Mobilising an Empire: Part 1 – Sir George Grey and the Tale of the Self-Sacrificing Cape Colony

Posted on by Kate Boehme — No Comments ↓

In our last couple of blogs, we have proposed the merits of viewing the violence of 1857 as a global event: one which necessitated the mobilisation of a global network of communications, technology, people, and power, and made use of all the means of bureaucracy, diplomacy, logistics, and violence available to the British Imperial State and the East India Company.

In this two-parter, we will be exploring the events of 1857 from the centre in India, and from the ‘peripheries’, considering both how the resources of empire were tapped in order to mobilise troops for service in India and, on the other hand, how such mobilisation efforts affected policy development in other colonies. In this first part, we will focus on the Cape Colony, which supplied many of the regiments used to put down the rebellion in India. Next week, the blog will focus on how the Indian Government and India Office in England coordinated complex geostrategic and diplomatic efforts to move troops from England through Egypt and the Red Sea.

 

The Cape
The Cape Colony featured heavily in those efforts to mobilise the Empire to support India. While for the East India Company Board of Control and the Government of India, the Cape was a crucial resource for suppressing the rebellion, it is important to remember that the Cape government likewise had its own concerns. The Indian Uprising, therefore, from the perspective of the Cape, served as a significant, but peripheral, event that shaped, but did not overwhelm, domestic issues. It was the Colonial Office, meanwhile, that balanced these two perspectives, identifying the Cape’s value in meeting imperial priorities while also seeking to maintain the security and stability of the colony. It is the ways in which these perspectives coincided to shape Cape Colony policy that will be discussed here.

 

Sir George Grey

Sir George Grey

The Indian Uprising
The colony’s governor, Sir George Grey, enthusiastically responded to requests for troops, horses, ammunition, and food stuffs. His first report of the uprising came direct from the Governor of Bombay, rather than the central Indian government or the Home Government. In response, he sent large numbers of troops and horses. By the 22 September, he still had not received any direct communication from the Governor General of India and, feeling affronted at the lack of communication, suggests that he may have “gone too far” in his support of the Indian Government, and will henceforth “be cautious what other steps I take until further instructions reach me.”[1] Nevertheless, just two days later, he anticipates further Colonial Office instructions, by “gradually purchasing horses for the Indian Government” and expresses his intention to “continue to do so as rapidly as possible.” Despite the demand from India being only for 250 horses, Grey asserts his intention to “continue to act upon my own discretions, and ship so many horses as I can procure, until I think that the requirements of the public service in India are probably sufficiently met.”[2]

This virtual exuberance at the prospect of supporting the military effort in India is echoed in all the subsequent correspondence on the subject. In October, Grey reports the despatch of the Boscawen steam ship, with 500 men, plus officers and non-commissioned officers, and the simultaneous shipment of “trained artillery horses from the field batteries in this country…These horses and 250 additional men, with their due proportion of officers, shall be sent on to Calcutta in Her Majesty’s Steamer Megara at the same time the Boscawen sails.”[3] He likewise recounts how 92 officers and 1,743 men, sent from England, were diverted from their original destination in China to support the military in Calcutta.[4]

Grey appears to have taken a great deal of personal discretion in determining what support was necessary and to where it ought to be sent. He often exceeds the requests made of him, or offers provisions without provocation. Some of this might be attributed to inconsistent communications. Grey constantly complained that requests received from the Presidencies of India did not align with those sent by the Supreme Government of India or by the Home Government. He uses such communicational discrepancies to justify his own deviation from official instructions. At one point, he reports that at the same time that the Government of Bombay applied for two infantry regiments on the 23 September,

The Supreme Government of India, in communicating with this Government did not even ask for one Regiment. The instructions I had received from Her Majesty’s Government were to send one Regiment to Calcutta, and one Regiment to Ceylon, and there was a general authority in your despatch of the first of August to take, in conjunction with the authorities in India, such measures in regard to the movement of troops as the interests of the public service might require.[5]

It was not only troops that the Cape was asked to supply; as the Indian Uprising was being suppressed, the colony was also considered as a potential location to which ex-mutineers could be deported. Following the end of the Uprising, sending the King of Delhi to exile in the Cape Colony was debated. Grey eagerly proposed a plan in which the King would be sent to King William’s Town, the capital of British-occupied Xhosa territory named British Kaffraria, where he could be monitored, far from any chance of escape by sea and far from any influence in India. Slightly tangential to the primary point of this blog, but no less interesting for it, was the proposal made by Grey in relation to this proposed plan that “It would be better not to call upon the British Parliament to interfere in the matter, for the Legislature here will readily pass the necessary law upon the subject…moreover it is clearly right, in a colony possessing a representative legislature, with full legislative powers, that the interference of the British Parliament should be as infrequent and as little obtrusive as possible.”[6] This seems to contradict the general tone conveyed in many of Grey’s despatches related to troop disbursements, that the priorities of the Empire take precedence over the immediate needs of the colony. Rather here, he appears to be making a play for greater autonomy, distinguishing the Cape Colony as an independent colony with its own representative government, needless of imperial interference, even while pleading for greater investment on the grounds of its vulnerabilities.[7]

 

Domestic Cape Policy in 1857
Nevertheless, from the majority of Grey’s missives it is clear that the picture he painted for the Home Government was one of a colony willing to sacrifice its own security for that of another. Emphasising the benevolence and generosity displayed by the Cape colonial government, Grey points out that at the same time that they were supplying India with a larger force than had been asked for, the Cape “was embroiled in its own crisis with the native tribes.”

In highlighting the excessive amount of support offered to the Indian Government he likewise emphasises the resulting weakness of his own Cape force. Often, it is clear that such statements are made in the hopes of acquiring further financial and military support from the Home Government. In one despatch sent to request reinforcements from England, Grey reports,

We have crippled the artillery here by sending every horse from our field batteries, that we have temporarily almost destroyed the Cape Corps by taking two hundred of the best horses from that force, and this has been done with 70,000 barbarians within our Colonial Borders, exclusive of those in Kaffraria and the neighbouring states.[8]

Specifically, Grey was making reference to a series of cattle raids in British Kaffraria, mounted by abaThembu from across the northeastern border. In relation to many such conflicts, Grey highlights the weakness of the colonial army, as a result of the Indian Uprising, often making note of the increased role of volunteer and police forces in securing reputedly dangerous colonial borders. In October 1857, Grey boasted that with only the Mounted Police and Burgher Forces – a primarily volunteer group – a number of border chiefs were captured and convicted of cattle stealing. He reports:

I then caused him [the abaThembu regent Fadana] to be suddenly fallen upon by the Mounted Police and Burgher Forces, who, under the command of Commander Currie, performed this service with the utmost gallantry, discretion, and activity, and the result was, as you will find from the enclosed despatches, that Fadanna’s [sic] party were routed, in a great measure destroyed, and that the robber Chief, and his ally…were both captured.[9]

Grey likewise states his intention to further augment that Mounted Police Force with volunteers, so as to “get it into the highest state of efficiency; and that if we were compelled to enter upon any active military operations against the Native Tribes, such operations should be principally carried on by rapid movements of the Border Mounted Forces.”[10] He further touts the importance of the colony being “entirely under the control of the Government, in order that we may efficiently assist our Indian Empire.”[11]

Nevertheless, a common theme in many of the despatches leaving the Cape was one of security threats caused by the generous role played by the colony in supporting the Indian Government. In the context of the ongoing Xhosa Cattle Killing episode (1856-7) the ability of the colonial government to sufficiently suppress disturbances was likewise frequently spoken of.[12] In February 1858, four Xhosa chiefs imprisoned in the belief that they were conspiring to challenge the colonial government during the Cattle Killing, escaped from the prison at King William’s Town. The reports of this escape were considered all the more troubling as those chiefs, upon reunion with their people, were rumoured to be inciting violence against the British by invoking the Indian Uprising. In a despatch of 11 February, Grey reported to the Colonial Office the rumours of the escaped chiefs that had been reaching his office:

