10
End of Dutch Spice Monopoly
Despite the failure to expand its empire into India, the VOC retained control over Sri Lanka and much of South East Asia till the end of the eighteenth century. However, its monopoly over the spice trade was about to be dealt a body blow by the emergence of plantations in other parts of the world. Over the years, many attempts had been made to grow expensive Asian spices outside their places of origin. Pepper, originally from south India, had spread to Sumatra and elsewhere but cloves and nutmeg had proved impossible to grow outside their original habitats. Moreover, the Dutch were aware that other Europeans wanted to break their monopoly and jealously guarded against any attempt to smuggle out seedlings.
The first systematic attempt at transplanting these spices was made by a French adventurer, Pierre Poivre, who had started life as a missionary in China and rose to become the administrator of Mauritius. Interestingly, his efforts were constantly opposed by Dupleix who may have been privately running a parallel effort to steal seedlings. Poivre personally captained a ship to the Spice Islands, narrowly escaped being exposed by a Dutch patrol ship, and procured a small number of seedlings. Unfortunately, the plants did not survive for long in Mauritius. A few years later, Poivre sent out a protégé called Provost to make a new attempt to procure seedlings. Sailing through VOC-controlled waters, the French managed to find a small island where the locals, unknown to the Dutch, had succeeded in transplanting clove and nutmeg. Provost procured seedlings from them before heading for Mauritius but was stopped by Dutch customs officials. The price for being caught smuggling was death, so this must have been a tense moment. However, the French managed to convince the officers that they had been blown off course and escaped a full inspection.1
Provost returned to Mauritius with four hundred rooted nutmeg trees and seventy rooted clove trees. Within a couple of decades there were spice plantations in Zanzibar, Madagascar and the Caribbean. The VOC’s spice monopoly had been shattered. Poivre returned to France a very wealthy man. After his death, his widow would marry Pierre Samuel Dupont, a liberal politician and publisher. During the French Revolution, the couple would narrowly escape the guillotine and head for North America where Dupont would use his wife’s wealth to set up a successful gunpowder factory near Wilmington, Delaware. Dupont’s business would flourish and survives today as one of the world’s largest chemical companies. In contrast, the VOC’s fortunes would go into rapid decline and the company would be dissolved in 1799.
The transplanting of spices was by no means the only instance of economic espionage. Indian textile technology was also stolen and copied by the Europeans. Indian cottons, especially wood-block prints called ‘chintz’, were so popular in Europe that governments often imposed severe import restrictions and bans on usage. A French missionary called Father Coeurdoux managed to get some Indian weavers, whom he had converted to Christianity, to reveal the secrets of the technique to him. Over time, further details were sent back by agents of the French East India Company. Thus, by the 1760s, French and English factories were churning out chintz on an industrial scale.2 Western countries today often accuse Asian economies of violating intellectual property rights but it is worth remembering that their own economic rise was based on stealing ideas from others.
The Free-Port of Singapore
Meanwhile, the English East India Company had a problem—it may have succeeded on the battlefield but its operations in India were not very profitable. The constant wars and the unscrupulous dealings of its agents meant that individuals became rich but the company suffered. Both Robert Clive and his successor Warren Hastings would be accused of corruption. By the late eighteenth century, trade with China was the only profitable part of the EIC’s operations. However, the Chinese insisted on being paid in silver coins in exchange for tea, porcelain and other products coveted in Europe. As the trade gap grew, the British faced the same precious metals shortage faced by ancient Romans when trading with India. These are the problems that would have been debated by the EIC’s directors sitting at the company headquarters on Leadenhall Street in London.
They found their solution in opium. Opium had been imported in small quantities into China from ancient times and used in traditional medicine. From the late eighteenth century, however, it became very fashionable to smoke it.3 Depictions in popular culture tend to show sleazy opium dens but in reality, it was consumed at all levels of society and was seen as a sign of connoisseurship with its intricately carved pipes, silver heating lamps and reclining couches in red silk. As demand for opium boomed, the British found that they could use their control over India to grow poppies. The system of triangular trade was born: The British sold cheap mill-made textiles to the Indians and bought opium from them at artificially low prices. The opium was then sold to the Chinese in exchange for goods that were sold back in Europe. It solved the EIC’s silver problem but destroyed the Indian economy. Cheap textiles made on an industrial scale by British mills devastated the old artisan-made textile industry. The shock was so great that a century later, the leaders of India’s independence movement would choose the hand-turned spinning wheel as their symbol of protest. Meanwhile, farmers in EIC-controlled areas were forced to grow opium (along with indigo that was used as a dye) and sell it to company agents at artificially low prices. The adverse terms of trade impoverished the farmers but what made it worse was that they were often not free to grow food crops; a small fluctuation in weather conditions resulted in devastating famines.
Although the triangular system solved the payments problem of trade with China, it still left the British exposed to geopolitical risk. The sea route from India to China had to pass through the Malacca Straits and there was always the risk that the Dutch would use their control over the region to cut off the passage. The British had a couple of small holdings in the region—at Penang and Bencoolen (now Bengkulu)—but they knew that these were inadequate. Thus, when Napoleon took control of Holland, the British moved systematically to take over Dutch territories in the Indian Ocean: Cape Colony at the southern tip of Africa, Sri Lanka, the nutmeg-growing Banda Islands, clove-growing Ternate. With the mother country under occupation, the Dutch put up little resistance and by 1799, the VOC itself ceased to exist. The remaining Dutch territories were briefly managed by a French vassal state called the Batavian Republic but after a brief period of peace, the British took over the Dutch headquarters at Batavia (Jakarta) and occupied Java in 1811. Note that most of the British troops consisted of Indian soldiers who had become the backbone of British power in the East.
