Discussion HW4

It could not have been predicted, in the fourteenth century, that among the several international trade networks then existing, the one up in the far north- western corner of the Eurasian landmass would come to dominate almost the entire world. It was far from the richest one at the time. In the fourteenth cen- tury, there were several major trade networks.

China during Ming dynasty was the central power of a far-flung trade-trib- ute system. The Chinese had developed excellent ocean-going junks, some as long as 180 feet, benefiting from the Chinese invention of the magnetic com- pass (carried by Arab traders to the West), the sextant that could chart courses at sea by fixing on the Big Dipper, watertight compartments, dry docks, paddle wheel ships, and weather forecasting. During the period from 1405 to 1480, China became a maritime power that might have come to dominate the Pacific and Indian oceans as Europeans later did. In 1405 a Muslim eunuch from Yun- nan named Zheng He commanded a fleet of over 300 ships and 20,000 men, which sailed as far as India, Hormuz, and the east coast of Africa. This armada set out not to conquer but to trade. They were especially concerned with the strategic city of Malacca (Malaka) on the strait between Malaysia and Suma- tra, which controlled the waters connecting the Indian and Pacific oceans. But by 1480, bureaucrats at the capital began to worry about the costs of these mar- itime excursions and perhaps worry about the growing wealth and power of merchants in the eastern coastal cities. They turned down new requests for funds, burned records of Zheng He’s accomplishments, and turned inward, leaving the seas to others.

The Strait of Malacca, which was of such interest to China during its brief period as a maritime power, was a second maritime trade center from a very early period. Whoever controlled the strait and nearby islands and peninsula

reaped the benefits of a continuous sea-based trade, the southern trade route of Eurasia. The first to do so was the Srivijayan Empire, a contemporary of the very different, land- and agriculture-based state of Angkor. Srivijaya thrived on a trade that linked the treasures of China—porcelain, silk, lacquers—with India, the Middle East, and ultimately Europe. This trade link was based on a model of international trade very different from the one Europeans were to bring in a later period—the theoretical notion, at least, of “free trade” among “equal” nations, this idea that dominates even today. For Srivijaya to be able to play the middleman role between China, on the one hand, and a host of Indian and Arab traders, on the other, the empire had to submit to the Chinese model of international trade. For China, there could only be exchanges between the Middle Kingdom and its tributary states. There was no question of equal trade between equal nations. No nation was the equal of China, and the emperor was the Son of Heaven; nominally, at least, he claimed to be the emperor of the entire world. The Chinese knew of the existence of nations beyond their con- trol and made no particular assertions about them, but any nation wanting to engage in trade with China had to formally acknowledge China’s suzerainty by arriving with “tribute” and performing the three kneelings and nine prostra- tions before a symbol of the emperor. In return, they were lavished with gifts of greater value than they had brought, plus an imperial letter of patent, a seal of rank, and the Chinese calendar. They then had the legal right to trade and could get on with business. This vassal status may have seemed like a small humiliation for Srivijaya, since it did not involve them in any effort by China to dominate them politically, and it gave them access to the wealth of Chinese goods so desired in the rest of the world.

A third center of trade was a network linking Indian and Arab merchants in the Indian Ocean. Imagine the Indian Ocean as an enormous version of the Mediterranean Sea; small, coast-hugging trading ships could make stops along a vast semicircle from Zanzibar to Arabia to the two coasts of India to Burma to Indonesia. Calicut on the Malabar coast was a rich trade city where mer- chants who worked these waters exchanged gold, jewels, ivory, silk, and spices.

