is no more than a fellow-subject; before a tribunal, which all his wealth accustomed as it is, to bear every thing before it in the east, is not able to bribe.”8 1 But, his purpose was also to blacken the reputation of Sarah Bonner, his would-be wife, by demonstrating the depravity of her conduct, and he chose to do so not by focusing on her life-long history but by building the case that India had altered her. “Her person,” he wrote, “when I took her out to India, was perfectly agreeable and engaging.” By the time he sat to write his treatise, however, she had become “a mere outside beauty.. .Her charms were of the bewitching kind; they infused a soporiferous poison into the mind, which benumbed and stupefied the reasoning powers, and left her sole mistress of the head and hearts of her lovers. Such was her dominion over mew.”8 2 mIbid., 1 57. 8 1 Ibid., 169. 8 2 Ibid., 17. 346 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Over men. Not over a single man, but over men bad Sarah Bonner won dominion. Despite ail that had passed between them, Richard Barwell and Henry Thompson were bound together through their shared addiction to Sarah Bonner and her “soporiferous poison.” She had cost Henry Thompson everything, and she had nearly done the same to Richard Barwell. Thompson’s story was both a plea and a warning. He published his text to win the sympathies of the EIC’s Court of Directors and the metropolitan public, but his efforts had the unintended consequence of highlighting the promiscuous behavior of the most prominent men in British India. Barwell, like Hastings a member of the Supreme Coundl of Bengal, was using his status in South Asia to trade in women and steal other men’s wives. Barwell’s treachery in The Intrigues o f a Nabob, amplified public awareness of the scandalous relationship between Warren and Marian Hastings, but it also resonated with the unsavory affair of Philip Francis, another member of the Supreme Council and the 16 year-old wife of a Swiss officer in the EIC’s service. Francis’ affair was less than a year- old when The Intrigues o f a Nabob first appeared in London, and though Francis had ended the affair in March 1779, shortly after being fined fifty thousand rupees for damages by Sir Elijah Impey, the story of his affair refused to fade away.8 3 Sarah Bonner, like Marian Hastings, therefore, became through the pages of The Intrigues o f a Nabob, the central figure in a disreputable love triangle and the symbol of a series of love triangles that were made possible in the fluid atmosphere of empire in South Asia.® * She, again like Hastings, abandoned a “husband” for a lover who had more power in South Asia. Sarah Bonner may never have married Thompson or Barwell as Marian 8 3 Indeed, the affair became cause for public comment once more in 1801 when Francis’ young mistress married Talleyrand, Napoleon’s Foreign Minister. See the DNB, vii, 617. 8 4 For more on public scandal relating to the sexual lives of Britain’s elite in the eighteenth century, see John Brewer, A Sentimental Murder, 88-90. 347 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Hastings had Carl von Imhoff and Warren Hastings, and she may never have received an invitation to appear at court, but the only truly striking dissimilarity between Hastings and Bonner seems to be the fact that Bonner’ jilted first lover, Thompson, refused to go quietly, while Carl von Imhoff had chosen to retire to Europe silently with the large sums of cash he had been paid by Warren Hastings. In metropolitan Britain, both women’s stories became widely known. Both became public examples of the type of lax morality that was possible within the European settlements in South Asia, and their stories were buttressed by reports in the popular press that consolidated domestic perceptions of life in South Asia further. Imperial Scandal and Domestic Gossip In its June and July issues of 1776, The Town and Country Magazine ran articles in its “T&e-h-T&e” section that specifically targeted the culture of British South Asia that, the magazine’s publishers felt, was seeping backwards into metropolitan society. Readers of The Town and Country Magazine would have been long familiar with the “Tete-h-Tete” articles. Each told the story of an illicit and, more often than not, failed love affair. As Claire Gervat has noted, the “Tete-a-Tete” articles exposed men of fashion and their mistresses, making public that which “its subjects would rather have kept hidden. Readers who had formerly thrilled to reports of curiosities such as mermaids, Indian chiefs, and dogs fluent in the Greek alphabet, could not but lap up outrageous tales of the rich and famous which stirred up envy and disdain in equal measure.”8 5 The “T&e-h-T&e” articles frequently made a moral connection between the fate of the relationship and the impropriety of the lovers’ behavior, but they did so with a generous helping of satire and sarcasm. They were 8 5 Clair Gervat, Elizabeth: The Scandalous Life of the Duchess of Kingston (London: Century, 2003), 2-3. For more on the magazine’s tete-lk-tSte articles, see John Brewer, A Sentimental Murder, 125- 134. 348 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. always supplemented with an engraved portrait of each of the central characters of the monthly romance. The July edition of The Town and Country Magazine ran, as the subject of its “Tete- a-Tete” column, ‘Memoirs of Sir Matthew Mite and Mrs. A-st-d.” As we have seen, Matthew Mite was the nabob-hero of Samuel Foote’s popular 1772 play, The Nabob, and was, very likely, based on the actual nabob, General Richard Smith. As such, Matthew Mite’s appearance in The Town and Country Magazine would have stirred up immediate attention and recognition. The story opened, as the “T€te-a-Tetes” always did, with a biography of its hero. Matthew Mite, like most nabobs in the popular press, came from a humble background. He had been bom near the S t James’ Market to a local cheesemonger. His parents saw to it that he was well educated, even if he lacked any proclivity for learning. His schoolmaster, the article reported, found that “the first rudiments of Lilly’s grammar” had to be literally beaten into Mite’s head with “birchen reasoning.” But Mite “despised trade, and had an utter aversion to the very odour [sic] of his father’s shop.” Like so many nabobs, he was, it seems, too good for his own background. He was overjoyed when a distant relative presented him with a military commission in India. After only a short time in South Asia, Mite was able to return to Britain “with a princely fortune.” He carefully remitted his money to Europe, saw to it that his father was financially settled for the remainder of his life, and, as so many nabobs before him had done, sought a seat in Parliament.8 6 Unable to purchase a seat even in “the most rotten” of rotten boroughs, Mite resolved to try his hand at politics later in life and to enjoy what was left of his youth as a man of culture. Believing that “a man of taste” needed a mistress as much as a man-cook “to 8 6 The Town and Country Magazine (London, 1776), 345. 349 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. establish his reputation,” Mite decided to court the famed mistress of Briton’s elite, Mrs. A-st-d, “who can claim the conquest of two ducal coronets, a marquis, four earls, and a viscount” Of Mrs. A -st-d’s background, The Town and Country Magazine could find little evidence that traced “this lady’s lineage to any high pedigree, for some positively assert that she came upwards into the world; or, in a vulgar phrase, was bom in a cellar.” To be sure, by 1776, Mrs. A-st-d was living very comfortably in the home of Matthew Mite, “who made her a very handsome allowance.” At Ranelagh Gardens, she continued to be, the magazine claimed, the focus of quite a few admirers, and rumor had it that she “avails herself of [Mite’s] situation to increase the splendor of her conquests.” Fortunately, Mite was “not of a jealous disposition,” making it possible for him to continue enjoying his “connexion with one of the finest women in England” despite the knowledge of his mistress’ infidelity.8 7 No concrete evidence supports a direct and factual connection between The Town and Country Magazine’ s Matthew Mite narrative and General Richard Smith, but, as has been noted, the popular connection between the two was widely celebrated. Furthermore, the nature of the “T§te-a-Tete” column’s tale was not hard for domestic readers to believe in light of what they had already heard from South Asia Warren Hastings had purchased his wife from Carl von Imhoff, Philip Francis was cavorting with the teenaged wife of a Company soldier, and Richard Barwell’s mistress was Henry Thompson’s “wife.” Why then, was it not possible for Matthew Mite to share his mistress willingly with the domestic aristocracy? The Town and Country Magazine's point, however, went further still. Matthew Mite’s sexual transgression did not take place in South Asia. He had imported the sexual mores of empire to the metropole, and his actions left the magazine’s authors and publishers 8 1 Ibid. 350 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. unsettled by the increasing similarities between domestic and imperial spaces, especially because it was empire that seemed to be changing the metropole rather than vice-a-versa. The story of Matthew Mite was not the first time that The Town and Country Magazine had highlighted the connections between metropolis and empire for their readership. The June “T6te-h-T6te” column, which ran under the title “Memoirs of the Disappointed Nabob and Miss R—d,” began by connecting itself to the recent uproar that had surrounded Britons returning from South Asia. ‘The Nabobs have of late attracted the attention of the public in a more particular manner than usual,” it opened, “and excited a general curiosity to become more intimately acquainted with their memoirs and characters.”8 8 The unnamed hero of the article had won a position as a writer in the EIC through a well-connected family relation, and he had won, in South Asia, the favor of Robert Clive, “who put him into the road of making a very rapid fortune.”8 9 Indeed, the young nabob returned to London within a decade to “enjoy his Asiatic wealth in Asiatic luxury.”9 0 As with Clive and other nabobs before him, the hero of the article was not content to rely solely on his fortune, and he sought a seat in Parliament. Having won the seat, “he forgot there was a tribunal to which the candidate was to appeal before he obtained his seat; and after all his expence [sic], trouble, and strategem [sic], the election was set aside.”9 1 As other nabobs before Mm had learned, money alone did not pave the path to power in the domestic world. Our disappointed nabob was not totally defeated by Ms failed attempts to win a seat at Westminster. Rather, he “bore Ms misfortune with a becoming fortitude, resolving to wait m Ibid., 289. ^ Ibid. 9 0 Ibid. 9 1 Ibid. 351 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. for a more favourable opportunity to carry Ms point” He passed his idle time, with a tour of Ms home nation’s “Watering Places, where he entered into all the spirit and gaiety of those lively places.” The greatest part of his time, he spent with “the ladies” of “these places.”9 2 And so, with tMs turn in the narrative, The Town and Country Magazine was able to turn away from the typical story of the nabob, with its critiques of his rapacious accumulation of wealth and Ms equally rapacious desire for metropolitan power, to a moral critique of the nabob that was rooted in the sexual appetites of British men in South Asia. As had Warren Hastings, PMlip Francis, and Richard Barwell, the nabob in the June “T&e-h-TSte” seems to have had no regard for marital vows. At Brighthelmstone, the nabob “was particularly struck with the charms of Mrs. M—rs,” who was the “wife of an officer then abroad.” As was often the case with the wives of British soldiers serving over seas, Mrs. M—rs lived on “extremely slender” finances, and it was tMs need that allowed the nabob to win her confidence. “Our hero,” the magazine wrote, “very gallantly always lost” to Mrs. M—rs at the quadrille table which made Ms presence “always agreeable to her.”9 3 The couple soon found themselves engaged in an affair which was facilitated by the fact that the nabob had moved into the same boarding-house as Mrs. M—rs so their visits could be “as frequent as they judged proper, without the prying eyes of curiosity interrupting them.”9 4 Mrs. M—rs soon had to return to London to meet her returning husband. Her nabob lover, to console his loss, decided on a tour of the continent Upon her return to the capital, however, Mrs. M—rs “found herself pregnant” and found it “necessary to get rid of the burthen [sic] as secretly as possible.” She applied for help at the house of Mrs. S near Soho, “where she remained from the time of her situation being visible,” but Mrs. S— 9 2 Ibid. 9 2 Ibid. 9 1 Ibid. 352 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. charged a price. “Not contented with fleecing her lodger in every article she charged,” Mrs. S “did not hesitate making free with Mrs. M—rs’ cloaths [sic], and even with her money.” Because of the situation, Mrs. M—rs “did not dare remonstrate, much less prosecute her.” And so, Mrs. S— continued to fleece Mrs. M—rs, the child was bom, it was “disposed of,” and Mrs. M—rs, without a child, was able to meet her returning soldier undiscovered.9 5 That is, she went undiscovered until Mrs. S— came asking for further cash. With her nabob lover vacationing on the continent, Mrs. M—rs had no recourse but to confess her infidelity to her husband. Her husband, the captain, who “had had fighting enough and sufficiently established his courage,” decided it would be best to bring criminal charges against both the nabob and Mrs. S . His determination was tempered, the story goes on, when the nabob returned to England, offering to pay Mis. S a substantial fee and to bestow on the captain and Mrs. M—rs an equally “considerable sum.”9 6 Money might not have bought a seat in Parliament, but it certainly helped to smooth one’s way out of a scandal. The nabob had not, however, returned from the continent alone. Having only recently left behind Mrs. M—rs, he returned to Britain with a new female companion, “a Flemish Brunette, with whom he had made acquaintance at Brussels.” He was not profoundly hurt to find that his new favorite was secretly seeing his valet de chamber, however, because, soon after he had settled Ms business with the M—rs, the nabob had turned his attention to Miss R—d. Miss R—d was a different sort of woman altogether from Mrs. M—rs. She had “started in the world of gaiety about eighteen, and she had soon many 9 5 Ibid., 289-290. 9 6 Ibid., 290. 