By developer 
At the peak of the Mughal Empire, India controlled a quarter of the world’s economy, and as much of the world’s population. India was a military super power of it’s time, capable of wielding massive armies, with advanced artillery, powered by a thriving industrial and mercantile economy which held a commanding position in Asia. It boggles the mind, how this India fell to the British, a nation which at the time been at the periphery of the world’s economy, and a secondary position even within Europe.
Yet, history has shown that it was capitalist Britain through the East India Company that conquered India and not the other way around. The story of the British conquest of India is often presented to us in a simplified and confused manner which hides the underlying forces of history that went on behind it. Neither, do we get a sense the global significance of the conquest of India. Understanding the history of the British conquest of India is to understand how India became capitalist, for this was not just a simple act of conquest, plunder and exploitation, this was a particularly destructive transformation of Indian society from a pre-capitalist mode of production, to a capitalist mode of production.
The question often baffles ordinary Indians as to how a gang of armed merchants backed by a second rate European power, could have conquered what was the richest and most populous region in the world. Even after the collapse of the Mughal Empire, the Marathas, the Kingdom of Mysore, and later the Sikh Empire, would be successful in building large and capable militaries, which had inflicted defeats on the British troops on Indian soil. Yet, at the end the British triumphed, and India was subjected to colonial rule which left it one of the most impoverished nations in the world at the time of independence.
The bourgeois revolutions of Europe:
Capitalism emerged as a political, social and economic force the first in Europe. A multitude of factors made this transition possible, the first being the existence of European feudalism. This in turn was the product of the collapse of Rome and with it the slave based mode of production that it represented.
The political and social forces that created the conditions to make European feudalism possible, also laid the groundwork for the emergence of the proto-capitalist classes which would evolve into the bourgeoisie.
The merchant guilds, bankers, trading guilds, workshops and artisans were the bedrock of what would become the bourgeoisie of the future. While these classes existed in India as well, the leviathan absolutist state ruling over a society where property was owned in common, or held by the crown, stunted the growth of the bourgeoisie in the same way, and when they did, wars and political strife derailed the future development of these classes, as was the case with the Chola merchant guilds.
The contradictions between the capitalist class and the feudal state grew till it reached a breaking point by the 17th century. The wealth and social power of the emergent bourgeois class became too much for the feudal classes to hold back, the first revolution broke out in the Spanish held Netherlands. The first bourgeois republic was born in the Netherlands, followed a few decades later by revolutionary developments in England, leading to the English revolution and civil war of 1640.
By this time, the colonization of the Americas had already begun, evolving from the first colonies by the Spanish in the Caribbean, into an expansive empire over Central Mexico, the Andes, and the first colonies in the East coast of the North America. These colonies provided another avenue for the enrichment of the European bourgeoisie, who no longer had to negotiate with the Asiatic empires of the East for trade.
All of these events played out at the same time, when the Holy Roman Empire collapsed into itself during the 30 years’ war. Protestantism was a religious expression of the rising European bourgeoisie. The impulse of bourgeois revolution in Europe at this time was heavily coated in religion, and took the form as a war against the Catholic Church, which controlled almost a third of all land in the continent. The Catholic Church was the central pillar on which European feudal power rested. The decline of European feudalism went hand in hand with the decline of the power of the Catholic Church, reaching its culmination during the Napoleonic wars. There was no other organization anywhere in Asia, let alone in India comparable to the Catholic Church.
Modern Britain owes its existence to the parliamentary revolution of the 1640s, which achieved the final destruction of the feudal monarchy, and replaced with a monarchy that was subservient to the bourgeoisie. The supremacy of the parliament, achieved through the bourgeois English revolution enabled the further capitalist transformation of England, and the British isles. Till this point, Britain was at best a secondary power on the European continent, attempting and failing at matching the vast colonial empires of Spain and Portugal. The modest colonial holdings of the early 16th century, and trading companies like the East India Company which started its life from a small office in London, were expanded and enriched under the new bourgeois regime led by Cromwell.
England hastened its capitalist transformation through warfare and brutal colonization, all built on the foundation of the corpse of English feudalism. Cromwell had reformed the army and the navy to become one of the finest in Europe and the world. The English navy was feared for its discipline, professionalism and fierce tactics, while the army had been reformed into one that could match the power of those in the European continent. This army had inflicted defeats on Spain, the Dutch, and the French. Even as the counter-revolution reinstated the Stuart monarchy back, the gains of the revolution could not be undone. The counter-revolution would itself be undone a few decades later, when the English bourgeoisie reasserted its power in the Glorious revolution of 1688.
