By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
In his major book
about the Indian Ocean Michael Pearson, views the 1800 era, when all the deep
structural elements underlying Indian Ocean history enters an era of Globalization,
and monsoons, currents, and land barriers-are, "overcome by steam ships
and steam trains in the service of British power and capital; the Indian Ocean
world becomes embedded in a truly global economy and for the first time
production, as opposed to trade, is affected." There can be little
question that the global forces of business and British imperial domination
played out their historical drama on the Indian Ocean stage in the nineteenth
and the Pacific in the twentieth centuries, as we will explore.
It seems in fact,
that there recently has been a selective amnesia of past empires recently
with the exclusion of most historical models of empire in a celebration of an
imagined genealogy leading from Rome through Britain to the United States; and
second, the erasure of the subjecthood of the colonized and with it the
degradation of colonial rule. Yet there is much to be gained from a serious
rather than a superficial recourse to the drawing board of history. And, a
multifaceted and expansive approach may supply some indirect insights into the
contemporary predicament of the U.S. empire in light of the British Empire a
hundred years ago.
In May 1916, on the
first stop of his voyage to the United States, celebrated poet
Rabindranath Tagore observed a distinctly Indian character while arriving in
the capital of Burma:
The streets are
straight, wide and clean, the houses spick and span; Madrasis,
Punjabis and Cujaratis are wandering about in the
streets and on the river banks. In the midst of all this if somewhere suddenly
one spots Burmese men or women dressed in colorful silk, one imagines that
they are the foreigners . the city of Rangoon is not a city of Burma, it
appears to stand in opposition to the entire country.1
The Bengali poet had
set off on this long voyage from Calcutta on May 3, 1916, aboard the Japanese
ship Tosamaru. Being primarily a cargo vessel, it had
just a few cabins for passengers. But there were plenty of deck passengers,
mostly "Madrasis." These Tamils of south
India, both Hindu and Muslim, moved in large numbers to Southeast Asia in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as traders and laborers.
Traveling on this route, Tagore encountered a mighty storm in the Bay of Bengal
that left no dividing line between the clouds and the waves. Someone seemed to
have opened the blue lid of the ocean and countless demons had emerged from
below wrapped in grey coils of smoke, as in the Arabian nights, and were
shooting up to the sky. After four days at sea the appearance of birds in the
sky signaled that land was near. If the ocean was the domain of dance, its
shores heralded a realm of music. As the ship moved up the Irrawaddy toward
Rangoon, Tagore observed the row of kerosene-oil factories with tall chimneys
along its banks, commenting that it looked as if Burma was lying on its back
and smoking a cigar. Closer to the city, the long line of jetties seemed to him
to be clinging to the body of Burma like so many hideous, giant, iron leeches.
Other than the Shwedagon temple, Tagore did not find
anything in the city that was distinctively Burmese. He lamented the cruelty of
the goddess of commerce. "This city has not grown like a tree from the
soil of the country," he wrote. "I have seen Rangoon, but it is mere
visual acquaintance, there is no recognition of Burma in this seeing." 2
The wealthiest of the
"Madrasis" whom Tagore would have seen on
the streets of Rangoon were the Nattukottai Chettiars, also known as Nakarattars,
of the Ramnad district and the Pudukottai
princely state of Tamil Nadu. "Displaced from the credit markets of
Madras," writes David Rudner, "and displaced from British investment
and exchange markets throughout greater British India, the Nakarattars
found a new niche in servicing the credit needs of the indigenous Southeast
Asians and migrant Indians who fought with each other and with the British in a
race to produce agrarian commodities for the European export market." 3
Having made their
initial overseas foray by following the British imperial flag into Ceylon and
the Straits Settlements in the 182os and 1830s, they carved out their largest
zone of operations in Burma following the colonial conquest of Lower Burma in
1852. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 dramatically expanded the European
rice market and provided a major incentive to further colonize the rice
frontier of the Irrawaddy delta from the 1870s onward. The area under rice
cultivation in Lower Burma increased from 600,000 acres in 1852 but over
1,100,000 acres in 1872.