It was a column of Indian troops, led by a young officer called Thomas Stamford Raffles, that marched into central Java and stormed the palace of the Sultan of Yogyakarta. The palace still exists although many of the original buildings were damaged during the British attack and had to be substantially rebuilt. Wandering around the grounds and the airy pavilions of the palace, one is struck by how the influence of the Majapahit has survived to this day despite European colonization and the conversion to Islam. Raffles too was amazed by the large numbers of remains of the ancient Hindu–Buddhist kingdoms of Java. One of the sites that he ‘discovered’ was Borobudur that he arranged to be cleared of the encroaching jungle and to be surveyed. Raffles showed an extraordinary interest in the natural and cultural history of the region and would be one of the first to initiate its systematic study. A factor that may have driven his interest in the temple ruins was that he had become a Freemason and Masons during this period were very interested in the study of ancient pagan sites.4 One wonders if Raffles saw the panels in Borobudur depicting the merchant ships, a reminder of another age of globalization.
Raffles would return to England briefly before coming back as the Governor of the tiny British colony of Bencoolen in Sumatra. He soon realized that with Napoleon defeated, the Dutch would ask the British to return their territories in the Indian Ocean. This would mean that the sailing route to China through the Malacca Straits would again be under threat. After surveying the area, Raffles identified Singapore as a good place to set up a new outpost that would ensure permanent British control over the passage. Using an internal squabble within the royal family of Johor, Raffles managed to gain control over the island in 1819. Crucially, he declared that Singapore would be a free port: ‘Our object is not territory, but trade; a great commercial emporium, and a fulcrum, whence we may extend our influence politically as circumstances may hereafter require.’5
The idea of a free port under British protection was immediately attractive and within a few weeks, thousands of Malays and Chinese had shifted from Malacca to Singapore. The Dutch were furious and lodged a protest with London claiming that the free port was within their traditional zone of influence. The British Governor of Penang also opposed Singapore as it undermined his turf. However, the new settlement became so successful in such a short time that it could not be ignored. The authorities in London and Calcutta grasped its strategic importance at the tip of the Malay peninsula and eventually backed Raffles. The Dutch, in any case, were too weak to push their case too far. The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 gave the British control over Singapore and the Malay peninsula, including Malacca. The Dutch retrieved territories that we now know as Indonesia. As compensation for Singapore, the Dutch also got Bencoolen (proving once again that the British always trump the Dutch when it comes to urban real estate).
When the British first established their outpost in Singapore, the coastline was drastically different from what we see now. Beach Road is now far inland due to several rounds of land reclamation but, as the name suggests, it used to originally run along the beach. Thus, residents of the famous Raffles Hotel could sit on the veranda and look out to sea. Similarly, Telok Ayer Street which runs through today’s central business district was once the water-front. One of the most prominent buildings on the street is the Thian Hock Keng temple, established in the 1830s, that Chinese sailors visited as soon as they landed on firm land in order to give thanks for a safe sea voyage. Right next door is Nagore Dargah that was used by Indian Muslims for exactly the same purpose. The Hindus had also been given a plot on the street for a temple but would build the Mariamman temple on another site not far away. Thus, Singapore was a bubbling mix of cultures right from the beginning.
Kandy for the British
One of the Dutch territories occupied by the British during the Napoleonic wars was Sri Lanka. The Europeans had taken control of the coast but the mountainous interior was still under the kingdom of Kandy. The kingdom was then ruled by the Nayak dynasty who, interestingly, were not Sinhalese but were of south Indian origin. The last Sinhalese ruler of Kandy did not have any legitimate sons and, after his death in 1739, the throne was taken over by his queen’s brother who came from the ruling family of Madurai (once the capital of the Pandyas). As one can see, the link between the Sinhalese and Madurai is a very deep and long-lasting one. Nonetheless, the Nayaks were aware of their foreign status and they strongly encouraged a Buddhist revival in order to cement their position.
Just as Tamils and Sinhalese had close links, we have seen how Hinduism and Buddhism were also very closely connected throughout the island’s history. As already mentioned, virtually all old Buddhist temples in Sri Lanka have shrines dedicated to Hindu gods including the most sacred Temple of the Tooth Relic. Indeed, the Sinhalese hero Rajasimha, who had fought the Portuguese, would probably have described himself as a Hindu. In the same vein, it was an Indian dynasty that would heavily invest in reviving Buddhism on the island. By the eighteenth century, the institutions of Buddhism had long been in decline due to constant wars and the pressure from Christian missionaries. The Nayak kings, therefore, imported monks from Thailand to re-establish various institutions.6 According to historian K.M. de Silva, the famous Esala Perahera procession of Kandy was originally a procession for Hindu gods under the Sinhalese dynasties but was repurposed for the Tooth Relic under the Nayak kings.
Meanwhile, having secured the coast, the British decided to attempt what both the Portuguese and the Dutch had failed to do—subjugate Kandy. In May 1803, an expeditionary force was sent into the mountains but on arrival found that the town had been evacuated. While the commanders were debating what to do next, the monsoons arrived and the British found themselves caught without supplies in a muddy and wet terrain. Eventually they decided to retreat to Colombo but were harassed constantly by Sinhalese guerrilla attacks as they made their way back through the slushy mountain passes. Almost all the British officers and men were killed. The episode is not dissimilar to the much better-known events relating to the retreat of the British army from Kabul during the First Anglo-Afghan War. As with the Afghans four decades later, the gains of the initial victory were not long-lasting. The British returned to Kandy in 1815 and, taking advantage of frictions between the king and the nobility, took over the kingdom with little resistance. Thus, the whole of Sri Lanka became part of the British empire.