By the end of the 17th century, a new reality was dawning on the world, as European feudalism continued to decline in power, while new capitalist nations such as the Netherlands and Britain grew. Yet, even at this stage, Britain no match for the Asian behemoth that was the Mughal Empire.
The disparity of power between the English and the Mughal Empire was laid bare when an ill thought out military expedition by Josiah Child met the might of the Mughal army in 1686. The result was a humiliating defeat, which nearly ended the East India Company’s till then modest existence. Six decades later, the scenario would change dramatically.
The character of India in the 17th and 18th century:
In the high 16th and 17th century, four great Asian empires controlled the world economy. The Ottoman Empire, Safavid Persia, the Ming Empire and the Mughal Empire. Collectively, these four accounted for most of the world’s population, trade, production, and military power. The closest Europe came to such power was the vast American empire of the Spanish and the sprawling colonial empire of the Portuguese. The English and French were nowhere near either in economic power or military capabilities.
This was a time in world history when European feudalism was declining in power and that of the bourgeoisie was rising. The colonial empires brought in new opportunities for primitive capitalist accumulation, exploiting the resources of the new world, and creating avenues for new trade East and West. The Portuguese were crucial in internationalizing this trade from the new world into Asia.
The wars between the Portuguese and the Ottoman Empire was among the first direct conflicts between the rising European capitalism, and the Asian behemoths, still resting on systems where land was owned in common. However, there was no iron division between the capitalist core and the pre-capitalist empires of Asia. Trade and political interaction were regular throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. The Portuguese East India Company were the first to establish colonies in India’s coast to trade in Indian spices. This was the stepping stone on which the later colonization of the Dutch East Indies would be built.
Mughal India was not alone in this, European trade was a key part of the economies of all the Asian empires, particularly the Islamic gunpowder empires of the Ottomans, Safavid Persians. The entry of early capitalism did not overturn the modes of production that characterized these polities, from all available records there was a parity between the Europeans and the Indian Empires. The capitalist character of the Portuguese Indian trading companies did not accord them any automatic superiority simply because they were capitalist.
At the same time, the Mughals did not simply become backward on account of not being capitalist. However, while the Asiatic system of the Mughals stagnated and decayed, the capitalist states of Europe continued to innovate and grow. Their economies and militaries would match and outpace those of the gunpowder empires of the past, even as those empires decayed and collapsed in on themselves.
Even as capitalism rose as a social and political force in Europe, there were elemental capitalist forces within India who were growing in wealth and power. Unlike the Ming, the Mughals were not closed to foreigners or foreign trade, capitalist enclaves allowed for the growth of Indian merchants who interacted with the Portuguese and through them, with European capitalism directly. The growth of Mughal manufacturing, particularly in textiles would become a sound basis on which a future capitalist class could grow and prosper in India. However, this development happened within the strictly limiting framework of Mughal despotism.
The power of Mughal nobility and military, resting as it did on the exploitation and management of land in common, could not allow the growth of the bourgeoisie. This Indian proto-bourgeoisie had neither any political prospects, nor any desire for power, quite unlike their European counterparts. Even in terms of religious expression, the proto-bourgeois of India never seriously challenged the prevailing status quo. There was never any war of religion in India, even if religious reform movements grew and supported by the mercantile capitalists of Western India.
The closest one can find to an armed militant challenge to the Mughal order, came in the form of the Maratha Kingdom. Mobilizing an army of peasants, artisans and traders, Shivaji ran circles around the lumbering Mughal behemoth which struggled to conquer and pacify peninsular India.
Among the 16th century great powers, Mughal India was the first to collapse, and ironically the first to develop its own indigenous capitalist class. For all the Empires that dominated the 16th and early 17th century world, the Mughals had gone the furthest in terms of proto capitalist development, owing to its openness to foreign trade, its productive lands, and the thriving financial sector. So when the great edifice of the Empire collapsed in the 18th century, it left the emergent bourgeoisie in an unexpectedly powerful position.