An Indian Ocean Sort of Kaiser-i-Hind
Over the course of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when European trade spread trough the region, Indian coastal potentates began to see
themselves as coastal sovereigns, triggering a sort of clash between
notions of sovereign authority but also inviting the charge of piracy.
Meanwhile, European seamen also came to be viewed as pirates within Indian
society, as demonstrated by hidden transcripts in the form of Malayali
chronicles and Bengali ballads. The struggle for supremacy between these
foreign and indigenous "pirates" remained unresolved until the
English East India Company scored a decisive victory, both military and
discursive, in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
At the turn of the
nineteenth century the tussle between "pirates" of different stripes
took on a new intensity across the Indian Ocean from East Africa to Southeast
Asia-and for good reason. Various maritime peoples and states had been stoutly
resisting the monopolistic trading practices of the European powers during the
eighteenth century. Perhaps the most successful resistance was put up by the
Sulu sultanate in Southeast Asia, which was able to maintain its own trading
patterns for a long time by fending off the incursions of the Spanish, the
Dutch, and the British. In the European view, Sulu was the quintessence of
"an Islamic world whose activities centered about piracy and
slavery."
Lord Curzon was the
last viceroy of India in the Victorian era, which came to an end a little
over one hundred years ago. During a cruise on board the Argonaut on
November 21, 1903, Curzon explained why according to him, Great Britain sought
dominance in the region:
The history of your
States and of your families, and the present condition of the Gulf, are the
answer . We found strife and we have created order. The great Empire of India,
which it is our duty to defend, lies almost at your gates. We are not now
going to throw away this century of costly and triumphant enterprise; we shall
not wipe out the most unselfish page in history. The peace of these waters must
still be maintained; your independence will continue to be upheld; and the
influence of the British Government must remain supreme.
Lord and Lady Curzon with staff on the Argonaut November 21, 1903 before
landing to give his speech
In 1877 at an
"Imperial Assemblage," Queen Victoria had been proclaimed with much
pomp and ceremony to be "Kaiser-i-Hind,"
the "only appropriate translation of the title of the Empress of
India."' The assemblage was held in the old Mughal capital, Delhi, rather
than Calcutta, then the second city of the British Empire.
Yet even by the early
nineteenth century the meanings of Mughal ritual had changed, with "a
ritual of incorporation" under Indian rulers metamorphosed into "a
ritual marking subordination" under the British.' The suppression of the
great revolt of 1857 desacralized the Mughal emperor, under whose sovereignty
the rebels had sought to reconstitute the legitimate eighteenth-century state
system after destroying the illegitimate rule of the East India Company."
The Mugha1 imperial center, like its ottoman and Safavid counterparts, had
always aspired to be the repository of the highest level of sovereignty,
leaving room for negotiating the terms of imperial unity with a plethora of
regional and local governments. In periods of decentralization, as in the eighteenth
century, real power seeped downward within this architecture of layered
sovereignty. But Mughal legitimacy among the Indian people long outlasted
Mughal power.4
The renewed
centralizing impulse in the Ottoman domains in the mid-nineteenth century did
not wholly abandon older notions of sovereignty that enabled Istanbul to be the
center of a somewhat loosely organized "galactic polity." 5
But centralization
and westernization may have been the slogans of the Tanzimat
reforms of 1839-1876, but "this was paradoxically meant to transform the
Ottoman Empire into a sort of sprawling unitary state, rather than into a
colonial empire in the European style." 6
Yet the reformulation
in India of political authority in the decades following 1857 had both
structural and ideological dimensions. The centralized, modern structure of the
colonial state was buttressed with new ideological concepts of sovereignty. The
spectacles of British imperial power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, therefore, showed an obsession with Mughal form while rejecting its
substantive basis.
The Sepoy (hired
soldiers) mutiny of 1857 in a way also was a last gasp of resistance by
disaffected Indian kings and nobles against the rule of the East India Company.