The Haze of Opium
Although trade had been booming since the eighteenth century, Chinese authorities strictly restricted trade with the Europeans to a single port—Canton (i.e. Guangdong) in the Pearl River delta. Here business was controlled by a cartel of wealthy Chinese merchants known as the Hongs. During the trading season (September to January), Europeans were allowed to stay in the port in lodgings leased out by their Hong counterparts. Situated deliberately outside Canton’s city walls, these ‘factories’ included warehouses and living quarters. Outside of these months, the foreigners were expected to either go home or withdraw to the Portuguese enclave of Macau.7 In other words, the Chinese government kept the Europeans at arm’s length.
Despite these restrictions, the East India Company and its agents benefited from its cosy long-term relationships with the Hongs. However, lobbying by its business rivals in Britain ended its monopoly over trade with the East and suddenly there were many new merchants trying to sell opium in China. Even the Americans entered the business. Many of the new entrants began to bypass the old arrangements and smuggle the drug into the mainland. As a result, the price of opium fell and its usage rose sharply in China. The flow of silver coins reversed and opium addiction became widespread.
The Chinese imperial government was eventually forced to take action and, in May 1839, the authorities confiscated and destroyed 20,000 chests of opium in Humen. This triggered a chain of events that resulted in the First Opium War. The British sent out fifteen barrack ships with 7000 soldiers, mostly from India. They were armed with modern rifles and were backed by the Nemesis, a steam-powered warship. The scattered and outdated Chinese army was completely outmatched as the British fleet pounded its way up the coast. The apparently magical ability of the Nemesisto move irrespective of wind direction caused panic. Ultimately the Manchu emperor was forced to accept the humiliating conditions of the Treaty of Nanjing by which several ports were forced open for foreign trade and the British gained control of Hong Kong. War reparations, including compensation for the confiscated opium, were also paid.
It is worth mentioning that when the Chinese were fighting British-led Indian soldiers along the eastern coast, they were simultaneously fighting Indian soldiers in Tibet! After establishing control over Ladakh, the famous general Zorawar Singh decided to march the Dogra army into Tibet in 1841. He pushed his way up to the sacred Mansarovar Lake but, despite his meticulous planning, was ultimately unable to sustain his supply lines through the harsh terrain. This allowed the Tibetans, along with Chinese reinforcements, to counter-attack. Zorawar Singh was caught defending an untenable position and was killed. The Dogras were now pushed back to Ladakh where they, in turn, defeated the Tibetan–Chinese army. At this point both sides seem to have been exhausted and peace was concluded under the Treaty of Chushul but this stretch of border between India and China remains disputed to this day.
The peace between the Chinese and the Dogras would last (till the Indo-Chinese War of 1962) but that with the British would unravel a few years later. Tensions began to simmer in 1856 but the British could not respond for the next couple of years because a large section of the British-Indian army was in revolt across northern India during 1857–58. Given the importance of Indian soldiers in policing the growing empire, the British were able to pay attention to China only after the revolt had been brutally suppressed. The Second Opium War started as a series of skirmishes. A large expeditionary force was finally dispatched in 1860. With the active support of the French and the Americans, the British repeatedly defeated the Chinese imperial army and marched into Beijing. The Qing emperor fled his capital and the Summer Palace was deliberately destroyed.8Yet again, Indian troops formed the bulk of British forces. They would return four decades later to help the British put down the Boxer Revolt in 1900–01.9
One can see how Indian soldiering was of such importance in world history. The British empire, in particular, was heavily dependent on it. This is why one stream of India’s freedom movement would focus over several decades on undermining the loyalty of these soldiers.
The Tycoons of Bombay
The East India Company had built the British empire in Asia but by the middle of the nineteenth century it was effectively defunct. The incessant wars, rampant corruption and, ultimately, the loss of its monopoly had steadily eroded the company’s profits. The Revolt of 1857–58 in India exposed its inability to govern the empire it had created. The Court of Directors met one last time on 1 September 1858 at the company’s headquarters at Leadenhall Street. A few weeks later, its colonies were taken over by the Crown.10 The building on Leadenhall Street that housed the EIC’s headquarters, once the heart of the world’s largest commercial enterprise, no longer exists. I walked up and down the street one winter afternoon, armed with old sketches to identify the place till I realized that the site is now occupied by the Lloyd’s building which incongruously looks like a twentieth-century petrochemical refinery.
Even as the EIC’s fortunes declined, it was replaced by new merchants and agency houses such as Forbes & Company and Bruce Fawcett & Company.11 One of the largest of these operations was run by Jardine, Matheson and Company (which survives today as the conglomerate Jardine Matheson Holdings). It was set up by Charles Magniac, James Matheson and William Jardine who initially used technical loopholes to circumvent the EIC’s monopoly in order to trade Indian cotton and opium in exchange for tea out of Canton. Business boomed after the EIC lost its monopoly in 1834 and they relocated their operations to Hong Kong after the First Opium War.
While most Indian farmers and weavers were hurt by the triangular trade system, some Indians also benefited from working for the European merchants as agents and brokers. Many of these were drawn from the Parsi community, descendants of Zoroastrian refugees who had come to India centuries earlier from Iran. From the late eighteenth century, many Parsis had migrated to Bombay where they prospered as suppliers, victuallers and shipbuilders. Opium exports were initially monopolized by Calcutta but Bombay gradually emerged as an alternative hub as cotton farmers in Malwa switched to growing opium. Soon, Parsi agents became an important part of the supply chain all the way to Hong Kong. This is why many of Hong Kong’s old institutions have Parsi founders. The famous ferry between Hong Kong island and Kowloon, for example, was set up by Dorabjee Naorojee Mithaiwala. The Indian brokers and agents were known as ‘shroffs’ (derived from the Hindi word ‘saraff’ used variously for agent, broker or money changer). The term ‘shroff’ survives in Hong Kong but is now used mostly for parking-ticket collectors—one of those odd artefacts of history!