353 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. admirers.” Miss. R—d suffered from one social malady, the lack of a fortune, but she did not allow this deficiency to halt her progress in society. Having refused the hand of a number of impoverished suitors of rank, she determined to win the hearts only of men of means. She thought it, the article claimed, “less dishonourable to be the mistress of a nobleman, than the wife of a plebian.”9 7 The nabob first met Miss R—d at the home of Lord B , with whom she was then living. He met her next at the home of Count G—s, after she had been turned out of Lord B ’s house in favor of his new mistress, Mrs. A-st-d, who seems to have been a rather ubiquitous mistress in the 1770s. “There is,” the magazine went on, “reason to believe that Miss R—d has since that period had some other admirers,” but at present, the article reported, “she is happy as wealth and love can make her” at the home of the nabob. “Our readers may be veiy surprised that a lady fond of Coronets, should condescend to accept of a Commoner; but there are charms in a handsome settlement, which few ladies in her line can resist, notwithstanding their partiality for nobility.”9 8 Not unlike Barwell, Francis, and Hastings, the nabob of the June 1776 “TCte-a-Tete” article cavorted his way through female society, bribing his way into marital beds and then again out of the scandals his actions created. The article juxtaposed his immorality against that of Captain M—rs whose family the nabob ruined while the captain was away fighting honorably for his country. Worse still, however, the returned nabob provided sustenance in metropolitan society for the worst sorts of behaviors. Miss R—d, the article admited, was not the product of the nabob’s wealth. The article, in fact, seemed to accept that “ladies in her line” were part of the structure of metropolitan society, but the nabob had, the article ™ Ibid. 9 8 Ibid. 354 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. demonstrated, made her lifestyle easier, expanding her social horizons and her financial prospects. Echoing Fanny Burney’s concerns, therefore, The Town and Country Magazine exposed the ramifications in metropolitan spaces of the lifestyles that were possible in imperial terrains. The logical extension of allowing men like Barwell, Francis, and Hastings to “purchase” wives in South Asia was that returning nabobs like the hero of this article felt empowered to do the same when they returned to the metropole. Such a fear was certainly central to Agnes Maria Bennett’s 1785 novel Anna: or, Memoirs of a Welch Heiress, Interspersed with Anecdotes of a Nabob. The novel, which, by 1804, had been through five editions including two, printed in Dublin, centered on the travails of Anna, a young, innocent Welsh heiress. As the title suggested, however, one of the earliest catastrophes to befall Anna was her connection with a nabob, Colonel Gorget. Gorget was “a little man, with a fallow complexion, small black eyes, Roman nose, and fine teeth.”9 9 Following the examples of Barwell, Francis, and Hastings, Gorget had seduced the wife of his Captain in South Asia.1 0 0 He left the couple, their marriage in tatters, behind him in India, and returned to Britain with his fortune with which “he purchased a magnificent house, which was adorned with all the trappings of the East, and finished quite in the Nabob stile...His carriages were superb; his servants numerous; his liveries gaudy,” and he was even able to purchase a seat in Parliament representing a rotten borough.1 0 1 Bennett’s long introduction of the character of Colonel Gorget was, as her title had anticipated, a mere anecdotal aside to the main point of her text. The novel’s central character, Anna, met Gorget socially in the twelfth chapter, and he decided that she would 9 9 Anna; or, Memoirs o f a Welch Heiress (Dublin, 1786), 41. 1 0 0 Ibid., 45-49. 1 0 1 Ibid., 56-57. 355 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. make the perfect mistress for him, for, he believed, “a mam of fashion was nothing without a mistress.”1 0 2 Indeed, not unlike the Vicomte de Valmont of Choderlos de Lacks’ 1782 Les Liasons Dangereuses, who set out to seduce and destroy Madame de Tourvel, Gorget set out to seduce Anna specifically because her youth, beauty, and innocence could serve to magnify his conquest over her.1 0 3 Gorget was not, however, the only male to pursue Anna’s affections. Late in the first volume of the novel, she was similarly chased by the son of a West Indian planter. Both the West Indian planter and the East Indian nabob, therefore, became symbols of empire and the threat it posed in domestic society in Anna, but the nabob remained as the most palpable and the most direct of the two. Colonel Gorget, and not the planter’s son, merited a place in the tide, and Gorget’s biography alone distracted Bennett from the main plotiine of the novel. It would seem that the nabob was a more threatening predator than his West Indian counterpart and that his wealth and the influx of imperial attitudes from South Asia were more threatening in domestic settings than were British imperial connections to the Caribbean.1 0 4 The dangers presented by the sexual mores of British South Asia in metropolitan Britain were more profound even than The Town and Country Magazine or Bennettt’s novel might have made them out to be. If the wealth of the nabob had tempted the likes of Miss R—d away from the titles and honors that normally drew her attention, there were more wealthy nabobs in South Asia than in metropolitan Britain. A greater threat than nabobs taking women like Miss R—d as mistresses after their return to Britain, therefore, was that 1 0 1 Ibid., 56. 1 < B Choderlos de Lacks, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, trans. Douglas Parmee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 1 0 4 See Chapter Four, 253-255. 356 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. women like Miss R—d would make their way to South Asia in search of nabobs. As Ann Stoler has noted, the latter part of the eighteenth century witnessed a shift in imperial policies that sought to encourage the presence of western women in European imperial settlements in South, Southeast, and East Asia. This new policy, Stoler has argued, revolutionized the structures of imperial society as western women imported with them into the imperial world the norms and structures of domestic society.1 0 5 In British South Asia, new imperial policies that favored the presence of women in the empire and encouraged settlements over military and trading encampments simultaneously stimulated a new market between Britain and its Smith Asian empire, a commercial circle of eligible women seeking out wealthy, unmarried nabobs. This perceived new trade was certainly the motivation behind the epilogue of the 1772 satirical comedy The Wife in the Right. Written by Mrs. Griffith, The Wife in the Right revolved around the love lives of its central characters, and it ended when its cast of nabobs, including Governor Anderson and Colonel Ramsay, were partnered with eligible women from polite domestic society. The lone female character left unmarried at the play’s end, portrayed by Mrs. Mattocks, remained behind the rest of the cast to read the play’s epilogue. “s Tis very fine, indeed!,” she began. Her other female companions were “all match’d I see, All happy, all provided for, but me.” But Mattock’s character was not content to leave her future in fate’s hands. Rather, she announced that: Blown up and ruin’d here - ‘tis a strange notion. You’ll say, but I’m resolved to cross the ocean; I’ ll e’en equip me for the Indian route; Seaton and Ramsay join to fit me out: Bull says he’s sure I need not despair, 1 0 5 See Stoler, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power,” 220-225. See also, Sen, 123-129. 357 R eproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. For British features bear a premium there. Even this homely face would charm, they say, Amongst the copper beauties of Bombay; And she who in a crowd would scarcely pass With us, would be a Venus, at Madrass. Pantheon, Opera, Playhouse, Fantoccini, Farewell - Fll go, and be a Nabobini.1 0 6 Mrs. Griffith’s epilogue, therefore, struck directly at the center of the fear that both The Town and Country Magazine and Fanny Burney had expressed before her - the awareness that, so long as men were allowed to make vast fortunes in the imperial world, there was the chance that the rapacious agendas of the nabob class might also become the agendas of groups at home. Here the group in peril was, as Mrs. Mattocks labeled them, the women of Britain who would become the “nabobini” class alongside the nabobs they hoped to win as husbands. According to The General Evening Post of London, there was no shortage of women who aspired to be nabobini. “We are sorry to learn by account from Bengal,” the paper reported in 1786, “that several fair adventurers are to be re-shipped for Europe; the market being already overstocked, and many samples o f beauty remaining on hand!”1 0 7 The English Chronicle echoed The General Evening Post on 15 June 1786, when it advised all “India ships” that “the Asiatic market is overstocked with British Beauties, and that the price falls daily, insomuch that a Nabob, having lately purchased a comely widow, was offered her two cousins, and a sister-in-law into the bargin.”1 0 8 As both The General Evening Post and The English Chronicle made clear, women who could not find husbands in Britain itself stood a better chance of finding a husband in South Asia, and a rich one at that. But, as both papers predicted, a surge of husband-hunting nabobinas in South Asia could easily surfeit the marriage market in British India, opening 1 0 6 Mrs. Griffith, A Wife in the Right, 88. 1 0 7 The General Evening Post of London, Saturday April 1 to Tuesday April 4,1786. 1 0 8 The English Chronicle, 15 June 1786. 358 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. the possibility that unmarried European women could be left alone in South Asia without any means of support. These women, “the flowers of Britain," had, The English Chronicle reported, “trusted to their beauty for making their fortunes,” and, when their hopes proved futile, “those fair fugitives” faced “a dreadful blow.”1 0 9 Such women, it was feared, might turn to prostitution or, worse still, marry themselves to South Asian men. As The Public Advertiser noted, “the spirit of adoption’” had so overtaken Britons in South Asia that one gentleman was “moved...by the spirit of adoption” to take “two young ladies, besides a young wife, in the course of his few months sojournment in England. The young ladies on their arrival at Bombay, will, no doubt, be vended as the Virgin honey of Europe.”1 1 0 Mrs. Griffith’s epilogue took even this eventuality into consideration. Mrs. Mattocks, after announcing her intentions to join the ranks of the nabobini, noted that “if that scheme, perchance, should not succeed,” she would “e’en wed a Seapoy chief, and mend the breed.”1 1 1 The threat that the aspiration to nabobery would draw in British women as it had the rapacious men of the nabob class went one step further still, threatening the racial stability of Britishness itself. A surfeit of British women eager to marry in the British settlement towns of South Asia, with their limited populations of British males, could easily encourage mixed-marriages between British women and South Asian males. If, as Ann Stoler has argued, the arrival of western women encouraged a more rigorous adherence to European social norms in South Asia under the auspices of protecting the newly arrived western women, the western women themselves also posed a challenge to imperial stability.1 1 2 Many of the women who would go to empire, The General Evening Post argued, xw Ibid., 1 1 April 1786. 1 1 0 The Public Advertiser, 26 December 1780. 1 1 1 Mrs. Griffith, A Wife in the Right, 88. 1 1 2 See Stoler, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power,” 220-225. See also, Sen, 123-129. See also, Felicity Nussbaum, “Introduction,” in Satires on Women (Los Angeles, William Andrews Clark 359 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. would be “consignments of damaged virginity ” whose morality was suspect from the start, and the paper further feared the unpredictable response such opportunities would have on the male populations of South Asia.1 1 3 Fears such as this had certainly been the motivation behind James Gillray’s 1786 aquatint etching, The Sale o f English Beauties in the East Indies.1 1 4 Set at the docks of an East-Indian port, Gillray’s etching showed a lanky English auctioneer standing at an impromptu podium, constructed out of crates and boxes destined for the Supreme Council. Before him was a crowded mass of humanity: British army officers, European merchants, South Asian tradesmen, Hindu maharajahs, Muslim Sultans, and a host of fair-skinned British women. Immediately in front of the auctioneer’s podium were two men: one a South Asia dressed in billowing pants and a bright yellow turban, and the other a corpulent European merchant, accompanied by an almost completely naked African slave boy who held an umbrella positioned above his master’s head. Between the two men, a tall British woman stood, wearing a bonnet with a large feather in it and a long gown with yellow and white stripes. The bodice of the gown, however, had been pulled down to expose her chest. The South Asian male stood pinching the nipple of her left breast while the European merchant grazed his hand across the right side of her chest. Behind this threesome, another British woman prepared for her trip to the auction block. With her back turned outwards from the image, she seemed to be engaged in Memorial Library, 1976), i. See also, Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University press, 1989), 183. See also, Felicity A. Nussbaum, “Heteroclites: The Gender of Character in the Scandalous Memoirs,” in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987), 144-167. See Nussbaum, Torrid Tones, 1-7 and 176-179. m The General Evening Post of London, Saturday April 1 to Tuesday April 4,1786. 1 1 4 See Wilson, The Island Race, 98. 360 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. conversation with a British redcoat and a turbaned South Asian male. A rotund sultan, wearing curled-tipped shoes, a long red cloak, a full white turban, and carrying a long pipe, Illustration 39. The Sale of English Beauties in the East Indies, James Gillray, 16 May 1786.1 1 3 lifted the bade of her skirt to inspect her lower legs. The background of the image was filled with other groupings - British women set out as displays for western and non-western men alike. One particularly heavy woman sat atop a scale in the back of the scene, her value weighed out in rupees. With her breasts exposed from the top of her dress, the heavy-set beauty leaned back from the pan of the scale, her arms gripping the supporting chains and her legs stretched forward as if she were enjoying an afternoon in a tree-swiag. Like the principle figure in Jean-Honord’s 1767 Les Hazards Heureux de I’ escarpolette, better known as The Swing, she seemed pleased, if not completely unaware, that she was subject to the gaze of so many male admirers. Indeed, the only women ia the entire image who seemed at all troubled by their fate are those in a long line at the back of the print, most of whom were m Images scanned from & photograph courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London. 361 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. crying and some of whom had their distraught faces fully buried in handkerchiefs. They were parading into a warehouse where the sign above the door read “unsaleable goods from Europe” that were “to be returned by the next ship.” Gillray’s image, then, summarized all the potential threats presented by the migration of British women to South Asia in search of marriages. At best, they would join the ranks of the nabobini or be sent home to Britain broken-hearted. At worst, they would be sold off to South Asian men. After all, as Mrs. Mattocks had announced in the epilogue to The Wife in the Right, marriage to a South Asian had its perks. “What if one’s husband is a little frightful,” she had asked, Where every thing besides is so delightful. ‘Twill be so charming, on a summer’s day, For forty slaves to fan me as I lay, Or cm rich carpets free from noise and hurry, Sit cross-legg’d with my spouse, and feast on curry. If I’ve a taste for baubles, my good man, Will load me with old China and Japan. Diamonds on diamonds heap’d, and pearly rows, For hair, ears, neck, and breast, perhaps my nose.1 1 5 Though she end up married to a “Seapoy chief” or any one of Gillray’s collection of sultans, rajahs, or potentates, Mrs. Mattocks could hope to dress richly, her desire for wealth and luxury satiated. She would no longer ride in “filthy hackneys” but rather in a palanquin guided by a dozen sepoy. “I’ll keep a little squadron at my call,” she went on, “and make my first grand visit in a shaul.” It had long been the case that a simple British male could go “out a writer” in the service of the EIC and expect to come “home a king,” and now, as Mrs. Mattocks best expressed it, British women had the same opportunities opened to them.1 1 7 1 1 6 Mrs. Griffith, A Wife in the Right, 88. m Ibid. 3 6 2 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. When Elizabeth Sophia Plowden, hoping only to have her portrait painted while she was dressed as a Kashmiri dancing girl, sat for John Russell in 1797 there were, therefore, a handful of negative perceptions and stereotypes from South Asia with which her self- representation had to compete. Dressed in a gauze sari and a silk turban, bejeweled with emeralds, diamonds, and pearls, she connected herself to images of the lax South Asian woman, stories of sexual impropriety among Britons in South Asia, and the perceived threat that that impropriety was washing backwards into the metropole from throughout the empire. More palpably still, her sartorial transgression connected her to the emerging image of the nabobini class, a group of women who demonstrably problematized the wealth of empire by fusing luxury, morality, sexuality, and imperialism into a single discourse. Sprung Up like Mushrooms: Empire and Luxury in D om estic Settings Considerations of the connections between empire, gender, and luxury were not new in late eighteenth-century Britain. As early as the first decades of the century, The Spectator had noted that the single dress of a woman of quality is often the product of an hundred climates. The muff and fan come together from the different ends of the earth. The scarf is sent from the torrid zone, and the tippet from beneath the pole. The brocade petticoat rises out of the mines of Peru, and the diamond necklace out of the bowels of Indostan.1 1 8 In 1712, Alexander Pope echoed The Spectator’ s point in his poem The Rape o f The Lock. On a single English lady’s dressing table, he noted, it was possible to “cull with curious Toil” the “glitt’ring Spoils” of the globe - here a “Casket” filled with “ India’ s glowing Gems,” and there “all Arabia breathfing] from yonder Box.” Jewelry, perfumes, and other trinkets reified empire in metropolitan settings. The ramifications of European expansion across the globe and the increasing 1 1 8 The Spectator, 4 vols., (London, 1767), i, 279. 