The new Crown raj took calculated steps from 1858 to disarm any cultural
resistance to colonization, making sure that the preservation of ceremonial
trappings and a measure of internal autonomy transformed the princely states
into solid bulwarks of empire. At the same time, the raj strengthened the power
of the Indian princes and Gulf sheikhs over their subjects. While the princes
may have been weakened in relation to the paramount power, the British
guarantee of personalized sovereignty, for example of the Dogra ruler of Jammu
and Kashmir, obviated the need for the ruler to seek legitimacy through the
time-honored practices of cultural patronage and material munificence toward
one's subjects.7
The buttressing of
princely autocracy was one of the key changes brought about by colonialism in
the latter half of the nineteenth century, and it involved a very dramatic
shift in ideas about sovereignty and legitimacy throughout the Indian Ocean
arena. The rhetorical claim was that these sovereign princes occupied
"thrones which were filled by their ancestors when England was a Roman
Province." 8
In practice they were
often of more recent vintage, the Dogra chieftain of Jammu, for example, having
acquired the vale of Kashmir as recently as 1846.
Between 1858 and 1877, however, he was transformed into an ancient,
"traditional" ruler -a good, old "Rajput," no less
governing under the authority of the queen-empress. The colonial state had
imported from post-Enlightenment Europe the notion of unitary sovereignty,
which replaced the concept of layered and shared sovereignty that had characterized
Indian and Indian Ocean polities of the precolonial era. The British raj, for
example, would not encourage any substantive move toward the acquisition of citizenship
rights. In colonial India and the paracolonial rim of
the Indian Ocean, there were to be only subjects of the empire and of
"traditional" princes. There were to be no citizens.
In the colonial
discourse the princes and chiefs of the Indian Ocean arena certainly stood for
"order" and with the aid of a Curzonian
flourish, if not flight of fancy, for "freedom" as well. During
Curzon's speech on November 21, 1903, and the proconsul claimed that "a
hundred years ago there were constant trouble and fighting in the Gulf; almost
every man was a marauder or a pirate." 9
The stigma of piracy
has provoked heated historical and political debate without always shedding
much new light on its meaning and substance. And with the European intrusion
into the Indian Ocean arena, piracy acquired a new connotation as "a
category of subversive Asian activity."The
Portuguese had pioneered this transformation, which merely was taken to its
logical conclusion when the English East India Company became involved. Prior to
the European challenge, Indian rulers had not typically claimed sovereignty
over the seas. Their attitude was best encapsulated in a Gujarati ruler's
statement: "Wars at sea are merchants' affairs and of no concern to the
prestige of kings." But once Europeans had asserted exclusive control
over the seas and sought to regulate shipping through a system of cartaes (passes issued by the Portuguese), merchants
responded with a variety of methods of everyday resistance without making any
"counter-claim to sovereign control." It was only gradually, over the
course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that Indian coastal
potentates began to see themselves as coastal sovereigns, triggering "a
fundamental clash between notions of sovereign authority" and inviting
the charge of piracy." 10
Meanwhile, European
seamen also came to be viewed as pirates within Indian society, as demonstrated
by hidden transcripts in the form of Malayali chronicles and Bengali ballads.11
At the turn of the
nineteenth century the tussle between "pirates" of different stripes
took on a new intensity across the Indian Ocean from East Africa to Southeast
Asia-and for good reason. Various maritime peoples and states had been stoutly
resisting the monopolistic trading practices of the European powers during the
eighteenth century. Perhaps the most successful resistance was put up by the
Sulu sultanate in Southeast Asia, which was able to maintain its own trading
patterns for a long time by fending off the incursions of the Spanish, the
Dutch, and the British. In the European view, Sulu was the quintessence of
"an Islamic world whose activities centered about piracy and
slavery." Yet commerce, marauding, and servitude were bound in an
intricate symbiosis: the testimony of fugitive captives from the Sulu
sultanate, for example, suggested a certain status of "acquired
persons" and the possibility of their upward mobility-none of which appeared
in denunciatory narratives on uniform categories of piracy and slavery., So
far as the Europeans could see, piracy was rife in the Malay, Indian, and Arab
maritime worlds alike throughout the eighteenth century. Only success against
organized indigenous resistance on the Indian subcontinent would enable the
English East India Company to combat piracy in the Gulf in the second decade of
the nineteenth century.12
Having successfully
surmounted "various internal troubles in India" between 1814 and
1817, the company raj could turn to making "an end to piracy in the
Persian Gulf."