Nowhere more was this power visible than in Bengal, where the banking family of the Jagat Seths controlled the economy of the Gangetic plains. At this time, the Jagat Seths were by far the richest family in the world, running the richest bank in the world. The collapse of the Mughal Empire saw the downfall of its armies, the centralizing revenue and administrative system, and the rise of smaller independent kingdoms which had to make do with fewer resources. The role of the bankers in financing the various kingdoms in North and Central India were vital. Yet, this layer of the bourgeoisie were too entangled with the Asiatic kingdoms and their economies to play an independent political role.
The merchant class and artisans were in no position to play an independent political role, though one can speculate that this may have emerged in time. Eventually the emergent capitalist class could have organized into a revolutionary force and replicated the transformations of Europe in India, perhaps through the agency of an enlightened monarch, or under the aegis of a religious movement, or through a technocratic coup. Yet, this was not how history unfolded.
Bengal was the most industrial of the Mughal provinces, it was also a hub of foreign trade. Over the course of the 18th century many European nations set up colonies along the Hooghly River, creating what is called a ‘Little Europe’ between Calcutta and Serampore. Together with its pre-existing financial and industrial base, foreign trade and contact furthered the growth and enrichment of the proto-bourgeois class, especially its Jain financiers. In 1757, the contradiction between this emergent capitalist force and the despotic regime of the Nawab came to a culmination. Rather than form their own political force, or back any viable indigenous candidate against Nawab Siraj ud Daula, they took the help of Robert Clive, and the British East India Company.
The strengths of the British, weaknesses of the Indian kingdoms:
The British conquest of India was not the result of any precise political plan emanating from Britain itself, but rather as a series of decisions made on the field by ambitious company officers, commanding armies in India. Often, these decisions were taken without the permission or knowledge the East India Company’s Board of Directors.
The stark differences between the two competing modes of production were seen on the field in the nature of opposing armies. The superiority of European line tactics of the mid-18th century, were first seen in the Carnatic wars at the hands of the French East India Company armies in their war against the Nawab of Carnatic and the Nizam’s forces. Dupleix had once remarked that he could conquer the entire peninsula with 2000 professionally trained soldiers. Of course France itself was not yet fully capitalist, but the British were. In the conflict between Britain and France over the fate of India, it was the British with their superior economy and administration that would prevail, over the still feudal French.
In contrast to this stood the Indian states, now fragmented across the sub-continent and in a state of anarchy, they were administered with loosely defined hierarchies, and relied on mercenary armies. The collapse of the Mughal Empire and the rise of the Marathas, saw a putrefaction of the dominant mode of production, from the chaos new social forces rose up, and new political realities dawned on the sub-continent. The collapse of the centralizing despotic authority of the Mughals meant that soldiers of the once vast empire and its military machine were often without employment. Rebellious lords and satraps such as the Rohillas and Jat kings, would often raid the former Mughal capital of Delhi to change the politics to their will.
Meanwhile, the Marathas, who had innovated a highly decentralized and mobile army reliant on commanders and their respective fiefdom, ran an empire which relied extensively on the forcible extraction of tax in the form of chauth (a quarter of revenues). Though the Marathas had built an Empire in India, but had not replicated the sophisticated administrative machinery of the Mughals, nor could they enforce their centralizing control over all realms that they invaded and conquered. Yet, their influence spread from the Indus to the Bay of Bengal, from Delhi to Kanyakumari, up to the boundaries of Afghanistan. The Marathas under the Scindhia rulers would be the final opponent that the British would battle as equals in India, and theirs was the last true attempt at building an indigenous modernized armed forces in India.
The rise of the Marathas represented less the emergence of any indigenous capitalism, and more the downfall of India’s Asiatic mode of production. This was by no means a clear cut process, even as the East India Company advanced through the sub-continent, the Marathas and the Kingdom of Mysore were beginning to modernize their armed forces. The Scindhia domains would go the farthest in terms of modernizing the Maratha armed forces, building a French trained infantry corps which proved to be a match for the Company’s Europeanized sepoy army.
In the South of India, the Kingdom of Mysore would advance capitalist transition in the economic and administrative realm under Tipu Sultan. He began seriously investing in foreign trade, infrastructure, created a modernized bureaucracy, even building their own trading company with investments across the Persian Gulf. These were sure signs of indigenous efforts to develop their own capitalist economies, and creating the groundwork for primitive accumulation.
