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Robert Clive, the first British governor of Bengal
Lord Richard Wellesley
Nicholas I
Queen Victoria
The British had the world's most advanced economy and were the world's foremost commercial power, creating for themselves greater economic opportunity. They had become the world's foremost trader across oceans and the world's foremost naval power. They were largely devoted to freedom in economic enterprise - rather than government-owned and directed enterprise. And they thought of themselves as moral and most civilized.
On the western coast of India, Britain's East India Company held the island of Bombay - which had been a desolate place that Britain's Charles II (1630-85) had acquired when he married a Portuguese princess. The company was also established in the Indian province of Madras, and it had a trading center at Masulipatam (Machilipatam). But the base in India for the East India Company was on the eastern side of the sub-continent, at Calcutta . In 1690, Calcutta was a village, sixty miles upriver in the Ganges delta, with access by ship to the high seas. There the company was close to textile producers, who took their goods overland to Calcutta. In 1717 the Mughal emperor, Farukh-siyar (1713-19), granted the company duty-free trading rights in exchange for three thousand Rupees, and, by 1735, Calcutta's population had risen to 100,000 and Calcutta had become a thriving commercial port.
In the 1700s, factional rivalries and warfare within the ruling Mughal dynasty was fragmenting its Islamic empire. Mughal rule remained around Delhi, and in the east a Mughal prince, Siraj-ud-Daula, in April 1756, succeeded to the throne of a fragment of the old empire. A few weeks after taking power he demanded that the British destroy their fortifications at Calcutta - a part of his domain. The British refused. Siraj-ud-Daula marched a small army with elephants against the British. His troops imprisoned British in what has been described as the Black Hole of Calcutta. Two months later news reached the British in Madras that 146 British men had been imprisoned and that only half of them had emerged alive the next day, the rest having suffocated. Scholarship has concluded that the story was an exaggeration, and some doubt that Siraj-ud-Daula was responsible for it. Nevertheless, from Madras the British sent an expedition of redcoats - British regulars - led by Robert Clive, a military officer belonging to the East India Company. Clive and the redcoats recaptured Calcutta on January 1, 1757, and the war continued.
Allied with the East India Company in Calcutta had been Hindu bankers, including India's wealthiest banker, Jagat Seth. Seth supported a pretender to power, Mir Jafar, to replace Siraj-ud-Daula. Some of the 50,000 or so troops on the side of Siraj-ud-Daula were paid not to fight, and the East India Company's force of 800 redcoats and 2000 Indians (Indians fighting with the British called Sepoys) defeated Siraj-ud-Daula at the Battle of Plassy. A week later, Clive led Mir Jafar to the throne, and, a few days after that, Siraj-ud-Daula's body was found floating in a river.
The East India Company became the power behind the throne in Bengal, and it began taking responsibility for collecting taxes and maintaining law and order in Calcutta and from Bihar in the northwest to Orissa to the southwest. The bankers in Bengal found security in Britain's support for free enterprise and rights of private property. Company men bullied their way into domination in the trading of salt, opium, tobacco, timber and in boat building. The nominal ruler, Mir Jaffer, demanded some limits on commercial activities by company men, and the company described him as unfit to govern and had him replaced. Eventually, his replacement, Mir Kasim, tried to acquire independence from company rule, and, in 1763, a war was fought against his supporters, won by the company, and the company expanded to the city of Petna.
Late in 1769 the monsoon rains failed, leaving Bengal without grain. Famine appeared in 1770, taking the lives of an estimated third of Bengal's peasantry. The company had stored grain for itself, its military and servants, and some of it was sold to the populace at inflated prices, producing fortunes for a few, while some people in the area were reduced to cannibalism.
Some were getting rich, but the company itself was financially burdened, partly from the cost of maintaining its military force. Britain's parliament intervened in 1773, passing an act that put the company back on its feet financially while giving parliament greater control over the affairs of the company and placing British affairs in India under the administration of a governor-general.
In the Seven Years' War (1756-63), the British fought the French in India as well as in North America and Europe, and with the French losing that war, its enclaves in India were reduced and no longer a competitive challenge to the British. But soon the French allied themselves with a sultan in India hostile to the British. This was Sultan Tipu of Mysore, who had come to power in 1782. In 1789 he invaded the nearby state of Travancore (on the southeastern tip of the sub-continent) expecting help from the French that did not arrive - the French having been distracted by their revolution. Travancore had allied itself with the British, and war between Sultan Tipu and the British followed - the Third Mysore War - ending in 1792 in a British victory and Tipu forced to cede a small portion of his territory, Malabar, to British control.