The Mysore sultanate
had already fallen to British troops in 1799 and the last embers of Maratha
resistance were snuffed out by 1818. In November 1819 an expedition set sail
from Bombay under General William Grant Keir to sort out "the Arab chiefs
of the pirate coast." An earlier expedition in 1809 had inflicted no more
than a temporary setback to the recalcitrant Qawasim
tribal confederation based in Ras al Khaima. The 1819
force was the largest ever sent to the Gulf and consisted of three thousand
men, of whom about half were European artillery and half "native Indian
infantry." Three ships of the British navy-the HMS Liverpool, HMS Curlew,
and HMS Eden, were supplemented by nine cruisers of the East India Company.
Ironically, the best-known pirate of the region, Rahmah
bin Jabr of the Jalama tribe, was, willy-nilly, on
the British side in this antipiracy campaign. As Francis Loch, captain of the
Eden, recorded in his diary: He was as great a pirate as those of the Joasmi Qawasim tribe with this
exception, he protected British trade, and was at peace with Basra and Bushire,
but at war with every other part of the Gulf. The warming of British
relations with the Sultanate of Oman, which controlled the stretch of sea from
Muscat to Zanzibar, had contributed to the casting of their common enemy, the Qawasim, as pirates. A battle broke out between the BritishIndian expeditionary force and the Qawasim on December 3, 1819. The Qawasim
were forced back "with great slaughter, taking care to carry with them the
greater part of their dead and wounded, many of whom were females who had
joined in the sortie." Loch's journal records "a loss of about 200 in
killed and wounded, including several officers" among the British and
Indian troops, "the pirates neither giving nor expecting quarter and,
owing to their savage brutality, they received none from our troops." 13
The citadel of Ras al
Khaima was captured on December 9, 1819, paving the
way for the first truce by the signing of a "General Treaty of Peace"
with Arab chiefs of the coast, including the sheikhs of Bahrain. In the
British lexicon the "Pirate Coast" was now metamorphosed into the
"Trucial Coast" (after "truce"). As usual, it was easier to
declare peace than to enforce it. General Grant Keir's interpreter, Captain
Perronet Thompson, had successfully inserted an antislavery clause into the
treaty. A Methodist from Yorkshire whose parents were friends of William
Wilberforce, founder of the Anti-Slavery Society, Thompson was made the
"Political Agent" to deal with matters concerning the Arab tribes and
left in command of the garrison at Ras al Khaima once
the main expeditionary force was withdrawn in July 1820. A better ideologue
than a soldier, he promptly led a small force of British and Indian troops into
a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Bani Bu'Ali
tribe. This necessitated the dispatch of another large expedition from Bombay
of more than 1,200 British and nearly 1,700 Indian soldiers, which in alliance
with the Sultanate of Oman brought the Bani Bu'Ali to
heel. There followed in the next few decades seven more treaties with Arab
chiefs. The "Maritime Truce" was reached in 1839 and periodically renewed
until the grander "Treaty of Perpetual Peace" was concluded in 1853.
Curzon was able to sermonize to the Arab chiefs in 1903, "Out of the
relations that were thus created, and which by your own consent constituted the
British Government the guardian of inter-tribal peace, there grew up political
ties between the Government of India and yourselves, whereby the British
Government became your overlords and protectors and you have relations with no
other Power.
The interregional
strategic and political link that had been forged across the Arabian Sea
between India and the Gulf. From the second decade of the nineteenth century
the two major British political residencies at Bushire and Basra reported to
India, in particular to the provincial government of Bombay, from which it drew
its salaries in Indian rupees. As an increasingly centralized, modern state came
to be constructed in India under colonial auspices in the middle decades of the
nineteenth century, the government of India took over powers previously held
at the provincial level. From 1843, the political residency and agencies in
Ottoman Iraq reported to Calcutta, the capital of British India, rather than to
Bombay, even though a comparable switch of political authority was not effected
in the Persian Gulf for another three decades.