363 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. interconnectedness of global networks of trade and consumption were, as Pope and The Spectator noted, visibly displayed on the dressing tables of women across Britain, fusing empire and trade to gendered patterns of consumption in the metropolitan world. As Pope had noted, “The Tortoise here and Elephant unite, I Tranform’d to Combs, the speckled and the white.”1 1 9 In this early period, neither The Spectator nor Pope, understood the increasingly global nature of British commerce in specifically negative terms. “In its natural prospect,” Britain, The Spectator noted, was “a barren and uncomfortable” terrain. “Natural historians.. .tell us that no fruit grows originally among us.. .that our melons, our peaches, our figs, apricots, and cherries are strangers among us, imported in different ages, and naturalized in our English gardens,” and each of these would “degenerate and fall away into the trash of our native country, if they were wholly neglected by the planter, and left to the mercy of our sun and soil.” Britain had benefited greatly from its history as a trading nation that had increasingly expanded the geographic scope and the absolute value of its commerce. “Traffick,” wrote The Spectator, “has improved the whole face of nature among us. Our ships are laden with the harvest of every climate.” Looking out from Britain, “the vineyards of France” became British gardens, “the spice islands our hot-beds, the Persians our silk- weavers, the Chinese our potters.” Nature had furnished the British “with the bare necessities of life, but traffick” had supplied the “great variety of what is useful, and at the same time supplies us with everything that is convenient and ornamental.”1 2 0 By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the connection between empire, gender, and consumption had become far more complex. In September 1774, The Public Advertiser 1 1 9 Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock,” in Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Aubrey Williams. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969), 83. 1 2 0 The Spectator, i, 279-280. 364 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. had reminded Londoners that “a great writer speaking of England, says, ‘Your spot has passed its Meridian; Luxury has taken root.’” With parliamentary controversies surrounding nabobs like Robert Clive clearly in mind, the article went on to note that “the unexpected Wealth got from the Poor of a distant Country by Robbery has changed the Bulwark of the English Constitution, your House of Commons.”1 2 1 On Saturday 28 May 1785, The Lounger echoed The Public Advertiser’ s editorial when it published a plaintive letter from a simple, country, gentleman who had lost control over his household. He was drowning, he reported, in the luxurious expenses that imperial commerce had made possible. The signature at the end of the letter was that of a Mr. John Homespun, but the author of the letter was likely Henry Mackenzie, The Lounger’ s editor. As we have seen, Mackenzie created a repertoire of memorable characters in his The Mirror and The Lounger, and John Homespun was among the most popular and the most frequent of the two magazines’ contributors. Homespun had first written to The Mirror in March of 1779. “I am,” he noted, “a plain country-gentleman, with a small fortune and a large family,’ but the security of both was, he wrote, in peril. By any measure, Homespun had tried to do well by his family. “My boys, all except the youngest,” he noted, “I have contrived to set out into the world in tolerably promising situations,” and two of Homepun’s six daughters were married - one to a clergyman “with a comfortable living, and a respectable character” and the other to a neighbor “who farms most of his own estate, and is supposed to know coimtry-business as well as any man in this part of the kingdom.” Homespun had hoped to make matches for his four younger daughters equal to or better than those he had made for their two older sisters. He found that his world had changed, however, by the time he sat to write his first letter to The Lounger in 1785. As he 1 2 1 The Public Advertiser, Tuesday September 13,1774. 365 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. had in Ms letters to The Mirror, Homespun found himself unable to control Ms own household as Ms wife and daughters were captivated by the manners of the family’s new neighbors, the family of a nabob who brought imperial money and Indian fortunes into the neighborhood and threatened to push the Homespuns to the verge of ruin. True to their name, Mushroom, the Homespuns’ neighbors had come from nowhere; they had “sprouted” quickly - sprung up in the Homespuns’ neighborhood as if like a fungus. Homespun wrote that Ms old neighbor’s son had been “sent out to India” only a dozen years earlier and that he had “returned home with a fortune as we are told, of £100,000, and has taken up Ms residence at Ms father’s till some finer place shall be found for him.” Not unlike many who made fortunes in India, the young Mushroom made several large remittances to his family in Scotland. They used the money to refurbish their home and to restore their estate prior to the return of their newly triumphant nabob. The young nabob had also sent home “a trunk full of fineries to dress up Ms mother and sisters,” but, “the good old Lady.. .restrained her daughters from wearing them (as indeed they did not well know how to make them up or put them on), till her son should arrive.” It was not the young nabob, however, who taught Ms mother and sisters how to wear their new South Asian finery, for, as Homespun wrote to The Lounger, “the young man had made a love-match before he left tMs country, with a good-looking girl of our neighbourhood, who, not altogether with Ms inclination, had gone out to Mm soon after his establishment in India.” It was, Homespun noted, the nabob’s wife who “returned hither with him, and has edified all the family amazingly.”1 2 2 As at the Homespun household, the Mushroom women, and young Lady Mushroom in particular, dominated Mushroom Hall, as Homespun dubbed Ms neighbor’s estate. 1 2 2 Ibid., i, 158-159. 366 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Much to Homespun’s regret, his neighbor’s influence did not limit itself to the walls and gardens of Mushroom Hall. “Her instructions.. .are not confined to her own family; mine is unluckily included.” Rachel Homespun, his wife, was “very proud” of the favor that Lady Mushroom had bestowed on her family and was flattered that Lady Mushroom had identified her and her daughters as among the few in the neighborhood who had what she called “capability.” Unable to define the term to The Lounger, John Homespun could only say that those who had been identified as having the quality were those who would “listen to all the nonsense that [Lady Mushroom] talks, and ape all the follies she practices.” Lady Mushroom, in short, infuriated the simple Scottish lard. ‘T o think,” he wrote, of that little Chit Peg Mushroom playing all this mischief among us! - Why, Sir, I remember her but as it were yesterday, when she used to come draggled to our house of a morning a-foot, and ride home double, on my blind mare, behind one of the plough boys.1 2 3 Peg Mushroom was a social upstart who dared not only to belong but also to control the Homespun’s social network, without a social, moral, or financial claim to belong in the first place. Peg Mushroom acted the part of the good nabob in Homespun’s Scottish neighborhood, and, as we have seen, nabobs captured particular attention in the Scottish context1 3 4 Writing less than a year after Henry Dundas’ ascension to the EIC Board of Control, John Homespun was the model contrarian; he appreciated none of the changes he saw coming to Scotland from the empire and none of the changes he saw coining out of Mushroom Hall. He complained of the Mushroom’s pew at the local church, which they had had carpeted and covered in cushions, and he protested the spectacle they caused upon entering the church to worship. “There were flowered muslins,” he wrote, “and gold m Ibid., i, 159. 1 2 4 See Chapter Three, 192-195. 367 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. muslins, white shawls, and red shawls, white feathers and red feathers; and every now and then the young Mushroom girls pulled out bottles that sent such a perfume around them.” Even their father, the elder Lord Mushroom, had been induced to dress the part of the nabob, wearing “such a mixture of black satin and pink satin about him” as to look “for all the world like the King of Clubs.”1 2 5 It was not, however, the Mushroom’s extravagance alone that stirred John Homespun’s ire. Rather, it was the example they set for the rest of his once-simple community. The women of the Homespun family, he complained to The Lounger, had grown to think that “everything that used to be thought comfortable and convenient formerly, is now intolerable and disgusting.”1 2 6 Homespun lamented that he had been “silly enough to let my wife get hold of a draught on town for the price of my last year’s barley” because Rachel Homespun had spent “the produce of ten acres” on shawls that, she insisted, were “a decent comfortable wear for a middle-aged woman like her.”1 2 7 His daughters, likewise, refused to speak to their father at all, except about life at Mushroom Hall. “Everything we now put on, or eat, or drink, is immediately brought into comparison with the dress, provisions, and liquors” at Mushroom Hall, noted the greatly agitated Homespun. “My girls,” he wrote, wore home-made gowns, of which they were lately so proud have been thrown by with contempt since they saw Mrs. Mushroom’s muslins from Bengal; our barn-door fowls we used to say were so far and well-tasted, we now make aukward [sic] attempts, by garlic and peper [sic] to turn into the form of Curries and Peelaws, and the old October we were wont to brag all our neighbours with, none of the family but myself will condescend to taste, since they drank Mr. Mushroom’s India Madeira.1 2 8 1 2 5 The Lounger, i, 160. 1 2 6 Ibid., i, 162. 1 2 7 Ibid., i, 160. 1 2 8 Ibid., i, 162. 368 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Homespun’s worries about Ms family’s desire to imitate the Mushrooms and their South Asian manners and styles were complicated by the simple finances of his rural estate. Before there was a nabob in his neighborhood, Homespun counted value in “hundreds and thousands of pounds,” amounts that “carried a sound of some importance, and could easily be divided into lesser parts.” Since the Mushrooms returned from India, all that the people of the neighborhood had spoken of was their imperial fortune, which they counted in lakhs of rupees. Taken ffom a Sanskriti term for something of great value, “lakh” had come, in South Asia, to represent the value of 100,000, but, for Homespun, the value resonated only with the English verb “to lack.” Lord and Lady Mushroom’s “lack,” he noted, “sounds like nothing at all.” Homespun’s complaint, therefore, turned on a clever linguistic play, one that expressed his own inability to measure his domestic fortune against the imperial fortune of his neighbor. Lord and Lady Mushroom could speak of spending several “lacks” as if it were but a “trifling” thing.1 2 9 Homespun and the others of his neighborhood could not. They, quite literally, lacked knowledge of and familiarity with a monetary system that counted in “lacks” rather than in the value of the pound. Not unlike a nabob’s diamonds, Indian wealth and imperial luxury simply did not make sense to Homespun. It seemed thin and insubstantial - similar, in many ways, to the speculative credit economy that had sprung up in eighteenth-century Britain.1 3 0 Credit, as Erin MacKie has argued, was often represented as a woman, and the insubstantial and inflated nature of the credit economy was frequently compared to the puffed-up structure of m Ibid., 1,161. 1 3 0 See Chapter Four, 245-266. See also, Lucy Sutherland, “Samson Gideon: Eighteenth Century Jewish Financier,” in Politics and Finance in the Eighteenth century, pp. 387-398. See also, Sutherland, “Samson Gideon and the reduction of Interest,” 399-413. 369 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. a lady’s hoop-skirt1 3 1 When the women of the Homespun household set their sights on fasMons, foods, and goods from the empire, they were participating in an economy that was as foreign and as insubstantial as the credit economy, and, in doing so, they linked the imperial economy, the economy of luxury, and the question of female desire to a well- known economic discourse of instability and hysteria.1 3 2 lik e “Lady Credit” herself, the Homespun women had become economic flibbertigibbets. They were luxurious and extravagant, and they threatened to take control of the national economy.1 3 3 Henry Mackenzie, The Lounger’ s publisher and John Homespun’s creator, recognized a marketable character and storyline when he found one. The story of the Mushrooms did not, therefore, end with Homespun’s letter of May 1785 to The Lounger. In October of the same year, a letter appeared in the periodical from Marjory Mushroom, the nabob’s sister and Lady Peg Mushroom’s sister-in-law. Marjory Mushroom was, she wrote, shocked to find that she and her family had been attacked on the pages of The Lounger by none other than their neighbor, John Homespun. “I dare to say,” she began her letter, his letter “is all out of spite and envy at our having grown so suddenly rich, by my brother’s good fortune in India,” and Mackenzie’s readers might well have believed Marjory Mushroom’s claims against Homespun, for her family’s fortunes had, by her own admission, “changed from what I remember.”1 3 4 Marjory Mushroom’s claims that Homespun was merely jealous of the new-found wealth of Mushroom Hall faltered, however, when Marjory herself began to complain of 1 3 1 See Erin Mackie. Market & la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in the Tattler and The Spectator (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 104-143. 1 3 2 See Brown, Fables of Modernity, 97-116. See also Laura Brown, Ends of Empires: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 103-114. 1 3 3 See Brown, Fables of Modernity, 104-105. 1 3 4 The Lounger, ii, 1-2. 370 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. some of the changes that Indian wealth had brought into their home. With the return of Lord and Lady Mushroom from South Asia, Mushroom Hall had been filled with servants. “There came down,” Marjory wrote to The Lounger, my brother’s own valet de sham, my sister’s own maid, a man cook, who has two of the negers under him, and Mons. De Sabor, whom my brother wrote to me he had hired for a butler, but, when he came he told us he was a mailer dotell, and had been so to the Earl of C , the Duke of N , and two German princes.1 3 5 The whole family, she noted, was afraid to speak to the servants after having been so fully chastised by their new servant.1 3 6 Moreover, Marjory Mushroom reported, De Sabor informed Lord Mushroom, her father, that he could no longer smoke his pipe in the house. In addition, she had ordered the new servants to pull down all the house’s old furnishings so that they could be replaced with more fashionable chintzes. Her brother, Lord Mushroom, was just as critical of the rest of the family’s habits, dictating who could and could not visit the house. He had, his sister lamented, “a mind tobea parliament-man,” and it was critical, he explained to his family, that he invite all the right people of the country “to eat and drink with him.” Having “turned an improver,” he tore down “a piece of an old church that stood in the way of what they call the approach to the house” only to replace it with a newly- constructed “ruin” in its place. Such things were, Lord and Lady Mushroom explained, “the very thing wanted in that place.”1 3 7 The changes at Mushroom Hall, changes that had bothered John Homespun from one house over, constricted Marjory Mushroom as well. She felt that her brother and his wife had done little more than bring back from India with them “embarrassments and vexations in the enjoyment of our good fortune,” and her complaints against her sister-in-law 1 3 5 Ibid., ii, 3. m Ibid.. 1 3 7 Ibid., ii, 5-7. 