The British advantages on the field were evident in many of the early victories against Indian kingdoms, particularly battles like the retaking of Calcutta, the Battle of Buxar, the Battle of Plassey, and during the Carnatic wars. The second less obvious advantage was in the nature of the company, rooted in English capitalism.
The company was able to utilize the resources of their conquered provinces or subjugated kingdoms more thoroughly and efficiently than their Indian rivals. They fully leveraged the advantages of working with the nascent indigenous capitalist class, the financiers and merchants of Bengal. This provided the company with money and resources than Indian states could not hope to match. In addition to that, the company held a virtual monopoly over foreign exports to Europe, giving it a large market for export of Indian goods and unmatched access to trade. Often times, it was the command over trade that the East India Company wielded which provided them a huge advantage. The company could bribe European officers of Indian kingdoms, and keep a constant flow of recruits from India’s traditional mercenary soldier class.
The advantages of the East India Company were considerable but the Indian kingdoms were learning and fast. The Maratha kingdom of the Bhosle’s had developed a modern infantry and artillery force led by the French officer Benoite de Boigne. In Mysore, Tipu Sultan led economic and administrative reforms which created the first Indian trading company, and the development of silk industry. The Mysore kingdom innovated rocket technology which would then be utilized by the British during the Napoleonic wars, in addition to reforming the traditional Mysorean army on European lines.
In the decade of the 1780s, the Marathas and Mysore kingdom held an alliance against the East India Company. The Marathas dealt a defeat to the company forces at the Battle of Wadgaon, while the Mysorean forces under Tipu Sultan’s leadership nearly pushed the East India Company out of Southern India in the second Anglo-Mysore war. These disasters came at a time when the company’s administration was in a crisis and the British had just lost their American colonies. Panic and desperation had set in Britain, it seemed likely that India would be lost much like America was lost.
The failures of the 1780s would not be repeated again, the company would reform their administration, enlarge their army, and soon unleash the full war waging potential of British imperialism on the sub-continent.
The final victory of the East India Company
The East India Company was present in the Indian sub-continent since the 1660s, but they did not begin seriously conquering any part of India until the Carnatic wars of 1740. From then, until the victory in the second Anglo-Maratha war in 1805, represents a 60 year period. A fairly short time for the near complete conquest of the Indian heartland. By comparison, the Mughals built their Empire in India over 180 years from the date of Babur’s invasion into Northern India.
Most of the East India Company’s territorial conquests came in the very brief period between 1790 and 1805, under the leaderships of Lord Cornwallis and Lord Wellesley. This period marked a culmination of the British conquest of India, after which the British became the preeminent power over the Indian sub-continent. The bedrock of this power was the brutal exploitation of the Bengali peasantry, made possible through the Permanent Settlement Act, which as Marx explained, was a ‘species of private property’.
The first three decades of company rule over what had been the most prosperous and economically advanced regions of the fading Mughal Empire, was characterized by a brutal primitive accumulation chiefly aimed at the destruction of indigenous industry, the destruction of communal landholdings, and the large aristocratic families of Bengal. The famine of 1770 was the direct result of the actions of Robert Clive and the brutish company rule. The administrative reforms carried out by Warren Hastings marked an end to the chaotic loot of Bengal, and paved the way for a more systematic, orderly capitalist exploitation. Hastings’ rule also represented the first direct involvement of the British state in the regulation and administration of the affairs of the East India Company.
The defeats suffered in the First Anglo-Maratha war and the Second Anglo-Mysore war impressed upon the company the need to reform the armed forces. With the economic administrative foundations set by Cornwallis and Hastings in place, Lord Wellesley could build up a military force to match. While the company was arming itself to the teeth and outshining every other Indian kingdom economically, the two leading Indian powers of the Scindhia Marathas and Tipu Sultan’s Mysore Kingdom began to stagnate.
Mysore was limited in its potential by its small size and limited demographic power, Tipu Sultan did not have the diplomatic skills of his father and ran the kingdom as a centralizing despot. While he had reformed the economy and administration farther than any other Indian state, the results of these reforms had yet to bear fruit. There was a small window of opportunity for the British to Act in the decade of the 1790s, before the Mysore Kingdom could forge alliances, or grow too large for the East India Company forces to defeat him. The Fourth Anglo-Mysore war happened as part of Wellesley’s Southern push that also drove the French forces off Hyderabad, securing the Nizam’s subjugation to the company.