In the early 1500s when the first Portuguese ships began going directly to the Spice Islands, they described encountering enormous ships plying Southeast Asian waters, larger than their own largest ships. All were over 200 tons, and some were as large as 1,000 tons and carried 1,000 men. They were called jong in Malay and Javanese, which the Portuguese called junco. (The English learned this term, “junk,” and applied it to Chinese ships.) The main builders of these ships, heirs to 2,000 years of shipbuilding, were all along the north coast of Java and in southern Borneo and Pegu, close to the teak forests. The Srivijayan empire was long gone, and these were local sultans and merchants engaged in the lucrative long-distance, high-seas shipping, traveling to southern China, Malacca, the Coromandel coast of India, Aden, the Red Sea, and Madagascar. A fourth trade network was the land-based northern Eurasian route, the stretch of central Asia crossed by the ancient Silk Road. Throughout its history,

this venerable trade link between the Far East and the Mediterranean opened and closed depending on the local political climate, but from 1240 to 1340 it was again open, protected by Mongol outposts. During that “window of opportunity” thousands of European merchants poured eastward, including Marco Polo (see chapter 3).

Finally, there was the trade network of the eastern Mediterranean, where merchants from Italian city-states, Byzantium, and North Africans were in a lucrative transnational trade system.

Each of these networks was a “world system,” in the phrase made famous by Immanuel Wallerstein (1976). This term contrasts with the term “empire.” Both an empire and a world system are transnational bonds among polities of various size and type, but an empire is a system of political domination whereas a “world system” is an economic system. There may indeed be inequi- ties in such systems—Wallerstein’s analysis of the capitalist world system is an analysis of economic dominance—but they are not based on direct political dominance. Of course, it can happen, and did, that a world system produces empires, and that is the topic we turn to next. But the capitalist world system was always larger than, and different from, the empires that thrived on it.

The European period in Asia opens with the Portuguese. Prince Henry of Portugal, “The Navigator,” in one of the earliest partnerships of science and commerce, sponsored exploration by Vasco de Gama in search of a new route to the Indian Ocean that avoided the unfriendly Turkish-controlled Red Sea. Could you get there via the Cape of Good Hope? As it turned out, you could, and soon Portuguese trading ships were going all the way to Southeast Asia. When Vasco De Gama arrived home at the end of the fifteenth century with a cargo of cinnamon mixed with clay for which he had paid double its market value in Calicut, then sold it for 60 times the total cost of his two-year expedi- tion, the European rush to Asia was on.

Four years before this fortuitous voyage, the Pope had sought to contain Portuguese and Spanish rivalry by dividing the world between them in the Treaty of Tordesilla (1494). Spain got the New World and Portugal got Asia. This meant that during the sixteenth century, Portugal had no competition from Spain except for Spain’s backdoor entry to the Philippines via the Pacific late in the century.

The first viceroy of Portugal in the East was Dom Affonso d’Albuquerque (1509–1515) whose vision of an Asian empire was fired by a loathing of Mus- lims. This made the Islamic Mughal Empire in India, then in its prime, a par- ticular challenge. Albuquerque’s strategy was to establish a series of fortresses along the major coasts of the Indian Ocean. Unlike Arab and Indian trading vessels, his ships were armed. His first conquest was at Goa on the Malabar

Coast, a city that still retains its Portuguese flavor and was the very last spot in India to be relinquished 450 years later. From here the Portuguese controlled the pilgrim route to Mecca and could interfere with the spice trade from South- east Asia. In 1511 Albuquerque captured the crucial city of Malacca, and Macao was founded after Portuguese traders were expelled from Guangzhou. With coastal trade fortresses in India, Ceylon, Southeast Asia, and China, Prince Henry of Portugal was soon one of the richest princes in Europe, enhanced by another source of wealth: pirating Arab ships in lonely waters.

At mid-century, three Portuguese sailors who had taken passage in a Chi- nese junk were stranded by a typhoon off the coast of Japan. The Japanese wel- comed them with curiosity and friendliness. The Japanese were particularly interested in the weapons of the Portuguese castaways; very soon there were Japanese copies of them, which would transform the war culture of the samu- rai. Before long, both traders and missionaries were making their way to Japan. Francis Xavier and two other members of the Order of Jesus, known as the Jesuits, having just left Goa, landed in 1549 in early Tokugawa Japan and immediately began making converts. At first Christianity seemed to the Japa- nese to be another form of Buddhism; Christ was a saving Bodhisattva, as lov- ing and merciful as Amida or Kannon. The daimyo were given to understand that the price of lucrative trade was allowing the Jesuits to preach, a deal they were willing to make. But the intolerance of Christianity, which was gearing up for the Inquisition back in Europe, especially Xavier’s insistence that anyone who died without being a Christian would burn in hell forever, made enemies among the Buddhist monks. For people who revered their ancestors and had never really believed in hell, despite all the Buddhist iconography of hell, this

was a shocking doctrine.