In May 1798, Napoleon and his troops crossed the sea from France to Egypt. The British feared Napoleon's forces going as far as India. Tipu allied himself again with the French and began organizing for another war. The British, aware of Tipu's alliance, asked him about it, were unsatisfied with his response and attacked - the Fourth Mysore War, fought in 1799. Tipu died at the head of his troops, and the British took control of Mysore, restoring the rule of an old Hindu royal family to a center portion of Mysore, with whom the British made a subsidiary alliance - an alliance in which the kingdom was dependent upon the British for its security.
Britain's governor-general in India since 1798, Richard Wellesley, thought well of subsidiary alliances. The many independent Hindu kingdoms north of Mysore remained hostile to British and to East India Company impositions. These were kingdoms of Marathi speakers. In a confederation, the Maratha (or Mahratta) kingdoms had become India's foremost power - having expanded against the weakened Mughal empire to their north. During Britain's war against Napoleon, the Maratha powers allied themselves with Napoleonic France. The British exploited rivalries among the Maratha, and they defeated Maratha powers militarily. They left the Maratha kingdoms independent - easier, perhaps, than attempting an extension of rule and with a greater appeal to hearts and minds. The British ended their alliance with those Maratha princes who had sided with them. But British power remained a shadow over the kingdoms, and the princes who had fought the British felt their power to be in limbo.
After the Maratha wars of 1802-1805, many Maratha soldiers turned to looting, and political anarchy and banditry spread across India and into territory dominated by the East India Company. The British augmented their force in India, recruiting Indians and creating an army of 200,000. With this force, the company was able to suppress disorder across India, including a few isolated uprisings. A unified rising against the British would have destroyed the British presence in India, but the British were careful not to aggravate the Indians to an extent that would create a unified rising. Trying to avoid increasing hostility toward them, the British chose not to tamper with the rituals and customs of the Hindus, and they tried keeping taxes lower than what Indian rulers before them had demanded.
In 1813, Britain's parliament renewed the East India Company's charter but placed more government control over the company and abolished most of its trading monopolies within India - to the pleasure of other British business interests. The company had been against the arrival of Christian missionaries, fearing that missionaries would annoy the Indians, and parliament forced the company to allow a few Christian missionaries into restricted areas in India.
In 1814-15 the British in India fought a war against expansion by Nepalese Gurkahs out of the Himalayan mountains. A treaty was signed with the Nepalese in 1815, and ratified in 1816, depriving the Nepalese of their newly acquired territory. The Nepalese agreed to a British residence at Katmandu, and the British recognized Nepal as an independent nation.
In 1817, the British joined the Maratha kingdom of Nagpur into its system of subsidiary alliances, and on the day the alliance was signed, the British residence at Poona (Pune) was sacked and burned. Another Anglo-Maratha war erupted, with a force of 27,000 men attacking a British force of 2,800 at Khirki or Kirkee (now Khadki), a few miles north of Poona. With superior weapons and artillery the British force put the Maratha force to flight. Other risings against the British occurred among the Maratha. The British won again, the war ending in 1819 with the British annexing Maratha territory.
The war with Napoleon was over, and in Britain, people saw the success of their countrymen in India not as aggression but as a noble enterprise - the overcoming of mischief, poor governance and an evil obstruction to honest trade. The British had also outlawed slave trading across the high seas and their warships had begun patrolling against such trade. Looking at India they disapproved of infanticide, the caste system and the suicide of Hindu widows - suttee. But in time and with tranquility under British domination, some believed, the people of India would be amenable to reason and morality.
Meanwhile Christian evangelists in India were having little success. Unlike the barbarian kings converted by Christian missionaries in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, the Muslims and Hindus of India had a rich intellectual tradition and were to cling to those traditions - the Hindus as stubbornly as they had against the Islamic incursions of previous centuries.
