08-18-2007, 02:54 AM
http://soc.world-journal.net/indianoceansb-intro.html
We earlier pointed out on this website that while the British Empire and the USA may have had their relative rise and fall at different times during the 20th Century, they have marched along a similar route, and to similar tunes. Like for example the claim to be civilising dependent peoples. But for whatever the complaints of the left and the colonial nationalists about the nastier aspects of late British imperialism (such as torture in Kenya, or police brutality in the West Indies), the empire grappled with its Kiplingesque ârecessionalâ with a fair degree of grace and a decent sense of timing. And although not necessarily Americaâs imperial retreat (example Iraq), might at times be, less easy and smooth. But imperialistic intentions is one, capitalism is another: both empires rose and spread around the world on a crest of expanding commerce and foreign investment, dubbed âfree tradeâ by the British and âglobalizationâ by the USA. And although not insisting on a similar approach by British Colonialism and the strategic defense by the US with its expansionist war in Iraq, we earlier indicated how the US can learn from past experiences. See Case Study:
The business success of the British India Company and many of its freebooting (in the business sense of the word), employees can be traces back to a Mughal imperial decree of 1717, which granted a suspension of tariff for some Company trade under limited conditions. This situation set the tone for the systematic misuse of also other grants, treaties, agreements, and understandings, each of which-for example in the case of the Diwani grant of 1765 Âbecame the pretext for the assumption of sovereign rights over trade, revenue, law, and land on the part of a monopoly joint stock company that was at the same time also violating the terms of its own relationship to the Crown and Parliament of England. And there were also the debates over the relative sovereignty of different Indian rulers, some of which had been prearranged. (Philip Lawson, The East India Company, 1993, p.120.)
Even one British sea captain, Captain Rennie, wrote about the injustice accorded the nawabs by various agents of the Company just after the fall of Calcutta : "The injustice to the Moors conÂsists in that, being by their courtesy permitted to live here as merÂchants-to protect and judge what natives were our servants, and to trade custom free-we under that pretence protected all the NaÂbob's servants that claimed our protection, though they were neither our servants nor our merchants, and gave our dustucks or passes to numbers of natives to trade custom free, to the great prejudice of the Nabob's revenue; nay, more, we levied large duties upon goods brought into our districts from the very people that permitted us to trade custom free, and by numbers of impositions caused eternal clamour and complaints against us at Court."( H. V. Bowen, ReveÂnue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757-1773, 1991, pp. 64-66.)
For the British, the fall (their loss) of Calcutta was short-lived, reversed by the victory at Plassey in 1757. Plassey itself was not a major military victory-despite the reputation it subsequently received around the putative military genius of Robert Clive-so much as it was the negotiated outcome of the decision by Mir Jafar the nawab of Bengal, to conspire with the English, by making Clive a high ranking âservantâ(mansabdar) of the Mughal emperor. Yet by 1757, the British had begun on a trajectory of military conquest and occupation that gave them control, at least for a time, not just of growing swaths of India, but of Indian history too.
<span style='color:red'>
Where Robert Clive conquered Bengal, it was Warren Hastings who first seriously began to rule it. And his first act was to undertake direct management of revenue collecÂtion in Bengal rather than relying on the nawab. To do this, he had to devise an entirely new revenue system, establishing direct administration over local agencies and landlords. Hastings also instituted new systems of civil and criminal law, crafted on the basis of a thorÂough study of indigenous systems of justice.
</span>Nevertheless he would later be put on trial in England , found guilty of misuse of power, following which Hastings is said to have taken his own life. (For details see N.B.Dirks, The Scandal of Empire, 2006.)
By the time Hastings returned to London in 1785, he had changed the fundamental nature to colonial rather than metropolitan considerations when starting to project its vision across the Indian ocean, soon that of Britain's Indian empire. And little over a century later, it was the colonial British Indian empire that fought the first Gulf War of the twentieth century against the precolonial Ottoman Empire. The Indian soldiers who were sent out to fight played both a global and an Indian Ocean role and they understood the difference as we will see.
Yet it was this huge asymmetry in economic power relations on a world scale that led Indian and Chinese intermediary capitalists to build their own lake in the stretch of ocean from Zanzibar to Singapore. Highly specialized capital and labor flows connected different parts of the Indian Ocean rim. Innitially investigated by Ashin Dasgupta, who in Malabar in Asian Trade, 1740-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1967), concluded that: Intimations of "modernity" in the Indian Ocean interregional arena are discernible as early as the sixteenth century. It was K. N. Chaudhuri however who posed the question: "Is the 'Indian Ocean' as a geographical space the same as Asia?" His answer, following Braudel, was to draw a distinction between a physical unit and a human unit. "Asia as a continent," suggesting that the Indian Ocean was a more meaningful human unit for historical analysis. (Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean:An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, 1985, p. 4, ibid see also chapter 5.)