Arguably the most successful of the Parsi merchants of Bombay was Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy. He was born in 1783 and is said to have moved from Navsari to Bombay when he was still a boy. Bombay was a much smaller settlement than Calcutta but, with the Maratha threat receding, it was witnessing rapid growth. In 1780, the population of Bombay was estimated at 47,170 but by 1814 it had risen to 162,570 and had further jumped to 566,119 by 1849.12 Armed with a smattering of English and some knowledge of bookkeeping, the enterprising boy soon inserted himself into the city’s trading community. Jamsetjee would steadily earn himself both a large business and a good reputation as a reliable partner.
In 1805, a few months before the British decisively beat the French navy at Trafalgar, Jamsetjee and William Jardine were taken prisoner by the French while sailing off the Sri Lankan coast. The captors later agreed to release the prisoners at a neutral Dutch outpost near the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa. While this transfer was taking place, a sudden gale wrecked their ship near the Cape. Both Jamsetjee and Jardine survived, but the shared experience created a bond that became the basis of a long-term business partnership. Jamsetjee soon became the main Indian partner of Jardine, Matheson & Company and acquired a large fleet of ships. He also became a highly respected citizen of Bombay and was included by the EIC’s Court of Directors in the Queen’s Honours List. In an elaborate ceremony at the Governor’s residence in May 1842, Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy was knighted.13
Modern-day critics of Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy may say that he was no more than a drug lord who collaborated with a colonial power to enrich himself by engaging in a business that devastated the lives of many fellow humans, both Indian and Chinese. His supporters would argue that he was just a businessman who responded to the circumstances of his times. Moreover, they will point out the fact that Jamsetjee gave away a significant part of his fortune in charity. Mumbai is still served by the Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art and the Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy Hospital. Whatever one thinks of him on balance, he was certainly a remarkable man living at a remarkable time in Mumbai’s history.
One of Jamsetjee’s lesser-known contributions to Mumbai is the introduction of ice cream. This was made possible by the regular supply of ice from Boston from the 1830s. An ‘ice-house’ was built to store the ice but the stock often ran out due to melting or delays in the supply chain. Not surprisingly, the rich saw ice as a way to display their wealth and Jamsetjee began to serve ice cream at his dinner parties. The very first time he served it, it was alleged that everyone caught a cold!14 Social rivalries within the city’s elite were just as intense in the mid-nineteenth century as they are today.
Another of Bombay’s merchant princes was David Sassoon, a Baghdadi Jew who had fled the despotic rule of Daud Pasha.15 When Sassoon arrived in Bombay in 1833, the city already had a significant Jewish population. He soon built a business empire trading in cotton and opium but the Sassoon family fortunes skyrocketed when the American Civil War cut off supplies of raw cotton between 1861 and 1865. The mills of Lancashire turned to India for raw material and Bombay witnessed a boom. David Sassoon died in 1864 but he is remembered through several institutions built by him and his sons in Mumbai and Pune.
Sassoon’s palatial house survives as Masina Hospital in the neighbourhood of Byculla. Readers familiar with Mumbai may wonder why one of the city’s richest residents built a house in such a crowded area but Byculla was in fact a fashionable suburb in the nineteenth century. The exterior of the main building is in good condition but the interiors have been haphazardly divided into cubicles for various medical activities. I did, however, find a grand wooden staircase that has survived largely unscathed and retains the feel of a merchant prince’s house. The David Sassoon Library, built in Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda area, is another elegant example of the period’s architecture. The Sassoon Docks in Colaba were built by David’s son Albert-Abdullah. It is now used to land Mumbai’s daily supply of fish. This is the reason that on a hot day, when the wind is blowing from the east, Mumbai’s expensive Cuffe Parade neighbourhood finds itself cloaked in a strong fishy odour.
Not all of Bombay’s tycoons made their money from opium. Premchand Roychand would make, lose and regain his fortune in real estate and financial markets. His father had brought his family from Gujarat and had settled in a tenement in the densely packed Kalbadevi area. As a boy, Premchand would have heard about the exploits of David Sassoon and Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy. By the 1850s, he had amassed a sizeable capital base as a cotton broker. Around the same time, a small group of Indian brokers began to trade financial securities and bullion under a banyan tree in front of Town Hall (this later evolved into the Bombay Stock Exchange).
It was in this milieu of speculation and risk-taking that Premchand Roychand began to promote land reclamation projects. By this time, the original seven islands of Bombay had already been connected through land reclamation into a single land mass but growing population and commercial activity argued for further reclamation. What added fuel to the fire was the cotton boom caused by the American Civil War. So when Premchand launched the Backbay Reclamation Company, its shares spiralled up in a frenzy of speculation. Soon, the city saw many new banks, companies and construction projects being launched and Premchand was involved in several of them. It was mania like never before and, inevitably, it ended suddenly when North American cotton supplies resumed in 1865. The shares of the Backbay Reclamation Company dropped from Rs 50,000 to Rs 2000 and that of Bank of Bombay from Rs 2850 to Rs 87. Many investors were ruined and the economic collapse was so large that the city’s population dropped from 816,000 in 1864 to 644,000 in 1872!16
Premchand Roychand not only lost everything but was also blamed for the wider financial mess. Nonetheless, he seems to have been stoic about the whole affair and, over the following decades, would repay his creditors and gradually build back his fortune. When he died in 1906, he would be remembered for his extraordinary resilience and the large sums he gave away to charity and public works. For instance, the Rajabhai Clock Tower, one of Mumbai’s most iconic buildings, was built with funding from Premchand Roychand and is named after his mother.