That all the troops had gone to India from England, but were so overpowered by the Indians that all the English troops had left this country for the purpose of assisting their countrymen. That all the horses had been shipped at East London, also the guns, and that the troops had embarked at Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. That it was heard with delight that the Indians are a black race with short hair, and very like the Kaffirs. That it is to be regretted that, whilst their race is overpowering the English in India, the Kaffirs are at the present moment unable to follow up the success, and fall upon the English in this country, and that it was known to his people that Krili [Sarhili] is looking forward to an opportunity and is devising plans for bringing on a war.[13]

 

“We maintain not a Garrison, but rather an Army”
You may have noticed at this point that discussion of the Cape Colony’s contributions have been largely focused on Sir George Grey and his reports thereon. There is a reason for this: accounts sourced from his despatches do not seem to match numbers found in official reports of the War Department and Colonial Office. Grey paints a comprehensive picture of a colony selflessly denuding itself of military resources to support the imperial agenda, all while battling frontier incursions from the inside. Meanwhile, the Home Government sees a very different picture: one of a colony receiving far more than their fair share of imperial resources and consuming a significant majority of available military funding.

The first suggestion that the Colonial Office was aware of the true size of the resources held by the Cape Colony is in November 1857, when the Secretary of State, Henry Labouchere, urges Grey to donate a portion of what they have to the effort in India.

You are fully apprised of the desire of H.M.’s Government that you should avail yourself of the circumstance of so large a number of troops being assembled in the British Provinces of South Africa to render the utmost assistance…to the Indian Administration, and pray that you will have been able to despatch considerable additional services to that Country, where seasoned Troops will be especially valuable.[14]

Keep in mind, that at this point Grey had, for some months, already been sending reports of vast exports of troops, horses, and other military resources to India, as well as complaining of the effect this had on the state of security in the Cape. It begs the question, therefore, why the Colonial Office would feel the need to encourage greater distribution of resources? Nevertheless, there seems to be little further reference made to any discrepancy until the following year, when the Indian Uprising was over.

A confidential report examining military expenditure in the colonies was circulated by the War Office in 1859, looking directly at the distribution of military resources across the Empire between March 1857 and March 1858. This did not include India because the East India Company still maintained its own force, despite in 1857 having received reinforcements from the general imperial army. In this report particular note was made of inequality among the colonies, both with regard to the amount of support they received from the Home Government, and the amount they themselves contributed toward their own defence. For example, while the colony of Victoria paid, in 1857-58, roughly two-thirds of its own ordinary military expenditure, Canada paid only one-fifth, and the colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Tasmania, and New Zealand all contributed nothing. The most stark anomaly, however, related to the Cape. The report of the War Office made special note of,

The drain on British resources which has resulted from our undertaking the defence of this colony, and to the inadequacy of the benefits resulting to British interests. As affording a field of emigration, a supply of our wants, or a market for our produce, our connection with the colony has not been, comparatively speaking, of any considerable advantage to us; in fact, the only direct object of Imperial concern, is the use of the road steads at Table and Simon’s Bays.[15]

While Sir George Grey repeatedly bemoaned the dearth of military support in the Cape Colony in 1857, the report of the War Office actually suggests that for that year the Imperial government had at the Cape, including the German Legion, an army of 10,759 regular troops, costing them a total of £830,687, equal to more than one-fifth the military expenditure across the entirety of the Empire.[16]

 

A chart noting the relative military investment in the Cape Colony, in relation to its contributions toward the Empire and similar figures for all other colonies. Source: Thomas Frederick Elliot. Memorandum, Colonial Office, 28 January 1860

A chart noting the relative military investment in the Cape Colony, in relation to its contributions toward the Empire and similar figures for all other colonies.
Source: Thomas Frederick Elliot. Memorandum, Colonial Office, 28 January 1860

 

In a minute thereon, Thomas Frederick Elliot of the Colonial Office reports that, in addition to those numbers, the Home Government additionally gave the Cape Colony a grant of £40,000 “for civilising the Kaffirs and averting disputes with the Natives.”[17] Elliot further complains, “It is true that these efforts have given us the satisfaction of being able to say that we have not had a Kaffir War, but nine or ten thousand troops constitute such an army as England seldom has to spare for less favoured spots.”

Omitting the Mediterranean garrisons, which Elliot qualifies as a “special class” he reckons that the Cape Colony received nearly a third of the direct military expenditure of the British Imperial Government in 1857-58.

Meanwhile, it is also worth noting that Grey repeatedly reported his use of civilians to maintain a volunteer and police force in lieu of military support. While he commended their effectiveness as a means of securing the colony against ‘native’ incursions apparently, in England, opinions differed somewhat. In fact, the only comment made in favour of retaining the exceptionally large garrison in the Cape was that, though “the Colonists would be willing enough to undertake their own protection provided that they might deal with the Kaffirs as they themselves consider best…this would entail a mode of warfare which would not be tolerated by public opinion in England.”[18]

Ultimately, it would appear that while the Cape Colony certainly contributed significantly toward efforts at putting down the uprising in India, reports relating to the detrimental effect on colonial security may have been exaggerated. Rather, it seems as though Grey might have utilised the Indian Uprising, as a means of overstating the colony’s insecurities so as to gain greater military and financial support for his wars against Africans. For the Home Government, while dismayed at the clear anomaly in how their resources had been spent, the solution was still unclear. Elliot himself sums up his minute thusly:

So long as British authority restrains the settlers from defending themselves in their own way, it is bound to find some efficient substitute. The result has been to produce an excessive drain of British resources for a single Colony; the expenditure, as above shown, is enormous, and it is not likely ever to be materially reduced except by a radical change of policy. Such a change would relieve this country from a heavy burden, and, so far as concerns the demands both for men and money, would be a palpable gain. Whether it would be opposed to any just claims of philanthropy, or to the general duties of the Sovereign States towards their subjects, and whether also it would be irreconcilable with public opinion, are questions of a different kind, lying beyond our province. They can only be determined by Statesmen engaged in the actual conduct of affairs.[19]

Sir George Grey was ultimately recalled from office in 1859, in consequence of the Home Government finally acknowledging the extent of the discrepancy between his protestations of resource starvation on the one hand, and the dawning recognition of the disproportionate expense that he incurred for little strategic or economic gain on the other. Yet historians have not yet noted how important the Indian Uprising was for both Grey’s and the Cape’s fate: it provided the prompt for Grey finally overstepping the mark, protesting rather too loudly both a self-sacrifice and a self-pity that drew newly critical attention.

Kate Boehme

 

[1] National Archives (NA), Cape Colony Despatches 1 Sept – 30 Nov 1857, Letter from Sir George Grey to Henry Labouchere, 22 September 1857.
[2] NA, Cape Colony Despatches 1 Sept – 30 Nov 1857, Letter from Sir George Grey to Henry Labouchere, 24 September 1857.
[3] NA, Cape Colony Despatches 1 Sept – 30 Nov 1857, Letter from Sir George Grey to Henry Labouchere, 3 October 1857.
[4] NA, Cape Colony Despatches 1 Sept – 30 Nov 1857, Letter from Sir George Grey to Henry Labouchere, 2 November 1857.
[5] NA, Cape Colony Despatches 1 Sept – 30 Nov 1857, Letter from Sir George Grey to Henry Labouchere, 24 September 1857.
[6] NA, Cape Colony Despatches 1 Sept – 30 Nov 1857, Letter from Sir George Grey to Henry Labouchere, No.304, 11 November 1857.
[7] On Grey’s imperial politics at large, see Alan Lester, ‘Settler Colonialism, George Grey and the Politics of Ethnography’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34, 3, 2016, 492–507.
[8] NA, Cape Colony Despatches 1 Sept – 30 Nov 1857, Letter from Sir George Grey to Henry Labouchere, 2 November 1857.
[9] NA, Cape Colony Despatches 1 Sept – 30 Nov 1857, Letter from Sir George Grey to Henry Labouchere, 3 October 1857.
[10] NA, Cape Colony Despatches 1 Sept – 30 Nov 1857, Letter from Sir George Grey to Henry Labouchere, No. 134, 27 August 1857.
[11] Sir George Grey to Henry Labouchere, 3 October 1857.
[12] See Jeff Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856-7, Raven, 1989.
[13] NA, Cape Colony Despatches 1 Jan – 31 May 1858, Letter from Sir George Grey to Henry Labouchere, No.9, 11 February 1858.
[14] NA, Cape Colony Despatches 1 Sept – 30 Nov 1857, Letter from Henry Labouchere to Sir George Grey, 27 November 1857.
[15] NA, Military Expenditure in the Colonies, War Office, 1859.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Thomas Frederick Elliot. Memorandum, Colonial Office, 28 January 1860.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.