Colonial India's
interregional links stretched eastward as well, across the Bay of Bengal toward
Burma and Malaya. The Straits Settlements on the Malay peninsula remained under
the administrative jurisdiction of Calcutta until 1867. These included Penang,
acquired by the East India Company in 1786; Singapore, founded by Stamford
Raffles in 1819; and Malacca, obtained as a result of the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of
1824, which demarcated the Strait of Malacca as the dividing line between the
British and Dutch empires in Southeast Asia. As free ports, these served as
convenient stopping points for company vessels as long as the China tea trade
remained of vital importance in the early nineteenth century. Once the revision
of the Charter Act in 1833 had taken away the company's monopoly over trade
with China, the Indian government's interest in the Malay peninsula began to
wane. A transformation in sovereignty in this sector of the Indian Ocean rim
followed. In a trajectory somewhat different from what has been outlined for
the Persian and Arabian Gulf, it was the snapping of the interregional
administrative bond and the 1867 transfer of the affairs of the Straits
Settlements from the Indian government to the Colonial Office in London that
enabled capitalist interests, British and Chinese alike, to press for a more
interventionist policy at a time when tin mining was altering the economic
landscape of Malaya. The reported plunder in June 1871 of a British merchant
ship by Chinese and Malay "pirates" in Selangor triggered the policy
discourse on how best to assure "order and freedom." 14
It only required the
presence of an aggressive proconsul to make Malaya part of the larger story of
a new imperialism-a story that endured for the last three decades of the
nineteenth century. Anarchy in Perak, too close for comfort to the British
settlement of Penang, led Andrew Clark, governor of the Straits Settlements, to
intervene in the name of order. On January 14, 1874, his emissary concluded
with a pliable chief of Perak the Pangkor Engagement,
by which the sultan agreed to receive a British resident whose advice he was
bound to accept on all matters except those concerning Malay religion and customs.
The terms of the Pangkor treaty were soon extended to
the states of Selangor and Sungei Ujong.
The resident system in the Malay peninsula had an inauspicious beginning. The
British and their Malay wards did not see eye to eye on what in fact
constituted the domain of Malay religion and custom. The overzealous first
resident, James W Birch, stepped on Malay sensitivities and was assassinated
in November 1875. British and Indian troops had to be rushed from India and
Hong Kong to fight a little Perak war.15
A clash of
sovereignties was exacerbated by an inability of the British to acquire
information about the Burmese throughout the nineteenth-century colonial
advance into Burma. As C. A. Bayly writes, "No
ethnic Burmese were found to write digests and reports on their homelands to
help the conquerors, and even if there had been, the British could not yet read
them ." 16
The final reply of
the Burmese monarchy on November 4, 1885, to an ultimatum delivered by the
British a few days earlier, was dignified and firm in not parting with the
accoutrements of real sovereignty. The Burmese did agree to the stationing of a
British resident in Mandalay, but denied that his intervention would be
necessary in a legal dispute with the Bombay Burmah
Trading Corporation, in which the Burmese judiciary's ruling remained supreme.
The sovereign of Burma was also not prepared to conduct his state's foreign policy
in the manner to which Indian princes acknowledging British paramountcy had
been compelled.17
It took the British
and Indian military forces a mere two weeks to reach Mandalay and depose the
king of Burma. Refused a last ride out of his capital on an elephant, the
monarch and his family were bundled onto ox-carts to be exiled to India. The
novelist Amitav Ghosh perhaps best captures the mood of that moment:
An anguished murmur
ran through the crowd: the captives were moving, alighting from their ox carts,
entering a ship. Rajkumar jumped quickly into the branches of a nearby tree.
The river was far away and all he could see was a steamer and a line of tiny
figures filing up a gangplank. It was impossible to tell the figures apart.