The stories of these three tycoons give a good flavour of how Bombay evolved and expanded over the nineteenth century. These were larger-than-life figures who took big, even reckless risks but were also prepared to share their good fortune. Many of the city’s most loved buildings and institutions were built by them or others like them. More importantly, they bequeathed the city a risk-taking spirit that remains alive to this day. David Sassoon, Jamsetjee and Premchand were all migrants who had made it big in the city. Mumbai’s slums are still full of migrants who think they too can do it. This is why Mumbai slums are not places of hopelessness as one may expect but full of industry and enterprise despite all the squalor.
Oman to Zanzibar
Even as the Europeans were tightening their stranglehold on the Indian subcontinent and South East Asia, the Persian Gulf was witnessing its own geopolitical realignment. As we saw in the previous chapter, the Omanis had managed to evict the Portuguese in the mid-seventeenth century but a few decades later they found themselves under occupation by the Persians led by Nadir Shah (this is the same Nadir Shah who raided Delhi in 1739 and took away the famous Peacock throne from the Mughals). In 1747, Ahmad ibn Said united the various feuding Omani factions and then invited the Persian officers for a ceremonial banquet. At a pre-planned signal midway through the meal, the hosts suddenly attacked and massacred the guests.17 The occupying Persian forces were leaderless and were pushed out with ease. Nonetheless, the Omanis knew that they remained under threat and therefore opted for a long-term strategic alliance with the British. The British, in turn, were keen on building up a local ally as a bulwark against the Wahhabis of the Arabian peninsula. This special relationship with Britain would remain alive till the late twentieth century.
In 1804, Sultan Said came to the throne. His fifty-two-year rule is often seen as the golden age by the Omanis. His success was based on naval power that he systematically built up over time. Sultan Said supported shipbuilding yards at Muscat, Sur, Mutrah and Shinas (the one at Sur still builds wooden dhows) but also imported a number of European-designed ships built in Bombay.18 Using this growing fleet, and with implicit British support, the Omanis steadily expanded control over a maritime empire that extended from Gwadar on the Makran coast (now in Pakistan) to Zanzibar off the east African coast (now in Tanzania).
The economic engine of the empire was powered by cloves grown in Zanzibar and African slaves procured from the interiors. This meant that Sultan Said needed to maintain control over the Swahili coast. Recall that much of this coastline had been explored and settled by the Omanis in medieval times and some links had been intermittently maintained. Even before Sultan Said, the Omanis had nominal control over some parts of the coast but in the 1830s the Omani court moved to Zanzibar and tightened its grip. Many reminders of these times have survived on the island’s Stone Town including the palaces of rich merchants and the Omani nobility. The hanging balconies look exactly like those one sees in the older parts of Muscat and Ahmedabad, a reminder of linkages across the Indian Ocean. One can also see remains of the dark hovels where newly procured slaves were kept. Climbing down into one of the underground slave prisons, one can still feel some of the terror that newly arrived slaves, chained together, must have felt as they waited for an uncertain fate.
The trade in slaves, however, was eventually abandoned under pressure from the British. The role of the Royal Navy in ending this despicable practice is indeed praiseworthy but let it be clear that British motivations were not entirely driven by altruism. The British economy had already gone through the Industrial Revolution and was less dependent than its rivals on mass deployment of unskilled labour. Coal and steam now provided much of the muscle of their economy. Moreover, the British also had access to an inexhaustible supply of cheap indentured labour from India where British policies had systematically impoverished the population. So, the anti-slavery position of the British at least partly aimed at undermining rivals and was self-serving.
The Omani nobility would continue to rule over Zanzibar till as late as 1964 when a revolution would overthrow them. Many would be killed in riots and most of the remaining Arabs would leave. Zanzibar would then merge with Tanganyika on the mainland to form Tanzania. The island’s once thriving Indian community was also hurt by the revolution and most left for other shores. But I was pleasantly surprised to find a small group that still survives in the narrow lanes of Stone Town and maintains a handful of Hindu temples; a reminder of another age.
Steam Ships and Fishing Fleets
From the middle of the nineteenth century, the commercial and human dynamics of the Indian Ocean world suddenly went through a radical shift as Victorian-era transportation technologies began to reorder the landscape. Coal-powered railways and steam ships dramatically reduced the time taken to move goods and people over land and sea. It also changed the dynamics of naval war with the construction of steam-powered, armour-plated, iron-hulled warships. Amazingly, the very first such warship—HMS Warrior of the Royal Navy—has survived and has been beautifully restored. Maritime history enthusiasts can visit it in Portsmouth harbour. The design was still a hybrid as the Warrior also had masts for sails and its guns were lined along the sides for a broadside. Nonetheless, the contrast with the previous generation of ships is plainly visible if one compares it with HMS Victory that is also moored at Portsmouth harbour. The latter had been the most advanced war machine of its time and had participated in the Battle of Trafalgar as Nelson’s flagship (indeed, Nelson would be killed on its deck). Interestingly, the Warrior never participated in a war. Its design was so successful that all ships were subsequently designed with steam power and metal hulls, and the Warrior itself rapidly became outdated.
The other major factor that changed the dynamics of the Indian Ocean was the Suez Canal. As we have seen, the idea of a canal was not new and various versions had been built since ancient times. However, all the earlier versions had focused on connecting the Red Sea to the Nile and, in each case, was choked by sand and silt after a few years. In contrast, the nineteenth-century canal built jointly by the French and the Egyptians connected the Red Sea directly with the Mediterranean. It was opened in 1869 under French control but faced severe financial difficulties. Their Egyptian partners eventually sold their stake to the British. Combined with steam power, the Suez Canal soon changed the logistics of Atlantic–Indian Ocean trade as ships no longer had to make the long and arduous journey around Africa. Aden re-emerged as a major hub after centuries of decline.