Posted in 1857, Colonial Office, Communication, Military

1857: Managing imperial crisis

Posted on by Peter Mitchell — No Comments ↓

In our last blog, we looked at some of the ways in which the events of 1857 played out in one nodal point of the network of empire: how colonial administrators, as they went about the business of moving goods, people and capital around that network, coped with new stresses and anxieties, assessed risk, and strategized against potential anti-colonial resistance. In the management of education and language policy in Mauritius, we saw how these process were linked with the regimes of knowledge, acculturation and pedagogy through which imperial power was reproduced. Over the past couple fo months, as we’ve been going through the 1857 materials in the records of the East India Company and the Colonial Office, we’ve begun to get a clearer picture of the year’s events as an interlinked series of upheavals whose ramifications reached through every part of the global network of imperial governance.

The most consequential event of the year, of course, was the Indian Uprising. But at the same time but there was also a serious conflict in Persia, the beginning of the Second Opium War in China, and the aftermath of the unrest, famine and millenarianism of the Great Xhosa Cattle Killing in the Cape. The reverberations of the Crimean War and the ongoing continental anxiety over what would become known as the Eastern Question were still conditioning the mood around the Black Sea, the Middle East and Central Asia. Meanwhile, as these matters were aligning global affairs into ever-more-intricate interrelationships, the means by which people and information travelled were in constant development. Telegraphs were being laid in India and across Europe, and the first transcontinental link had just crossed the Atlantic; the railway boom of the 1830s and 40s in Europe had been extended to India, with a flurry of projects beginning to take shape and lines already being built; and steamship technology continued to increase in speed and efficiency, while the infrastructures which supported it – coaling stations, navigation aids, engineering base, deepwater ports – grew apace.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been focusing on the records of the Political and Secret Committee of the East India Company. This committee dealt, as its name implied, with matters which could not necessarily be broadcast publicly: matters of diplomacy, warfare, geostrategy, political negotiations and future policy. The Uprising, and the wider crisis of 1857, throw into sharp relief the means by which the empire was governed; the archive of the Political and Secret Committee (hereinafter P&S) provides some potent insights into the inner workings of that system of governance, and the contradictions and tensions in its modes of crisis response, policy-making, and the organisation of geostrategic action at a distance.

The Uprising’s first appearance in the archive (assuming, for simplicity’s sake, that we designate the outbreak of open violence in the Bengal cantonments as the beginning of the Uprising proper) is in the P&S committee’s minutes for the 29th of June 1857. Amongst other communications received, the day’s minutes note a “telegraphic message”, numbered 692 (meaning that it was the 692nd such received in 1857), relating “Disturbances in the Bengal Army”. [fig. 1]

IMG_4283

Fig 1. East India Company Political & Secret Committee Minutes, 29th June 1857. IOR L/PS/1/12 f.145v

It’s worth divesting the telegraph, here, of the aura of simultaneity and instant communication with which we now surround it: the dispatch itself was dated in Bombay on the 27th of May, a month and two days before its arrival in London, and the first mutiny had occurred at Meerut on 10th of May. In 1857, information still couldn’t travel that much faster than people: telegraphs from India had to be carried by mail steamer from Bombay or Karachi to Suez, transported over the isthmus to Alexandria, and then telegraphed again from either Trieste or Marseilles. Letters travelled via Malta, then either by train from Marseilles or through Gibraltar to the port of Southampton. Later in the Uprising, telegraph lines across India were destroyed by Indian troops, who burned the poles for firewood and, according to some accounts, cut the wires into slugs for ammunition. (There is also at least one recorded incident of a railway locomotive being stoned by an angry crowd: to what extent the two can be linked as instances of both real and symbolic violence against the technologies of imperial communication and control is, let’s say, beyond the scope of this blog.)

The Uprising and its ramifications spread quickly within a field of action, and a web of political and social connections, that was already global in scope. This point is nicely illustrated by a P&S meeting minute from only five weeks later, on August 4th [Fig. 2]:

IMG_4291

Fig 2. Political and Secret Committee minutes, 4th August 1857. IOR L/PS/1/12, f.148v

Here, a bundle of dispatches has been received through Marseilles. Besides the mutinies of Indian and Nepalese regiments, there are reports of disturbances in Broach (Bharuch, Gujarat), reports of the imprisonment of the Nawab of Awadh, and the death of another prince. In Persia, peace terms are being ratified after the Anglo-Persian War, fought to establish the city of Herat under de facto British control (and, in the Persian case, to get it back); a separate dispatch from Sir James Outram, leader of the expeditionary force and still in the Gulf, confirms the dispatch of troops from Bushehr. The Governor of Ceylon, likewise, has been asked to contribute regiments for putting down the mutiny.

In the most immediate sense, the Uprising didn’t elicit a particularly subtle response. Whatever the logistical and diplomatic complexities of what followed, the general aim remained obvious and brutally simple: to concentrate the empire’s maximum capacity for violence on suppressing anti-colonial resistance and preventing its spread. For that, the main challenge was that of getting as many troops as possible to Northern India, as fast as it could be done.

But how that policy, and others, got made illuminates the extent to which power was networked just as much in the imperial centre as in the global web of empire. The often complex systems of bureaucratic routine, precedence, protocol, subordination, negotiation and duplication through which policy was formed are on full and rich display in the P&S Committee’s correspondence with other government departments, collected in the India Office Records as the ‘P&S Home Correspondence’ (IOR L/PS/3; the volumes for 1857 are L/PS/3/54-56).

The first item in this series, as far as the Uprising is concerned, is a request to the Board of Control that the P&S Committee be allowed to share the first telegram (the same one noted in the Fig. 1) with the Court of Directors. The Board, by this point, was exercising control not just over policy but over the internal informational security of the company itself. The nature of Crown Government capture of Company policy by 1857 – how complete it was, what the significant moments of extension were – is a matter of some debate, but it’s worth noting here that the Government had very handily extended a kind of sovereignty over information. Messages that passed between Company servants in India and those in London belonged, in a sense, to the Government, and the Company only enjoyed access to them on the Government’s sufferance. Throughout the Uprising, the communicational networks of the Company ran at full tilt: the collections in the India Office Records series of “Mutiny Enclosures” (largely assembled for fortnightly dispatches by the Suez mail steamer by the unfailing efforts of Henry Lacon Anderson, the chief secretary to the Presidency of Bombay) contain a wealth of military reports, returns, judicial papers, maps, intelligence digests and narratives. In every case, however, only the Board and the P&S Committee had automatic right of access to this material, and applications to share any information with the Court of Directors were frequently refused – as was the case, for example, for the dispatches from Bombay listed in Fig. 2.

The Home Correspondence also points up the extent to which the Board was the effective channel of communication with the Company and all other government offices. At first glance, the series looks like a record of communication in all directions between the Committee, the Court and Chairs of the Company, the Board, the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, the War Office and the Admiralty.

