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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