On the Malay Peninsula in 1771 the Sultan of Kedah was desperate for help against his enemies and offered the British the little island of Penang in exchanged for help in defending his territory. In 1795, the year that the Netherlands were annexed by France, the British took control of what had been Dutch controlled territory called Malacca (Melaka), on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. And in 1802, in accordance with the Treaty of Amiens between Britain and France, the British moved into Ceylon, where the Dutch had been since the 1660s - Ceylon becoming a British Crown Colony.
In 1818 the Napoleonic wars were over and the Netherlands were independent again and the Dutch back in Southeast Asia, and an East India Company employee, Stamford Raffles, argued that Singapore island, on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, was a good place to create another port for the sake of ending Dutch domination around the Malay Peninsula and Java. The island was 25 by 15 miles (40 km by 24 km) with a scattered population of about 1,000. (At the end of the twentieth century its population would be more than four million.) After negotiations with rulers at the south end of the peninsula, the company founded their settlement.
The British, meanwhile, were having problems with the Burmese. Burmese rulers had been slow in agreeing to meet with British envoys, and, in 1785, Burma expanded territorially into Manipur, massacring, according to the British, half the population. In 1819 Burma expanded into the Ahom kingdom in Assam, again massacring, and sending refugees into British dominated areas. The Burmese demanded extradition of the refugees and spoke of their intention of conquering Calcutta. In 1824, the Burmese pushed farther west, and the British declared war.
The British and their Indian soldiers expelled the Burmese from Assam, and British ships attacked Rangoon, which a British-Indian force captured in May, 1824. In April,1825, they captured Prome, 150 miles upriver from Rangoon. Then, south of Ava, the British-Indian force killed the Burmese general Bandula and routed his armies. In February, 1826, the Burmese made peace with the British - Treaty of Yandabo - agreeing to pay war indemnity that was about one-fifteenth what Britain spent on the war. The treaty gave to the British the right to dominate the coasts along Arakan and behind Tenasserim Island, and it recognized Manipur as an independent state. And toward the end of that year, the Burmese, at Ava, agreed to a commercial treaty with the British.
In 1824, the British and Dutch signed a treaty expressing their recognition that Sumatra, Java, the Maluku Islands and other islands in the Indonesian Archipelago, were to be within the Dutch sphere of influence and that the Malay Peninsula, Singapore and northern Borneo would be in Britain's sphere of influence. The treaty provided that neither the British nor Dutch would restrict the other in trade anywhere in their areas they controlled. And the two powers agreed to repress piracy.
The treaty began:
The King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and His Majesty The King of the Netherlands, desiring to place on a footing, mutually beneficial, their respective Possessions and the commerce of their subjects in the East Indies, so the welfare and prosperity of both Nations may be promoted in all times to come, without those jealousies which have, in former times, interrupted the harmony which ought always to subsist between Them ; and being anxious that all occasions of misunderstanding between Their respective Agents may be, as much as possible, prevented.
The Dutch had been in the "East Indies" since the 1500s, with an interruption of French rule from 1795 to 1810, and the return of the Dutch did not please local people. On Java, the Dutch returned to an ownership that was all but the middle and southern half of the island, up from about one-sixth of the island in 1750. With the death of a sultan, the Dutch intervened, passing over an elder son, prince Diponegoro of Yogyakarta and allowing his younger brother the succession. Diponegoro organized a revolt against the Dutch and against other foreigners, mainly Chinese, to whom the Dutch had sold a considerable amount of property. Diponegoro mobilized the island's aristocracy, and, as a leader in the religious community, he was able to mobilize common people. Java had a population of around three million (around 115 million in 1995), and Diponegoro launched guerrilla warfare that was substantial and at first successful. The Dutch managed to hold on, and in 1826 more Dutch troops arrived. They posted soldiers in forts dispersed in contested territory, from which they made successful forays, and by 1830, with superior firepower, the Dutch defeated Diponegoro and his followers. Perhaps 200,000 Javanese died in the war. Diponegoro was arrested and was exiled to Sulawesi, where he died.
While the Dutch were fighting a rebellion on Java, a rebellion was raging on the island of Sumatra - the Paderi War, from 1821 to 1837. This war had origins from 1803, when Muslim pilgrims returned to Sumatra from Mecca, where they had had contact with their Wahhabi (wahabi) co-religionists, the pilgrims returning wearing white robes and turbans and with a passion for Wahhabi reforms. They began a movement for purified living, in the name of the Prophet Muhammad. Ostentatious dress, cockfighting, gambling, alcohol, chewing the narcotic betel nut was opposed, as was opium and that vice called tobacco. The Wahhabists, who became known as the Paderi, moved from preaching to forceful political action against the islands high-living and wealthy Indonesian rulers. These rulers looked for help where they could get it and allied themselves with the Dutch. The Paderi took up guerrilla warfare against the Dutch.