We earlier pointed out on this website that while the British Empire and the USA may have had their relative rise and fall at different times during the 20th Century, they have marched along a similar route, and to similar tunes. Like for example the claim to be civilising dependent peoples. But for whatever the complaints of the left and the colonial nationalists about the nastier aspects of late British imperialism (such as torture in Kenya, or police brutality in the West Indies), the empire grappled with its Kiplingesque ârecessionalâ with a fair degree of grace and a decent sense of timing. And although not necessarily Americaâs imperial retreat (example Iraq), might at times be, less easy and smooth. But imperialistic intentions is one, capitalism is another: both empires rose and spread around the world on a crest of expanding commerce and foreign investment, dubbed âfree tradeâ by the British and âglobalizationâ by the USA. And although not insisting on a similar approach by British Colonialism and the strategic defense by the US with its expansionist war in Iraq, we earlier indicated how the US can learn from past experiences. See Case Study:
The business success of the British India Company and many of its freebooting (in the business sense of the word), employees can be traces back to a Mughal imperial decree of 1717, which granted a suspension of tariff for some Company trade under limited conditions. This situation set the tone for the systematic misuse of also other grants, treaties, agreements, and understandings, each of which-for example in the case of the Diwani grant of 1765 Âbecame the pretext for the assumption of sovereign rights over trade, revenue, law, and land on the part of a monopoly joint stock company that was at the same time also violating the terms of its own relationship to the Crown and Parliament of England. And there were also the debates over the relative sovereignty of different Indian rulers, some of which had been prearranged. (Philip Lawson, The East India Company, 1993, p.120.)
Even one British sea captain, Captain Rennie, wrote about the injustice accorded the nawabs by various agents of the Company just after the fall of Calcutta : "The injustice to the Moors conÂsists in that, being by their courtesy permitted to live here as merÂchants-to protect and judge what natives were our servants, and to trade custom free-we under that pretence protected all the NaÂbob's servants that claimed our protection, though they were neither our servants nor our merchants, and gave our dustucks or passes to numbers of natives to trade custom free, to the great prejudice of the Nabob's revenue; nay, more, we levied large duties upon goods brought into our districts from the very people that permitted us to trade custom free, and by numbers of impositions caused eternal clamour and complaints against us at Court."( H. V. Bowen, ReveÂnue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757-1773, 1991, pp. 64-66.)
For the British, the fall (their loss) of Calcutta was short-lived, reversed by the victory at Plassey in 1757. Plassey itself was not a major military victory-despite the reputation it subsequently received around the putative military genius of Robert Clive-so much as it was the negotiated outcome of the decision by Mir Jafar the nawab of Bengal, to conspire with the English, by making Clive a high ranking âservantâ(mansabdar) of the Mughal emperor. Yet by 1757, the British had begun on a trajectory of military conquest and occupation that gave them control, at least for a time, not just of growing swaths of India, but of Indian history too.
<span style='color:red'>
Where Robert Clive conquered Bengal, it was Warren Hastings who first seriously began to rule it. And his first act was to undertake direct management of revenue collecÂtion in Bengal rather than relying on the nawab. To do this, he had to devise an entirely new revenue system, establishing direct administration over local agencies and landlords. Hastings also instituted new systems of civil and criminal law, crafted on the basis of a thorÂough study of indigenous systems of justice.
</span>Nevertheless he would later be put on trial in England , found guilty of misuse of power, following which Hastings is said to have taken his own life. (For details see N.B.Dirks, The Scandal of Empire, 2006.)
By the time Hastings returned to London in 1785, he had changed the fundamental nature to colonial rather than metropolitan considerations when starting to project its vision across the Indian ocean, soon that of Britain's Indian empire. And little over a century later, it was the colonial British Indian empire that fought the first Gulf War of the twentieth century against the precolonial Ottoman Empire. The Indian soldiers who were sent out to fight played both a global and an Indian Ocean role and they understood the difference as we will see.
Yet it was this huge asymmetry in economic power relations on a world scale that led Indian and Chinese intermediary capitalists to build their own lake in the stretch of ocean from Zanzibar to Singapore. Highly specialized capital and labor flows connected different parts of the Indian Ocean rim. Innitially investigated by Ashin Dasgupta, who in Malabar in Asian Trade, 1740-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1967), concluded that: Intimations of "modernity" in the Indian Ocean interregional arena are discernible as early as the sixteenth century. It was K. N. Chaudhuri however who posed the question: "Is the 'Indian Ocean' as a geographical space the same as Asia?" His answer, following Braudel, was to draw a distinction between a physical unit and a human unit. "Asia as a continent," suggesting that the Indian Ocean was a more meaningful human unit for historical analysis. (Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean:An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, 1985, p. 4, ibid see also chapter 5.)