Another important sorbet to open up minds, challenge stereotypes and break up all the great political steak here!
The British conquest of India is one of the most controversial and least well known events in history. The gradual conquest that started in 1701, took 140 years and ended with Britain in control of tens of millions of Indians, Afghans, Burmese, Hmong, Nepalese and just everyone who lived in what was called the British Raj. British control of India was essential to the success of the British Empire and some studies have indicated that as much as 1/4th of British wealth and wealth today came from India. I’m dead serious. Wealth made in or stolen from India built much of the Royal Navy, Buckingham Palace, and payed off the war debts that resulted from the American Revolution. The 220 year occupation is one of the most extensive wealth transfers in World History and its results are still being felt today. But the British did not acquire it or conquer India in the way you probably think.
Political conquest is usually a result of a successful military campaign by an invading power. In reality this looks very similar to what you may have seen on television. Large formations of uniformed men battle over and over again until one side submits. Thousands of people die and shadowy political elites like Donald ‘Loser’ Trump direct events. But this isn’t what happened in India and it’s not how the British conquered a continent. Indeed, the British never launched a multi stage invasion of India and the kinds of large field formations of British regulars that appeared in Europe never appeared in India. Turns out it was it was Indian Woman, specifically Indian Princesses, which were the driving force behind both of those efforts at least until 1840 when India was effectively conquered.
India is one of the Earth’s oldest Kingdoms. Some of the first civilizations to get started founded themselves on the banks of the Indus River or on the plains of Northern India. For some 5000 years India was divided into perpetually warring city-states similar to those in Greece. Occasionally a single city-state would rise to power but lasting hegemony was never established. In the 1500’s a new successor state to the Mongol Empire, the Mughals, arrived from Central Asia. Cooperating with some local Muslim princes and conquering others the Mughals used medium cavalry, mounted archers, light infantry and heavy cannon to gradually unify India. Thru a merciless and violet campaign the Mughals conquered all of Northern India by 1601 and most of Southern India by 1707. The Mughals however struggled to govern and were widely despised for forced conversion and using famine as a means of control. Mughal power extended across India but it was not solidified and many city-states still exerted substantial autonomy.
Starting in 1674 a revolt began amongst the disaffected members of the Mughal Aristocracy. Eventually and odd union of Muslims, Hindu and Sikh elites formed the Maratha Confederacy and began to openly challenge the Mughals. Using diplomatic intrigue and absurdly complex webs of marriage that often included 50 families the Marthans established a power base in Central and Western India. After the 1707 death of the Mughal Emperor, the Marathans launched a continent wide revolt and captured the capitol of Dehli. But the Marthans couldn’t effectively govern either and tensions between Muslims, Hindu and Sikh kept India divided. In 1761, the final confrontation between Marthan and Mughal occurred at the Battle of Panipat. Due to hundreds of slaughtered elephants, horses, camels and thousands of men the battle had to be stopped several times because the field was too bloody. Eventually the Marthan Army was destroyed but not before the Mughals took crippling casualties themselves. After sacking some cities and murdering a whole lot of people in Delhi the Mughals returned to Central Asia and a power vacuum ensued.
All of the players seemed to be in the game and then just offshore a bunch of terribly dressed people on ships started disembarking at Indian Ports.
Initial British attempts to establish a presence in India met with difficulty. In the early 1700’s India was the fabled ‘exotic’ kingdom of Alexander the Great that had only limited name recognition in Western Europe. During the Mughals period a random assortment of Dutch, French, Portuguese and English merchants worked the Mughal court but the trade was not substantial. British diplomats didn’t understand the politics of India or the complex social structure. Meanwhile the British Army of Navy was of little use due to the fact that deploying forces to far away India would open up Britain to invasion from France. Of course Britain could just be a good neighbor and not expand its imperial domains but when has something that sensible ever happened.
In any event, British presence in India started in 4 cities: Madras, Malabar, Calcutta, and Bombay. Small trade forts quickly expanded and British soldiers and officials were based in these cities where they lived in walled compounds protected by small British units. Some British women lived in these compounds but usually they were occupied by 10 times as many men as women. Since men are you know men and Indian women are the best looking women in the World by far a few wandering eyes started to be cast. This was aided by the fact that most British men had been forced at gunpoint to marry their own cousins. From the Indian perspective it was also aided by forced cousin marriage and also the small fact that India was literally running out of men (remember the 80 years of total war). British traders were also seen as a good match since they were financially independent and broke the rules of social convention in service (which is hot, guys take note). So together what you had was a bunch of hot, young, well dressed and single women hanging out in the same area as a bunch of rich, tall, and edgy men. I wonder what happened right?
Now British sexual politics were very strict, male Brits were supposed to marry a WASP woman that your family approved of. Like I said an acceptable British wife was often your 2nd Cousin and they also usually hated you because they loved someone else and you were their cousin. Interracial marriage was taboo but then again the Brits in India were 8000 miles away from anyone enforcing that taboo. The British Officers were also human and the last time I checked humans tend to like a little romance. When off duty the British Officers began to date, then make love to then marry Indian women who also feel back in hysterical joy at the fact that they didn’t have to marry their potentially abusive cousin. The vast majority of the women who married British Officers were noblewomen from powerful families and here is where it all gets interesting.