371 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. only grew in a letter to The Lounger from February 1786, which told of a trip the two women made to Edinburgh.1 3 8 “I was content,” Marjory told The Lounger, “to be lugged about by my sister for the first week or two, as I knew that in a large town I should be like a fish out of water,” but she found that her sister-in-law’s “always putting me in mind of my ignorance” bothered her more than she could tell. “You country girls,” Lady Mushroom would say, should learn from “we who have been in London and we who have been abroad,” but Marjory Mushroom doubted her teacher’s credentials. “I don’t find,” she confessed to The Lounger, “that she knows quite so much as she would make me believe.” Indeed, she went on, “it seems they can’t learn many things in the Indies, and when she went out she knew as little as myself.” As for London, Marjory noted wryly, “she was only a fortnight there in her way home.”1 3 9 In Edinburgh, Marjory found that her sister-in-law was not, after all, the height of fashionablity. Lady Mushroom, Marjory wrote, prided herself on her style and social charm, particularly her musical talents, but, while breakfasting one morning on Prince’s Street, Marjory Mushroom overheard Captain Coupee “saying to one of his companions, that Mushroom’s dinners were damn’d good things, if it were not for the bore of the singing, and that little Nahobina [who] squalled like a pen-hen.”1 4 0 Marjory’s estimation of her sister-in- law’s character fell still further when the latter decided they should all attend a masquerade. “I [was] half afraid,” wrote the “afflict’d” Marjory Mushroom, when she was told that “we are to go to a masked ball,” but, she noted, “my sister-in-law is quite in raptures about It.” To the young Miss Mushroom, the idea of a masked ball verged on the scandalous. Such a thing, she explained, would never happen “were my grandmother to lift up her head now,” m Ibid., ii, 8. 1 3 9 Ibid., ii, 201, 1 4 0 Ibid., ii, 202-203. 372 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. bat Lady Mushroom, she went on, “was not brought up by my grandmother.” The lack of a suitable upbringing, then, served to explain Lady Mushroom’s eagerness to attend the masked ball, but Marjory Mushroom attributed her sister-in-law’s poor judgment to another cause as well. “She has been in India,” she noted, suggesting a link between the world Lady Mushroom knew in South Asia and her continued willingness to participate in activities that Marjory, her grandmother, and other domestic observers might have considered to be dubious.1 4 1 Rather than leaving his readers to believe that John Homespun envied the Mushroom’s new-found wealth, Henry Mackenzie made it quite plain, through the letters of Maqory Mushroom that even those within Mushroom Hall resented the changes that life with a nabob had inflicted on the patterns of their daily domestic life in rural Scotland. The story of the Mushrooms served as a didactic tale, one that warned of the potential unhappiness that could result when empire infused the metropole. Indeed, the narrative was a cultural warning, an advisory against the dangers of the returning nabob class, as even Marjory Mushroom, in her final letter to The Lounger of April 1786 had come around to seeing the world through her brother and sister-in-law’s eyes. “Our society in Edinburgh had latterly become much more agreeable to me,” she wrote, noting that, upon her return to Mushroom Hall, she had found John Homespun to be “a very odd sort of man” and “ten times more rude and disagreeable than he was before I went to town.. .He says, that since I came, I have infected his daughters.”1 4 2 Maijory Mushroom’s character, it would seem, had not survived the onslaught of new values that her nabob brother and his nabobina wife had imported back to Scotland with 1 4 1 Ibid., ii, 206-208. 1 4 2 Ibid., ii, 254-260. 373 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. them from South Asia. Their commitment to wealth and a life of high fashion had seduced her in the end, which is precisely why Henry Mackenzie chose to let John Homespun have the last word on the subject In a letter dated 16 December 1786, Homespun wrote to The Lounger to tell of his most recent adventure at Mushroom Hall. Lord and Lady Mushroom had, he wrote, “laid their heads together” that “Mr. Mushroom shall be member for our county the next vacancy.” To that end, all of the neighborhood was invited to celebrate a grand feast at Mushroom Hall. Homespun did not want to attend the banquet, but the very thought of an invitation “tickled the ears of my wife and daughters.”1 '6 Coerced into entertaining the “fuss” of his wife and daughters, John Homespun attended the dinner party at Mushroom Hall. The meal, he reported, included “mutton- chop,” which “smelt so of garlic” and other spices that Homespun was “glad to get rid of it as soon (and that was not very soon) as I could prevail a servant to take away my plate,” and roast beef that was “so red and raw, that I could not touch a morsel of i t ” The Mushrooms, Homespun concluded, had mistaken him for a “cannibal.”1 4 4 In the end, Homespun and his close friend and neighbor, Mr. Broadcast, decided to flee Mushroom Hall and all its imperial customs, and Homespun vowed never again to sell his vote in a local election without the promise that he “shan’t be obliged to study the pictures of [the candidate’s] saloon above half and hour” and “that he have something to eat and something to drink at dinner.”1 4 5 He had learned from his experience. The ways of Mushroom Hall were simply not compatible with the customs of his own simple household. Maijory Mushroom had agreed with him once, before she herself was consumed by the changes her brother and sister-in-law wrought in her household, and John Homespun’s challenge was, as he presented it to The Lounger, to m Ibid., iii, 291. 1 4 4 Ibid., iii, 295-296. 1 4 3 Ibid., iii, 299. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. save his wife and daughters from the same temptations of luxury and fashion that had “infected” Maqory Mushroom. In the character of John Homespun, Henry Mackenzie, therefore, devised a clever and long-lived critique of luxury in metropolitan Scotland. For over a year, John Homespun had fought off the dangers of imperial luxury that threatened the females of his family, and through Homespun’s struggle, Henry Mackenzie made the point that it was the concrete material, cultural, and moral changes that the nabobs brought back with them from South Asia that most clearly demarcated them as different in metropolitan settings, and it was the figure of the nabobina who most fully and most commonly displayed these material artifacts of empire. Absent the type of constant vigilance that John Homespun was struggling to maintain, the luxurious material life of the nabobina threatened to tempt the metropolitan public down the primrose path to nabobery - a state of existence that conjured images not only of luxury itself but also moral decay and degeneracy. As the Homespun/Mushroom saga played itself out on the pages of The Lounger, it resonated in communities across the nation, and, more significantly, it demonstrated the that the threat of nabobery was a specifically gendered peril. It was the women of the Homespun house who were most at risk, and it was they who were most tempted by the lifestyle of the nabob. Not dissimilarly, it was Marjory Mushroom who gave in to the temptations her brother and sister-in-law constantly set before her, and, most importantly, it was Peg Mushroom, the lady of Mushroom Hall, who had first instructed the women of the Homespun household and Mushroom Hall on how to wear the clothing sent back for them from South Asia. It was she who made the tempting display of imperial luxury possible in domestic settings, and it was her female disciples who spread her imperial gospel throughout the neighborhood. 375 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “The Great Sultana from the W aves:” Nabobinas in Domestic Britain Despite Henry Mackenzie’s clear assault against Peg Mushroom as an archetypical symbol of British women returning from South Asia in the late-eighteenth century and his suspicions of the threats they posed to domestic society, nabobinas won fame in late eighteenth-century Britain for importing more than just the luxurious fashions and 4 extravagant cultural forms of South Asia back into metropolitan settings. As Linda Colley has noted, Sarah Shade was a well-known figure in late eighteenth-century London for having been captured and held prisoner along with her husband for eleven months in Haider Ali’s Bangalore prison. Upon her release, Shade returned to London where she capitalized on her history in South Asia by cooking and selling South Asian food to a metropolitan clientele. Shade’s small business attracted a sizable patronage in London, though her primary network of customers was a group of “East India families living in the capital, people who - like her - had returned to what was nominally their home country, yet found themselves homesick for the vast subcontinent they had left.”1 4 6 As Colley has argued, Shade’s story directs our attention to one of the dangers of British imperialism - the worry that Britons who spent substantial time in India were at risk of becoming captive there in a fundamental, if not in a literal sense. Since Britons in India were so sparse, and dependent on the local population in so many ways, fears were regularly expressed back home - particularly at this early stage - that they would be taken over by their Indian surroundings, become entrapped by indigenous habits and values, cease to be authentically British, and go native.1 4 7 1 4 6 Colley, Captives, 254. 1 4 7 Ibid. 376 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. As Sarah Shade’s small-bustness venture demonstrates, these threats were even more palpable in metropolitan settings because they placed the very reservoir of British identity, the metropolitan center, in danger and not just those few Britons who ventured out to South Asia. Because she brought the empire back to metropolitan Britain in concrete material forms, Sarah Shade was a member of the nabob class and proof that women, nabobinas, were just as much a part of the imperial peril as their nabob counterparts. Unlike Sarah Shade, Lady William James had never been to South Asia, but she, like Shade, rose to prominence in the South London community of Eltham because of her connections to the subcontinent when she paid to erect a triangular tower at Shooter’s Hill in honor of her deceased husband, Sir William James, in 1784. The life of Sir William James was, in Lady James’ eyes, a truly remarkable story. Bom at Haverfordwest in Pembrokshire to a miller, William James went to sea at the age of twelve. By his eighteenth birthday, he was serving in the West Indies under Sir Edward Hawke, where he was placed in command of a training ship that was captured by the Spanish in the Gulf of Florida. When the ship capsized during a storm at sea, James and seven members of his crew were able to escape. Under James’ leadership, the men floated in an open boat for twenty days before touching ground on the island of Cuba. As a reward for his heroism, James won promotion to the East Indies, where he was employed in efforts to protect EIC shipping on the Malabar coast, known in the middle years of the eighteenth century as a haven for pirates. James’ most famous adversary was the pirate Conagree Angria. Made the commander-in-chief of the East India Company fleet on the Malabar coast in 1751, James decided that something had to be done about Angria whose piratical activity, centered at the small island of Sevemdroog, was costing the company roughly £50,(M X ) a year. 377 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In March 1755, James launched a massive attack against Sevemdroog island. Warned in advance of the attack, the pirate fleet of Angria slipped away, but their island port fell into James’ hands on April 12. Buoyed by his success, James paired his forces with those of Rear-Admiral Watson later in the same year, and together they were able to eliminate the pirate fleets of the Malabar coast Shortly thereafter, James retired from service in South Asia and sailed home to Britain. He had been in South Asia for just eight years and was only 39 years old. Back in Britain, James married his third wife, Lady James. The two settled at their estate, Park Farm Place in Eltham. James went on to become a senior director of the EIC, the governor of Greenwich Hospital, and the member of Parliament for West Looe in Cornwall. In 1778, James’ noteworthy career was capped when this son of a miller-made- good was named a baronet Five years later, James died of apoplexy on 17 December 1783 in the middle of his daughter’s wedding.1 4 8 It was a widowed Lady James who oversaw the construction of what she would call the Sevemdroog Tower at Eltham beginning in 1784. The tower itself, Lady James hoped, would be a model of the fortress at Sevemdroog island where her husband had won his greatest battle, and while the final edifice bears no similarity to its South Asian predecessor, most of those who visited it in the last years of the eighteenth century would never have noticed. Indeed, Lady James had commissioned Richard Jupp as the architect for the project specifically because he served, from 1768 until his death in 1799, as the surveyor to the EIC. Jupp was famous as the architect behind the fist Bengal Warehouse in New Street, built 1 4 8 Collection of articles on Shooter’s Hill, BL w.7135,2016-2017. 378 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. between 1769 and 1770, and later warehouses built for the Company at Houndsditoh and Cratched Friars.8 4 9 Illustration 40. Sevemdroog Castle, Shooter’s Hill.1 5 0 If Jupp did not build a tower that matched the real towers of Sevemdroog island, his credentials as a London architect certainly conjured connections to South Asia through Ms work for the EIC. To assure that visitors to the tower, which became something of a celebrated local tourist spot shortly after its completion, connected it to her husband’s South Asian career, Lady James installed a plaque over the main entrance that read: TMs Building was erected MDCCLXXXTV by the Representative of the Late Sir William James, Bart. To Commemorate that gallant Officer’s Achievement in the East Indies During Ms Command of the Company’s Marine Forces in those Seas: And in particular manner to record the Conquest of the Castle of Sevemdroog, on the Coast of Malabar, WMch fell to Ms superior valour and able conduct, On the T 6 day of April, MDCCLV.1 3 5 Inside the tower, Lady lames established a museum that celebrated the victory at Sevemdroog. According to a magazine article from 1838, the museum housed a significant m Jupp’s most famous project is M s work on the India House itself. He designed and oversaw the major renovations to the Leadenhall headquarters of the East India Company that began in 1797. Jupp died in 1799 before the project was completed. Henry Holland, who had designed Robert Clive’s Claremont estate thirty-five years before and who w ould later work on the Prince Regent’s estate at Brighton, oversaw the completion of the India H ouse according to Jupp’s plans. It was this building that was demolished ia 1861 after the East India Company was Itself abolished and the headquarters of the new Government of India were moved to the new India Office at Whitehall. 1 3 0 Photograph scanned from Roger White, “Folly of Form: Sevemdroog Castle, Shooter’s Hill” in Country life (December 27,1984), 2016. 1 3 1 The Pictorial Guide to Eltham Palace (London: William S. Qrr and Co., 1845), 26-27. 