One of the less anticipated effects of the Suez Canal was the flood of young, unmarried European women who headed for India and other colonies in search of husbands.19 Known as the ‘fishing fleet’, these women were drawn from all segments of society. Depending on their class background, they would marry British civilian and military officers, merchants, clerks and so on. Some even found their way into the harems of native princes. While Victorian society was very conscious of class, it was possible for an enterprising woman to climb the ladder in the East. An average-looking girl from a modest background could become a sought-after beauty if she made her way to a sufficiently remote outpost. The arrival of so many women transformed the Europeans in Asia into an endogamous ruling caste that lived in enclaves with conventions and etiquette completely separate from those of the indigenous people. The stage was set for the numerous Raj-era books about tiger hunting, amateur theatricals, and tea parties in hill stations.
Meanwhile, the ships also carried increasing numbers of Indians across the Indian Ocean and beyond, but their experience was very different. A key factor driving this churn of people was the shortage of labour in sugar-growing colonies after the British abolished slavery in 1833. Within a year, there were fourteen ships engaged in transporting Indian indentured workers from Calcutta to Mauritius.20 The original contracts were for five years at Rs 10 per month plus some food and clothing. An option of a free return passage was provided at the end of the contract. Soon Indian indentured workers were being transported to faraway places like the Caribbean and Fiji. Other European countries, such as France, also began to recruit workers. By the 1840s, the authorities began to encourage women to sign up so that self-perpetuating Indian communities could be created which in turn would reduce the need for constant replenishment from the mother country.
The recruitment of indentured workers was done by a network of Indian subagents who further contracted out their work. For example, Ghura Khan was British Guyana’s subagent at Buxar and paid his recruiters Rs 5 to Rs 8 per month plus Rs 5 for a man and Rs 8 for a woman (evidently women were more difficult to recruit). The whole supply chain was riddled with false promises and rampant abuse but repeated famines in India pushed increasing numbers to risk the journey. During 1870–79 alone, Calcutta shipped out 142,793 workers, Madras 19,104 and Pondicherry 20,269.21
Indentured workers and soldiers were not the only Indians on the move. The late nineteenth century saw Indian merchant and financial networks come alive again after a hiatus of centuries. Tamil Chettiar merchants and moneylenders spread across South East Asia. In Malaya they lent to Chinese tin miners and European planters, and in Burma they supplied credit to farmers. They operated through a system of guild-like firms and agencies, usually run by members of the extended family. One of the largest of these firms, established by Muthiah Chetty in the early 1900s, was headquartered in Kanadukanta in Chettinad, Tamil Nadu, but with offices in Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaya and French Indo-China. Similarly, Gujarati traders and moneylenders established themselves along the coast from South Africa to Oman.
A significant concentration of Indians settled around Durban in South Africa. Some had come as indentured workers and stayed back while others came freely in search of economic opportunities. By the end of the nineteenth century, their numbers not only equalled that of the white population but they were successfully competing with the Europeans as accountants, lawyers, clerks, traders and so on. This led to a series of discriminatory laws aimed at protecting the interests of the whites. This was the milieu to which a young lawyer called Mohandas K. Gandhi arrived in 1893. He was brought to South Africa by a well-established Gujarati businessman Dada Abdoolah to assist in a personal matter. However, he was soon part of a movement to oppose anti-Indian laws. In 1894, the Natal Indian Congress was established with Gandhi as its secretary. Thus began a journey.
The Scramble for Africa
The nineteenth century was a tumultuous time for the African shores of the Indian Ocean. The Cape at the southern tip of Africa had long been a Dutch colony but it was taken over by the British during the Napoleonic wars. The treaty of 1814 confirmed British control but a sizeable community of Dutch settlers continued to live there. Known as Afrikaners or Boers, they were constantly suspicious of the motives of their new rulers. When the British outlawed slavery, the Afrikaners saw it as a ruse to undermine them. Eventually large numbers of them decided from the 1830s to take their families, livestock, guns and African slaves (now dubbed as servants), and trek into the interiors. As one trekker subsequently wrote:
We abandoned our lands and homesteads, our country and kindred [because of] the shameful and unjust proceedings with reference to the freedom of our slaves: and yet it is not so much their freedom that drove us to such lengths as their being placed on an equal footing with Christians, contrary to the laws of God and the natural distinction of race and religion. . . . we rather withdrew in order thus to preserve our doctrines in purity.22
Just as the Afrikaners were moving into the interiors of what is now South Africa, the area was also witnessing a large influx of Bantu tribes from the north-east. A prolonged drought in the early nineteenth century had caused these groups to migrate but there was a more immediate cause—the rise of the Zulus. The Zulu tribe had been converted into a military machine by the famous leader Shaka. Using a combination of spears and fast-moving, disciplined units, the Zulus were even capable of taking on guns on occasion. As they expanded their territories, the other African tribes were forced to flee. This is known as the ‘Mfecane’ or The Scattering. The current location of various tribes in southern Africa is a direct outcome of this episode. Swaziland and Lesotho were both founded as a result of refugee groups banding together under powerful chiefs to defend themselves. The Xhosa (Nelson Mandela’s tribe of origin) were among the worst affected as they were being crushed between the Zulus and white settlers.
Thus, the political dynamics of South Africa was never simply a white and black matter (if you will pardon the bad pun). There was just as much rivalry and bloodshed within each racial group as between them. The Khoi-San, the original inhabitants of the country, were the sorriest victims—already marginalized, enslaved and dispersed, they would play almost no role in subsequent events.
