KS3 History: The East India Company - From Merchants to Rulers

Just over 400 years ago, a group of London merchants arrived here on the Indian coast hoping to do some peaceful trading. Those early pioneers dreamt of making huge profits.

Over 200 years, the Company they formed grew into a commercial titan. Its wealth rivalled that of the British State. It had its own army. And eventually ruled over 400 million people.

Its trade was vital to Britain’s commercial success and it revolutionised the British lifestyle.

Dr. Andrea Major:
The East India Company changed the way we dress… Um it changed the way we eat - it changed the way we socialise.

Dan:
And, by accident, created one of the most powerful empires in history.

But the company’s rise was followed by a dramatic descent into profiteering and corruption. And eventually a chilling story of unchecked greed with devastating consequences.

By the 1760’s, the East India Company had grown from a tiny band of merchants with a small foothold in India - into a colossal trading empire, pouring wealth into the pockets of its share holders back in Britain.

And then they conquered the wealthy region of Bengal and bled it dry - amplifying the effects of a deadly famine - leading to the deaths of millions of people, in a human tragedy of unprecedented scale.

The British were horrified and the government was forced to step in. From that point on the State’s grip grew ever tighter as it attempted to control this voracious monster.

Accused of corruption - incompetence and greed the Company’s reputation was in tatters and there was worse to come.

Nick:
The crisis that was affecting the Company really came to a head in 1772 where there was a failure of a major Scottish bank, the Ayr Bank. About thirty other banks in fact failed and that led to a major shortage of money in the economy, the Company had to go repeatedly to the Bank of England for loans to tied them over. They were very indebted.

Dan:
Now, starved of funds, the world’s greatest company had run out of cash.

There was only one possible way out. Massive government bailout. For reasons that are spookily familiar, it was decided that the East India Company was too big to fail.

The British Government rescued the Company with public money today equivalent to 176 million pounds.

But it's powers were progressively curtailed. The India Act of 1784 transferred its executive management to an Independent Board of Control - answerable to parliament.

A new chapter in its history began – from now on its affairs in India would be run by a Board of Control appointed by the British Government. And Parliament would gradually transform the way that the Company functioned in India.

The British State was now pulling the strings.

Instead of chancers like Robert Clive, the British Government would now send out its own more reliable people to run India. The Governor General here in Calcutta would rule supreme, given sweeping new powers in revenue , diplomacy, and war.

It was nothing less than the birth of Empire.

In 1798, Lord Richard Wellesley, was given the top job in India by the British Government.

In the 19th century the biggest risk to the company would be the emerging struggle between trade and empire, between the objectives of the company and those of the government. This conflict was intensified by Wellesley.

Wellesley was from a grand, aristocratic family back home and he took one look at Government House in Calcutta and decided that something a little more ostentatious was required to reflect the power of the British in India, not to mention his own exalted status, and so he built this - the new Government House. It’s not much, but it’s home.

The cost of the project rang alarm bells back at Company headquarters in Leadenhall St. But of more concern, were Wellesley’s outright imperial ambitions – which clashed with the Company’s stated objectives to minimise military expenditure.

In London the Directors were keen to avoid wars their costs were certain, their outcomes less so, but Wellesley dismissed the concerns of the people he described as the cheese-mongers of Leadenhall Street. He was here with a personal agenda, one supported by the British Government, and it had little to do with the rag trade. He wanted to smash the vestiges of French power in India. Wipe out local opposition and extend British rule across the subcontinent. And from 14,000 miles away, there was little the Directors could do to stop him.

Wellesley had set his sights on a formidable, Muslim adversary… Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore.

The rich, battle-hardened Muslim leader of Mysore, was the East India’s Company’s most intractable enemy. Three times in three decades his family had fought the Company. They were known as the terrors of Leadenhall Street. And now Wellesley discovered that, on top of it all, they were in league with the French.

Zareer:
I think he identified quite early on that if he could play the French and British off against each other he could expand at their expense. The French were at the time Britain’s main global rival for the status of global superpower and that was being played out in India as it was in North America and other arenas.

Dan:
A striking force of around 4,000 East India Company troops – many of them native soldiers or sepoys – attacked Tipu’s fort in Seringapatam. Inside with his men, the Tiger was ready to do battle.

A ruler who prided himself on military prowess had to have an extensive, extravagant, ornate collection of weapons in his personal arsenal. And here are some of them. Now, the sword was the emblem of manhood in this period, the emblem of a great rulerand judging by these swords Tipu Sultan was a deeply religious man and a deeply aggressive one.

Look at this fabulous sword here. The hilt is entirely covered in gold.

Gold tiger clasping a steel blade in its mouth. This man was absolutely obsessed with the tiger motif. He lived his life as a tiger. In fact his favourite expression was, ‘It’s better to live one day as a tiger than a thousand days as a sheep.’

What I love about this particular blade is on the hilt, is written an expression in Persian, ‘This blade is the lightening that flashes though the lives of infidels.'

Probably quite near the end of their lives I expect. And on here, it’s the name of Tipu Sultan himself and Allah/Mohammed his prophet.

This was a man who believed that he was engaged in holy war. He was God’s instrument on earth and the task was to destroy infidels, driving them out from the Indian subcontinent.

But this time it wasn’t to be. After a month-long siege, Tipu’s stronghold fell and the tiger was slaughtered.

When news of the Tiger’s death reached Britain, there was jubilation. It turns out the British people didn’t share Tipu Sultan’s opinion of himself as a noble servant of God, they thought he was an extremist tyrant. There were parties and balls cross the country, decorations and medals were struck. Artists got in on the act and painted depictions of the final battle.

This wasn’t being celebrated as a private, commercial triumph for the East India Company, but as a moment of national, public achievement. There was now nothing else standing in the way of total British domination in the subcontinent.

With the vast, rich kingdom of Mysore now under their dominion, the Company’s power in India was growing. But territorial growth meant bigger and more expensive armies to hold it.

The cost of this could ruin the Company – but, from their offices in London, the directors were powerless to contain Lord Wellesley.

Wellesley saw himself as a ruler, not a merchant and, like countless other empire builders, he developed an insatiable desire for ever-wider expansion. He spent a vast amount of money that should have been for commercial purposes on conquest.

Against the Company’s wishes, Wellesley annexed more and more Indian territory. Vast swathes of southern, western and Northern India fell to the British.

Saul:
One quote contemporaneous at the time, is that he’s increased the population of British India by forty million.

So this is a massive expansion and it’s really the time when the East India Company moves from paramountcy, from being the, the, the major influential power, to being the major territorial power. It’s the start, in effect, of the British Empire.

Dan:
Wellesley had completely transformed the Company’s position in India, even whilst the Directors back in Britain were complaining that his actions were taking them into debt. By the time he was finished Britain controlled an area that was ten times the size of the British Isles, with a population of 180 million people, that’s one sixth of the entire global population at the time.

British India flourished under Wellesley and in turn Britain was boosted - the stage was set for the creation of an empire and despite their objections, the East India Company was at the heart of it.