By marrying, the British Officers were now relatives to some of the most influential families in India and as relatives had access to that families economic and military ties. If the British needed soldiers or money they often just went to the father in law and asked for some men. The British trained and equipped thousands of Indian Levy’s and used familial money as start-up capital. This evened the manpower equation and Indian trained troops often outnumbered British Regulars by 3:1. On top of military manpower the marriages were diplomatically advantageous. By marrying the British injected themselves into Indian Politics. This process was so effective that it even stopped revolts. In 1800 the entire state of Decca was going to rebel over taxes (c80%), but the revolt was stopped because the British Ambassador, James Achilles Kirkpatrick, had married a Telgue Princess named Khair-un-Nissa. Another revolt in Bengal was averted because a British Admiral married a woman named Maria Patel whose father was the 3rd richest man in Northern India. Nearly every early British Governor of India had a secret wife and Colin Powell is probably the decedent of a British Officer named Eyre Coote and a princess who was said to be the best looking woman in all of Carnatica.
Using this system British domains in India gradually expanded from 1707-1820. Britain never took particularly large swaths of territory, instead expanding gradually thru marriage and an alliance system that was taught to the British by Indian relatives. While a number of new territories were gained via direct conquest the majority were not. Moreover, inside the British Mandate it was India allies/relatives that managed the day to day operations of the British India. It was Indian administrators not British ones that navigated the complex social, religious and political circles of India. They did this not out of some sense of betrayal but out of a sense of service to families that they considered themselves a part and that they had given their most precious possessions (their children). Sure setbacks were suffered and revolts occurred but they were of a far lesser intensity than would have occurred had the British been going it alone.
I want to stress that the system of inter-marriage was mutually beneficial to all parties. On one hand the British received the domestic assistance they needed to conquer India without a big investment of money or manpower. On the other hand, noble Indian families were able to ‘arrange’ good marriages with allies that could greatly expand that family’s influence. Best of all the people getting married got to marry people they actually loved and were attracted to.
Sadly since British Society ranged from semi-racist to fully racist most of these liaisons were hidden from public society. Officers often maintained 2 homes one official home that was empty and another where they could express their passion with their legitimate wives. Officially these women were referred to as ‘Indian Maids’ but they weren’t maids they were these guys wives. Everyone knew what was going on and the secret Indian wives appear rather obviously in many paintings of the time. The gorgeous and exotic Indian wives also appear blatantly in wills. Over 35% of British wills in the 18th Century name an Indian wife as the main beneficiary of a British Officers estate. The presence of wills proves that these women were not maids, nor dirty secrets but the most beloved wives of reasonable men. The names of the Indian wives also appear constantly as ‘guardians’ of children in British boarding schools, and in lawsuits filed by long scorned first wives still living in England.
My mentor Dennis Showalter often refers to these process of inter-marriage as the most important part of the British conquest in India. Think about it, no marriages means no sepoys and no political division which means the British have to conquer India the hard way from square one. I honestly don’t think any of this was intentional. Indeed, most of the liaisons were probably just some lonely British Officers sitting around saying “Wow we are surrounded by the hottest women in the world, so I really don’t care about bizarre British race theory and cousin marrying and if we get a bunch of free soldiers from it why not. And who the hell can blame them.”
Without this process of inter marriage it’s just not likely the British would have conquered India. India was 8000 miles away from Europe and its politics were completely foreign to the British. Indian armies numbered by the 100,000 and until about 1800 India actually had more raw wealth than the rest of the British Empire combined. Sure the British held a technological and naval advantage but in a continent sized land this would not have been enough. Until 1840, Britain was constantly under the threat of invasion from France. Whitehall also had dozens of other colonies it had to protect and or crush into bloody submission. Deploying a large invasion fleet and field army to India would have been far too risky and no Prime Minister would have ever even suggested it. But as it was the British didn’t need a big invading army to conquer India because they had a manual written by Indians on how to conquer India.
By the 1840’s enough British women had immigrated to India to stop the practice of inter-marriage and the racist assholes in the British Raj banned it. This was not just a moral travesty but also a humanitarian one as well. History would show that the initial ‘Nabobs’ that managed British interests were far more benevolent than the autocratic corporatists that flocked to India after 1840. Since the ‘Nabobs’ had Indian families they were far more prone to treating Indian workers and Indian business partners fairly. But the corporatists that came later held no such sympathies and were more than happy to treat their Indian subjects like animals. In their shame the later administrators of the British Raj even doubted whether or not Indians were people at all. The initial exchange between the two group was covered up and replaced by a set of history books that emphasized British exceptionalism in a way that totally mythologized British History.
The actual way that the British conquered India (by marriage) stands in History as a truly unique spectacle. It shows that direct military conquest is not the only or most effective way to attain a particular goal and it shows that reality is often far more unexpected than you think.
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