Rethinking Institutional Transformations in the Making of Modern Empire: The East India Company in Madras

Introduction

The President has a large Commission, and is Vice-Regis; he has a Council here also and a Guard when he walks or rides abroad, accompanied with a Party of Horse, which are constantly kept in Stables, either for Pleasure or Service. He has Chaplains, Physician, Chyrurgeons, and Domesticks; his Linguist, and Mint-Master: At Meals he has Trumpets usher in his Courses, and Soft Musick at the Table: If he move out of his Chamber, the Silver Staves wait on him; if down Stairs, the Guard receive him; if he go abroad, the Bandarines and Moors under two Standards march before him: He goes sometimes in his Coach, drawn by large Milk-White Oxen, sometimes on Horseback, other times in Palenkeens, carried by Cohors, Musslemen Porters: Always having a Sumbrero of State carried over him: And those of the English inferior to him, have a suitable Train.¹

Such a picture is evocative and emblematic of the most iconic images of the early British conquest of India: Benjamin West’s painting of Robert Clive, accepting of the diwani of Bengal from the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam in 1765; John Zoffany’s Warren Hastings, being received in 1784 by Shah Alam’s son, Javan Bakht, at Lucknow; or maybe Mather Brown’s Charles Cornwallis, receiving the hostage sons of Tipu Sultan in 1792. It is a description of a regime clearly concerned with pomp and splendor, not for its own sake but in the service of establishing political power, both over those subject to its rule as well as (perhaps even more importantly) those powers with which it engaged diplomatically and militarily. It is thus perhaps surprising that this account is of none of those symbolic moments of “early” British India, but rather a depiction of Company rule from almost a century earlier, by a much more anonymous chronicler, the physician and traveler John Fryer, of a certainly less famous figure in the political history of the British Empire: Gerald Aungier, the Governor of Bombay responsible for establishing Company law and rule on the island in the 1670s. Fryer also offered a similar report of the diplomatic state of Aungier’s even lesser-known counterpart at Fort St. George, Madras, William Langhorne. As Fryer reported, “His Personal Guard consists of 3 or 400 Blacks; besides a Band of 1500 Men ready on Summons. He never goes abroad without Fifes, Drums, Trumpets and a Flag with two Balls in a Red Field, accompanied with his Council and Factors on Horseback, with their Ladies in Palenkeens.”²

From the broadest of undergraduate surveys to the most specific of monographs, the story of the East India Company’s concern with politics and rule in British India has tended to begin in the time of Clive, Hastings, and Cornwallis, rather than Langhorne and Aungier, or others known primarily to specialists and antiquarians: names like Charnock, Yale, Gayer, and Pitt. When they do appear, these figures tend to appear as pioneers in the early or “dark” days of the Company’s mercantile affairs, before large territorial acquisitions supposedly transformed the Company into a political body. In turn, the period they represent tends to be treated as a prologue from a bygone commercial era, connected to a host of stories about early modern British overseas activities but only tangentially germane to the story of the making of British empire in India. Moreover, in rendering Robert Clive’s fateful defeat of the nawab Siraj-ud-daula outside Murshidibad in the summer of 1757 and his subsequent acquisition of the diwani (revenue collector) the pivot point between commercial and imperial eras, this “trade-to-empire” narrative — borne of our historigraphical traditions as well as our enduring assumptions about the supposedly divergent nature of states and companies — has tended to fix the origin of the vast majority of the “early” colonial history of the Company in Bengal, and in the mid-eighteenth century. Thus, despite the East India Company’s long political history, focused more in southern and western than northeastern India — not to mention in Persia, Southeast and East...