The next twist in the story took place with the discovery of diamond and gold deposits in South Africa. Till new deposits were found in Brazil during the eighteenth century, India had been the only source of diamonds in the world. The quantity and quality of South African diamonds, however, was at a different level altogether. This led to a mad rush. Within just a year of the first claims being made in 1867, fifty thousand people were living in tents and other temporary shelters in Kimberley. By 1871, there were more people in Kimberley than in Cape Town!23 In that year alone, South Africa exported 269,000 carats of diamonds. With the boom came dubious claims, financial manipulation and large-scale gun running. It is estimated that 75,000 guns were sold in Kimberley between April 1873 and June 1874.
Eventually, order was restored and the entire operation at Kimberley was brought under the control of a single company; De Beers Consolidated Mines Limited was incorporated in 1888. The man behind this consolidation was Cecil Rhodes.
Rhodes had arrived in Kimberley as a dirt-poor teenager but, over time, had managed to establish himself as a formidable businessman and canny speculator. With the backing of wealthy financiers like the Rothschilds, he eventually came to control all the diamond mines of Kimberley. In 1890, he would become the Prime Minister of Cape Colony. Rhodes now began to use his immense wealth and political power to push the interests of large mining magnates as well as expand the British empire at the cost of both the Boers and the African tribes. It is said that Rhodes wanted to expand the empire from Cape Town to Cairo. The discovery of large gold deposits in 1886 only added to the heady mix of greed and imperial ambition.
The frictions between the British and the Afrikaners eventually led to the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). The Boers made pre-emptive strikes and laid siege on a number of towns including Kimberley. The British struck back with reinforcements shipped in from India. Indian soldiers would yet again play an important role in the course of events. Interestingly, Mohandas Gandhi also participated in the war by organizing a group of local Indian civilians into the Natal Indian Ambulance Corps that provided support to the British forces.
By the middle of 1900, Boer resistance had begun to crumble and the British had taken over their capital, Pretoria. The Boers now shifted to guerrilla tactics and continued to harass their adversaries. The British responded by creating large concentration camps where they herded in the families of the Boer guerrillas. At their height, the concentration camps held 112,000 inmates. Conditions in the camps were appalling and an estimated 28,000 Boers, mostly women and children, died over the course of a year from malnutrition and disease.24 Reports of these civilian casualties would cause an uproar in Europe and embarrass the British government. Boer forces would eventually surrender in May 1902 and the two Boer republics were incorporated into the British empire.
Cecil Rhodes did not live to see the end of the war as he died in March of that year. He would leave most of his estate for the creation of the famous scholarship that now bears his name. The idea seems to have been to create an Anglo-Saxon elite, educated in Oxford, who would rule the British empire into perpetuity (there was also a hope that the United States would join the British in this grand enterprise). Rhodes lived during the high noon of British power and it would not have occurred to him that his beloved empire would cease to exist within half a century.
It is somewhat ironic that I owe most of my education to Francis Xavier and Cecil Rhodes. I attended a high school named after the former and my years at Oxford were financed by a scholarship named after the latter. I am quite aware that in both cases I was not the intended beneficiary. This brings us to the tricky question of how to judge individuals from history—do we judge them by their intentions or by the consequences of their actions? Do we judge them only by the standards of their times or by some absolute yardstick? I do not claim to know the answer but these are questions that scholars of history constantly grapple with.
Nonetheless, while researching this book, I was surprised to come across the following line in Rhodes’ final will and testament: ‘No student shall be qualified or disqualified for election to a Scholarship on account of his race or religious opinions.’25 This is a remarkably liberal statement given the context of the times and Rhodes’ reputation as a racist. Perhaps like Ashoka he wanted future generations to think well of him. Or perhaps he had more shades of grey than I had imagined. The first black Rhodes Scholar was elected as early as 1907 and this elicited such a backlash in the United States that American selection committees did not award the scholarship to another black student till 1963. The Rhodes Trust to its credit, however, persisted with its open policy in other parts of the world and non-whites continued to be elected (Queensland 1908, Jamaica 1910 and so on).
Note that the British were not the only Europeans occupying swathes of Africa in the late nineteenth century. In earlier times, Africa had been seen as an impediment on the way to Asia and occupation was limited to resupply outposts along the coast. The Suez Canal had reduced the need for re-supply ports but Africa’s interiors were now seen as a source of raw materials to feed industrial economies and of easily conquerable territories to feed imperial egos. France took over large swathes of north and west Africa. Germany had only become a united country in 1870 but it lost no time in claiming territories that we now know as Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Namibia, Togo and Cameroon. When the Omani Sultan of Zanzibar objected to the land grab in East Africa, Otto von Bismarck sent in his warships.26 The Sultan had probably hoped that his British allies would help, but the British turned a blind eye and carried out their own land grab in what is now Kenya. A few years later, they placed their own candidate on the throne and effectively turned Zanzibar into a protectorate.27 Even tiny Belgium got into the act and occupied a large swathe of central Africa, what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The takeover of Africa had been so quick that colonial governments often struggled to keep up with it. For example, the British-held territory of Nyasaland (now Malawi) had a budget of just 10,000 pounds per year. This was just enough for ten European civilian officers, two military officers, seventy Sikh soldiers of the Punjab regiment and eighty-five porters from the Zanzibar coast.28 This was all the resources available to run a territory of 94,000 square kilometres with a population of one to two million. Ignoring for a moment the morality of the colonial enterprise, one must admire the sheer scale and audacity of it. National borders across the continent are still marked by the arbitrary straight lines drawn on a map by various European powers to mark out their acquisitions. These boundaries made no geographical or cultural sense on the ground, but this would not have bothered European colonizers who had convinced themselves that Africans had no history or culture.
