Abstract
Sir John Malcolm’s first major work, the Sketch of the Political History of India (1811), is a path-setting book in the historiography of the British conquest of South Asia. It was the first British narrative history of the period from 1784 to 1805. As such, it charted the final transformation of the East India Company from a body of merchants into the custodians of the British Empire in India. Put another way, it presented the history of British India in the late eighteenth century in terms of the futile resistance of Company’s directors to the growth of a British imperial state in South Asia. The Sketch is the first major historical work of this period to apply British theories about the unsuitability of the law of nations or the concept of a balance of power to British relations with the Indian princes. Written by a major actor in the diplomatic events it described, the Sketch expressed the historical consciousness of the Company officials who had pushed for imperial expansion in the generation after Warren Hastings.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), p. xii; Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, pp. 2, 5.
Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society 1700–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 166–67;
Peter J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India and America, c. 1750–1783 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 143.
Raymond Callahan, The East India Company and Army Reform, 1783–1798(Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1972) p. 134.
Edward Ingram (ed.), Two Views of British India: The Private Correspondence of Mr Dundas and Lord Wellesley; 1798–1801 (Bath: Adams & Dart, 1970), p. 7;
Sir John Shore, The Private Record of an Indian Governor-Generalship: The Correspondence of Sir John Shore, Governor General of India, with Henry Dundas, President of the Board of Control, 1793–1798 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Historical Monographs, 1933), p.103.
The role Madras’ security problems played in the development of an all-India defensive strategy is outlined in M. E. Yapp, Strategies of British India: Britain, Iran and Afghanistan, 1798–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 8. There is no modern study of Hobart’s Madras.
William Dalrymple, White Mughals: A Tale of Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth Century India (London: Flamingo, 2003), p. 91.
C. H. Philips, East India Company, 1784–1833 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1941), pp. 90, 92.
John Malcolm, “Reflections on the Policy of Forming a More Intimate Alliance with the Nizam,” April 19, 1798, BL/MSS Eur F 228/8, pp. 3–4.
Penelope Carson, “Golden Casket or Pebbles and Trash? J.S. Mill and the Orientalist/Anglicist Controversy,” in Lynn Zastoupil, M. Moir, and D. M. Peers, J. S. Mill’s Encounter with India (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 161;
Douglas M. Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in Early Nineteenth Century India (London: Taurus Press, 1995), p. 38.
The more conventional view, that Wellesley’s servants were his creatures, can be found in Iris Butler, The Eldest Brother: The Marquess Wellesley, The Duke of Wellington’s Eldest Brother (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973) and in Dalrymple, White Mughals.
Stewart Gordon is explicit that the British and French were merely carrying on existing practice by entering into subsidiary alliances. The argument that this was a European innovation for slowly transferring power and authority out of the hands of native governors, which Arthur Wellesley makes, ignores the extent to which the East India Company incorporated itself into existing military and political networks. Stewart Gordon, The Marathas: 1600–1818(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 75.
F. Whelan, Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire,(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), p. 101.
Raghubir Sinh (ed.), The Treaty of Bassein and the Anglo-Maratha War in the Deccan 1802–1804, English Records of Maratha History. Poona Residence Correspondence, Vol. 10 (Bombay: Sri Gouranga Press, 1951), p. xix.
C. A. Bayly, “Richard Wellesley,” in Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 58(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 37–45.
C. Halliwell, “The Marquis Wellesley’s encounter with the Maratha Empire,” unpublished PhD thesis, University of Southampton, 1999, p. 176.
J. W. Kaye, The Life and Correspondence of Henry St. George Tucker, late Accountant General of Bengal and Chairman of the East India Company(London: Smith & Elder, 1854), p. 175.
John Malcolm, Observations on the Disturbances in the Madras Army in 1809(London: John Murray, 1812).
For a detailed analysis of this literature and its critique of the East India Company, see H. V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics 1757–1773, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
A. Webster, “The Political Economy of Trade Liberalization: The East India Company Charter Act of 1813,” in Economic History Review, 2nd Series, 43(1990), p. 405; Stokes, English Utilitarians and India, pp. 38–40.
Reproduced in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Problems of Empire, Britain and India, 1757–1813 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968), p. 166.
Charles Grant, “Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect to Morals; and on the Means of Improving it: Written Chiefly in the Year 1792,” Parliamentary Papers, 10 (1812–1813), No. 282.
G. Carnall, “William Robertson and Contemporary Images of India,” in S. J Brown (ed.), William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 219.
For example, Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Books IV–V(London: Penguin, 2006), p. 22.
Earl of Lauderdale, An Inquiry into the Practical Merits of the System for the Government of India under the Superintendence of the Board of Control(Edinburgh, 1809), p. 137.
Abbé Raynal, A History of the Two Indies: A Translated Selection of Writings from Raynal Peter Jimack (ed.) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 45. This text appears in the third French edition, published in 1780.
John Malcolm, Sketch of the Political History of India from the Time of Mr Pitt’s India Bill, A.D. 1784, to the Present (London: William Miller, 1812), p. 33.
John Malcolm quoted in Interesting Extracts from the Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Committee of the Whole House to Whom it Was Referred to Consider of the Affairs of the East India Company (London: T. Davison, 1814), p. 3.
Ibid., p. 145; James Paull, A Letter from Mr. Paull [on the subject of the charges preferred by him against Marquis Wellesley] to S. Whitbread (London, 1808).
John Malcolm, “Reflections on the Policy of a Closer Connection with the Nizam,” April 18, 1798, IOR MS Eur F288/85, f. 2.
Arthur Wellesley, “Notes on the Administration of Marquis Wellesley,” in Selections from Wellesley’s Despatches, Sidney Owen (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1880), p. 283.
John Malcolm, “Commentary on the anonymous ‘Observations on the Treaty of Bassein,’” November 1804, British Library, Add. MSS. 13, 472, f. 89.
C. H. Alexandrowicz, An Introduction to the History of the Law of Nations in the East Indies (16th, 17th & 18th Centuries) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 156, 176.
G. D. Bearce, British Attitudes Towards India, 1784–1858 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 264;
G. D. Bearce, British Attitudes Towards India, 1784–1858 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 264; Martha McLaren, British India and British Scotland, 1780–1830. Career Building, Empire Building, and a Scottish School of Thought on Indian Governance (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2001), p. 143.
Charles Grant, “Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect to Morals; and on the Means of Improving it: Written Chiefly in the Year 1792,” Parliamentary Papers, 10 (1812–1813), No. 282, 23.
C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 103.
A. S. Bennell, The Making of Arthur Wellesley (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1997), p. 224. Bennell has written six further articles on the Second Maratha War.
Copyright information
© 2010 Jack Harrington
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Harrington, J. (2010). The Political History of India and the Creation of an Historiography of Imperial Conquest. In: Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117501_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117501_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29170-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-11750-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)