Jesuits were received by the powerful Japanese daimyo Nobunaga in 1568 with courtesy that astonished people who knew him; he invited them to private suppers and listened to their religious views even while remaining a Tendai Buddhist. The samurai admired the Jesuits because they shared values of ascet- icism, loyalty, learning, and a certain aristocratic arrogance. And the Jesuits introduced material items the Japanese came to desire: tobacco, clocks, globes, maps, musical instruments, bread (still called by its Portuguese name, pan), rosaries, and European clothes. Perhaps most significant of all were the castle- fortifications, which the daimyo began to build in the Portuguese style. Hideyo- shi’s castle at Osaka is the most beautiful example.

But when Spanish Franciscans arrived, the two Catholic orders began to intrigue against one another. The Dutch and English arrived next and gave Tokugawa Ieyasu (the founder of the last shogunate) a Protestant view of Christianity. These foreigners also described the ambitions of European mon- archs, while Spanish armadas arriving in the Philippines vividly illustrated the dangers. There were a great many Christian converts, perhaps as many as 300,000 at the peak, along with a number of daimyo, and these, it was feared, might align themselves with a foreign power against the shogun. Acting on his

growing suspicions, the daimyo warrior Hideyoshi executed six Franciscans, three Jesuits, and 17 Japanese converts in 1597, thus beginning four decades of persecutions. In 1638, 37,000 Christians led by five samurai took refuge in an old feudal castle in Shimabara. They held out for two months but were finally overtaken, and all but 105 were killed. This was virtually the end of Christian- ity in Japan. After 1640 no foreigners remained except a handful of Dutch who were practically imprisoned at Nagasaki and became Japan’s sole source of knowledge about the outside world (this knowledge thus was called “Dutch Learning”) until Perry arrived in 1853.

The Spanish were, of course, cheating on the Treaty of Tordesilla when they established a presence in Manila, but politics back home—uniting the crowns of Portugal and Spain—made all that moot. They named the Philip- pines after Philip II of Spain and made themselves welcome in Asia by sending shiploads of Mexican silver across the “Spanish lake,” the Pacific. By the end of the sixteenth century, 72 metric tons of silver were arriving every year from the New World on the famous “Manila galleons,” and Mexican dollars became the de facto standard currency in international trade, the role of the US dollar in the twentieth century. In the Philippines no strong state had emerged on the order of China or Japan, and the many small-scale tribal societies were unable to fend off the Spanish. Thus the Philippines became the first Asian region, aside from the small Portuguese coast towns, to succumb to colonial dominance.

Half a century after Japan’s ill-fated encounter with Europeans, the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci was granted residence in Beijing, and for 125 years, until they were banned from China in 1725, Jesuits were a conduit for knowledge of China in Europe and of European learning in China. Europe was having its own form of Enlightenment (not the Buddhist one), and the learned Jesuits were the right monastic order to bring this new learning to China. Jesuits trans- lated Euclid’s geometry, over a hundred treatises on Western science and tech- nology, and many Christian works into Chinese. The Chinese emperor Kangxi (1661–1722), a man of tremendous energy and curiosity, was particularly favor- able to the Jesuits, especially to Ferdinand Verbiest, with whom he endlessly discussed science and religion (Spence 1974). The Jesuits wrote back to Europe that China was ruled by “philosopher-kings” (they meant the Confucian scholar-official class), provoking great admiration for China among Europe’s intellectuals. “Chinoiserie” came into vogue with Chinese-style furniture, fab- rics, and ceramics ornamenting mansions and pagodas rising from lavish gar- dens. But the Catholic mission to China self-destructed in much the same way it did in Japan, and in 1724 Christianity was banned from the Middle Kingdom.