IMG_1559

Fig 3. Index page to Political & Secret Home Correspondence, September 1857. IOR L/PS/3/56, f.5r. Featuring letters between Sir George Clerk and Robert Vernon-Smith MP (Board of Control) and Sir James Cosmo Melvill (Secretary to the East India Company) and the Company’s Chairs, Edmund Hammond and Lord Shelburne (Foreign Office), Lord Panmure and Henry Knight Storks at the War Office, and W.A. White, HM Consul in Warsaw.

For the most part, however, what it actually represents is the correspondence between the Board and all these agencies, with no communication between them except through the Board; except through the Board, the Committee, and indeed the Court and Chairs of the Company, can’t meaningfully communicate with anyone. Not only that: except for the correspondence between the Committee and the Board, everything else here is a copy of an original which the Board holds: the Company itself is reduced to a largely spectatorial role, as if cc’d into an email thread in which they are powerless to intervene directly. The impression the series as a whole gives to the modern historian is of something like a ringside view of policymaking, curated for the benefit of a body whose control of policy was so mediated, policed and deliberately attenuated as to be reduced largely to an advisory function, even while its most vital interests are at stake.

Much of the most interesting correspondence is between the Board and the Foreign Office. For instance: the Court wished, with the Board’s concurrence, to send advance parties of officers and men from cavalry regiments through Suez, so that they could arrive in India before the bulk of their regiments – which were travelling via the Cape – and have their establishment prepared for immediate action when they arrived in India. Soldiers in uniform, even those of friendly powers, were not allowed across Egypt, so the soldiers had to travel in ‘mufti’. This necessitated letters under flying seal to both Company agents and consular staff in Suez and Alexandria, letters to shipping companies warning them of the plans, and a flurry of correspondence with Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe, the experienced diplomat serving as ambassador to the Porte, and Major John Green, the (apparently very capable) Acting Vice Consul in Alexandria, relaying the progress of a complex and delicate diplomatic dance between the Ottoman court, the Egyptian Pasha, and the somewhat precarious British presence. Meanwhile, consuls in Baghdad and Aleppo were being briefed to give all possible assistance to Company and Army agents trying to source horses for Indian service, bypassing the Parsi horsetrading families of Western India.

The scramble to formulate policy and keep a hold on the global situation means that, among many other concerns, we find Foreign Office staff digging up consular reports from the end of the Crimean War assessing whether it would be possible to recruit the Kurds as irregular cavalry against Persian and Russian opportunism; meanwhile, the Consul in Aleppo sends a series of letters advising that an Arab militia could easily be raised. The Foreign Office forwards letters and carefully filleted digests of intelligence from St Petersburg, including reports of quite abstruse conversations in which hidden meanings might have been intended, and translations of needlingly ambivalent commentary from the Northern Bee (Severnaya Pchela), the semi-official newspaper that was commonly known to be a mouthpiece for the Third Section, the Tsarist secret police. From the Embassy in Washington, there’s a report of an Irish Republican meeting in New York, in solidarity with the rebels – at which it was debated whether Republican activist (and escapee from Van Diemen’s Land) John Mitchel would give his support, since as a fervent anti-abolitionist it was supposed he could not support a non-white insurrection against a white proprietory class; enclosed with the clipping is Mitchel’s almost offensively evasive letter to the editor in reply. Outside of the Foreign Office correspondence, there is a huge volume of correspondence with the War Office, Admiralty and Colonial Office about the movement of troops around the world, in a complex shuffle revealing the insecurities of governors around the empire. There is a long and ongoing correspondence with the Admiralty about navigational infrastructure, particularly that relating to the Red Sea, a sea route whose importance the febrile communicational activity of the Uprising is throwing into stark relief; there is correspondence with Richard Burton, the Arabist and translator of Omar Khayyām, about whether to establish British bases in the Horn of Africa; and a fraught exchange with a Liverpudlian guano prospecting firm over a ban on using Arab labourers on the Khuriya Muriya Islands near Aden.

So what’s to be learned from this? Well, as ever in our blog, conclusions are provisional. We’re gathering what we hope will be the materials of a new history of imperial governance; this blog is about the journey rather than the destination. But what we’ve found so far from the records of 1857 is, we think, further evidence of the simultaneity of imperial governance, across multiple modalities of rule, constitutional arrangements, and administrative agencies; of its global reach, its interrelatedness, and of officials’ keen awareness of that interrelatedness; and of some of its contradictions as it changed over time, was contested and pulled in different directions. What we get from the Political and Secret Home Correspondence is an idiosyncratic, and in some ways unexpectedly illuminating, view of a major imperial crisis as it both drew on a global system of power and helped to induce the conditions by which it would be further entrenched.

— Peter Mitchell

Posted in 1857, Communication, India Office

Security, Economy and Education in Mauritius, August 1857

Posted on by Kate Boehme — 1 Comment ↓

In August 1857, the British Empire was in the midst of an imperial crisis. The Indian Uprising caused panic across the governmental system, as it threw the vulnerability of British colonialism into stark relief.

This was no more evident than in Mauritius, which had become a formal colony of the British Empire through the Treaty of Paris in 1814, when it was ceded by the French (though the French language remained commonly spoken there). In Mauritius, the Governor led a legislative council in the construction of local policy. While the council had the power to pass laws, called ‘Ordinances,’ they were subject to the approval of the Home Government and had to adhere to imperial policy. Often, the creation of an Ordinance would involve a long, drawn-out, process of discussion and debate, between members of the colonial legislature, prominent colonial figures, the Governor, and the Colonial Office in London.

While the uprising in India persisted, the demand for labour in Mauritius had never been greater. High prices encouraged cultivation of sugar cane which, being grown on large-scale plantations, required increasing numbers of unskilled workers to tend to the fields. Plans to recruit immigrant labour to construct new roads and other public works in the Seychelles, only served to further exacerbate demand.[1] With a small ‘native’ population, these conditions opened up an avenue for a substantial rise in indentured labourers in the late 1850s and early 1860s, many originating in India.

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The Futty Satam of Bombay carrying 300 Immigrants and Coolies, and dismantled in a hurricane, being towed to Mauritius (© National Maritime Museum) [2]

Bombay had only  recently, on 17 June 1857, reopened the channels for Indian emigration to Mauritius, to the considerable elation of the Mauritius landholders and the island’s Governor, James M. Higginson. The temporary embargo on the flow of labour from India had, in the meanwhile, inspired some fairly dramatic – and illegal – efforts to meet demand. In one instance (though likely not the only case), a group of enslaved people were purchased in Boyanna Bay, Madagascar. Upon boarding the English ship, the Joker, their owners declared the captives to be ‘free,’ before later selling them onward, in Mauritius, as indentured labourers. While frowned upon, the practice was common, and virtually impossible to prosecute under existing law in the colony, as in many cases such as this one, the slaves-cum-indentured-labourers were brought to Mauritius under old licenses which, while no longer issued, were still technically valid in 1857. The Governor bemoaned the escape of Captain Aps, commander of the Joker, from Mauritius, and stated  the intention to prosecute Aps should he return, yet also anticipated  “considerable difficulty in obtaining a conviction.”[3] On the part of the Colonial Office, the effort to curtail the flow of illegal indenture was limited to communication with the Admiralty and the Foreign Office, in order to clarify policy with regard to the ban on bringing emigrants from Madagascar and curtailing the use of old licenses.