379 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. display of Indian weapons and armor on the ground floor, and a model of the Protector, James flagship at the battle of Sevemdroog, one floor up. The first floor ceiling was domed in a South Asian-style and painted with scenes of James’ fleet, but a mid-nineteenth century travel guidebook reported in 1845 that the building itself was “in a state of great dilapidation” and that much of the collection had been “stolen by some nightly visitants.”1 5 2 While she never actively encouraged her neighbors to wear muslin garments or eat South Asian curries as did Peg Mushroom or Sarah Shade, Lady James did import a significant display of Britain’s South Asian empire back to metropolitan spaces. Her agenda may not have been the cause of fashionability and luxury, but she did hope to raise domestic awareness of the imperial history of British South Asia and of her husband’s career. Her efforts, as references to the tower in magazines and guidebooks demonstrate, were largely successful, but Lady William James was, herself, a unique example. While she must be remembered as one of those women who were active in making Britain’s South Asian empire visible in late eighteenth-century domestic society, she was not a typical nabobina. Most of the women who appear in publicly celebrated representations of Britain’s South Asian empire in this period more nearly mirror Peg Mushroom than Lady James. Henry Mackenzie’s Lady Mushroom was, therefore, more than a fictional character - a product of the over-active imagination and anti-imperial political sentiments of an Edinburgh publisher. In the early part of July 1786, The General Evening Post, a London paper, noted that “a Mrs. K— is arrived from Bengal, and it may be depended upon as a truth, says a morning paper, that she put on a new muslin or chintz gown every other day on her passage home; and when she arrived in the Downs made her valet a present of the whole. - This is 1 5 2 Collection of articles on Shooter’s Hill, BL w.7135,2017. 380 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Eastern luxury!”1 ® As had Lady Mushroom in John Homespun’s complaints, Mrs. K— here is seen to have invested herself in the luxurious fabrics and excesses of empire. General Richard Smith’s wife and sister, likewise, were known to live lives of “the greatest Magnificence and Grandeur,” and Paul Benfield’s wife was famous for the diamond ring she had received from her husband on their wedding day, and the ring, itself valued at £3,000, was only part of her wedding settlement, which also included a jointure of £3,000 a year and £500 a year in pin money.1 5 4 As had her scandalous affair with the future governor-general of British India, Warren Hastings, Marian Hastings’ penchant for luxury, however, made her by far the most celebrated nabobina of the late eighteenth century. The Public Advertiser was alone in defending Marian Hastings when it published a report of her return to Britain in September 1784. “No part of her equipage or economy,” the paper noted, “has any of that assumption of affectation so offensive in other Asiatic Grandees.”1 5 5 Fanny Burney’s thoughts on Marian Hastings’ style were, however, more representative of popular opinion. “I have always been very sorry that Mrs. Hastings...should have an indiscretion so peculiarly unsuited to her situation, as to aim always at being the most conspicuous figure wherever she appears,” mused Burney after having met both Marian and Warren Hastings at a public gathering in 1792. On this particular occasion, Burney had noted, “her dress now was like that of an Indian Princess, according to our ideas of such ladies, and so much the most splendid, from its ornaments and style and fashion, though chiefly Muslin.” Marian Hastings outshone everyone else in the room, Burney argued. She made the rest of the gathering appear “under dressed in her presence.” Hastings’ fashions were, Bumey thought, 1 3 3 The General Evening Post, Saturday July 8-Tuesday July 11,1786. 1 5 4 The Francis Collection, OIQC MssEurK 58/E 22,26. See also the DNB, i, 1270. 1 5 5 The Public Advertiser, 7 September 1784, quoted in Holzman, 26. 381 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. particularly inappropriate given that Warren Hastings was then in the middle of Ms drawn- out impeachment trial. “It is,” Bumey wrote, “for Mr. Hastings I am sorry, when I see tMs inconsiderate vanity in a woman who would so much better manifest her sensibility of Ms present hard disgrace, by a modest and quiet appearance and demeanour.”1 5 6 Despite Burney’s concern, neither Warren nor Marian Hastings seem to have been preoccupied about the perception that the latter’s extravagance occasioned, and there is reason to believe that both bear some of the blame. Hastings, who remained at Calcutta after Ms wife left for Britain, seems to have been eager that Marian display their wealth in metropolitan settings. Writing to her in October 1784, Hastings reported that “the shawl commission wMch you gave to Johnson is executed,” but he was pleased to inform his wife that “Cashmeereemall has brought me others of Ms own taste, wMch are beautiful beyond imagination.” Rather than send the less elaborate shawls to Britain, he wrote that “I have countermanded the shawl handkercMefs ordered in your letter,” replacing them with the finer ones from Cashmeereemall. “Why should I provide paltry tMngs for you,” he asked, “when I cany with me immitables?”1 5 7 For her part, Marian Hastings made an elaborate show of making gifts to die royal family during her reception at court in 1784. The Lady’ s Magazine reported in September of that year that she presented “a state bed of rich and very curious workmansMp.. .from India, which far exceeds anything of the kind for grandeur, ever seen in tMs kingdom” to Queen Charlotte.1 3 8 Burney’s fears that Marian Hastings’ presence at court could bring with it the moral taint associated with the former-Baroness von ImhofFs scandalous affair, divorce, and 1 5 6 Quoted in Raven, 226. 1 5 7 Grier, 336. 1 5 8 The Lady’ s Magazine (London 1784), 22 September 1784. See also The Gloucester Journal, Monday 1 1 October 1784, Creswell and Burbage’ s Nottingham Journal, Saturday 2 October 1784, The Caledonian Mercury, Saturday 2 October 1784, and Felix Farley’ s Bristol Journal, Saturday 2 October 1784. 382 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. remarriage was compounded by suggestions that Hastings was corrupting the court with the luxury of the east, perhaps even tempting the Queen with bribes to assist her husband out of the complex legal web of impeachment The Morning Herald reported that “the papers have very pompously announced a magnificent present of an extraordinary diamond to be sent by Mr. Hastings to her Majesty” through his wife. But it was not the court alone where the Hastings’ luxurious bribes posed a threat. “Lest Mr. Pitt should be jealous of this diamond,” reported The Morning Herald, the Hastings “have undertaken that [the Prime Minister] shall have one of equal value. The appellation of Diamond Pitt will therefore be resumed in the family. Are these things for nothing?”1 3 9 The luxurious importation of diamonds by nabobs and nabobinas not only threatened the moral honor of the British royal family, the stability of the English constitution, and the integrity of the entire political system but also the economic structures of the nation as well. As early as September 1772, The Public Advertiser had cautioned that the influx of South Asian diamonds was destroying Britain’s commercial gem markets. The market for Brazilian diamonds had utterly collapsed, the periodical noted, because there was “no estimation” between Brazilian and “Oriental stones.” The mass quantities of stones imported by the nabobs enabled them, as we have seen in previous chapters to buy their way into the social hierarchy of British society, but, by 1772, increased supplies of South Asian diamonds had “vastly reduced their Rice” to the point where diamonds were “scarce a marketable commodity.”1 ® Because it was she and not her husband who wore the diamonds they had brought back from South Asia, it was Marian Hastings and not the retired-govemor-genera! who 1 3 9 The Morning Herald, and Daily Advertiser, Wednesday 21 July 1784. 1 6 0 The Public Advertiser, Thursday September 10,1772. 383 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. attracted the most criticism for the dangers that South Asian diamonds, the wealth of empire, seemed to bring to metropolitan settings. As Bumey had noted, Marian Hastings was wont to go out without being dressed in her finest. Horace Walpole went so far as to suggest that she would not be seen in public with anyone whose dress did not meet her standards. Writing to Mary Beriy in February 1791 of Madame dn Barry, whose jewelry collection had recently been stolen, he jokingly noted that “if she regains her diamonds, perhaps Mrs. Hastings may carry her to court.”1 6 1 By Walpole’s estimation, Marian Hastings wore diamonds and jewels enough to merit celestial comparison. “Our weather,” he wrote to Berry in November 1793, “remains unparagoned: Mrs. Hastings is not more brilliant”1 6 2 As did Walpole, the authors of The Rolliad saw Marian Hastings as the visual paragon of the nabob class. Having cautioned King George against speaking openly in the presence of nabobs such as Paulk, Smith, Barwell, Call, and Vansittart, The Rolliad warns that when “rich odours scent the sphere,” one can be sure that “‘tis Mrs. Hastings' self brings up the rear!” It was not her perfume alone, however, that announced Marian Hastings among her nabob colleagues. She alone stood out for the brilliant and luxurious extravagance of her dress. “Gods! How her diamonds flock,” announced the poem, On each tinpowdered lock! On every membrane see a topaz clings! Behold! - Her joints are fewer than her rings! Illustrious dame! On either ear, The Munny Begums' spoils appear! The nabobs had made vast fortunes in South Asia, and, in the absence of complex organs of monetary exchange. They had remitted those fortunes in the form of diamonds back to Britain, where the public constantly came into contact with South Asian gem stones 1 6 1 Letter to Mary Beiry, 26 February 1791, in Walpole, xi, 207. 1 6 2 Letter to Mary Berry, 7 November 1793, in Walpole, xii, 55. 384 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and nabob wealth on the bodies of nabobinas like Marian Hastings. The body of the nabobina, therefore, was marked as a symbol of the presence of South Asian wealth in metropolitan Britain, a walking representation of the effects that imperial money had at home. Politicians were not free of Marian Hastings influence. “Oh! Pitt,” exclaimed The Rolliad, With awe behold that precious throat, Whose necklace teems with many a future vote! Pregnant with Burgage gems each hand she rears; And lo! Depending questions gleam upon her ears! Nor, it would seem, was the royal family. “Take her, Great George,” the poem advised, “and shake her by the hand.” This was, wrote The Rolliad authors, the best way to “loose her jewels, and enrich thy land.”1 ® The Rolliad was a long series of satirical poems and vignettes of literary critiques directed at a myriad of targets - royal, political, social, moral, and commercial. More specifically directed at Marian Hastings and far more critical of her status as the physical embodiment of South Asian wealth in domestic settings, is The Hastiniad, a poem ascribed to an Eliza Ryves from 1785. Written in the heroic style, The Hastiniad traced Marian Hastings’ life from Calcutta to London and then on to Gloucestershire where Marian and Warren Hastings retired after purchasing Ms ancestral estate at Daylesford. In India, Marian Hastings was depicted as being “vain of wealth” as well as of “favour” as she pressed through the crowds and “flaunts” her “new-blown honours proud.”1 6 4 It is was Marian Hastings prepared to leave South Asia for Britain, however, that the full spite of The Hastiniad emerged. “Now on the beach with stately mien,” the poem noted, 1 6 3 The Rolliad, 325-326. 1 6 4 Eliza Ryves, The Hastiniad (London, 1785), 7. 385 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “the Dame descended, in port a Queen.” Received as royalty by the populations of India over whom she had, as Macaulay was to note, ruled as a “Queen,” Marian Hastings is depicted on a “gilded chariot” that carries her across the seas through the “full” and “auspicious gales” of the East, while, beneath her, the ocean “groans beneath the weight of gold and iv’ry’s precious freight.” She was “the great Sultana from the waves” who ruled over the “tawny band” from her “chairs of state.”1 6 5 The poem listed a long catalogue of the luxurious cargo that Marian Hastings imported with her from South Asia when she returned to Britain in 1784, including “curtains rich with netted gold,” “costly robes all broider’d round, with pearls in farthest India found,” opals that are “studded, glorious to the view... [and] of each varying hue,” and, of course, “the iv’ry bed” that would become a gift for Queen Charlotte.1 6 6 Written in the same year that Warren Hastings returned to Britain from South Asia and the same year in which Edmund Burke first announced his intentions to charge Hastings with his long list of articles of impeachment, The Hastiniad placed the blame for the rapine of Hastings’ administration in South Asia squarely at Marian Hastings’ feet. It was she, the poem argues, who coveted the Lacks pil’d c h i lacks, a princely store; Millions of wealth, the spoils or bribes Of ravag’d India’s royal tribes. Proud stubborn tribes, who dar’d withhold Their long worn gems, their thrones of gold, Till from the scourge of war to save Their country, they their treasure gave.1 6 7 Back in Britain, Hastings continued, the poem suggested, to conceive of herself as royalty and to demand to be accorded such a status. “Though in a northern isle,” she 1 6 5 /hid., 7-8. 1 6 6 Ibid., 8-11. 1 6 7 Ibid., 11. 386 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. demanded that “where’er she toms her eyes, the splendor of the Indies rise.” Thus, her host of “swarthy” servants constantly busied themselves to arrange for her arrival, spreading “carpets more worthy of her tread,” hanging wall tapestries that are “dazzling to behold,” and relocating her “sofas string’d with waving gold.”1 6 8 Settled in at Daylesford, described in The Hastiniad as “her glitt’ring Palace” in which she displayed enough wealth to “barter half [of] Peru,” Marian Hastings oversaw a “torban’d train” of servants and received her guests who pass through grand saloons spread “richly” with Persian carpets, tapestries, and other displays of “the wealth from plunder’d India brought.”1 6 9 The Hastiniad argued that Marian Hastings, that “illustrious dame,” will shine where e’er thy fancy may incline; Alike rever’d if thou resort, To Britain’s, or thine Indian Court.™ Hastings represented the portability of South Asian wealth - its potency in both South Asian and metropolitan environments, and, as a result, she became a symbol of Britain’s South Asian empire, the rapine that came to be associated with the construction of that empire, and the changes that becoming an imperial power brought to metropolitan society - changes that, to metropolitan observers, looked more like ill effects than positive social change. She, like Elizabeth Plowden before her, demonstrated that the female body bound empire, gender, sexuality, consumerism, and luxury into one form and problematized the interaction of these forces in metropolitan settings. As Michael Rysbrack’s bas-relief sculpture in the India Office Council Chamber had represented it, empire was about trade, commerce, merchandise, and power. The world’s oceans and rivers were conduits to bring goods and wealth to the very seat of British power 5 6 8 Ibid., 13-14. m Ibid., 16. 1 1 0 Ibid., 21. 