During the sixteenth century, Portuguese were also stopping along Viet- nam’s long coastline to buy raw silk, and soon they were followed by Jesuits. Again Jesuits had great success in converting the people. The Vietnam elite, the Nguyen dynasty, had begun its conquest of Vietnam from their central capital at Hue, gradually taking over the Mekong delta and establishing a Confucian state on the Chinese model. They organized an examination system for select-

ing officials on the basis of scholarship in the Confucian classics and created a script for their language derived from Chinese characters. The Jesuits had little success with this Sinicized elite, but by the nineteenth century there were more Christians in Vietnam than in all of China. The Jesuits created a romanized script for Vietnamese, which eventually beat out the Chinese script. The Chris- tianization of Vietnam continued for the next 200 years; persecution of Chris- tians did not begin until the nineteenth century, when it provided a pretext for French invasion.

When the Spanish and Portuguese were powerful enough to divide the world between them, they didn’t leave any little spaces for other nations, and consequently they largely owned the sixteenth century, reducing people like Sir Francis Drake to risky adventures and piracy. But when the English defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, the seas were less dangerous for English and Dutch sailors who wanted their share of discovery and trade. The Dutch were a bit ahead of the English, with an excellent center of cartography in Antwerp, ambitious merchant houses, and nationalist loathing of the Spanish tyrants they had only recently escaped. In the 1590s, they sent no less than 91 ships to run the Spanish blockade to the Spice Islands. English ships were having less success, although Ralph Fitch had visited Mughal Emperor Akbar’s two capi- tal cities in 1585 and reported that each was twice the size of London. At that point, England’s only ambition was a share of the Indonesian spice trade.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century two unique and crucial organi-

zations were founded. On the last day of 1600, Queen Elizabeth I signed a charter creating the East India Company; in 1602 the Dutch East India Com- pany was chartered (the VOC, for Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie). Both were joint-stock companies, early forms of the financial corporation. No Eng- lish or Dutch merchant could afford the huge costs and risks of outfitting a ship and supporting it for a two-year voyage to Southeast Asia; one ship, the Red Dragon, cost 3,700 pounds and took four years for a round-trip. But 217 Lon- don merchants each contributed a few hundred pounds, thus forming the first great trading company. The Dutch raised 10 times more capital than the British and thus were able to send 38 ships to the Indian Ocean, where they defeated the Portuguese fleet and seized Amboina. The English were able to send out only four ships on their first venture, but their risk was handsomely repaid by an average profit of 170 percent on the first seven voyages.

The crowns of both countries granted their corporation a monopoly on trade for a specified number of years and the right to conclude treaties with native princes, maintain armed forces, build forts, and found “factories,” which then meant only warehouses and trade establishments in foreign places. Both companies began as trade enterprises but ended up deeply involved in local politics, joined Asian princes in warfare, and ended up as territorial empires. Merchants became colonial administrators, “factories” grew to huge cities, and

investment expanded from trade alone to production by means of another social invention of colonial times, the plantation system.

Better funded, the Dutch became the foremost naval and commercial nation in the first half of the seventeenth century. They captured the Javanese city of Jacatra, renaming it Batavia (it’s now Jakarta), and from here the first company governor-general, Jan Coen, ruthlessly extended Dutch control, both maritime and inland. In order to monopolize local trade in spices, they used their armies to destroy independent producers and traders. Cloves could only be grown in the Dutch-controlled region around Amboina; so 65,000 clove trees were destroyed in the Moluccas. When nutmeg growers on Banda Island resisted Dutch control, 2,500 inhabitants were massacred and 800 were taken to Batavia. This process reduced whole island populations, once prosperous with spice production and trade, to poverty.