The Dutch crushed the Wahhabist soldiers of God, but it cost the Netherlands government more money than they could afford. So the Netherlands government ordered its new governor-general in the East Indies to exact more wealth from their East Indies possessions. So for more wealth to tax, the governor-general launched a program for expansion of commercial agriculture.
Iran in the early 1700s suffered from civil wars and economic decline, especially in northern Iran, where silk and cotton had been exported and through which caravans had passed on their way to Turkey and Russia. And, weakened militarily, Iran was invaded by Sunni Afghanis, who were outraged by Shia persecutions of Sunni Muslims in Iran.
Reunification followed a struggle for power among feudal lords in the north and a struggle between the north and pretenders to power in the south. Emerging as the dominant power in the north of Iran was Aga Muhammad Khan - of a tribe originally from Azerbaijan, in the Caucuses. In warring against the south he emerged victorious, with young women in the south distributed as slaves to soldiers of the north, and with Aga Muhammad Khan presented with 20,000 pairs of eyeballs. Aga Muhammad Khan sent his soldiers out to unite more of Iran, and he sent an army to Georgia and Azerbaijan. Georgia had been fought over between the Turks and the Iranians for centuries, with the Russians guaranteeing its independence in 1783. Azerbaijan had been under Iranian control for centuries, except for 1723-35 when it was held by the Russians. In 1795, Aga Muhammad Khan left the Georgian capital, Tiflis in ruins and took from Georgia 22,000 slaves.
In 1796, Aga Muhammad Khan crowned himself as King of Kings (shahinshah). He had no sons (at the age of five he had been emasculated by his family's enemies) but he was the first of what was to be a new dynasty of kings, the Qajar dynasty (to last until 1979). In 1797 he was assassinated by two servants whom he had condemned to death, and his nephew, Baba Khan, inherited his rule, taking the name Fath Ali Shah.
Shiite ulama were of dominant influence again in Iran, while Fath Ali Shah enjoyed his vast harem and the prestige of rule, and he liked to identify himself with the great rulers of Iran's past. By 1801, Georgia had reverted to Russian control, and, in 1804, Fath Ali Shah sent troops back to the Caucasus, where they fought the Russians until 1813, when he felt compelled to abandon Iran's claims there and to sign the Treaty of Gulistan.
Fath Ali Shah sought advantage from the British, who had begun to look to Iran as a bulwark against Russian expansion in the direction of India. In 1814, when France was being defeated and Austria was weakened, Russia was the remaining great power in Europe. The British were suspicious of Russia's old-fashioned autocracy, and they saw Russia - their ally against France - as their major power rival. The British saw the Iranians as no match for the Russians, and in 1814 they continued what had been a series of agreements with Fath Ali Shah. The British agreed to come to Iran's aid should any war with a European country arise. They agreed to refrain from interfering in any struggle between Iran and Afghanistan (where Iran was claiming suzeraintry) and they promised to pay the Iranians an annual subsidy of 150,000 pounds. Iran, in turn, agreed to break relations with any power that attacked the British.
A decade later, with the death of tsar Alexander I (Russia's victor over Napoleon), Fath Ali Shah sent his troops back into the Caucasus. Russia's new tsar, Nicholas I, said, "I am just crowned and here the Persians are occupying several of our provinces." Nicholas disliked going to war, but did so to defend what he called Russia's dignity. The British failed to join Iran against the Russians, claiming they were not abandoning their treaty because the Iranians were the aggressors. Fath Ali Shah was miserly about spending his great wealth on his military, and against the shah's weakened force the Russians were able to push through the Caucasus and force Iran to sue for peace. The Treaty of Turkmanchai followed, in 1828, a treaty said to have left Iran not completely independent. Russian goods were to be exempt from tariffs within Iran; Russians in Iran were not to be subject to Iranian law; and the Iranians were not to have a naval force on the Caspian Sea. The latter gave a Russian military force easy access to northern Iran - a step closer to Afghanistan - which disturbed the British.