Denying a people’s history and culture is an obvious way for a colonizing power to present everything preceding their arrival as the age of darkness and ignorance. Thus, the conquered territory can be termed as Terra Nullius or Nobody’s Land, and the rights of the indigenous people can be denied. Indeed, the Terra Nullius argument was used in Australia till as recently as 1992 when the courts finally began to accept the land rights of the aborigines.
Not all the African tribes and kingdoms gave in without a fight, and in at least one instance the Europeans were beaten back. We have seen how the Ethiopians had preserved their independence in isolation for centuries despite being surrounded by the Arabs. Unfortunately, Ethiopia was one of the last independent territories left in Africa when the Italians too decided to join the scramble for Africa. In 1885, the Italians simply seized the port of Massawa on the Red Sea and turned Ethiopia into a landlocked country. Emperor Menelik protested against this but found no support from major world powers. Soon he was forced to sign a treaty that ceded Eritrea to Italy in return for recognizing his sovereignty over the highlands of the interior.
The Italians, however, had no intention of stopping with just the coast. They picked on some differences between the Italian and Amharic texts of the treaty and occupied northern Ethiopia. Menelik now began to smuggle in modern rifles and train an army. After a few initial skirmishes, the final battle took place at Adowa in March 1896. The Ethiopians inflicted a crushing defeat in which 3179 Italians and 2000 locally recruited auxiliaries were killed.29 Many more were wounded or taken prisoner. At this stage, Menelik may have been able to march on Eritrea but he knew that his supply lines were stretched. Moreover, despite the victory, the Ethiopians had suffered 7000 dead and over 10,000 wounded. So, the emperor accepted a new, more favourable treaty that explicitly recognized his independence.
Thus, Ethiopia would be the only African country to successfully defend itself against the colonial onslaught. The Italians had retained Eritrea but had been made to look very foolish. Mussolini would try to erase the memory of this defeat by invading and briefly occupying Ethiopia in the 1930s but would lose control of it during World War II. Given their long history of defending their country against both the Arabs and the Europeans, often at great cost, the Ethiopians can be justly proud of their record of preserving their independence.
The End of Pretence
When the twentieth century dawned, almost all of the shores of the Indian Ocean were already under European control. The British controlled the Indian subcontinent, Burma, Malaya, Australia and large sections of the east African coast. The French had established themselves in Indo-China (what is now Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia). Even a latecomer like Germany had managed to find a territory to colonize in East Africa and in the north-eastern quarter of New Guinea. This probably left the Dutch feeling inadequate. They had once been the dominant power but had steadily lost influence and territory. The British had taken away their former holdings in South Africa, Sri Lanka and Malaya. Although they had tightened control over their remaining territories in the Indonesian archipelago, they must have felt that history had left them behind. So the Dutch did what all school bullies do when they are feeling down—they beat up the smallest kid in the class.
The small island of Bali was divided into a network of tiny kingdoms that, despite frequent Dutch interference, had remained effectively independent.30 In 1906, the Dutch used a minor pretext to land a large force on the island armed with modern rifles and machine guns. They knew that the Balinese were armed with no more than spears, shields and a few muskets. They also had a handful of small cannons that can still be viewed at the Bali Museum at Denpasar. They are beautifully decorated with dragon-heads but are of an eighteenth-century design that would have been hopeless against modern weapons. In other words, both sides knew that the Balinese did not stand a chance.
The Dutch force landed on Sanur beach and faced little resistance as it marched inland. Along the way, it found that all settlements had been abandoned. Only when they approached the royal palace at Denpasar did they see signs of activity. There was no army to greet them but they could see a lot of smoke rising and hear drums beating inside the palace compound. The invading force took up positions and waited. After a while, a ceremonial procession emerged from the main gate including the king, his queens and children, priests, servants and retainers. They all wore funerary garments and their finest jewellery. The women next walked up to the lined soldiers and mocked them, flinging their jewellery and gold coins at them. Then a priest took out a kris, the traditional dagger, and stabbed the king to death in full view. This seems to have been the signal for the Balinese to pull out their krises and make a last charge. The Dutch machine guns and rifles mowed them all down within minutes. Waves of men, women and children kept coming out of the palace and the Dutch kept shooting them down. There were soon mounds of dead bodies, probably numbering over a thousand.
What the Dutch had just witnessed was the Balinese Hindu rite of ‘Puputan’ or the Last Stand (the Indian equivalent is called jauhar). This extraordinary event took place in the open field in front of what is now the Bali Museum in Denpasar. There is a memorial on the spot to commemorate it. I stood there for a long time trying to imagine the mental state of those who had preferred to die rather than live under foreign domination. The nearby museum has a few photographs that show the aftermath of the massacre.
The Dutch commanders, however, were not too impressed by what they had just witnessed. They only waited to allow the soldiers to collect all the jewellery and loot the palace before setting it on fire. They then marched to the next kingdom where they witnessed a similar sequence of events. They finally left after forcing the king of Klungkung, the senior most of Bali’s rulers, to sign a humiliating treaty. Not surprisingly, the Balinese were seething with anger that would spill over into riots. This gave the Dutch the pretext to return in 1908 and attack Klungkung. Yet again, the Balinese opted to commit Puputan. The king charged out wielding his kris along with two hundred of his followers and they were all shot dead. His six queens committed ritual suicide; the palace was looted and razed to the ground.
The Dutch today take great pride in their liberal traditions but the history of their occupation of Indonesia tells a different story. When reports of the events in Bali finally reached Europe, it caused quite an uproar. It did not help that they had themselves photographed the atrocities. By now the supposed civilizing mission of the European colonial enterprise was sounding increasingly hollow. The incidents in Bali were merely the last nails in the coffin. Within a few years, the barbarity of the First World War would take away even the pretence of moral and civilizational superiority.