Following the reopening of emigration from Bombay, it was chiefly Indian workers who began to flood into the colony, with demand for labourers largely trumping concerns regarding security during the Indian Rebellion. Ships carrying indentured labourers arrived in a steady stream, while colonial troops left the island in a similar exodus, bound for India. On the 10 August alone, six companies of the 33rd Regiment and one company of artillery left for Bombay, with further troops scheduled for despatch the following day.[4] Over the subsequent weeks, more troops departed, bound for Calcutta and Bombay. The governor acceded to all requests for troops received from India, while complaining of the vulnerable position in which Mauritius was left:

The detaching of a wing of the 4th Regiment will certainly leave Mauritius with a garrison reduced considerably below the strength that has been assigned for its requirements, and less than the position and importance of the Colony would entitle it to; but the urgency of the requisition and emergency of the service for which additional reinforcements were required at Bombay, appeared to the Major General and myself to justify our laying aside ordinary considerations.

It was therefore under heightened security considerations that the colonial government was faced with an influx of unskilled indentured labourers. Interestingly, it was also at this time that they began discussions for the implementation of a compulsory government education scheme.

Ordinance No.21 of 1857, “for rendering compulsory the education of children in the colony,” while being generally agreed upon in theory, was debated on virtually every detail in the colonial legislature, in the religious community, and in the Colonial Office in London. The exact nature of the instruction to be offered and the methods by which Indian children in particular would be exposed to British ideas were considered of great importance. While some members of the legislature thought that it might be prudent to trial an easier, voluntary, system first, the Governor and most members saw that if they were to attempt comprehensive education, it would have to be compulsory so as to combat both considerable resistance among the immigrant population, and concerns over class status among the more established inhabitants:

Now, whatever force this line of reasoning [in favour of a voluntary system] may be supposed to carry with it, as regards the creole population…more especially if the promised influence of the Roman Catholic Church be exerted in favour of state education, from which it has heretofore stood aloof, the argument is totally inapplicable to the immigrant population, whose reluctance to sending their children to Government Schools, as at present constituted, is notorious, and cannot be neutralised by those influences that may operate with the creole. By the last return, it is shown that only 51 immigrant children, throughout the island, were attending these schools, and 31 Indians born in the colony, and belonging to classes above that of the common labourer, and even admitting the necessity for compulsion was not equally imperative in both cases, the strong and patent objections to class legislation could not be overcome.

Exposure to European social and moral ideas was to be conducted in part through religious instruction. While all agreed on the importance of teaching Christian values, for the “moral benefit” it would afford to the newly arrived children of labourers, the emphasis that government schools would place on Protestant religion infuriated some members of the Roman Catholic clergy, who had already established schools in the colony.[5] Bishop Collier, leader of the Roman Catholic community in Mauritius, expressed his concerns that government inspectors would destroy all the Roman Catholic elementary schools in the colony, “by declaring that the instruction given in them is inferior than that given in Government schools and forcing accordingly all the children to attend the latter.”[6] He likely expressed concerns that students, in switching between government and Catholic schools, might receive conflicting religious instruction. In response, the Colonial Office concurred that the Ordinance ought to be amended so that “no child should be compelled to attend the government schools if already receiving regular instruction in some other school to be certified as efficient by the Anglican or Roman Catholic Bishop, or by the officiating minister of any other Christian body in the colony to which the school is attached.”[7] The Colonial Office thereby protected the semi-autonomy of the Roman Catholic schools, so long as “an opportunity will be afforded to Indian children to hear the word of God, without offending the religious prejudices of the Coolies” and they adhered to the requirements of government.

Ultimately, Christian education was deemed necessary as a means of adapting Indian children to British codes of morality and ethics. Parents of students were given the choice of exempting their children from religious instruction, but only if they should themselves pose an objection; without an explicit statement from the parents, in person, the child would be subject to an hour of Christian instruction per day.

The colonial government likewise determined that instruction should be given in the principal administrative language of Mauritius, French, rather than in an Indian  language or English. This deviated from the previous example set by the Roman Catholic schools, which had up until then often used the children’s vernacular tongue in the classroom. The provision was voted through by the general body of the colonial legislature, to the chagrin of Governor Higginson, who foresaw considerable resistance from the general community of labourers and difficulty in enforcing the policy. In fact, it was only through considerable coercion that he saw a mandatory requirement that children know French being practicable. The level of coercion necessary to impose such a measure likewise raised concerns in the Colonial Office, whose officials, in light of recent events in India, apprehended the possibility of arousing resentment in the population. Given the current state of affairs in India, and the diminution of the garrison held in Mauritius as a result, such resentment among a newly-arrived, unknown immigrant population was a troubling prospect.[8] Nevertheless, the measure passed. The choice was ultimately made to serve the dual purposes of ensuring that Indian labourers were steeped, from an early age, in the linguistic culture of the colony and, practically, that a sufficient pool of teachers, knowledgeable in that language, would be available.

The linguistic debate likewise demonstrates the close links between how the colonial government – and the Colonial Office – sought to protect social order and promote commercial development. Forcing children to learn the language of colonial government served a similar purpose of producing a cohesive, communicable, working class. Ordinance No.21 also included provisions designed to preserve the central reason for the children’s presence in Mauritius: to work. The final Ordinance required all children in the colony between the ages of 6 to 12 years, inclusive (6 to 10 years old for girls) to attend some kind of government-approved school for three hours per day.[9] Initially both girls and boys were to attend school for the same period of time, but it was later reduced for female children for reasons of morality,

To meet an objection of some weight, grounding on the unusually early physical development, and the precocity of the sexes so remarkable in Mauritius, and the consequent dangers to public moral that might arise from the intercourse between boys and girls of a ripe age.[10]

The school day was also fixed at three hours, as opposed to longer periods on alternate days, so as not to interfere with the great demand for child labour by employers. The role to be played by employers in ensuring compliance with the new ordinance was also a subject of concern. While employers were well-positioned to observe any instances of non-compliance, their strong presence among the unofficial council membership prevented any measures being added to the ordinance that would hold them liable:

I can see no reason, as observed by the late Sir William Molesworth, why persons who engage Indian parents should not be compelled to take care that the children of their labourers should attend Government Schools; and it was my desire and intention to have introduced an Article, enacting that the tuition fees should be deducted by employers from the wages paid to the parents, and rendering it illegal to employ any child within the specified ages who shall not, by regular attendance at school, be conforming to the law. As it appeared to me that by these means the chief incentive to contravention of the law would be supressed, and the inducement to parents to obey its provisions would be greater, than those operating for its evasion. But having ascertained that this proposition would be opposed, with strength and unanimity, by the unofficial side of the Council, I did not conceive it to be politic or expedient to press it.[11]

It was therefore, under these conditions, that a system of compulsory education was installed in Mauritius. A government initiative, designed to ensure all children – most especially immigrant labourers – were all provided with a uniform, government-approved programme, the final result offered a prescriptive combination of religion, literacy skills, and linguistic conformity. It represented the outcome  of debates with pre-existing education institutions and alternative Christian schools, while also indicating the ways in which various colonial government priorities intersected in the construction of imperial  policy. The compulsory education measure reflected a desire for social order, borne out of stability concerns during the Indian Uprising. Yet, it also points to a broader theme in imperial administration in this period: the extent to which the money-making machine of late-1850s empire, grounded in agriculture, trade, and the demand for labour, was prioritised, often placing social programmes at the service of this one, ultimate, goal.

Kate Boehme

 

[1] National Archives (NA). Mauritius Despatches: 1 August – 31 October 1857, “Report upon the condition and prospects of the Seychelles.” 10 July, 1857.
[2] National Maritime Museum. John Bechett Hodgson, “The Futty Satam,” c1851.
[3] NA. Mauritius Despatches: 1 August – 31 October 1857, “Letter from Governor James M. Higginson to Henry Labouchere,” 2 August, 1857.
[4] NA. Mauritius Despatches: 1 August – 31 October 1857. “Letter from Governor James M. Higginson to Henry Labouchere,” 10 August, 1857.
[5] NA. Mauritius Despatches: 1 August – 31 October 1857, “Draft Letter from Colonial Office to Governor William Stevenson,” 31 December, 1857.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] NA. Mauritius Despatches: 1 August – 31 October 1857, “Letter from Governor James M. Higginson to Henry Labouchere.” 4 September, 1857.
[9] NA. Mauritius Despatches: 1 August – 31 October 1857, “Letter from Governor James M. Higginson to Henry Labouchere,” 4 August, 1857.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.