In the early 1820s, Mahmud II, Ottoman sultan since 1808, was fighting a rebellion by his Greek subjects - what became known as the Greek War of Independence. The Greeks slaughtered some 30,000 Turks and Turks retaliated by massacring Greeks in Constantinople (Istanbul). Fath Ali Shah tried to take advantage of the Greek rebellion, but without success. He and Mahmud were bitter rivals - a Sunni Muslim sultan against a Shia Muslim shah - both of them called zill-ullah (shadow of God). Fath Ali Shah was obliged to withdraw from the war in 1823, signing a treaty with the Ottoman sultan that involved no changes of territory.
In 1824, to help fight against the Greek rebellion, Mahmud sought help from his governor in Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha, supposedly his subordinate but superior to him militarily. The governor sent his son Ibrahim as the head of a force that landed in 1825 at Navarino (Pylos) on the western coast of the Peloponnesian Peninsula (also known then as Morea). Ibrahim's force fought their way eastward, easily defeating the Greeks and massacring numerous Christians - which offended more people in Western Europe, especially in London. And, in 1826, the Egyptians overran Athens, and many in Europe concluded that the Greek rebellion was a lost cause
Mahmud felt disgraced that Muhammad Ali Pasha's military was better than his, and he was planning to strengthen his military. This required crushing an old institution in Ottoman Turkey: the Jannisaries. As described in a previous chapter, this was an institution of fighting men originally consisting of children taken from Christian slaves, selected for their potential as warriors, given military training and brought up as Muslims. Originally the Janissaries had been devoted to asceticism, celibacy and to other behavior that matched Islamic values. They had been proud warriors, an effective fighting force with esprit de corps, and had been eager for glory and much feared by Europeans. The Janissaries had become a power in Turkey, with feudal powers, not unlike the Samurai of Japan in their days of power. And like the palace guard in Ancient Rome, or Eunuchs in China, they had been the makers and breakers of kings. Also, they had become indolent, corrupt and opposed to reform.
Mahmud Sultan feared the Janissaries and surrounded himself with a military force with western artillery. Mahmud ordered the Janissaries to adopt the European form of military drill. The Janissaries refused. In late May, 1826, the Sultan Mahmud moved to expand his military force, and in June the Janissaries revolted, with the help of provocateurs loyal to Mahmud. Those Janissaries who rushed Mahmud's palace were gunned down with grapeshot from Mahmud's artillery. Mahmud's force bombarded the barracks of the Janissaries and hunted down and killed Janissaries wherever they could find them. The event was called Vak'ayi-Hayriye (The Auspicious Incident). And a curse was pronounced on the name Janissaries.
British trade with Turkey had risen over past decades, and the British were concerned about stability and unilateral Russian advances southward against Turkey. The new tsar in 1826, Nicholas I, was also interested in stability in Turkey and interested in cooperating with Mahmud. He was as Orthodox Christian, as were the Greeks, but his support for his brother Orthodox Christians was ambivalent. He viewed Ottoman rule over the Greeks as legitimate and the Greek revolt as a violation of the conservative order that he wanted to preserve in Europe as well as in Turkey. In an effort to settle the conflict between the Greeks and the Ottoman Empire.
Mahmud was hostile and afraid of the Russians and closed the strait of Bosporus, alongside Constantinople, to Russian ships. Nicholas could not tolerate this. The British and French, who still favored the Greeks, joined with the Russians in a combined navy - mostly British. In September, 1827, an Egyptian fleet with troop transports landed at Navarino Bay, and on October 20 the combined fleet of British, French and Russians attacked the Egyptian fleet bottled at Navarino and destroyed most of it.
Mahmud exhorted Muslims everywhere to a jihad against Russia, calling it "a struggle for the faith and for our national existence" and for everyone, rich and poor, "a sacred duty." In April, 1828, Russia declared war against Mahmud. That year the French landed a force of about 14,000 on the Peloponnesian Peninsula, and the Egyptians evacuated the peninsula. In 1829, the Russians were at Adrianople (Edirne), the going rougher for the Russian force than Nicholas had imagined. Nicholas was unenthusiastic for more war and uninterested in conquest of Constantinople and the straits. Britain, France and other European powers gathered and pressured Mahmud to sue for peace, the result being the Treaty of Adrianople, signed in September. In that treaty, Mahmud promised independence for a portion of Greece; granted autonomy to Serbia; gave Russia permission to occupy Moldavia and Walachia (Wallachia) until a large indemnity was paid; opened the straits to the merchant ships of all nations; and gave to Russia a piece of land at the mouth of the Danube River, on the Black Sea.