They also killed whole sectors of long-distance trade that once enriched Asian communities from Southeast Asia to India. For instance, Indonesian and Indian merchants had traded island spices for Indian cloth; cloth imported to Southeast Asia between 1620 and 1650 had been worth 60 tons of silver a year. The Dutch killed this trade by importing their own cloth, and then, by ruining the indigenous Southeast Asian trade system, the buying power of the people plummeted so that even the Dutch textile trade was permanently depressed.

The British East India Company also had ambitions in the Spice Islands, but the Dutch were intent on monopolizing this trade. There was an ugly inci- dent in 1623 when the Dutch captured 17 British traders whom they tortured and decapitated. This was the turning point; the British turned to India as sec- ond best.

Elizabeth I’s contemporary in India was Akbar, the greatest of the Mughal emperors. The Mughals were the Indian extension of the greatest colonizing empire ever to dominate Central Asia, whose founding figure, Genghis Khan, united the Mongol tribes in 1206 (see chapter 3). They conquered China in 1279 but stopped short of India. In 1398 Tamerlane plundered Delhi, but not until 1526 did a descendant of both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane actually con- quer and stay to build an Indian empire. That was Babur, who had inherited a kingdom around Samarkand but sought fame and fortune first in Kabul and then by invading India. We know quite a lot about Babur, because he was a cul- tured, Persianized lover of the arts who wrote his memoirs in a charming and personal style. From Babur on, India has been ruled by people who, like the Chinese, make extensive administrative records, keep journals and write auto- biographies, commission regional gazetteers, and in other ways leave a wealth of records about social life. Babur did not live long after conquering India, and it was really his brilliant grandson, Akbar, who created the Mughal Empire.

Neither China nor India ever imagined maritime empires, though both

countries have lengthy coastlines with vigorous trading communities that, for

centuries, were engaged in rich long-distance international trade. Their capitals were never coastal but always deep inland. The enemies they worried about were even further inland, across passes and corridors from which aggressive, mounted warriors periodically emerged. Wealth and glory could be had by conquering territories and putting populations to work. The seas, by contrast, seemed merely empty; they were the borders you didn’t have to worry about. Who could imagine a maritime empire?

Thus, when the East India Company turned from the Spice Islands to India looking for trade, it found the Mughal Empire at its peak; it had a mighty army but no fleet. England first sent high-ranking ambassadors to court to ask for trade treaties; here, too, there was the problem of Jesuits speaking against Protestant English traders; and there was the problem that England didn’t really produce anything that India needed or wanted. India had its own thriv- ing cloth industry; anyway, in the Indian climate, who needed English wool- ens? But they were happy to sell Indian products for silver or gold. Emperor Jahangir finally granted permission to trade and build a “factory” but refused to give the Company the monopoly they desired.

The first factory of the East India Company in India was in the Mughal capital at Agra. But Agra was not convenient for maritime trade; they needed a factory on the Ganges delta, which would turn the entire Ganges system into a vast trade network. They were given permission to build a factory at Hooghly near a Kali shrine and a ghat, from which came the name Calcutta (Kali-ghat). Down on the southeast coast, the Company bought some land from a minor raja near the village of Mandraz to build a fort they called St. George in 1639. The city that grew there came to be called Madras, after the village. And finally, on the west coast, there was a small island that King Charles II got in his dowry when he married the Infanta of Portugal. He rented it to the East India Company for a loan at low interest and 10 pounds a year; this became Bombay. These three posts, now India’s three largest cities, gave England a tri- angulation on India; convenient at first for shipping, they became toeholds, then the founding territories, and finally the three “Presidencies” from which Britain moved inland as the Mughals went into decline after 1707.

India became the place where ambitious young men went to seek their for- tunes. Salaries were low, but the expectation was you would use your entrepre- neurial ingenuity to engage in business on the side, where fabulous fortunes were to be made. The greatest of the early adventuring Company men was Robert Clive, a hothead who regularly got into trouble until his father sent him to India to straighten him out. He went to Fort St. George as a clerk, but this work bored and depressed him so severely that once he tried to blow his brains out. It turned out there were better adventures ahead for Robert Clive.