Posted in 1857, Colonial Office, Education

Under Pressure: steamships, global power and communications, and the East India Company — Part 2

Posted on by Peter Mitchell — 4 Comments ↓

Infrastructure, engineering, incidents and accidents

In the last blog, I discussed how steam navigation promised to change the East India Company’s ways of operating – its trade and communicational networks, its geostrategic presence, and its procedures of government and administration – and gave, I hope, a small impression of how the Company in London responded in terms of policymaking.

In this one, I want to give an impression of the demands that the new technology placed on the Company – infrastructural, human, resource, and logistical – and how the Company attempted to deal with them, on a day-by-day and week-by-week basis, over the short period of our January-March 1838 snapshot.

The Company, as we’ve seen, had committed to steam; a watered-down version of the Bentinck committee’s plan for the Indian Navy had been accepted, a new steam-savvy Superintendent was to be installed, and the building of new steam vessels not only assented to, but given the status of official policy. The adaptation to steam is already well underway; the problem, much of the time, is how to go about it.

The Company lacks neither advice nor encouragement on this score. In January alone, they receive a petition from a group of concerned citizens of Madras, requesting that the project of regular steam navigation through the Red Sea be carried forward as a matter of urgency; twelve copies of a pamphlet “On Steam Communication to India by the Cape of Good Hope”, from the chairman of the India Steam Ship Company, the first of several unsolicited publications and treatises on steam navigation to arrive during our three-month period; an offer from a Glasgow shipbuilder to build and refit steamers from the Company’s use, again one of many; a proposal from an employee at Alexandria (an expert on steam, who had appeared before the Bentinck committee) for a regular steam tug shuttle between Cairo and Alexandria, plus a system of horse-drawn cars for rapid transit from there to Suez; and a letter from a Mr C. Barwell Coles, informing the court that he has a patent pending on a revolutionary new means for propelling ships, without steam and in all weathers, by means of a large pendulum.

Meanwhile, early 1838 finds the Company scrambling to assemble an infrastructure to support the lines of steamship communication that are beginning to thread through its global shipping network. Steam power requires precision engineering, raw materials, a high level of human expertise: in the 1830s, all of these things were not only in short supply, but largely concentrated in Western Europe. If you wanted someone to build or repair a steamship in Bombay or Calcutta, you needed to send them out from Liverpool or Glasgow; the coal shipped out to Mocha, Madeira and Bombay was invariably mined in South Wales or Northumberland.

Coal is a particularly pressing issue. Coaling stations have recently been established at the Cape, at Madeira, at Alexandria and Suez, and at Mocha and Cosseir (Al-Qusayr) on the Red Sea. There is still debate about which harbours would be best placed to host depots on the Red Sea route, an area which presents not only difficult navigational conditions but the prospect of establishing stations in areas where local politics are somewhat beyond the reach of the Company’s influence and negotiations can be difficult. The Company’s Agent at Alexandra, Col. Patrick Campbell – who we last saw arranging escorts of janissaries for dispatches crossing the Suez isthmus – is kept busy negotiating with the local Pasha for the use of the buildings in Cosseir (Al-Qusayr) where the coal is to be kept; meanwhile, the French are requesting the use of the coal in the Madeira depot for their own steamships, an issue on which the Court and its committees are struggling to formulate a consistent policy.

The Red Sea: coaling depots, agencies, and sea routres

The Red Sea: coaling depots, agencies, and sea routes

The network of supply is beset by teething problems: the supply at Mocha turns out to be inadequate, and rather than send a semi-laden coaler the Company have to buy more than they intended; the Agent at Madeira forwards complaints from a shipowner about the damage done to trade by his ship having to wait a day for coaling, for which he demands compensation; and there are problems with unloading at the Cape. At home, each weekly or twice-weekly court discusses arrangements for putting out tenders for the supply and transportation of the coal itself, negotiating with the Board the conditions under which tenders and contracts can be drawn up, and answering incoming offers, many of them unsolicited. The main supply route is Llanelli to Bombay, and thence back East to the Red Sea; interestingly, the only suggestion that anyone might be thinking of prospecting for coal in India comes in a Court reply, in February, to a letter they’d received several months earlier from a Lt John Auchterlony in Madras. Auchterlony proposes to take some of the miner and sapper cadets at the Company’s military seminary at Chatham to the coal and copper districts of England to learn about mining and resource extraction. The Court rejects this plan, but assures him that it will ask the Madras Government if they can use him in an advisory capacity for mineral exploration. The sense is that Auchterlony is merely trying his luck; but the lack of any other indication that the Company might be interested in sourcing coal and metals closer to where they are needed does seem strange.

The absence outside Europe of the human capital of skills and expertise, and the plant required to effect meaningful maintenance of steam vessels, becomes apparent in December when the Berenice, newly assigned to share the Red Sea packet run with the Atalanta, breaks a paddle-wheel shaft. For the entirety of our three-month period she is laid up in Suez while the Company arranges repairs, resupplies, and the host of logistical problems that a large crippled steamship in a foreign port might cause. The range and volume of correspondence to and from the Court is impressive: the crew have to be accommodated and then given passage back to England, the doctor who attended them on the voyage “given some requital”, and the port authorities paid off. Col. Campbell appears to be in constant motion between Suez, Cairo and Alexandria, and at some points is writing three letters a day to the Court. The Admiralty, who have been examining the log, return it with thanks. John Laird (of the engineers and shipbuilders Laird’s of Birkenhead) has examined the damaged shaft, and sends a thorough analysis supported by affidavits from, the stoker and engineer present when the accident occurred. A Captain Grant, who brought the damaged shaft back to England with him, is demanding passage money again, and the court reiterate their refusal. Commander Lowe, who had been in charge of the Berenice, submits a full formal report, and says that although he is sure the repairs can take place in Egypt, they will take at least five or six weeks.

The actual repair is a feat of logistics, in which engineers in England fix a ship in the Red Sea. First, Lowe has moulds made of the parts of the engine affected, which are sent back to England with Waghorn (mentioned in our previous blog as packet agent in Alexandria – and also, apparently, well-informed about steam navigation). On arrival, these are forwarded “with immediate effect” to Napier’s engineering yard in Glasgow, where the Berenice was built. Once Board approval has been obtained (this is done quickly, in mid-February), Napier can be paid to produce new parts, which are then transported, along with senior engineers, out to Egypt for fitting.

In the midst of this storm of correspondence, however, is a sign that the Court have begun to appreciate the problems of lacking a human and technological infrastructure. They arrange to the have the mould of the engine parts duplicated in Egypt, and the copies sent out to Bombay, in the hope that future repairs might be dealt with there. If the Company had been aware before of the need for technical knowledge and resources to be available in the theatres of operation of their new ships, the Berenice affair must have brought the lesson home with considerable force.

So what can we learn from all this? Personally, I’m not sure – and a blog probably isn’t the best place to try to come to considered conclusions on raw archival data. But it’s certainly instructive to see the administrative work that made all these things happen, and watch a governmental structure begin to adapt itself to conditions which were changing faster than it could manage. As ever, reading the records of dissents and debates, inter-departmental rivalry and suspicion, and fraught exchanges between parties equally anxious about their lack of information, can give us a vivid sense of how much of the formation of policy and the practice of colonial power is attended at ground level by compromise, improvisation, bickering, boredom and the white noise of bureaucratic work. There’s also, in this case, an impression to be gained of what it looks like when an immensely powerful organisation meets a genuinely disruptive technology.