Then the ship's lights went out and it disappeared into the darkness. Many
thousands kept vigil through the night. The steamer's name was Thoonya, the sun. At daybreak, when the skies lightened
over the hills, it was gone.18
The way was now clear
for Randolph Churchill to make a New Year's Day gift of Burma to Queen
Victoria. On January 1, 1886, it was proclaimed:
By Command of the
Queen-Emperor, it is hereby notified that the territories governed by King Theebaw will no longer be under his rule, but have become a
part of Her Majesty's dominions, and during Her Majesty's pleasure be
administered by such officers as the ... Governor-General of India may from
time to time appoint.19
Burma had not yet
been annexed as a province of British India. Lord Dufferin, viceroy and governor-general
of India, gave some thought to the possibility of alternatives, including
turning the country into a protectorate. In a minute of February 17, 1886, he
dismissed these alternatives. Upper Burma could not work as a buffer state like
Afghanistan, sovereign in internal administration and submitting to British
supervision in foreign relations, because it was too weak to defend itself and
might drag Britain into war with China. Dufferin also saw difficulties with
converting it into "a fully protected State, with a native dynasty and
native officials, but under a British Resident, who should exercise a certain
control over the internal administration, as well as over its relations with
foreign Powers." In Dufferin's view, Burmese rulers were not "highly
civilized, intelligent, and capable persons" like Indian princes;
therefore, a "puppet King of the Burmese type would prove a very
expensive, troublesome, and contumacious fiction." Besides, there was
"no Prince of the Royal House to whom the trust could be safely
confided," one likely candidate being deemed too greatly under French
influence.20
Underlying Dufferin's
prejudices about the inscrutable Burmese was a larger British failure on the
northeastern fringe of their Indian empire to effectively penetrate Burmese
information networks and knowledge systems. So without further ado, Burma was
annexed to British India on February 26, 1886. Burma was to remain one of its
provinces until the mid-1930’s. But it required a five-year protracted
"war of pacification" against tenacious guerilla resistance and a
dismantling of local Burmese institutions before a semblance of colonial order
could be introduced.
1. Tagore, Japane-Parashye, In Japan and Persia, Calcutta:, 1940, pp.
18-19.
2. Ibid., pp. 14,
17-25.
3. Rudner, Caste and
Capitalism in Colonial India: The Nattukottai Chettiars, University of California Press, 1994, p. 69.
4. C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire,
1990, chapter 1.
5. The phrase is
Stanley Tambiah's in World Conqueror and World
Renouncer, 1976, and The Buddhist Conception of Universal King and Its
Manifestations in South and Southeast Asia, 1987.
6. Subrahmanyam,
"Imperial and Colonial Encounters: Some Reflections on an Undigested
Past," Social Science Research Council conference "Lessons of
Empire," New York, September 26-27, 2003.
7. Mridu Rai, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights and
the History of Kashmir, 2004, chapter 2.
8. M. Rai, Hindu
Rulers, Muslim Subjects, 2004 Pp. 90-93.
9. Charles Belgrave,
The Pirate Coast, 1966.
10. Lakshmi
Subramanian, "Of Pirates and Potentates: Maritime Jurisdiction and the
Construction of Piracy in the Indian Ocean," in Devleena
Ghosh and Stephen Muecke, eds., UTS Review: The
Indian Ocean 6, no. 2, 2000, pp. 14, 17.
11. James C. Scott,
Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Yale University
Press, 1991.
12. James Francis
Warren, The Sulu Zone, Singapore University Press, 1981, pp. xii-xiii.
13. See
Muhammad Al-Qasimi, The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf , 1988.
14. John S.
Galbraith, "The `Turbulent Frontier' as a Factor in British
Expansion," Comparative Studies in Society and History 2, no. 2, January
1960, 157-158.
15. Ibid., pp.
159-162.
16. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and
Social Communication in India, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 141. See
also pp. 113-128.
17. Htin Maung Aung, The Stricken
Peacock: Anglo-Burmese Relations, 1965, pp. 87-89.
18. Amitav Ghosh, The
Glass Palace, 2000, p. 47. 35.
19. Aung, Stricken
Peacock, p. 92.
20. Anil Chandra
Banerjee, Annexation of Burma, Calcutta, 1994, PP. 316-317.
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