Defeated militarily, Mahmud continued with reforms, for the sake of military power, until his death in 1839. His military needed officers with some education, and so he initiated reforms in education and sent some young men for schooling in Europe. For the sake of those wounded in battle, his education program included the creation of medical doctors. And Mahmud moved against the independent powers of feudalistic landholders and semi-autonomous governors. He succeeded in Mesopotamia, but he was less than successful regarding Egypt.
In 1831 the British claimed there was misrule in Mysore, a kingdom with which they had had a subsidiary alliance, and they took over administration of the kingdom. Meanwhile, people in Britain were criticizing the East India Trading Company for its restrictions on Christian missionaries and for supporting Hinduism, and in 1833 parliament responded by giving Christian missionaries the right to go to India without a license. Parliament took power from the East India Company, took over the company's debts, conferred all British power in India upon their governor-general in India, and eliminated the company's trading monopoly with China and the East Indies, leaving the company with a trade monopoly in India in salt. And parliament allowed any British subject to migrate to India.
In British controlled India, English was to be the language in the courts of law, and in 1835 the British opened an education system, with instruction in English, soon followed by English speaking civil servants. With only 17,000 military personnel in India, the British remained concerned about hearts and minds in India. The phobia in Britain about Russian expansion was at an all time high, and Britain's elder statesman, the Duke of Wellington, observed that, for defense against the Russians in India, Britain was dependant upon its Indian troops - the Sepoys.
In early 1838, Shah Muhammad of Iran, encouraged by Russians, sent a force into western Afghanistan and laid siege to the city of Herat. The British protested, and Russia's government publicly disowned Russian involvement in the Shah's venture. Nevertheless, with the left-liberals detesting Russia because of its illiberality and Britain's conservative-right concerned about Russia's threat to Britain's position in the world, a consensus existed for a tough line. Parliament decided in favor of a demonstration of British power. The British believed that the ruler in Afghanistan, Dost Muhammad, was too friendly with the Russians, and, on October 1, 1838, Britain's governor-general in India, Lord Auckland, issued what is called the Silma Manifesto. The welfare of India, it stated, required that the British have "a trustworthy ally" on India's western frontier. Lord Auckland, normally a pacific man, sent a force through the Bolan Pass - a force of 12,000 British and Indian troops, with elephants, 38,000 camels and a horde of followers, including families, prostitutes, and sellers of opium, rum and tobacco. They reached Kandahar in April, Gazni in June and Kabul in August, 1839. Some of the British in the force were hoping to show their courage against the Russians.
The British denied that they were invading Afghanistan. Instead, they claimed, they were supporting Afghanistan's legitimate ruler "against foreign interference and factious opposition." The man the British were supporting was Shah Shuja, a loser in recent decades in the struggle for power in Afghanistan. The British imprisoned Dost Muhammad, but he escaped. Guerrilla warfare continued against the British-Indian force, and rumors of a Russian invasion to restore Dost Muhammad became common among the British.
Dost Muhammad was recaptured and taken to India. The British were barely able to hold on in Afghanistan. In November 1841, Sir Alexander Burnes, Britain's appointed political resident at Kabul, was hacked to death, and an uprising in the city left 300 of a British detachment dead. The British ran from Kabul, but a British force returned to rescue captives, and to punish the city they blew up its covered marketplace and troops went on a spree of looting. In April, 1842, Shah Shuja was assassinated, and that year the British were forced to withdraw from Afghanistan.
The war cost the British and Indians 20,000 lives. Dost Muhammad returned to Afghanistan and to power in 1843. Before the British invasion, the Afghanis had been hospitable to foreigners, but now they were xenophobic. And the demonstration of power that the British had hoped to display had become humiliation.