The French had also established a post near Madras, and they got good at the game everyone (the English, the Dutch in Indonesia) learned: use your troops to support weak contenders for local thrones; put them in power; then use them as puppets. They repay you in currency, treasure, and trade; you get

rich. Clive was only 23 when he made his fame in India. There was one throne in nearby Arcot and two claimants; the French backed one, the English backed the other. The local prince (nawab), backed by the French, took all his troops from the capital to lay siege to the British candidate in Trichinopoly. Clive hatched the plan of taking Arcot while the nawab was away. A million specta- tors watched as he marched in with 200 British soldiers and 300 sepoys (from sipahi, soldier; Indian soldiers). It was so bold and brilliant that Clive’s fame immediately spread throughout India. The outcome was that the British- backed contender was declared king; the French-backed contender was exe- cuted; the French general, Dupleix, was humiliated and went back to France; and Clive was said to be invincible.

Not long afterward there was an incident in Calcutta that again began as competition between the English and the French but embroiled them with local rulers. The young prince, Siraj-ud-Daula, became suspicious when the English began to fortify Fort William against the French, and he moved an army to put a stop to it. The British official in charge took fright and fled downriver, leaving a small army behind, who were captured and imprisoned by Siraj in a small cell used to lock up three or four drunks at a time. As many as 145 men and one woman were forced inside to spend the night in the heat of May; only 23 sur- vived until morning. This incident, known as the “Black Hole of Calcutta,” provoked outrage in England, and Clive was sent to Bengal to take vengeance. There was a round of intrigue and duplicity, leading to the British victory in the Battle of Plassey in 1757, which resulted in another Clive puppet being put on a throne. Siraj-ud-Daula, who was only 20 years old, was captured, cut into pieces, and his remains paraded through the streets on an elephant. Clive was rewarded with the Mughal title of mansabdar, an administrative position that included a cavalry of 6,000 for which he was responsible, equivalent to that of a Mughal prince; this rank came with an estate of 880 square miles from which the expenses of the cavalry and his own personal fortune were to be raised. Overnight “Clive of India” became the richest man in England.

By the end of Clive’s career, the East India Company was the most impor- tant power in North India. In 1765 the Mughal emperor, Shah Alam, pro- claimed the East India Company his diwan or governor for the provinces of Bihar, Bengal, and Orissa. The Company was now to rule the millions of peo- ple in this region and collect the millions of rupees of revenue it generated. In return, they owed loyalty and support to the emperor in Allahabad plus 260,000 pounds annually. The East India Company was no longer just a trad- ing company; it had become the government of a vast territory of India.

As the official government with responsibility for the welfare of millions of Indians, the East India Company was expected to behave more responsibly than it had up to now. This was brought home when nearly a third of Bengali peasants starved to death in the famine of 1770. The famine was caused in large measure by British exploitation and was worsened when grain stores were sold at vast profit to the starving peasants who produced the grain in the

first place. Back in London, there was a growing sense that the Crown must take greater responsibility for what was happening in India. Pitt’s India Act of 1784 attempted to force responsible government on the Company by establish- ing a supervisory Board of Governors made up of British ministers and required the Company to begin training and adequately paying officials who would work diligently and honorably in India. It also called for regularizing the land holdings of Indians from whom revenues were collected. This resulted in a vast undertaking, in which the holdings and claims of every small and large zamindar were investigated and then British concepts of private property own- ership were imposed on what had been a vastly more fluid system of land use. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 thus made possible the displacement of the old Mughal princes of Bengal by newly rich Indian commercial families who could afford to buy them out when they fell on hard times.

Meanwhile, during the first half of the nineteenth century, economic phi- losophy was undergoing a shift. The philosophy under which the East India Company had first been chartered held that the purpose of trade was both to profit the merchants and to bring glory to the nation. The East India Company had been given a monopoly on trade to ensure it would become rich and pow- erful and simultaneously maintain and strengthen British power in competition with other sovereign nations. Business—international trade, at least—was to serve national interests. This philosophy was known as “mercantilism.”