387 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. where it could be controlled by British administrators such as the EIC and then the Government of India and, ultimately always, the state itself. This wealth benefited Britain’s native populations who could, as The Spectator had once noted, enjoy any number of fruits, fabrics, or products that their native soil could not produce. But, as this chapter has shown, the waterways of global trade were unstable conduits within which patterns of social order exported from the metropolitan world could be overturned by something as simple, it seemed to some, as a sudden change in a ship’s tack. Even onboard ships completely crewed by men, normative models of sexual propriety were almost impossible to police. Acts of sodomy committed onboard by men on the bodies of other men eradicated sexual difference as male sailors acted the role of women for other male sailors. This was, as Kathleen Wilson has shown, the terrible fear that underpinned anti-sodomy legislation directed at naval and commercial vessels in the last half of the eighteenth century. The presence of women on the water-based highways of empire further complicated gendered social patterns because they further expanded the number of potential ways in which difference could be erased in the context of empire. Women such as Marian Hastings and Elizabeth Plowden had, as this chapter argued from the outset, crossed “the dark waters” of empire and returned to Europe to find that metropolitan observers viewed them as changed and different. Rather than marking differences, however, this chapter has demonstrated that they represented the growing danger that the nation and the empire were becoming more and more alike. The nabobina did not so much challenge the model of domestic British femininity because she was different as she did because she showed that it was possible for the women of domestic Britain to become other than they were. The gendered experience of empire exposed the constructed nature of normative models of domestic femininity and masculinity precisely because the instability of such models in imperial settings proved them to be mutable and permeable. Wives such as 388 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Marian Hastings could become concubines in imperial settings. Western women such as Elizabeth Plowden could become Kashmiri dancing girls while eastern concubines such as William Hickey’s Jendanee became “partners” to western men. In domestic settings, the mothers and sisters of nabobs became nabobinas themselves, as John Homespun witnessed, and on the body of women like Marian Hastings, the luxury and wealth of the east became the luxury, wealth, and even the power of western nations as well. Indeed, as Lady William James’ tower at Eitham demonstrated, the very history of South Asia could become the history of London itself, etched to this day on the landscape of the city in the form of a small triangular tower, a garden folly of the Georgian era that proclaims the elision of Britain and India through their eighteenth-century imperial encounter with one another. The female figure of the nabobina gendered the experience of empire as the bodily expression of the eradication of difference and distinction. She demonstrated that, as Britain became an imperial power and as nation was subsumed by empire, the existence of Britain, Britons, and British national identity were reduced to tessellated fragments of a much larger mosaic, an image that was best viewed and appreciated from without than from within. To domestic observers the nabobina was a clear, gendered, and present threat to normative models of British identity, making women of the British imperial project the disproportionate objects of anti-imperial ridicule in the late eighteenth century. To those who worked in the India House at Leadenhall Street, and those who subsequently worked at the India Office at Whitehall, the Rysbrack sculpture was likely never more than a decorative flourish above the fireplace. But, as this chapter has demonstrated, its iconography merits more attention. India and Africa stand before Britannia in the bas-relief scene handing over their treasures. Equally so, however, they stand before Britannia’s throne announcing their presence. They stand on Britannia’s shores commanding the center of the iconographic scene. They are British subjects, and they invite the possibility that Britannia and the river god Thames are similarly part of the extra- 389 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. European world The imperial experience draws each of the figures - Asia, Africa, Thames, and Britannia - out of their isolation with the possibility that difference is a shared similarity between them all. In Rysbrack’s scene, the female body becomes the location at which difference is made evident and at which difference is made irrelevant, and it is for this reason that the figure of the nabobina, despite the relatively small number of European women who went to empire in the eighteenth-century, became so disproportionately the subject of ridicule and critic in late eighteenth-century Britain. The figure of the nabob may have represented the political and cultural hybridization wrought by empire, but the nabobina, his female counterpart, was the figure that promised a new breed of imperial subjects who fused empire and metropole into a singular identity. 390 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Conclusion One Em pire, T wo. Nations: The Limits pf Imperial Identity The process of building an empire in South Asia was predicated on difference. India was not Britain; Britain was not India. Eighteenth-century Britons fashioned a soi-disant image of their nation as an island whose history was rich with stories of the triumph of the Anglo-Saxon people over invaders from the Romans to the Stuart pretenders and their French allies - stories of the victory of liberty over despotism, reformed Protestantism over superstitious Catholicism, and the British people over the vicissitudes of nature that had placed them on a windswept archipelago whose climate could be cold and whose soil was not always fertile. With the help of diaries, memoirs, and letters sent from India by the employees of the EIC, Britons conjured a contrapuntal image of South Asia as a place where despotism and luxury reigned, where the fetters of superstitious religiosity bound the people to the rule of a tyrannical priesthood, and where the land itself was so fertile that the native people had their every want provided for them. It was a place where great civilizations had emerged from the very soil itself, where the people did not have to work to build a world of their own, and where, as a result, an indolent and lazy population had allowed their bounty to spoil around them. India was a place that needed to be conquered, harnessed to the civilizing force of an ingenious, hard-working, and punctilious master - a nation like Britain. EIC employees, this study has shown, were the fulcrum of the British imperial process in South Asia in the late eighteenth century. They were the ones who generated the evidence that supported the teleological image of India as a place that was imminently colonizable, and they were the ones who carried out the act of colonizing the subcontinent. At the same time, Company employees were always present as a potential danger to the imperial project in South Asia. As Kate Teltscher has argued, “the assumption of colonial 391 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. power marks the emergence of a much more precarious sense of self.”1 British nabobs gave this reality a human face. Because they had imagined India as a place that corrupted its inhabitants to justify British mastery of the native people of the subcontinent, EIC employees opened the door to suggestions that they too could be polluted by going to and living in India. More significantly, when EIC employees became nabobs, they challenged the very boundaries of the British nation itself, bringing the material markers of South Asia home and planting them across the nation. All of this, of course, is not meant to suggest that the British empire brought about the formation of the British nation within the British historical context any more than it is to suggest that the British nation was a prerequisite for the British empire. The former claim, as Sara Suleri has rightly noted, would only serve “to replicate in inverse order an enduring imperial stereotype, which suggests that empire confers the rationality of nationhood on its pre-rational subjects.”2 What this study has argued, though, is that the process of empire and the process of nation were coterminous; the two developed alongside one another. As Kathleen Wilson has argued, “the eighteenth-century ‘empire of the sea’...was...a generator for ideas about nationality and race, ethnicity, and difference that impacted metropolitan culture and categories of knowledge in profound and quotidian ways.’* 3 Empire generated new ways of thinking about the nation, but it also generated new ways of thinking that subverted the nation. If, as we have seen, “the empire” was a fragile category predicated on delicate teleologies, “the nation” was no more secure. It was subject to the invasion of both imperial commodities and imperial agents like the nabobs. Empire was, as Wilson has written, “the 1 Teltscher, 62. 2 Suleri, 8. 3 Wilson, The Island Race, 15. See also Pratt, 4. 392 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. frontier of the nation,” but, as this dissertation has shown, not every community recognized the direct connections between nation and empire, and not all of those who did did so in the same way. Benedict Anderson’s formulation of the nation as little more than an “imagined community,” Wilson has reflected, always begs the concomitant question: whose community?4 It seems dear, as Jeremy Osborn has argued, that India was part of the “imperial world-view of many informed people in Britain” at the end of the eighteenth century.5 What seems equally clear, though, is that many of those same, well-informed Britons who accepted India as part of the British Empire did not see - or did not care to see - the empire as an integral part of the British Nation. The experience of empire exposed the fact that the nation was subject to competing definitions offered by imperial Britons like the nabobs as well as by their domestic critics who never left the confines of their island homeland. It exposed what Homi Bhabha has called “the agnostic uncertainty contained in the incompatibility of empire and nation.”6 Sara Suleri has suggested that “if cultural criticism is to address the uses to which it puts the agency of alterity, then it must further face the theoretical question that S. P. Mohanty formulates: ‘Just how other... is the other?”’ 7 Mohanty’s question is critical here because, as the nabob controversy of the late eighteenth century makes clear, the question of the other is as much a part of the internal or domestic dynamics of Britain’s national history as it is a part of the dynamic interaction between the center and the peripheries. “How do we negotiate between my history and yours?,” Mohanty has asked in reference to the people of Britain and the populations of South Asia.8 As the previous chapters have shown, this same 4 Anderson, Imagined Communities. See also, Wilson, The Island Race, 17 and 33. For more, see Philip D. Morgan, 42-78. See also, Sen, 153. 5 Osborn, “India and the EIC in the Public Sphere of Eighteenth-Century Britain,” 216. 6 Bhabha, 95-96. 7 Suleri, 9. 8 Quoted in Suleri, 14. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. question also applied internally to several competing British populations of the late eighteenth century. For those Britons who never left the three kingdoms, Great Britain meant something entirely different than it did to Britons who traveled throughout the empire. To Company servants, the empire was a vital component of the nation itself - an extension of the core rather than peripheral to it. As Major John Scott-Waring claimed in a letter to the editor of The Edinburgh Review in 1810, India was essential to Britain. It was, he explained, “the most important of all our foreign possessions.. .The nation has derived very great advantages from its Indian empire.” Some, he admitted, could not see these advantages. They “represented as a serious evil, instead of an advantage to the nation,” the wealth that Company employees brought home from South Asia. Domestic critics, he reflected, looked at nabobs as “insolent upstarts, who raised the price of provisions wherever they resided, and who elbowed out the old established gentlemen of the country,” but, he explained, they were, in fact, only examples of how India had promoted the “accumulation of private wealth,” which was always “an advantage to the nation.”9 The nabobs were not, therefore, silent victims of the nabob controversy of the late eighteenth century. Rather, they responded to their critics with their own vision of Britain and of the nation’s growing relationship with the expanding empire. The empire was the key to trade, they argued, and trade was the very lifeline of a nation of merchants and shopkeepers. Domestic observers saw the importance of trade; they understood the significance of the navy. As one letter to The Female Spectator noted in 1748, the royal navy was central “to the preservation of everything,” and industrious merchants supplied the 9 Scott-Waring, Letter to the Editor o f the Edinburgh Review, 4-11. 394 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. nation with “every delight that peace and plenty bring.”1 0 What these same observers failed to see, Company employees like Joseph Fowke maintained, was the fact that the empire, both in the east and the west, was the link between the navy, commerce, and the nation. It was the sustaining force of the nation - something to be defended at all costs. “With the loss of our colonies,” Fowke cautioned, “our commerce falls; with the loss of our commerce our Marine falls, and with the loss of our marine, Great Britain falls."1 1 Though this formula was plain to Fowke, he explained that the government and “the greatest men in the kingdom were slow in comprehending it.”1 2 The East-India Examiner echoed Fowke’s point in 1766 when it noted that “at present.. .there are near seven millions of property invested in [imperial] trade, an immense quantity of shipping employed, fleets and armies maintained, and great possessions acquired.” All Britons, the paper demanded, were involved in imperial trade; everyone was “more or less concerned.” Imperial trade, “next to the Constitution of England itself, ought to be the subject of our most serious attention.”1 3 The empire, then, was not a network of other places to nabobs. It was a critical extension of the British nation. The people of Britain, whether they stayed in Britain or not, were a part of the empire, and it was part of them When William Bolts wrote of British subjects in his Considerations on India Affairs in 1772, he understood the term to include “His Majesty’s newly-acquired Asiatic subjects, as well as the British emigrants residing and established in India.”1 4 When he wrote in defense of Richard Smith in 1783, Joseph Price reiterated Bolts’ sentiment “Was I an English patriot,’ he explained, “I would move the House to expel all aliens and interlopers of the patriotic tribe.” But, he went on, he was not 1 0 The Female Spectator (London, 1748), 148-149. 1 1 Joseph Fowke to John Walsh, 4 December 1755, OIQC Mss Eur D546/7. 1 2 Ibid. B The East-India Examiner, No. 1, (1766), 1. 1 4 Bolts, i, vi. 395 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. an English patriot He was a British patriot, and Britain was bigger than England. Britain was an imperial nation that encompassed more than just the British isles. “I see not,” Price explained, “why Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin, or President [Henry] Laurens, may not become Members of the House of Commons, as well as Edmund Burke.” Both men were landed gentlemen, and though their property was in North America, Price argued that it was British property that would, upon legal inspection, be found “to lye in the same country.”1 5 For Price, Benjamin Franklin and Henry Laurens were British subjects, citizens of an imperial state that spanned the globe. Only the refusal of metropolitan leaders to accept them as such, he argued, had driven the two men to side with the rebellion in America - one as an intellectual leader of the movement and the other as the president of the Continental Congress.1 6 Price’s vision of Britain’s imperial constitution matched that which Robert Clive had put forth during the 1773 inquires into his jaghir. “To the good people of England, fellow countrymen,” Clive had demanded, “you are a mixed breed.”1 7 Those who tried to erect barriers where none existed, then, were the cause of tensions within the British imperial nation. They tried to fix what was not broken. As The East-India Observer summarized their actions: I was well, I would be better, So I took Physic, And died.1 8 Company servants accused of being nabobs tried to defend themselves against the appellation. Kenelm Digby insisted that he would not be labeled as a nabob.1 9 Archibald Seton urged Henry Stewart to believe that his actions were not like those of the infamous 1 5 Price, A Vindication of General Richard Smith, 43. 1 6 Ibid. 1 7 Remarks made on the Attack on Lord Clive in 1773, Clive Collection, OIOC Mss Eur G37/8, 2. 1 8 The East-India Observer, No. 5 (1766), 32. 