The British were afraid of being perceived as militarily weak and in India were interested in demonstrating their power. Their major challenge was from Sikhs in the Punjab. Sikhs had been fighting among themselves over who would succeed to a throne that had been vacated in 1839, and the British allied themselves with one faction against another. The Sikhs were confident and well-trained fighters, better armed than other Indians had been, but not always as well-armed as the British and their sepoys. In December 1845 a coalition of Sikhs forces attacked the British. In three months of tough fighting in the Punjab - at Moodkee, Ferozeshah, Aliwal, and Sobraon - the British forces prevailed, and in 1846 the Sikhs signed a treaty obliging them to disband most of their military.
The Sikhs had been ruling in Kashmir since they had conquered it in 1757, and the British sold it to a Hindu maharaja, Ghulab Singh - despite that area being overwhelmingly Muslim.
A second Anglo-Sikh war erupted with a Sikh revolt in April, 1848. The British won again, and in 1849 they formally annexed the Punjab and territory to northwest, including Peshawar, pushing their control in India across the Indus River to the Khyber Pass.
China's population had doubled between 1700 and 1794, to 313 million.[note] Expansion of farming in Jiangzi and Hunan provinces had eliminated much forest there. Taiwan was now a part of China, having been annexed in 1683, and a census in 1811 showed Taiwan with a Chinese population of almost two million.[note] In 1756 and 1757 the armies of Emperor Qianlong had extended China's border to its farthest western point, and his rule included Tibet and Mongolia.
Agricultural production in China had not been rising relative to the size of its population, and, without cheap food, the average Chinese had little money with which to buy much else, and there was no boom in manufacturing and no increase in hiring the unemployed. China was exporting tea to Britain, making porcelain for export and manufacturing silk and cotton goods, but labor was plentiful and cheap enough that, like slavery, it diminished incentive for investing in machinery. Businessmen were not in an environment that encouraged entrepreneurship, the government providing little security for businessmen and private enterprise. Economics was not a subject that inspired interest among people of influence. Those who had leisure for learning were not interested in possibilities regarding technology. They were interested in literature, the arts, Confucianism and religion.
China was an autocracy and a theocracy, ruled by a Manchu emperor from the Manchu Aisin Gioror clan in Manchuria, the Qing dynasty, which had ruled since 1644. From the imperial palace at the Forbidden City, Beijing, the Qing dynasty was maintaining a Manchu military and trying to maintain a Manchu identity apart from the Chinese, while supporting Chinese arts and educating themselves in Confucian classics.
In the late 1700s, scarcity of land, corruption in the bureaucracy and military, and pauperization created unrest. Common people expressed their grievances through religious societies, societies compelled to secrecy vis-à-vis hostile imperial authorities. An impoverished anti-Manchu religious society in a mountainous region in central China had forecast the advent of Buddha, the restoration of the Ming dynasty and salvation for its followers. It confidently launched a tax protest. From 1796 to 1804, across China, secret societies were in rebellion against Manchu authority. This is called the Great Lotus Rebellion. Emperor Jiajing (1796-1820) pursued a systematic program of pacification, combining extermination of rebel guerrilla bands with offers of amnesty for deserters.
The violence returned in 1813 when rebels, aided by palace eunuchs, almost assassinated Emperor Jiajing. This was the Eight Trigrams Rebellion. One of its leaders, Lin Ch'ing, had declared himself the reincarnation of the Buddha and said that another leader of the movement, Li Wen-ch'ang, would rule on earth as the "King of Men." But this was preempted by the reality of Emperor Jiajing's army. Li Wen-ch'ang and more than 70,000 other rebels were killed.
China had long been aware of opium as a medicine. Its addictive qualities had also been known, and in 1723 its sale and consumption within China had been made illegal. In the 1790s the East India Company was sending to China around 4000 chests of opium each year, aboard third-party ships - alongside the cotton that it was selling to the Chinese. The British attitude toward opium was little different from their attitude toward the many other drugs sold in London's many apothecary shops. British merchants violated China's ban on the importation of opium and bribed Chinese officials.
The British were buying tea from the Chinese in an amount greater in value than the cotton and opium they were selling to the Chinese. To pay the difference, the British were losing silver. Rather than reduce their consumption of tea they sought remedy in an increase in the sale of opium to the Chinese. Between 1822 and 1830, the British shipped perhaps four times as much opium per year as they had around the turn of the century. [COMMENT]
The emperor, Daoguang (who ruled from 1821 to 1850), warred against the opium trade, with little success. His letter to Britain's Queen Victoria (whose rule began in 1837) was never delivered. In March 1839, after a decade of failed anti-opium campaigns, China's authorities demanded that merchants hand over their stocks of opium and promise never again to trade in opium in China, on penalty of death. Britain's Superintendent of Trade, Charles Elliot, on the scene in China, ordered British subjects to hand over their stocks of opium, and 21,000 chests of opium were surrendered to and destroyed by the Chinese.
