Abstract
Since the early seventeenth century, English, and later British trade to South and South-East Asia was conducted by the English East India Company, a privately owned joint-stock trading corporation endowed with a royal charter. In the eighteenth century, the Company increasingly acted as a political and military player in India, which was characterised by power struggles within the framework of the Mughal Empire, following the gradual decline of the Emperor’s central authority. The beginning of British colonial rule in India is usually marked by the battle of Plassey in 1757, when the East India Company used the dynamics of an internal struggle to become the power behind the throne of the Nawab (“provincial governor”), the ruler of Bengal in the northeast of India. The Company defended its position as the dominant power in Bengal in the Battle of Buxar in 1764, beating the combined forces of the Nawab and the Mughal Emperor. This Emperor, Shah Alam II (1728–1806), who afterwards was in dire need of allies, acknowledged the Company’s position with the grant of the Diwani, the privilege entailing the collection of land-taxes and the civil jurisdiction over Bengal. The leading officers of the Company in Bengal, located at Fort William, the Company’s headquarters in Calcutta, tried to fulfil their new role by constructing a system of government, placed as they were between the directives of the Company’s Court of directors—and increasingly the British ministry in London—and the necessities faced on the spot (Marshall 1987a, 70–136, id. 2006, 487–507; Mann 2000, 33–93; Chaudhury 2000; Bowen 2006).
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Notes
- 1.
Officially “An Act for Establishing certain Regulations for the better Management of Affairs of the East India Company, as well in India as in Europe” (13 Geo. III, cap. 63).
- 2.
Warren Hastings to George Colebrooke, Chairman of the East India Company’s Board of Directors, 3 March 1773.
- 3.
For the East India Company the question was essential for the defence of its property rights. According to a legal opinion (the “Pratt-Yorke Opinion” of 1757), conquered territory would fall under British sovereignty as property of the Crown, while any acquisitions made by treaty or through grant from an Indian ruler would belong to the Company. For the domestic concerns this was also the question of international politics; not only might European rivals be aggravated, but the Indian dominions would be drawn into any European conflict as well. In the end, Parliament also shied away from the responsibility and potential ramifications of officially taking over, preferring regular payments and the Company as an intermediary (Travers 2007: 43–49; Bowen 2002: 53–55; Dodwell 1929: 589–608).
- 4.
Warren Hastings to George Colebrooke, 7 March 1773.
- 5.
Warren Hastings to George Colebrooke, 26 March 1772.
- 6.
The concept of (Asiatic/Oriental) despotism had been very prevalent in eighteenth-century European political discourse and theory ever since it had been popularised by Montesquieu. The concept had two semantic levels, one descriptive and one pejorative, of which the emphasis differed. On the one hand, it was used initially to neutrally denote a system of government in which absolute sovereignty was concentrated in the ruler and in which no private property right existed. On the other, this form of government, which is often associated with Turkey, but also with East and South Asia, often served as a negative counter-model in discussions about European states. As such, it was associated with slavery and rule by fear, and rejected by the majority of authors (Richter 1973; Curtis 2009: 72–102). When applying the concept to Mughal India, the arbitrary character of rule was stressed, property, as well as offices or honours, being solely dependent on the will of the Mughal Emperor (Cohn 1996: 62–65).
- 7.
Public letter from Warren Hastings and Council to the Court of Directors, 3 Nov. 1772.
- 8.
Francis compared the Zamindars to the English landed gentry, thereby interpreting them as the very backbone of the Mughal constitution. He also acted as the defender of their ancient, pre-Mughal rights against Hastings’ executive tyranny. He strongly insisted that Mughal despotic rule and property rights went hand in hand. Therefore he proposed a system by which the revenue would be permanently set at a moderate level, allowing (following physiocratic reasoning) for the improvement of the economical situation (Travers 2007: 163–180; Weitzmann 1929).
- 9.
Heading taken from Bayly (1989: 116).
- 10.
- 11.
After a first phase of reforms, Pitt’s reforming fervour much declined. Apart from the wars, this can be ascribed to his determination not to yield competences of the executive to Parliament (Breihan 1984).
- 12.
Cornwallis to the Duke of York, 20 July 1787.
- 13.
Cornwallis to Henry Dundas, 15 Nov. 1786.
- 14.
Cornwallis to Henry Dundas, 26 Aug. 1787.
- 15.
For theory and practice of the collaboration of the involved institutions—Governor General, Secret Committee of the Board of Directors, and the government Board of Control, in which Dundas was the central figure—cf. Bowen (2006: 73–83).
- 16.