But if there’s a sense in these records that the advent of steam has thrown the Company into something of a panic, it’s worth noting that over a longer scale the transition looks very successful indeed. The Indian Navy was not renamed; by 1840, the Company was establishing an unimaginably lucrative Chinese trade by the expedient of sailing up inland rivers and demonstrating a capacity for overwhelming violence, helping to pioneer the new imperial playbook of gunboat diplomacy. However chaotic or even comic colonial power can look at its centre when studied closely, the global work of violence, appropriation and exploitation carried on with astonishing success. What studying these archives on a granular scale allows us to see is the energy of work and debate behind apparently smooth and successful transitions, and the ways in which banal bureaucratic decisions, technological innovation and engineering problem-solving in certain networked sites all facilitated violent imperialism at a distance.

 

Posted in 1838, India Office, Technology

Under Pressure: steamships, global power and communications, and the East India Company — Part 1

Posted on by Peter Mitchell — No Comments ↓

One of the advantages of what we’re doing on this project is that we get to see how large-scale shifts in colonial governmentality played out in the daily business of the offices at the nominal centre of empire. In the circulation of documents and the rituals of administrative work, it’s sometimes possible to discern some of the processes of adaptation, improvisation and contention through which the imperial project continually remade itself, being played out in ‘real time’. In records of the East India Company during our first ‘snapshot’ of January-March 1838 (see our first blog for why it is we’re doing this in the first place), I’ve been particularly fascinated with the changes occurring in relation to steam navigation, and the Company’s attempts to adapt to and take advantage of this emergent technology in remaking the conditions of global power. In the next two blog-posts, I’ll be exploring some of the things I’ve found, and wondering how they fit into larger narratives of technology and empire.

“Conducted separately and without intermixture”: imperial and administrative contexts

In February 1838, the Court of Directors of the East India Company (with the ever-watchful Board of Control’s permission) issued a circular to all its agencies:

“It being desirable that our correspondence with the several governments in India upon Marine subjects or on Matters in any wise connected with Steam Vessels and their Establishment and Engines, with Steam Communications between India and England, with river or Sea Steam Navigation in general, and with the Master Attendants’ Departments or Dock Yards, should be conducted separately and without intermixture with other Departments as at present, we direct that all such subjects be addressed to us in future in the [Marine] ‘Department’ and that your Consultations and Proceedings on such matters be recorded in that Department.”

Essentially, the Company had just opened a new department: alongside its Military, Judicial, Revenue, Home, Ecclesiastical, and Political Departments, there was now one that dealt specifically with marine matters, and especially with steam.

Within the company, a department was not so much a physical space as a method for partitioning administrative workflows and defining policy areas. All official correspondence between England and India is classified by the agency concerned (from amongst the Government of India in general, the three subsidiary Presidencies of Bengal/Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, and other agencies such as prince of Wales Island, St Helena, or China), and numbered according to their order in the year: so this inaugural Marine circular, for example, is designated ‘Marine Department, India, No. 1 of 1838’. Matters to do with steam navigation would still be decided by the same committees and individuals at all points of the administrative network; what the formation of a new department really signifies is a taxonomic move, by which the Company and Board recognised that here was a thing that needed to be responded to in a discrete and co-ordinated way: a field for specialised policy formation, for the consolidation of administrative attention and the concentration of expertise.

The Company’s reasoning for doing this is fairly clear: the correspondence relating to steam navigation and its effects is quite staggering, both in range and volume. Reading through this small mountain of paperwork, you get a vivid sense of a large global organisation scrambling to formulate a response to a new technology and adapt to the ways in which it refigures the whole practice of global power. The formation of the Marine Department marks the moment at which the Company began to firm up its policy towards steam: it’s the product, if you like, of a moment of commitment.

If this is a story of governmental and commercial power structures being challenged by new technologies, and attempting to control them, it’s hardly a new one. It’s hard to avoid a Silicon Valley-esque lexicon of ‘disruption’ and ‘paradigm-shifting’ when writing about this kind of thing, and interrelations between technology and geostrategy have proved fertile ground for historians of subjects that go far beyond nineteenth-century empire. (Check out, for example, Alex Wallerstein’s brilliant Nuclear Secrecy blog, which explores the dense imbrications of science, politics and geostrategy that made the Cold War.) It’s easy, sometimes, to get hung up on the distinction between motives and means: which came first, the desire to do something or the technology with which to do it? But naval engineering hardly occurs in a political void, and a desire to sail up rivers and enforce trade or conquest by violence didn’t sit around for centuries waiting for a suitable technology to bring it into the geostrategic toolkit. Close study of how governments and administrative structures respond to technological change, the ways in which policy and practice are generated, and the problems of applying and adapting those practices, might help us to understand this complex interplay a bit better. In doing the kind of study we’re engaged in – short, discrete ‘snapshots’ of governmental work – it might be possible to get a fine-grained sense of how, in committee rooms and offices, in the administrative procedures and cultures of imperial government, the capillary interplay of technology and policy played out.

The Company was, of course, used to technological innovation in the matter of navigation – sail and shipbuilding were hardly static technologies, and in 1838 we also find the Court exercising some deliberation over the type of sail fabric the ships of the company’s fleet should be contracting for. But steam presented an unprecedented technological shift. It was still relatively new: the first commercially successful steamship had begun operating in 1807; the first regular commercial sea-crossing between England and Ireland in 1816, the first transatlantic crossing in 1819; and the first steamships in Asian waters, the Diana and the Pluto, were built at Kidderpore in 1823 and 1824. Almost as soon as they were built, Diana and Pluto were used in the First Burmese War of 1825, sailing troops up-river to Yangon. In the late 1830s, larger and more complex craft began to be specially built in Europe and sailed around the Cape for Indian service.

“An Establishment of efficient Sea-going Steam Vessels”: steam’s potentials, and the Company response

The effects of steam on the Company’s way of doing things, and the ways these show up in the archive, can be roughly divided into two columns: the things steam can do, and the things steam demands.

Steam propulsion offered speed, power, and consistency. Steamships were not only faster than sail; they weren’t dependent on favourable weather conditions or prevailing winds. The South-West Monsoon had severely limited travel from the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea towards Europe, enforcing a seasonal rhythm to trade and communication; steamships, with their ability to make way against prevailing winds (up to a certain point, at least), upended all this, promising a year-round service. This would have obvious effects on trade and military capacity, but the immediate change for the Company was communicational. Under sail, the time a letter took to travel between Calcutta and London could be anything up to four months – with, again, that seasonal issue of the monsoon making things more complicated. With four months each way, and the work of bureaucracy and implementation at either end, the cycle of administration – from making policy in London to hearing of its application, or from applying that policy in India to learning what the Court of Directors thought you should do next – was rarely shorter than a year. Aboard the Company’s brand-new steam cutter the Atalanta, the dispatches of March 7th, 1838 reached Bombay in a record 41 days, and Calcutta in 54. The usual route was through the Mediterranean, with French packet steamers from Marseilles to Malta, a mail steamer from Malta to Alexandria, and then a short overland hop to the Red Sea, where a Company steamer – in 1838 the Atalanta and the Berenice, paddle-wheel hybrid craft with sails and gunports – would take them onward into the Indian Ocean. With the transit time of information halved, and no longer so dependent on seasonal variation, the policy cycle could be shortened too: the obvious multiplier effects of faster ships on trade and communication applied to government, too.

 

The Company steam ship Berenice, 1837. Note the traditional gunports along the aft side. (William John Huggins, 1838. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.)

The Company steam ship Berenice, built 1837. Note the traditional gunports along the aft side. (William John Huggins, 1838. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.)