1 9 See Chapter Four, 230. 396 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. nabobs of South Asia. He was a simple Company servant, saving Ms money so that he could return home to Ms family and his beloved estate at Touch.2 0 Though they lived in South Asia, men like Digby and Seton insisted that they were not different from Britons living in metropolitan settings. If India was part of the British imperial nation, they had never left home. When they came back to domestic Britain, they could not, therefore, import with them the accoutrements of foreign places. They did not need to be re-domesticated. Rather, they simply brought back symbols of the growing scope of the British imperial nation. Nabobs represented the vanguard of a new national identity that spanned the world. They saw the new nation as galvanic and exhilarating, though they were greeted by a domestic public that feared them as foreign and polluting. Their very possessions offended domestic British sensibilities. When Marian Hastings arrived at Portsmouth in 1784, officials seized all of her muslin gowns and detained them at customs. Customs law proMbited her bringing in her silks “as well as a velvet riding-habit worked with pearls, and various dresses, curtains, and stuffs containing gold and silver threat.” She was, one observer noted, “virtually threatened with the loss of her entire wardrobe but for those she had hand carried onto shore.”2 1 To Company employees like John Scott-Waring, “there [were] not such a set of vermin in England as our Custom House Officers.”2 2 Like Marian Hastings, William Hickey was stripped of a small fortune’s worth of property when he returned to London in 1808. He was outraged by the hebetude of the custom’s officers. They buffeted Ms belongings, confiscated Ms treasures, and seized a number of portraits he had commissioned of European artists while in South Asia. These images they impounded under regulations that forbade the 2 0 See Chapter Four, 223-225,239-240 and 247-248. 2 1 Grier, 394 7 2 Ibid. 397 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. importation of foreign art, Hickey considered the loss of Ms paintings to be “the most infamous part of the transaction.” What, he asked, made the paintings foreign'? Were they, he asked, foreign because they were painted outside of England? They had, after all, been executed in a British settlement, by different artists, but all of them Englishmen constantly living under English law. The persons represented were ail subjects of Great Britain, holding offices of trust under our government, and these paintings were executed for and paid for by me who am [sic] likewise a Briton bom and bred. Moreover, every canvas upon wMch the paintings were made, the colours, oils, and even the very hair pencils used in the work were all of British manufacture, and after all they were conveyed to Europe in an English East India Ship. Nothing foreign from beginning to end in the whole transaction! Under such circumstances is it not preposterous, is it not most unreasonable, to pronounce such pictures to be foreign!2 3 To metropolitan Britons, the nabobs were not arbiters of an imperial national identity. Such an idea was mere pablum. They were different. They dressed differently, they ate different foods, they had strange pets, they lived in unusual houses, they behaved rudely, and they seemed to be domesticating all of this foreignness on British soil. They brought home strange and unusual items that belonged to India, and they used them as a matter of daily course in domestic British settings. At a moment when, as this dissertation has shown, climatologies! determinants and cultural forms defined the boundaries of identity, nabobs appeared to be culturally degenerate, and their presence in the metropole seemed to endanger the British nation itself.2 4 The British press made a great deal out of rumors that nabobs made their way in the domestic world by means of their Indian commodities. Diamonds paved their way. Nabobs, it was assumed were responsible for bringing tainted Indian political forms like bribery to Britain, and it was Indian commodities that fuelled this economy of political corruption. 2 3 Hickey, The Memoirs of William Hickey, ed. Alfred Spencer, iv, 470-471. 2 4 See Harrison, 215-216. 398 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Warren and Marian Hastings typified this trend. As we have seen, they presented the royal family with a state bed made of ivory in 1784. It was a “peculiar” piece of furniture, the papers widely reported, and it was a political tool, as were the diamonds, the parakeets, and the hyenas that they gave as gifts as well.2 5 Amin Jaffer has rightly noted that “these gifts acquired a certain notoriety” once the impeachment charges were formally filed against Hastings in 1788. “The Queen,” he has written, “was openly sympathetic” to Hastings, and satirists suggested the reason - “a person could hardly take such articles as ivory chairs, ivory beds, rich pieces of silk or pearl necklaces without showing a degree of civility to the donor.”2 6 As contemporary papers noted when Hastings himself met with the King in June 1785, “the presents brought over by the Governor General of Bengal for the Royal family, and some other distinguished personages, are said to exceed, in rarity and richness all that have hitherto been produced from India.”2 7 The nabobs brought home Indian goods and used them to bribe their way through domestic society. More importantly, though, imported commodities were increasingly reaching every domestic Briton in the last years of the eighteenth century; the markers of difference that defined the imperial other were, as Felicity Nussbaum has written, moving “closer and closer to home.”2 8 The public newspapers advertised Indian commodities - an Asiatic tooth powder, pieces of ivory furniture, samples of South Asian textiles, exotic new foodstuffs, and Indian clothing. These items did not just settle in the nation’s ports. Rather, 2 5 Nottingham Journal, 2 October 1784; The Aberdeen Journal 4 October 1784; Jopson’ s Coventry Mercury, 4 October 1784; The Caledonian Mercury, 2 October 1784; The Reading Mercury and Oxford Gazette, 4 October 1784; The Reading Mercury and Oxford Gazette, 11 October 1784; Felix Farley’ s Bristol Journal, 2 October 1784; The Exeter Flying-Post or Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser, 30 September 1784. 2 6 Jaffer, Furniture from British India and Ceylon, 244. 2 7 The Aberdeen Journal, 27 June 1785; The Dublin Evening Post, 23 June 1785; The Caledonian Mercury, 20 June 1785; The Reading Mercury and Oxford Gazette, 20 June 1785; Felix Farley’ s Bristol Journal 25 June 1785; The Exeter Flying-Post or Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser, 23 June 1785. 2 8 Nussbaum, The Limits o f the Human, 239. 399 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. they appeared in local advertisements in cities from London to Edinburgh, from Dublin to Exeter, from Bath to Bristol, from Coventry to Cornwall, and from Nottingham to Plymouth.2 9 They poured in despite customs restrictions that made a great many of the items officially illegal, and in some instances, official ads reminding the public of their illegality ran alongside those for the illicit products themselves.3 0 By the late eighteenth century, Britain’s growing imperial identity was infiltrating the nation, and it was doing so in die form of material commodities from the imperial world. Lady Coke never felt quite so connected to the empire, she suggested in her journal in 1769, than when she went shopping on board an EIC ship docked in London. She had been permitted to board the vessel before it unloaded its wares. “We were hoisted on board in a Chair,” and “one of the East India Directors was so polite to meet us.” Coke and her shopping companions enjoyed an imperial breakfast onboard, dining on coffee, tea, exotic fruits, and wine before setting out to look “for East India goods.” During the course of her day, Coke purchased seven pounds of tea in Chinese canisters and a sculpted Indian figurine. The Company Director made her a present of two exotic birds.3 1 For domestic Britons like Coke, interaction with the material products of South Asia made the experience of Britain’s empire on the subcontinent a tangible one, something lived and real. For critics of the empire, these same products suggested the degree to which the empire was polluting the nation. If it was bad that a nabobina like Marian Hastings decorated her home in the “Indian style,” it was even worse that the Duchess of Kingston 2 9 The Gloucester Journal, 11 October 1784; The Dublin Evening Post, 14 February 1784; The Caledonian Mercury, 21 November 1785; The Bath Journal 6 December 1779; The Exeter Flying- Post or Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser, 9 April 1795; The Public Advertiser, 25 April 1772. 3 0 See The Bath Journal, 6 December 1779,17 January 1780,24 January 1780, 30 January 1780,7 February 1780, and 21 February 1780. 3 1 Coke, iii, 130-131. 400 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. slept in a boudoir that she called her “India Paper Bed Room.”3 2 No less troubling for those who sought to keep the nation and the empire distinguished as two separate entities was the fact that the Indian empire was infiltrating traditionally British pastimes like horseracing. Across the nation, racehorses appeared on tracks with imperial-sounding names like Bamboo, Mogul, and M uslim ^ The nation, such critics insisted, was not the empire; the two could not be blended. Lady Kingston might have been a scandalous figure in late eighteenth-century Britain, but she was still distinguishable - or should have been - from that group of women who were labeled as nabobinas. Similarly, nabobish country estates polluted the British countryside, but more importantly they diluted traditional British architectural styles. More than a few observers suggested that George Dance’s 1788 designs for the new facade of London’s Guildhall bore the markings of Dance’s friendship with William Hodges and Thomas and William Daniel!, all known for their contributions to nabobish architecture.3 6 likewise, critics of the nabobs were quick to note that the Prince Regent’s plans for the epitome of orientalized architecture, 3 2 Gervat, 92-95. 3 3 The London Chronicle, 25 laly 1772,3 September 1772, and 17 October 1772. See also, Osborn, “India and the EIC in the Public Sphere of Eighteenth Century Britain,” 206. 3 4 Photography by the author, 2003. 3 3 Photography by the author, 2003. 3 6 See Conner, Oriental Architecture in the West, 115. Illustration 41. Guildhall, London; I I.... ! .r ... Illustration 42. The Royal Pavilion, Brighton.3 5 401 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, only appeared after he visited Sezineote in 1808 and met its architect, Humphrey Repton, who later helped design the Prince’s eccentric pavilion. If the material culture of empire was, in fact, polluting the nation, it had reached the highest echelons of British society by the end of the eighteenth century.3 7 The London Chronicle expressed its fears with concinnity and concision in April 1804 when it lamented that “the genii of India” had poured “the treasures of the east into the lap of Britannia.”3 8 These products had made the nation wealthy, but they had also made it an imperial hybrid - something other than it might have been had it never engaged in the process of becoming and being an imperial power. The relationship between empire and nation complicated identity, and blurred boundaries that might otherwise have divided India from Britain, there from here, and them from us. These difficulties were evident at every level of British society in the late eighteenth century. From the moment Clive emerged victorious from the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the EIC, on behalf of the British nation, was a territorial master in South Asia, but at the very instant that Clive received the dewani of Bengal in 1765, the Company, and the British state, became feudatory vassals of the Mughal empire. By the standards of the British legal system, the situation was untenable. South Asian princes addressed letters to King George as “The King of England, Madras, Bengal, [and] Fort St. David.”3 9 Empire transformed the king and the nation from something provincial into something that spanned the globe, encompassed a plethora of people, and promised a future of synergistic interactivity between them all. 3 7 For more on the Prince Regent as an “Oriental Despot,” see Clark, Scandal, 183. 3 8 The London Chronicle, 28 April 1804. 3 9 Keay, 336 and 379. 402 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The N abob a t H om e: New Categories of Imperial Difference The nabob controversy of the late eighteenth century marked a substantial challenge to older categories of difference. As we have seen, modem categories of race rooted in science, in genetics, and in blood, were still in the process of congealing in the eighteenth century, and these new models did not simply replace older theories of human differentiation. Rather, eighteenth-century Britons charted difference using a nexus of several paradigms.4 0 Skin color was, as Roxann Wheeler has argued, rapidly becoming “the most important component of racial identity.”4 1 Black men and women, The Public Advertiser had proclaimed in 1783, were indisputably part of “a lower link of the human chain.”4 2 At the same time, there can be no doubt that attacks against the nabobs that highlighted their involvement in bringing South Asians, South Asian animals, South Asian foods, clothing, architectural styles, and languages home with them to domestic Britain were equally rooted in intrinsically xenophobic fears of outside people and unknown cultures. The quest to establish difference resulted in a paradigm that suggested inequality and fostered discrimination. This discrimination was rooted in the Indian climate, expressed itself in the religious and political institutions of South Asia, and manifested itself in material terms - those of culture rather than blood. Absent the ability to defer to a discourse of scientific racism that could root difference in blood lines, genetics, and heredity, eighteenth-century Britons relied cm cultural markers as the taxonomic indicators by which they ordered their world. Turbans, ivory furniture, curries, onion domes, and sacred cows - these were the material indicators that proved a person was South Asian. A Briton wore hats, sat on wooden furniture, lived in 4 0 Wheeler, 31-37. 4 1 Ibid., 9. 4 2 The Public Advertiser, 4 November 1783. 403 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. brick houses with sloping roofs, and ate roast beef. As a result, the question of racial miscegenation and its sexual consequences did not carry the same onerous burden that it would in the nineteenth century. William Hickey, as we saw, did not think twice about having bom a son by his Indian lover, Kiruan. The boy had dark skin, so they named him Mahogany. It is true that Hickey eventually threw Kiruan and her young son out of his house, but he did so only after discovering that she had been unfaithful and that the boy was her lover’s son, not his. It was not a concern for the racial purity of his children or of the British ruling class in South Asia that drove Hickey’s actions. Though he undoubtedly thought himself superior to South Asians, his actions were less those of a racist than they were those of a much older figure - a jealous and betrayed lover.4 3 As William Dalrymple has recently noted, the late eighteenth century was a time when Anglo-Indian sexual relationships were beginning to fall under scrutiny. In tracing the history of the love affair and marriage of Major James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the British resident at the Court of the nizam of Hyderabad from 1798 to 1805, and Begum Khair un- Nissa, Dalrymple has correctly shown that the late eighteenth century marked the start of a new age in the relationship between Britons and South Asians on the Indian subcontinent. It was, Dalrymple has argued, a time when the arrival of “Evangelical Christianity and the moral certainties it brought with it ended all open sexual contact between the two nations.”4 4 In his romantic desire to see the eighteenth century as a moment of racial harmony and the transition into the nineteenth century as an epic shift, though, Dalrymple misses the larger point. To be sure, there are countless narratives that could be told of Anglo-Indian love affairs and the children they produced in the eighteenth century that would support Dalrympie’s argument. Sir William Johnson, who was rumored to have advanced his career 4 3 See Chapter Five, 334-336. 