Anarchy in the East India Company

I recently read (well, listened to the audiobook of) The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple¹.

Before reading The Anarchy, my vague pop-culture understanding of the East India company went something like this: England, as a strong colonial power, de-facto invaded and colonized the less powerful India in order to extract its resources. I was completely wrong about that.

First, when the East India Company was founded, England was a backwater compared to India: orders of magnitude less industrial production, a smaller and weaker army, poorer architecture and culture, and so on. There are some great anecdotes in the book about the Indian Mughal emperor joking around by having his artisans perfectly copy the British delegation’s gifts in under a day. Second, England was not even the strongest colonial power in Europe. The Dutch and Portuguese had a better colonial footing in general, and certainly a much more secure presence in India.

The most interesting question to me, then, is why did England end up winning? How did they gain control over India, when India began with such an advantage? And why didn’t the other European colonial powers beat them to it?

How did the East India Company beat India?

They didn’t, for a long time. The first part of The Anarchy is a series of English humiliations, both at the hands of the Indian government and at the hands of their European colonial counterparties. For the entirety of the 17th century, the East India Company was clearly subordinate to the Mughal empire. The one attempt by England to go to war against the Mughals ended in embarrassing failure - total surrender, the payment of a massive fine, and having to literally beg the Mughal emperor to be allowed to continue to trade in India.

Getting a foothold in the Mughal empire

What changed? The power of the Mughal empire declined, for reasons entirely unrelated to English efforts. At the beginning of the 18th century, the death of the current Mughal emperor and subsequent internal turmoil allowed the Company to assume control over Bengal. Forty years later, the Iranian empire smashed the Mughal empire apart. Iran was fighting its own wars, and (correctly) saw India as a rich, vulnerable country, so they sacked and looted the Indian capital of Delhi. This was a fatal blow to Mughal control over India - in part because of the sheer amount of wealth Iran carried away with them, and in part because it’s hard to be a credible emperor when your capital city has been burnt down and your army torn to pieces.

It’s worth noting the advantages of the Iranian army, because these also end up being the advantages of the English armies later on. First, the Iranian army was more cohesive than the Indian army: the chain of command was clearer, they stuck to the same plan, and they held together better under fire. Second, the Iranian army made better use of modern weapons - in this case, swivel-guns, mounted on camels. That’s how they were able to crush the Indian army despite being massively outnumbered.

Proxy wars and European-style warfare

Even then, the East India Company (and England, by proxy) didn’t directly go to war with India. Instead, their forces backed various Indian powers against other Indian powers, effectively acting as a mercenary group that was paid in not just cash, but trade concessions and annexed land. Interestingly, the English were not the first to do this. It was the French who began this practice, training Indian locals in European-style warfare. The English copied this.

In The Anarchy, Dalrymple suggests that the frequency of land wars in Europe meant that European armies and tactics were just that much better than their Indian equivalents (presumably because armed conflict inside the Mughal empire was both less common and less brutal than in Europe). European powers in India were thus able to win battles even when considerably outnumbered (just like the Iranians earlier, who had honed their own tactics in warring against the Ottoman empire). A few thousand European-trained troops would routinely beat massive armies.

What was it specifically about European-style warfare that was so much more effective, and couldn’t be immediately replicated by the Mughal armies? You might ask the same question about American-style warfare, which also seems very hard for non-developed powers to replicate (note the frequent failed attempts by dictators to develop a “modern” army). In this case, it was probably² a combination of:

• Infantry drilled to withstand cavalry charges (the socket bayonet let trained infantry use their musket as a cavalry-repelling pike)
• A denser, unified command structure (any officer could give any company orders that they would understand and obey)
• High-quality ammunition and powder shipped in from Europe
• More and better field artillery (as opposed to large siege pieces, which Mughal armies favored)

Some of this was straightforwad to replicate, like manufacturing field artillery and the socket bayonet, but some of it (like the military command structure) was too tightly interwoven with the culture of each empire to shift quickly. Bret Devereaux has written about this extensively. European armies developed their professional military culture over a century or more - it’s not easy to replicate that in a handful of years.