Cornwallis to Henry Dundas, 18 June 1792. Dundas had given clear instructions on exactly this procedure years before, in a letter marked “private and confidential”: “We never before had a Government in India, both at home and abroad, acting in perfect unison together; upon principles of perfect purity and integrity; […] You may depend upon my giving the most exact attention to every suggestion you communicate to me, not only in your publick despatches, but in your private letters; and indeed there are many things which you cannot with propriety communicate to me otherwise.” Henry Dundas to Cornwallis, India Board 21 March 1787, received 26 Aug. 1787 (Ross 1859: 292f.). Cf. Mann 2000: 337–339.
- 17.
- 18.
Minutes of the governor-general (Cornwallis), 3 Feb. 1790.
- 19.
Minutes of John Shore, 14 June 1789.
- 20.
John Shore, remarks on the Mode of Administering Justice to the Natives of Bengal, 18 May 1785, IOR P/50/58, 382, 387ff., cited in Wilson (2008: 64f.).
- 21.
E.g. “Throughout the period examined in this book, the colonial state remained an unstable, restless entity, never quite certain what it was doing, how it should act or whom it was acting for.” (Wilson 2008: 8).
- 22.
The centrality of the state in German historical research can ultimately be dated back to German idealism and its influence on the foundations of historism in the nineteenth century. See Ameriks and Stolzenberg (2004); Iggers (1968). An in-depth analysis of the term “state” itself is beyond the scope of this article.
- 23.
“Export” of the state does not mean unproblematic or unchanged adoption. Indeed, the spreading of the state is seen as a topic that has to be approached in a highly differentiated way; it does mean, however, that “state and state-power are so conclusively of European origin that even that designation of origin appears to be dispensable.” (“Staat und Staatsgewalt sind so eindeutig Europäischen Ursprungs, daß sogar diese Herkunftsbezeichnung entbehrlich erscheint”), Reinhard (2000: 15); for Reinhard’s analysis of the “export”, ibid.: 480–536.
- 24.
In the introduction, labeled “Power Elites, State Servants, Ruling Classes, and the Growth of State Power”, Reinhard occasionally uses both “(process of) state building” and “state formation”, besides the omnipresent “growth of state power”, indiscriminately (Reinhard 1996b: 2, 4, 17 (state building); 4, 6 (state formation)).
- 25.
A recent and, because it is a German-English Miscellany, especially vivid example of this is “Hexenprozess und Staatsbildung—Witch-Trials and State-Building”, where the terms “State-Building”, “State-Formation”, “Staatsbildung”, and “entstehende Staatlichkeit” are used side by side. Johannes Dillinger’s introduction, which is presented both in German and in English, translates both state-formation and state-building as “Staatsbildung” (pp. 12, 22), while in the title of the introduction “entstehende Staatlichkeit” is rendered as “State-Building”. Last, but not least, the editors offer the term “Verdichtung von Staatlichkeit” in the preface (Dillinger et al. 2008).
- 26.
The problematisation of “the state” as a unique political configuration in the second half of the twentieth century also led to the emphasis of the processual character of the state. Cf. Reinhard (1998: 1–9). For a reserved assessment of the assertiveness of the modern state before the twentieth century, see Bayly (2004: 249).
- 27.
This is a matter much disputed in post-colonial research. In the critical approach of the Subaltern Studies group, for instance, a term like “pre-colonial” is seen to be problematical as such, because it is based on Western conceptions of “progress” and “modernity”. For Dipesh Chakrabarty, for example, the state is a problematical concept, in so far as it is part of “political modernity”, whereby the categorisation as “state” can become part of a normative chronology that tends to exclude certain phenomena as “pre-political”. Cf. Chakrabarty (2000: 3–16); Iggers and Wang (2008: 284–290).
- 28.
Both Bayly and Osterhammel stress the necessity of dynamic models. Osterhammel explicitly questions the validity of a state-based typology of forms of government and the fixed correlation of state and territory (Osterhammel 2009: 825f.). Similarly, Bayly stresses the co-existence of different forms of “statishness”, a neologism that, like the German “Staatlichkeit”, can be used to signify aspects of governmentality, without presupposing a centralised state: ““statishness” could take a variety of forms in the nineteenth century-world.” (Bayly 2004: 253).
- 29.
Many thanks to Daniel Lambach for useful hints and an enlightening discussion on this subject.
- 30.
It is rather revealing that this book’s title (“State-building”) has been (correctly) translated into German as “Staaten bauen” and not “Staatsbildung” (Fukuyama 2004b).
- 31.
In practice, the terms are often used interchangeably, and approaches can overlap. Also, there is a call for the “embedded state-building” approach, which focuses on the institutions, but pays close attention to the institutions’ connectedness to a given society and cultural context.
- 32.
This relation is, of course, very dependent on the applied definition of the state. The basic terminological distinction suggested here should, however, be largely independent of the individual concretisation of “the state”.
- 33.
Cf. the article by Stefan Brakensiek in this volume.
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Meurer, S. (2012). Approaches to State-Building in Eighteenth Century British Bengal. In: Flüchter, A., Richter, S. (eds) Structures on the Move. Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19288-3_11
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