The Company had already succeeded in bringing the Maratha Peshwa under their sway. With this, they secured much of the West coast from Gujarat to Goa and held a direct border with the Mysore state by the Tungabhadra River which were under the Peshwa’s domains. The British’s divide and rule policy exploited the pre-existing divisions between Indian rulers, who were unable to set aside their territorial divisions. Mysore was surrounded and crushed, and Tipu Sultan was killed. Destroying the most advanced opponent of the British in Southern India consolidated the British hold in peninsular India. However, Northern and Central India remained in the hands of the Marathas.
Over the decade between the passage of the regulating Act of 1773, and the decade of the 1790s, the company implemented a series of economic and administrative reforms which paved the way for the more efficient exploitation of its Indian territories, furthering primitive accumulation in India. Measures such as the Permanent Settlement Act, helped boost the Company’s revenues in Bengal to such a degree that it could outspend even the largest of the Indian states. The company could combine the brutal exploitation of the Indian peasantry with a world spanning commercial network, no Indian state no matter how advanced could match the scale of British capitalism that had begun colonizing India, nor even their continental European allies.
The economic and administrative advantages combined to give the company the largest army in South Asia, and one of the most lethal armed forces in Asia at this time. This was unleashed on the failing Maratha confederacy, when Lord Wellesley began his conquest of Central and Northern India. The second Anglo-Maratha war would be the final and most decisive conflict in early 19th century India. As a result of the conquest of the Scindhia domains, the East India Company extended its territorial expanse up to Delhi in the North, and completed its conquest over Central India. The Rajput states were easily subjugated once their Scindhia overlords were defeated. Punjab now lay open, and their hold over the West was consolidated, as the Peshwa had formally subjugated himself.
Consequences of the British conquest of India
Writing about the results of British rule in India, Marx had written :
“England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.
Arabs, Turks, Tartars, Moguls, who had successively overrun India, soon became Hindooized, the barbarian conquerors being, by an eternal law of history, conquered themselves by the superior civilization of their subjects. The British were the first conquerors superior, and therefore, inaccessible to Hindoo civilization. They destroyed it by breaking up the native communities, by uprooting the native industry, and by levelling all that was great and elevated in the native society. The historic pages of their rule in India report hardly anything beyond that destruction. The work of regeneration hardly transpires through a heap of ruins. Nevertheless it has begun.”
The consequences of British rule were devastating for the people of India. Had events progressed differently, India could have undergone a capitalist transformation that was indigenous and productive. Instead, capitalism arrived to India as a colonizing endeavour. The most immediate impact of British rule was the wholesale destruction of artisanal production, the subjugation of Indian agriculture to British capitalist trade, and the near total destruction of the hitherto existing nobility.
The destruction of the pre-capitalist classes did not result in the liberation of India’s peasantry, on the contrary the company created conditions for their more thorough exploitation by fostering a new bourgeois aristocracy in the form of the zamindar. At the same time, the proto bourgeois class of bankers and traders who helped the company gain its first victories in Bengal and the Carnatic, benefited from this unequal partnership with British colonialism.
The company replaced tenure based on communal ownership of land under the Indian system, to one determined by the compulsions of capitalist accumulation. This resulted in one of the most destructive famines in Indian history, in a province that had never experienced a famine on this scale in its history. The Bengal famine of 1771 caused the deaths of anywhere from a quarter to a third of the province’s population. This was the direct result of the company’s securing of the right to tax in 1765. Six years of brutal company administration had killed millions, and impoverished what had once been the most prosperous region of the sub-continent.
For British capitalism, India provided a large market for goods, and a massive source of agrarian and mineral raw materials. In addition, it created a geo-strategic stronghold in the most pivotal region of the Indian Ocean region. From here, British power could expand East into China, and West into Egypt. The conquest of India also gave India a massive reserve of manpower which Britain benefitted from in all its colonial wars through the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as the two world wars.
While the short term material consequences of British rule in India were devastating, the long term impact was more complex. Marx had termed the East India Company’s rule in India as a prodigy of creative destruction, with the destructive bits outweighing the creative parts. The British destroyed the political authority of the Indian kings, the final destruction of the Mughal Monarchy shattered the last nominal vestige of the pre-capitalist mode of production. The destruction of this pre-capitalist mode of production resulted in tumult and chaos in the lives of people, but it also allowed the nascent Indian bourgeoisie to grow under the shelter of British imperialism.
One of the results of this transformation was the rise of social reform movements, spearheaded in the West coast and Bengal, the two areas of farthest capitalist transformation. Barriers of caste, gender discrimination, and religious superstition were openly challenged by social reformers like Phule and Raja Ram Mohan Roy. Yet, even these reformers would be restricted in the aftermath of the rebellion of 1857, as the company preferred placating the reactionary layer of society than promoting rationalism in India.
India became the pivot of European capitalism in its final and most decisive struggle for world hegemony against the economies of the Asian leviathans. The opening up of China, the conquest of South East Asia, and the expansion of capital into Persia and the domains of the Ottoman Empire, would not have happened without the conquest of India. The subjugation of India, China and Persia to European capital represented the ending of the three most hegemonic economies of the pre-capitalist world, their conquests powered the rise of European industry and then of modern imperialism.
India’s capitalist transformation was brought about in a most destructive manner, which resulted in the hobbling of its further growth. Britain ensured that Indian enterprise would always play a secondary role to British enterprises. Indian trade and industry would remain dependent on British finance, and trade would be strictly controlled by a colonial authority.
For as long as British capital held sway, Indian enterprise would find itself restricted, forever having to play the role of a comprador. It was not until the First World War, when British imperialism was shaken to its core that Indian enterprise could expand. Now that the British needed its ‘Indian partners’ to stave off competition from the new dominant imperial power of the United States, there were overtures to self-rule.
The strength of the Indian capitalist class ran almost parallel to the strength of the national movement, it grew along with the national movement. Even then, the idea of complete independence did not become mainstream until Bhagat Singh forced it upon the Indian bourgeoisie. Indian independence would not be won on the feeble shoulders of the Indian capitalist class, but on the backs of workers and peasant’s struggle. This struggle would take until 1947 to fulfil, a full 142 years after the East India Company’s victory in the Second Anglo-Maratha war, and almost a hundred years after its annexation of the Punjab in 1849.
The Indian sub-continent still reels from the ill effects of such a long colonial rule, while the suffering of India’s populace remains a scar on our collective memory. This consequence was as much the result of Britain’s achievements as it was the failures of the Indian states.
Why did the Indian states failed?
No one in 1756 could have imagined that the whole of the Indian sub-continent would fall to the forces of the East India Company. Indeed, at many points it seemed like the military adventures of the British in the 18th century would end up like the misadventure of Josiah Child about a hundred years earlier. That misadventure almost resulted in the ending of any British presence in India, with Mughal forces utterly decimating the 17th century British forces that attacked the then Mughal Empire.
Yet, a little over a hundred years later the same people, now equipped with technically superior forces and a fully transformed state and society, dominated against the sub-continental armies on the battlefield, dominated them economically, and eventually conquered them politically. This need not have happened.
The Mughal Empire was shattered by the ruinous war with the Marathas, the Marathas themselves were slowly worn out by constant warfare in Northern and Southern India. The political fragmentation of India created conditions that could allow the British to conquer India piece meal, beginning from the most vulnerable provinces before attacking the most powerful ones.
Here too, there were many instances where the armies of the Mughals, the Nawab of Bengal, the Nawab of Oudh, could have dealt a final and decisive defeat upon the East India Company in Bengal, ending their rule before the worst features of company led primitive capitalist accumulation could be seen. Even after the conquest of Bengal, the conquest of the rest of India was far from certain.
The defeats of the British in the Second Anglo-Mysore war, the Battle of Wadgaon in the First Anglo-Maratha war, and the turbulence suffered by the various revolts in Bengal during this period, point to a great vulnerability of the British in India. In hindsight we think in terms of the native states uniting to oppose the British, not knowing that the two most powerful Indian states did in fact have an informal unity against the British. The Marathas and Mysore both dealt a double defeat on the British within the same decade.
Mysore and the Marathas under the Scindhias represented the two most modernized Indian armies present at that time, equipped and trained in the French techniques of fighting. Both were making advances towards a fully Europeanized army, and could have realistically ejected the company from India. Here, they were let down by the backwards structure of Indian polity, a product of the political fragmentation, and the character of the pre-capitalist mode of production in India.