We see the dominance of European-style armies in the battle of Plassey, which is when English rule over India is thought to have “officially” started. As we might expect from previous examples, the East India Company was nominally fighting for another Indian leader, not for the British Empire. They were also considerably outnumbered - 3,100 men to 45,000. The decisive moment in the battle was when a heavy rainstorm drenched both sides. The English had set up tarpaulins to keep their ammunition dry, while the Indian army hadn’t³. Assuming both sides’ artillery was useless, the Indian cavalry charged and was cut to pieces by the British guns. At that point the Indian army dispersed.

How did the East India Company beat European competitors?

That covers why the East India Company was able to defeat the massive Mughal empire:

• Decline of the Mughal empire due to outside factors
• The superiority of the European style of war (at that time)
• Backing various Indian powers against others (i.e. acting as a kingmaker)

But the French had the same advantages. Why didn’t they (or some other European power) win out over the English? Here’s five answers.

The first answer is English naval power. England’s dominance at sea meant that the East India Company could receive supplies from home (and funds, though I’d imagine the vast majority of funds were flowing out to England, not in). Not being able to defeat the English naval blockade put the French at a serious disadvantage.

The second answer is that the East India Company had a more solid commercial base. European-style mercenary work was so lucrative that for a long time it dwarfed the normal trading revenues of both companies. While the East India Company still continued to trade, the French put all their efforts into warfare, which made it less sustainable in the long-term. Although the French were as good at war, they ultimately weren’t able to fund themselves, which eventually caused the French government to recall their most successful general Dupleix - understandably frustrated that their trading efforts were costing money instead of making it.

The third answer is that the English made better choices about which Indian powers to support. The Anarchy spends a lot of time chronicling Indian internal power struggles - which makes sense, since the currents of internal Indian politics drove the fortunes of the European trading companies, not the other way around. Whether due to luck or skill, the Indian powers that the English chose to back endured longer.

The fourth answer is that the East India Company was more independent than the French. While the East India Company was strongly connected to English government, it wasn’t officially a branch of it. However, the French trading company was fully subordinate to the French government. That meant that the East India Company leaders could (and did) make bold plans right there on the spot, while the French often had to send back to France for approval.

Finally, the French were losing the war in Europe. If France had been defeating England in the broader global conflict, they might have been more willing to invest in the Indian theatre. But as it is, they withdrew resources from India to focus on Europe, at the same time as England was prioritizing India and other colonial campaigns.

Other interesting points

I was fascinated by how little the English at home understood about the East India Company’s operations in India, even as they were relying on the ridiculous quantities of wealth that were being cruelly extracted from the country. When a court case was finally brought about the Company’s abuses, it (a) got almost all the specific facts about India dead wrong, and (b) managed to indict Warren Hastings, who Dalrymple describes as perhaps the most moral and restrained leader of the East India Company⁴. It’s interesting how wrongheaded the case was about the specifics and the people involved, while being completely accurate as to the broad strokes of the Company’s horrendous behavior in India.

I also noted the story of Lord Cornwallis, who in his term of control over the East India Company instituted a set of explicitly racist policies banning Indians from holding any positions of power. Dalrymple attributes this to Cornwallis’ experience in America, where he failed to suppress the American rebellion during the American War of Independence. Cornwallis had hoped to rely on American elites to back England, but couldn’t - the American elites were either lukewarm and noncommittal, or actively part of the rebellion. When he came to India, he resolved to avoid the same mistake by filling the elite class entirely with Englishmen who had no loyalty to India.

Summary

How did the East India Company win out over a much more powerful empire? By exploiting recent improvements in European warfare that had not yet reached India. Even then, they couldn’t go up against India directly - instead they sold their skills to various Indian leaders, slowly increasing the level of influence and control they had over them.

The French attempted the same tactic, but the East India Company was better at the fundamentals of trade and resource extraction, and eventually the French traders ran out of money to fund their mercenary activities (it also didn’t help that the English were the dominant naval power).

The East India Company’s racist policies were largely a reaction to English colonial failures in America - never again could a home-grown elite be allowed to gain power. Meanwhile, the English at home were aware that the East India Company was engaged in horrifically cruel resource extraction, but had no grasp of even the most basic details.