But new ideas were in the wind, ideas associated with the growing middle class and with Britain’s emerging manufacturing base. This was the idea of “free trade,” destined to dominate the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the point of view of Manchester textile barons, the East India Company monopoly on trade meant flooding Britain with cheap Indian cloth just when English factories were becoming so productive that they needed constantly expanding markets to absorb all they could now produce. The monopoly on trade was abolished, but just to be on the safe side, tariffs were raised against Indian cloth entering Britain to protect the English textile industry. Thus eco- nomic policy under the name of free trade was tweaked to ensure England’s continued economic advantage. The result was the destruction of the Indian handloom industry.

A second new idea began to emerge: the linking of the British and Indian economies in a new way. Where, before, India had primary industries (grain, raw materials) and secondary industries (handloom cloth manufacturers), India would now specialize in primary production while Britain specialized in sec- ondary production, using its new industrial technology to add value to India’s raw goods. A permanent relationship and a single, pan-imperial economy would result. Rather than importing industrial technology to India, a new tech- nology for raw goods production was invented: the plantation system. Tea, cot- ton, opium, sugar, indigo—all were grown on vast estates owned by English planters employing Indians on a wage basis. Now instead of cultivating for themselves on small plots of land that could be passed down from father to son,

Indian peasants had no land, worked for wages kept artificially low in order to keep wages high and prices low in England, and had to buy food with their low wages. In this way, colonial economies were distorted by the growing imperial system, artificially simplified to the production of primary products only.

Meanwhile, piece by piece, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies, Britain gobbled up India. One means was the “doctrine of lapse.” According to Hindu law, when a raja was about to die without an heir, he could adopt a son, which would be treated like a first-born natural son. But in 1849 the British declared that “heirs and successors” in all treaties applied only to natural sons. Otherwise, the princely state “reverted” to the Company. In this way, state after state “reverted” to the Company—and many dispossessed heirs were skulking around, biding their time.

A crisis was brewing, and it exploded in 1857. The Company’s private army had grown to 40,000 troops—supplemented by 300,000 Indian sepoys. The sepoys tended to be men of the upper castes. They were well trained by the British and were overall intensely loyal, even though their commanders were almost always British and the handful of Indian officers were never put in com- mand over Indian troops. There had been a series of unpopular regulations, such as requiring sepoys to accept service in Burma, which was “across the Black Waters,” thereby causing pollution and outcasting. The triggering event, however, was a new Enfield rifle that fired a bullet greased, it was believed, by a mixture of cow and pig fat. The end of the cartridge had to be torn open with the teeth, which meant both Hindu and Muslim soldiers were polluted by using the new rifle.

The rebellion began in the garrison town of Meerut on May 10, 1857, when sepoys turned on their officers, killed some of them, then headed for Delhi. There they gathered under the window of Emperor Bahadur Shah in the Red Fort, fired a 21-gun salute and declared him emperor of all Hindustan. Europeans in Delhi were hunted down and killed. Between Meerut and Oudh, most garrisons joined the rebellion, murdering English military and civilian men, women, and children. The war raged throughout the hot summer, as the sepoys, at first spontaneous and disorganized, were joined and led by Indian princes like Nana Sahib of Oudh and the Rani of Jhansi. However, the rebel- lion was limited to the central Ganges basin. Bengal and Bihar stayed loyal; so did the Punjab, central India, and Madras. The telegraph system had just been completed, so communication was reduced to minutes rather than days or weeks in calling for reinforcements. Troops were summoned from Persia, Madras, Ceylon, Rangoon, and even an expedition to China was intercepted at Singapore and called back. By spring of 1858 England had reclaimed all the territory, inflicting often brutal vengeance. Emperor Bahadur Shah was exiled to Burma where he soon died, and the last 21 princes of the blood were hanged, thus extinguishing the Mughal dynasty.

After these events, Britain passed the Government of India Act, transfer- ring all rights and responsibilities of the East India Company to the Crown,

452 Part VI: European Empires in Asia