The armies were being trained to fight in European ways, but led by European officers with dubious loyalties, could very well switch sides. Conflict between native powers would trump earnest efforts at unifying for a common goal. The desire of some rulers to keep their particular authority against the threat of other native rivals, created further opening for the company to influence these states. In contrast, the British always put a united singular front against native princes. Having a weaker economic base, they could not bribe turncoats, or sow divisions amongst the mercenary Indian troops who formed the backbone of the company’s army.
Ultimately, the reasons for the defeat do not come down to the military superiority, the tactical genius, or strategic acumen of certain individual British leaders, but to the superiority of the capitalist mode of production over the India’s mode of production. Britain had its revolution, India did not, and India paid the historical price with colonial domination.
What lessons must we learn?
Writing on the nature of British Rule in India in 1853, Marx observed :
“… We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.
England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.”
For anyone making a cursory reading of the history of Indian colonization, it would come off as surprising how a trading company could possibly conquer the economic behemoth that was pre-colonial India. Even in a state of political fragmentation, Indian states could still inflict defeats on the more modernized European style armies of the East India Company. Yet, these exceptional victories by Indian states, did not inflict the final defeat over the Company.
The victory of the British over Indian states came down to a historic victory of a superior mode of production (Capitalism) over the pre-capitalist Indian society that it faced. The East India Company had the resources of Bengal, transformed in terms of capitalist exploitation. The company could outspend any of its Indian rivals, amassing a better equipped and numerous army than its rivals. This alone could give British a massive advantage of its Indian challengers.
India did not undergo a revolutionary transformation on its own terms. The states that came the closest to capitalist transformation on an indigenous basis, underwent these transitions too little too late. The fate of Mysore is especially telling, being the country that went the farthest in modernization and capitalist transformation without being colonized. Bengal which had the most capitalist features of Indian states, failed to organize their bureaucracy and army to face the superior forces of the British and collapsed. Lastly, the most powerful of the Indian states in the beginning of the 19th century, the Scindhia Marathas, fell owing to defections and poor leadership. The failures were rooted in social limitations that these pre-capitalist states suffered from.
The growth of capitalism in India could have taken a different, more organic course without British colonialism. However, this was not to be for reasons we have discussed above. Instead, India’s capitalist development took an uneven and unequal route, while Indian native capitalists found opportunities in the destruction of the pre-capitalist institutions of India, their further growth was limited by the force of colonial rule. India’s economy was oriented towards export of raw materials to feed the industries of England. Indian capitalists were cornered towards trade and finance, while some took advantage to push for much needed social reform, such as Jyotirao Phule and Raja Ram Mohan Roy. They could not break through the monopoly held by British capitalists through the East India Company. Exceptional families like the Tagores and Jheejheebhoy advanced their commercial interests in alliance with British capitalists, like Jardine Mathison in the case of Jamshedji Jheejheeboy.
The consequences of these developments still shape India South Asia in many ways. From the nature of the economy of several countries, the relative backwardness of Indian capitalism in comparison to Europe and other parts of Asia, to the persistent pre-capitalist social structures like caste oppression. Some of the heirs of the erstwhile Indian kingdoms have become bourgeois politicians in today’s India, particularly the Scindhia family.
If the first phase of India’s fight against colonialism was characterized by pre-capitalist classes in revolt against colonial oppression, the second phase could be characterized as the Indian bourgeois class struggling against the stranglehold of a colonial system that stunted the development of Indian capitalism. The fight came to a head by the Second World War, when British imperialism entered its terminal decline, no longer the dominant capitalist force in the world. In this fight, the Indian working class and organized peasantry played the most decisive role, fighting to free India from the clutches of British imperialism.
However, it would be the Indian bourgeoisie which would eventually take power, while India may have escaped dominance by imperialism by harnessing its larger industrial base and resources, partition ensured that at least a quarter of the former Raj would remain in the clutches of imperialist capital. Even if relatively independent, India could not escape the problems of poverty, Casteism, and backwardness imposed on it by over a century and half of colonial rule. At the same time, India’s capitalists were trained and grew at the expense of the pre-capitalist classes with the assistance of the British, becoming far more dynamic than many of its colonial peers.
On this Republic Day, we reflect on this history as the country observes the 77th Republic Day. History did not end with independence, and much as in the past, India’s future will also be shaped by class struggle, and the material forces of history.