The records bear this out; in early 1838 the Company is palpably anxious about re-engineering its communicational networks, and its hunger for information generates an enormous correspondence. Frequent letters go out to Col. Patrick Campbell, the Agent in Alexandria. One of the major stresses of Campbell’s job is to manage a communicational bottleneck: most of the correspondence and many of the people passing between India and England have to cross the short isthmus between Alexandria and Suez. Campbell has to travel constantly between Cairo, Alexandria, and the Red Sea ports of the Gulf of Suez, reporting on the arrival and departure of the Malta steamer, arranging for janissaries to escort the mails over the isthmus, and answering the Company’s often rather plaintive enquiries as to how best to tweak the network for maximum efficiency. Should the Malta steamer, for example, run monthly, as now, or every four weeks? Campbell is non-committal, but a small policy dispute begins to blow up between the Court and Board of Control. The attention paid to the minutiae of how to make the network run as smoothly as possible is impressive: a delay of a day has to be explained.

Steam – and the iron hull technology with which it developed in tandem – also offered new ways of projecting geostrategic force. While the steamboat’s manoeuvrability and capacity for being pointed whichever way you wanted it to go made riverine navigation much easier, the structural efficiencies of iron hull construction made the river gunboat possible: steamboats could carry heavy ordinance and troops up shallow inland waterways.

'Diagram Elucidating the principle on which the Honble East India Company's Steam Vessel Atalanta is Rigged, Displaying the greatest spread of Canvas, with least resistance from Masts', 1836. The Atalanta and Berenice could function under sail, steam or both, depending on prevailing wind and conditions. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.)

‘Diagram Elucidating the principle on which the Honble East India Company’s Steam Vessel Atalanta is Rigged, Displaying the greatest spread of Canvas, with least resistance from Masts’ (1836). The Atalanta and Berenice could function under sail, steam or both, depending on prevailing wind and conditions. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.)

But if the Company was well aware in 1838 of the geostrategic potentials of iron-hulled steamboats and warships, they were also in possession of a private navy which was struggling with poor morale, poor organisation, and an existential uncertainty over its purpose and its future in the face of steam technology. In 1837, William Bentinck MP had called a Parliamentary Select Committee on the issue. Having heard amongst others the opinions of several Company servants, Bentinck recommended that the Indian Navy (IN) be reconstituted as the Indian Flotilla, constituted entirely of steam vessels, with an increased focus on river navigation, and brought for good measure under the supervision of the Admiralty. In January and February 1838, we find the Company preparing a major reorganisation. Sir Charles Malcolm, Superintendent of the IN, is to be replaced by Capt. Robert Oliver, the latter having spent his career so far in the Royal Navy and being – unlike Malcolm – well-versed in steam technology. This is a popular move: although Court deliberations and dissents evince some disagreement about the choice of officer, there is no resistance to the idea that, if the Court wishes the IN to avoid being absorbed by the superior RN, they will have to catch up with their technological savvy. Steam vessels are not to entirely replace steam – as several member of the Court and the Indian establishment point out, entirely getting rid of a fleet of sailing ships seems a rash move – but a concerted push will be made to modernise the fleet. Here, as elsewhere, the records betray a certain sensitivity in the Company’s sense of precedence. In the constant back-and-forth over dispatches between the Court and the Board (nothing can go out to India until the Court has signed off on it, and they make frequent alterations), there is a short struggle over whether the IN is to be renamed the Indian Flotilla: eventually, and rather uncharacteristically, the Board concedes to the Court’s pride, and allows the name to stand as it is.

One Court dissent from February, by John Forbes, demonstrates some of the policy debates within the East India House. He objects strongly to the plans as they stand for slowly shedding the sail component of the fleet, reminding the Court that sailing-ships are essential in maritime surveying, and that should the Company end up offloading its sailing craft on the RN, they might leave themselves more open to an effective takeover should they ever want them back. He’s also critical of the Court’s sheer haste: he understands, he writes, the need to keep up with the French and the Russians, but suggests that a policy of crash modernisation with minimal budgetary constraints bears risks, especially given “a People [Indians] overloaded with taxation”: the sense is that the Company is threatened on the one side by a government which would welcome any opportunity to bring it to heel, and on the other by the potential resistance of its colonial subjects. He also needles at the Company’s characteristic meanness, wondering whether the failure to award a pension to Malcolm, and the reduction in pay for the post, might not lead to jobbery, place-hogging, and a blow to the Navy’s prestige – how, for example, is a high-ranking officer of the IN to fulfil his social obligations with a lower salary than that of his equivalent in the land forces?

Finally, the Court sends out a document that’s as close to a statement of policy as they’ll get. Marine Department (India) letter no. 5 of 1838 (dated 7th March, which rather appropriately makes it part of the Atalanta’s record-breakingly fast package of dispatches) sets out its stall with unusual force. Noting the sad state of the steam fleet at Calcutta, the Court writes:

“It is of the highest importance that your Govt. shall possess an Establishment of efficient Sea-going Steam Vessels, not only for the various ordinary purposes to which your present Steamers have been applied, but of a size and power to make them available as Transports and for the effectual Check of Piracy, and we are of opinion that three of such Vessels will not be more than adequate to your wants.”

To some extent, Forbes proves to have been right about the Company’s almost indecent haste. The Government’s last letter reported their having decided, on their own initiative, to commission a new vessel at Bombay and fit the engines of one of the moribund steamers into it. For an organisation engaged in a constant fight to assert its control over the Indian establishment, especially in budgetary matters, the Court’s assent to this is unusually even-tempered:

“Although these proceedings are contrary to our orders of February 1836 which forbad ‘the thorough repair of old Vessels or Engines or the building of new Vessels’ to be undertaken, we shall not under the peculiar and unforeseen circumstances in which you were placed by the simultaneous failure of all your Vessels, withhold our sanction … you must not however consider this relaxation of our positive injunction in respect of building and repairing Steam Vessels, as justifying any departure from them on future occasions.”

The letter they’re replying to is dated July 1837; the Company can hardly do much about a decision long since taken and money long since committed; withholding sanction from a fait accompli would only make plain the basic problem of asserting any real control that we’ve alluded to in previous posts. But in the weakness of the Court remonstrations, there may also be a consciousness that the urgency of building up steam capability outstrips the pace of imperial communications. It will be nearly a year between the Government informing the Court of their decision, and the Court sending back its half-reluctant sanction: even if steam itself speeds up this glacial policy cycle, the technology, and the ways in which other people are applying it, might move faster than that.
There’s also a fear that that pace of development might outstrip even the nimblest attempts to keep up:

“The repairs of Steam Vessels is at all time a questionable proceeding by reason of the continual improvements that are being made in the construction of such vessels which improvements are seldom, if ever, capable of being applied to old Hulls; and if the repairs are very extensive, it may be more economical in the end and certainly more advantageous to build a new Vessel than to alter and patch up an old one.”

Why spend money on outdated technology? Steam comes into focus here in its full disruptive force, as a technology which can’t really be bargained with but has to be committed to in order to maintain power. Besides, there are other things to focus on, like the usefulness of steamboats on rivers: anticipating “increased benefit from the extension of their Sphere of Employment” the Court wants to send steamboats up the Ganges past Allahabad, and eastward up the Brahmaputra into Assam. This is not only to project force and enhance the military control of territory, useful as that is in a period during which the Company is also aggressively pursuing the subordination of princely states, and issuing orders for the destruction of recalcitrant local feudatories’ forts: they have also calculated that they can make a saving of 12,000 rupees per annum by discontinuing military escorts for boats carrying treasure. With a proposed six more iron-hulled, shallow-draft river steamers, four new accommodation boats for soldiers, and some provision for training, the Company can use six sepoys and the river-gunboat’s concentration of firepower and stores to do the job of a much larger and logistically-challenging escort.

These aren’t all the documents to do with steam navigation that have turned up in our 1838 snapshot. So far I’ve only covered what steam offered: in Part 2, I’ll focus on the things it demanded – the infrastructure and human and technological capital it needed to extend a viable global reach – and how the Company dealt with the challenges of engineering such a huge technological shift in their operations.

Posted in 1838, Communication, India Office, Technology