4 4 Dalrymple, 498. 404 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in India by making “conncecions [sic] with the Daughters” of Indian leaders, was said to have had more than an hundred Anglo-Indian children.4 5 Sir William James, who died at his daughter’s wedding and whose widow memorialized his life with a museum at Eltham outside of London, had a son by his second wife, remembered in James’ obituaiy in The Nottingham Journal only as “an Indian Lady.” This unnamed son, a Sepoy in the Company’s army at Madras, the paper reported, survived his father and succeeded to the family name. “He is now,” the obituary concluded, “Sir Richard James, Bart, and the first of that country who succeeded to an English Baronettage.”4 6 Not dissimilarly, advertisements in the domestic press listed boarding and education opportunities for such children. One such ad from The Morning Herald openly noted how common it was for English gentleman to have children to tend to who were the result of their “connections.. .in India.”4 7 As he grew sick and faced death himself, even James Kirkpatrick recognized that his children, Mir Ghulam Ali and Noor-un-Nissa, would do better in Britain than in South Asia, so he sent them back to live with his family, as William George Kirkpatrick and Katherine Aurora Kirkpatrick respectively.4 8 In Britain, William seems to have moved in educated circles, influenced by the romantic poetry of men like Coleridge. His sister, Kitty, as the family knew her, was a popular figure in London’s social circuit in the early nineteenth century. In the mid-1820s, she was won the affections of a young Thomas Carlyle, not yet a known essayist Rather than pursuing a relationship with Carlyle, though, Kitty Kirkpatrick, the son of an EIC nabob and his South Asian wife, turned the young author away. He was beneath her. “He was,” she wrote, “the tutor to my cousin.”4 9 4 5 The Public Advertiser, Tuesday September 13,1774. 4 6 The Nottingham Journal, Saturday January 3,1784. 4 7 The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, 25 June 1785. 4 8 Dalrymple, 384. 4 9 Ibid., 474-478. 405 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. What Daliymple has overlooked, however, is the fact that the late eighteenth century was not, as he has argued, a time when moral certainty was not vested in a racial identity. It was not yet, to be sure, a time when moral certainty was fully vested as a sexually transmissible and genetically definite category. Rather, as this study has shown, the late eighteenth century marked a moment when categories of difference played themselves out in a complex set of ways, most visibly in material culture - visible and tangible markers of difference. Colonial rule, was always, to quote Sudipta Sen, “consonant with intimate forms of inequality that can be traced back to the depths of European history.”5 0 The attacks on nabobinas in the late eighteenth century began to hint at the sexual politics of nineteenth-century imperialism, accusing women like Sophia Plowden and Marian Hastings of being morally loose, but it was not until later that the full racial implications of the sexual interaction between westerners and non-westerners would become the central danger of imperial contact. “The growing conviction that racial characteristics were stable across generations,” Mark Harrison has suggested, “was of some comfort to the British,” and nabobinas challenged even this stability.5 1 In the late eighteenth century, though, the worry was still that empire changed Britons, and that change was measured through the artifacts of empire. Nabobs and nabobinas returned to Britain with strange clothes, they lived in strange houses, they ate exotic foods, and they had rude manners, unusual pets, and luxurious habits. Nabobs came home to Britain, in most cases, after decades spent in India. Though their domestic friends and families looked at them and saw in them change, difference, and divergence, the nabobs themselves demanded that they were still British, that the empire was part of the nation, and that India by extension was not a foreign place. 5 0 Sen, 86. 5 1 Harrison, 218. 406 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The result was that nabobs problemafized theoretical models of difference rooted in material culture in ways that rendered the system almost fully inoperable. In the face of this challenge, the only basis for difference that seemed ironclad and impermeable was the one rooted in blood.5 2 As Sudipta Sen has suggested, eighteenth-century articulations of difference “persisted as subtext in much of the nineteenth-century colonial accounts of Indians, alongside biological race, social Darwinism, and even early eugenics, as cumulative and residual mythologies of origins under colonial rule,” but, I would add the older proliferation of categories of difference remained only a subtext to biological race in the nineteenth century precisely because the nabob controversy of the late eighteenth century had demonstrated the degree to which cultural boundaries could be blurred and contested.5 3 For the title character of the anonymous novel The Nabob at Home (1842), questions of change and difference infused his return to Britain after decades spent working in South Asia. Though the novel appeared almost halfway into the nineteenth century, Dr. M’Alprin returned to his home after many years to find that his family no longer recognized him. He had, the novel explained, “sighed,” while in India, “for the time when he should be enabled to revisit his native land,” but, upon his return, his family saw a tanned old man with a “pale face, sunk eyes, and bald forehead,” not the “rosy-checked, curly-headed, active lad, who left them in the pride of youth and expectation.”5 4 The progress of time, it would seem, had not changed the fact that separation across long spans of time and great distances caused people to grow apart What had changed, however, was the sympathetic way in which the author of The Nabob at Home sketched the nabob’s arrival. 5 2 See Harrison, 119-121 and 204-205. 3 Ibid., 119. 5 4 The Nabob at Home, 3 vols., (London, 1842), i, 2-14. 407 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Rather than elaborating the many ways in which the nabob had changed during Ms travels to and from, and long residence in South Asia, the novel centered on the changes that had taken place in the metropolitan world. It was a different Dr. M’Alprin that returned to Britain than the one who left it, but, more importantly for the novel’s plot, it was a different Britain that he returned to than the one he had left behind. As the British landscape rose on the horizon, Dr. M’Alprin looked longingly from the deck of the EIC ship transporting him home, but his hopes were soon fractured. His first vision of Britain suggested future disappointments. The strawberry fields that he saw from the ship, he told Ms fellow travelers, “are nothing what I remember them - the strawberries of my time were quite different.”5 5 If the strawberry fields of southern England were changed from what he remembered, they were but the beginning of M’Alprin’s agony. As had William Hickey, he complained of the treatment he received at the hands of customs officials. “Of all the cold, cMlling bath shocks wMch a man can receive,” the doctor noted, “none are more vexatious than the rutMess piracy with which he is treated on Ms return to Ms own free land.”5 6 At his family’s estate, Fembra.es, he found that the “improvements wMch had been made have ruined the world he once knew.”5 7 The groves, fields of trees wMch would have made a man like Archibald Seton ecstatic, had “all been cut down.”5 8 His family seemed thrilled by the changes they had made, and they could not understand why he was not as well. He could not understand them, and they resented Mm for intruding on their world. They only cared about Mm, he knew, because of Ms money, the fabled diamonds of India. He was their wealthy and childless uncle, and they all wanted to be Ms heir.5 9 Like so many other Company employees before Mm, M’Alprin sought solace in other retired Company 5 5 Ibid., li, 101. 5 6 Ibid., ii, 104. 5 1 Ibid., ii, 121. 5 8 Ibid., ii, 122. mIbid., ii, 145. 408 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. servants. “So it is for this,” he told one Company friend, “that I have pined through the best years of my life, and now left the friends with whom I lived in ease and friendship, to come amongst animals like those that are at this moment under my roof.”6 0 By 1842, when The Nabob at Home was published, a sympathetic portrayal of the emotional turmoil caused by a career in India was possible. In a domestic world where the growing pace of industrialization was changing the face of the British nation, the nabob wanted tobea landed gentleman. He alone seemed to cling to a fast-fading image of the collective national self. More importantly, though, the nabob was no longer a cultural problem for domestic arbiters of British identity. The turn, as William Dalrymple suggested, to the moral certainties of Evangelical Christianity, the emergence of a scientific discourse of difference rooted in genetics and race, and the concomitant barriers between white and non-white sexual relationships that emerged in the nineteenth century established new ways to distinguish with certainty between the people of Britain and South Asia - building new boundaries between Britain and India, new barriers between empire and nation. The cultural perimeters that divided Britain from India in the eighteenth century, boundaries that had proven to be permeable and porous, were replaced in the nineteenth century with new modes of classification that had the permanence of moral law, the rigidity of scientific knowledge, and the security of sealed blood-lines that insured distinction and defended difference. In this new environment, it was possible to rethink the place of the nabob and to reflect on the traumatic dislocation that going to India had always caused. Nabobs could now be seen more positively as a group of men who were eager to build for themselves a world that honored Britain’s gentrified agrarian past vis-a-vis industrialists who were engaged in activities that despoiled the face of the nation and, even, as would become clear in the wake ) Ibid.,ii, 155. 4 0 9 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of the events of 1857 and 1858, the EIC itself, which continued to stand as a symbol of corruption, inefficiency, and maladministration until the Government of India Act of 1858 abolished the company and transferred its authority in South Asia to the crown. This is not to say, of course, that there was no voice of sympathy for nabobs in the late eighteenth century. The nabob controversy did not overshadow every aspect of a retired Company servant’s life. Listings throughout the provincial papers of the period show that local communities continued to care for their sons who were stationed in India. Obituaries from across the nation suggest that within smaller communities, Company employees continued to merit attention and, at times, concern. A nabob could also be a hometown son, and a hometown could grieve when that son was killed in distant South Asia.6 1 But, as the broader history of the nabob controversy has shown, the limited sympathy shown in local papers and printed obituaries for hometown heroes were anomalous. To the people of late eighteenth-century Glasgow mourning the death of Lieutenant Gilbert Ramsay, Ambrose Russell, or Thomas Brown, a Glasweigan son serving the Company might not be a nabob, but the rest of the sordid bunch certainly were.6 2 As a collective, late eighteenth-century nabobs were cultural threats because they brought empire home and threatened to naturalize it as part of the national landscape. They exposed the fluid dynamics that moved between empire and nation, and they undermined the barriers between the two, barriers that were constructions rooted in cultural difference. So long as the nation and empire were defined by material culture, they were permeable, and the national myth of a nabobical menace prevailed. 6 1 The Gloucester Journal, 21 June 1784; The Caledonian Mercury, 3 April 1794,28 April 1794,1 May 1794,7 March 1795,9 March 1795. 6 2 The Glasgow Advertiser and Evening Intelligencer, 30 December-3 January 1793/4,2 May 1794. 410 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Unpublished Manuscripts Allen, G.T. The Traveler’ s Scrapbook. QIOC Mss Eur B366. Catalogue of the Valuable Contents ofDaylesford House, Worchestershire, The Seat of the Late Hon. Warren Hastings (1853). BL RB.23.b.4295. Clive Collection. OIOC Mss Eur G37/3-12. Collection of articles on Shooter’s Hill. BL w.7135. Correspondences of Richard Car Glyn. OIOC Mss Eur D561. Correspondences of Sir Thomas Rumbold. OIOC Mss Eur Photo Eur 099. Day, Ella B. Without Permit. OIOC Mss Eur Photo Eur 331. Diary and Consultation Book of Elihu Yale. OIOC Eur Mss Mack General 55-56. Diary of George Patterson. OIOC Mss Eur E379/1-3. Family Correspondences of Alexander Davidson and his wife, Elizabeth (nde Pigou). OIOC Mss Eur E300/5-6. Fowke Collection. OIOC Mss Eur D546/7. Francis Collection. OIOC Mss Eur K49. Francis Collection. OIOC Mss Eur K58/E22. Grant, Charles. Observations on the State of Society Among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain. OIOC Mss Eur E93. Harvey, Mr. The Fortunate Englishman. OIOC Mss Eur B248. The Jenkins Collection, OIOC Mss Eur El 11. Journal erf Captain Walter Canfield Lennon. OIOC Mss Eur E74. Journal of Dr. Kenneth Murchison. OIOC Mss Eur G52. Journal of Judith Weston. OIOC Mss Eur B162. Journal of Richard Runwa Bowyer. OIOC Mss Eur A94. Journal of Sir Isack Fyke. OIOC Mss Eur K9. Letter Books of Charles Smith. 3 vols. OIOC Mss Eur E340/1-3. 411 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Letter from Abraham Caldecott to Miss Pettet 14 September 1783. OIOC Mss Eur D778. Letter from Capt. Francis Irvine to his father. 27 August 1805. OIOC Mss Eur Photo Eur 355. Letter from Charles Smith to Ms. Smith (his sister). 24 January 1764. OIOC Mss Eur E340/2. Letter from David Wedderbum to Lady Janet Erskine. 31 December 1771. NAS GD164/1698/5. Letter from George Gray to Captain A. Glover. 13 November 1762. OIOC Mss Eur C439. Letter from Lieutenant James Dalrymple to Ms mother. 11 January 1781. OIOC Mss Eur E330. Letter from Mrs. Sophia Plowden to her sister, Lucy. 4 April 1783. OIOC Mss Eur B187. Letter from Robert Harland to an unidentified recipient 30 September 1772. OIOC IOR H/MISC/111. Letters and Papers of John Gross. OIOC Mss Eur E284. Letters from the Fowke Collection. OIOC Mss Eur K25. Letters from George Gray to various correspondents. OIOC Mss Eur D691. Letters from Robert Clive to various correspondents. OIOC Mss Eur E379/2. Malet Collection. OIOC Mss Eur F149/47 and 97. Memoirs of Major John Corneille. OIOC Mss Eur B215. Memoir o f a Tract o f India. OIOC Mss Eur D635. Memoranda date 1785 by Colonel Robert Kelly. OIOC Mss Eur D11146/6. Papers of Ensign William Harry Massie. OIOC Mss Eur B74. Papers of Lieutenant-Colonel James Romney. OIOC Mss Eur F198/2. Papers of Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Kyd. OIOC Mss Eur F95/1. Papers of Major-General Sir Thomas Munro. OIOC Mss Eur F151/54-140. Papers of Paul Benfield. OIOC IOC C.307/3-4. Papers of Robert Orme. OIOC Mss Eur Orme/India 1 . Paper of Robert Orme. OIOC Mss Eur Grme/OV37-202. Papers of Sir Jasper Nicholls. OIOC Mss Eur F175.8 Papers of William Ford. OIOC Mss Eur C476. 412 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Princep, Sir Henry T. Three Generations in India, 1771-1904. OIOC Mss Eur C97/1. Property of the Late Sir Thomas Rumbold, Bart., carried out by Mr. Cristie on Tuesday 29 January 1793 at 1PM. BL7805.C.5. 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Asset Metadata

Creator Nechtman, Tillman W. (author)

Core Title Nabobs: Defining the Indian empire and the British nation in the late eighteenth century

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program History

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Art History,history, Asia, Australia and Oceania,history, European,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-333074

Unique identifier UC11340803

Identifier 3180309.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-333074 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 3180309.pdf

Dmrecord 333074

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Nechtman, Tillman W.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA