Welcome back. In this talk I want to focus on what happened in India during these revolutionary wars. It turns out, I think, this period is absolutely pivotal for the whole future of India. I'd zero in on a period between about 1799 and 1805 as an absolutely critical phase, and even within that phase, the pivotal battles are probably, again, in 1802, 03, which is an odd parallelism to the pivotal period in what's happening in North America. Coincidental not intentional. To help set the theme for that, let's go back and understand a little bit about the basic layout of power in India in the 1780s. This map can be a little bit confusing. Key thing to understand is, the domains ruled or dominated by Britain By the 1780s are here, here, here, off their outpost in Madras. They have an outpost here in Bombay and that's it. The other great power on the Indian subcontinent in this period would be the Maratha confederacy. And during this period, the Marathas really dominate almost this entire area. There's another very important power, a Muslim ruled state called Mysore that dominates southern India and is in constant conflict with the British in Madras Usually, either winning those battles or fighting the British to a draw. So in the 1780s these powers on the indian sub continent are pretty evenly matched. The British have become just one more the big territorial powers in India. All them paying nominal allegiance to Mogul emperor living in Delhi The British claim that they're doing everything they're doing in the Emperor's name. Here's the way deal works, is the British pay a subsidy to the Emperor, in return for which the Emperor gives the British rights to collect the taxes in his domains. The Emperor has a similar relationship with the rulers, the Hindu rulers, of the Maratha Confederacy. The Mogul emperor is a Muslim ruling out of Delhi. He has his Hindu potentates, his British potentates. Now, the Sultan of Mysore in Southern India, he doesn't recognize the emperor at all. But the main point to get in the 1780s is the British are now just one of several important powers. So what are the particular strengths of the British potentates of the emperor? Well they are connected to this worldwide network of British strength. British naval power, the home base back in London. But the British have some really significant weaknesses. One is that the British East India company was still really running the show. And the company was mainly interested in individual enrichment. So British weaknesses are plunder, Huge poverty in their domains, even a terrible famine in Bengal during the 1770s. Also the British are widely detested by the local people, So, they plunder the territories, they're disliked, their people are poor. The company itself is not terribly profitable though it's making huge fortunes for some of the individuals working for the company. Very controversial back home. The Maratha's also have some important strengths, they command very large and powerful armies, they're traditional rulers at the top of very rooted traditional Hindu hierarchy of power. The Maratha's also have some weaknesses. They don't have as easy access to foreign trade. The British increasingly control the oceans. They don't have a lot of money. One thing is clear, they're increasingly Europeanized militaries on all sides. Everybody has guns, everybody has artillery. The have European advisors, many of them French. The Sultan of Mysore in the South Has a [INAUDIBLE] Pretty strong fiscal military state that he's built up on his own. No obvious advantage to the British purely in military technology. But a big thing happens that changes the picture. The British change, their opponents don't. British India goes through a significant series of reforms in the 1780s and 1790s driven in part from London. London appoints governor-generals to exert firm control over all the outpost of the British East India company. Now central direction further The governor generals' scraps the old system of chaotic plunder of the East India company. He brings in a rule of law in places like Bengal, says here are completely new rules on property, here is a whole new tax system, here's a series of courts that are going to enforce it. This has enormous consequences What happens then is a huge turnover and who's controlling property, the institution of a regular tax system, and a lot of stability now. You know who has property rights. You know how much revenue is going to come into the state. You have courts that can adjudicate disputes which, by the way, helps a lot of Bengali property owners as well. Since the state has stable revenue, the state can borrow money against that revenue. So the financial capabilities of the British State now increase enormously as they borrow money both from Bengal bankers, Indian bankers and from British businesses. What follows this period of reform, there are a series of battles, in which the British defeat their main rivals. So just kind of the what happened part. First, in 1799, the British finally overcome defeat and kill the Sultan of Mysore. Now the British have established their strength in southern India, you see these dates 1800 and so forth. Then they engage in a series of battles against the Maratha Confederacy attacking from a couple of different directions, battles the British win in 1802 and 1803, The battles, by the way, incredibly close run things. The British barely win, but the Maratha Confederacy is defeated. Okay, so that's what happened, but as we've talked about in previous presentations, we're not just interested in the what happened part, we want to know why. Why were the Marathas defeated? A few factors really stand out. It's not so much that the British had better military technology or larger armies, the Maratha armies were larger. What the British did have is, Financial strength, partly from the way they'd reordered their government. They can hire more soldiers and they could buy France which helps produce the disunity og the British enemies. They can persuade states to become tributaries by agreeing to subsidize their rulers And another kind of disunity, the Marathas fall out amongst themselves. The rulers are fighting with each other, some of the rulers who are defeated in this fights may come and cause with the British, in that situation the British can prevail. The Governor General during this period, here is his painting men name Richard Wellesley. He didn't have orders from to go out and conquer India. He faced these threats, these constant rivals. His policy was that the best defense was a good offense. Also he saw signs accurately of French influence Among his rivals so he could make an argument that this was part of the revolutionary wars but in a way a lot of what happened here was an unexpected success for Wellesley and for the British. Some of those key pitched battles against the were in fact led by Richard's younger brother, Arthur Wellesley. A man that history knows perhaps a little better as the Duke of Wellington. The consequence however of these fights in the early 1800s are enormous. In an earlier presentation, I talked a little bit about how the British had actually tried to expand their empire with deliberate purpose in the Western Hemisphere. They've made a bid to conquer San Domang in the Western They'd made a bid to conquer Buenos Aires and established a foothold in South America. They'd failed. At the very time, they are failing in the Western Hemisphere whilst as succeeding in India. And the British can kind of feel, There is where the empire is growing. There's where were enjoying successors. There's where they begin pushing in additional assets. As the British become the dominant force in India, they're bringing a lot of change to India. They're upending the whole culture of traditional rule. Traditional Muslim rule had been represented by the Mughal Empire. The classical traditions of Islam, it's literature, it's art Are upended by the dominance of new cultural influences. Also, traditional Hindu hierarchies are also being overthrown. But a lot of the people in India are beginning to adapt to new influences, trying to find ways of fusing old traditions with the influence that the British are bringing with them. What the British Paramountcy in India creates in the early 1800s is really an entirely new situation in India and in Asia. For the British, they begin to realize that they now have a reasonably orderly and very powerful base in India. In which they have immersed Very large armies, mainly made up of Indian soldiers, paid with a combination of British and Indian money, and that army can be used, that base of production can be used. This map gives you a little bit of a sense of the way British power is expanding. The British position is pretty firm. In this whole area by say, 1810. They pretty easily expand to persuade monarchs to become British dependents in the succeeding decade, and then just simply begin moving outward from there. Suddenly, the British find themselves governing a huge part of South Asia This was especially new and interesting situation for many Hindus, some of them have been defeated by the British and they're deeply resentful for this. Some of them on the other hand are seeing all sorts of new opportunities opening up, new worlds of knowledge, culture and commerce. One really interesting example of how Hindus are adapting to the British presence Is this man. This is a painting of Ram Mohun Roy. Ram Mohun Roy came from incredibly able person, masters of six, seven, eight languages. Internalized Hindu traditions, also internalized about a lot what the British were bringing and was trying to find fusions of the two Very interested in religious reform, very interested in ways, in fact, to reinvent Hinduism. His attitude toward the British rule are very interesting. On the one hand, as you can see, he writes in 1809 that British government is "milder, more enlightened and more liberal" than the government had been under the Mogul Empire. He finds it liberating in that sense yet he later point out that the British created a new aristocracy in India one that increasingly is racially exclusive. Here is the way he put it, that the better classes of the natives of India. He is writing in English by the way in which he also became fluent Are placed under the sway of the Honourable East India Company in a state of political degradation absolutely without parallel in their former history. For even under the Mahomedan conquerors the muslim conquerors he's referring to people like the Mogul emperors such of your petitioners as are Hindus We're not only capable of filling, but actually did fill numerous employments from which I am the existing system of the honorable company's government. They are absolutely shut out. In other words, from the start, the British are creating a a basic tension. Yes, they are bringing better public institutions and public IDOs. But the basic ideas of these enlightenment institutions are fundamentally at odds with the way they treat the majority of the people that they rule. That tension isn't going to go away. Let's reflect on the next talk on the whole way the world has changed as a result on these revolutionary wars. Let's kind of take a look around this world of 1830.