Britain's government was under pressure from companies involved in the opium trade, and the party in power (the Whigs - soon to be called the Liberal Party) did not want to be accused of failing to protect Britain's commercial interests. Britain's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Palmerston, had previously acknowledged the right of China to end the importation of opium, but, under pressure, he considered that British subjects had been imprisoned in China and mistreated and that Charles Elliot had been coerced in surrendering stocks of opium, and, in October, Lord Palmerston authorized the sending of an expeditionary force to China.
British warships along China's coasts - including the Nemesis, a steam-powered ship of iron - had superior fire-power to that of Chinese vessels or shore defenses, and despite heroic efforts against the British, China felt obliged to acknowledge defeat and concede to British demands. With the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, signed aboard the warship Cornwallis, China agreed to trade with Britain. It agreed to "fair and regular" tariffs and to open the ports of Guangzhou, Xiamen (Amoy) Fuzhou, Ningpo and Shanghai to foreign traders and to grant to the British whatever trading concession China granted to other powers. China agreed to pay Britain an indemnity of 20,000,000 silver dollars and to cede the island of Xianggang (Hong Kong) to Britain.
European powers, led by Britain, were interested in stability between the Ottoman Empire and Russia, and in 1841 they signed a treaty that affirmed Ottoman control over the straits between the Mediterranean and Black Seas and forbade any power to send warships through the straits in time of peace. Nicholas I of Russia was a signatory to this agreement and was happy to cooperate with Britain. Britons had been afraid of Russian expansion southward, especially into Afghanistan, and some hostility toward Russia had been entertained. But Nicholas wanted to get along with Britain and visited there in 1844, leaving under the impression that his relations with Britain's leaders were good.
The revolutions in Europe in 1848 and 1849 strained relations between the liberal British and conservative Russia. Queen Victoria thought Tsar Nicholas not well educated. Nicholas (also the King of Poland) was disliked as an oppressor of the Poles, and his war against the Hungarians further damaged his image in Britain or France. In these countries Russia was still seen as a land of serfdom, the whip and knout.
Nicholas was head of the Russian Eastern Orthodox Church - the state religion. His subjects knelt when he came into view. Everyone, including scholars, were expected to be devoted to the "sacred principles" that Nicholas stood for. And Nicholas was sincerely devout. He saw himself as the defender of God's order across Europe. He adhered to the motto of his family (the Romanovs): "orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality." Nicholas was for doing right. He favored peace with obedience domestically and peace with other nations if at all possible. But troublesome for Nicholas was conflict among Christians concerning Jerusalem. There a silver star placed by Roman Catholics at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem was stolen, and Catholics described Orthodox Christian monks as the thieves. In Jerusalem, Orthodox monks and Catholic priests scuffled. France's president, Louis Napoleon, made a show of being a good Catholic and championed Roman Catholic control over Christianity's sites in the Holy Land. The Holy Land was part of the Ottoman Empire, and Sultan Abdul Mejid (1839-61) favored French control over the Christian sites. Nicholas saw this as a blow to Russia and to Orthodox Christianity, and he was forceful in demanding a reversal from the sultan.
Britain was still afraid of Russian expansion southward and gave the sultan surreptitious support. Backed by France and Britain, the sultan refused Nicholas. Blood was again to be shed over a religious dispute. In diplomatic maneuvers, Nicholas thought he neutralized European powers, including France and Britain, regarding his differences with the sultan. In February, 1853, he sent an ultimatum to the sultan demanding that the conflict in the Holy Land be settled in favor of the Orthodox Christians, Nicholas demanding that the sultan recognize the rights of Orthodox Christians living within his empire.
On April 19, 1853, while waiting for a response, Russia proclaimed the right to protect Christians in the Ottoman Empire. On May 21, the Ottomans rejected the Russian ultimatum. In July, Nicholas mobilized his armies and invaded neighboring vassal states of the Ottoman Empire - Moldavia and Walachia. Futile negotiations between Russia and the Ottomans followed, and the Ottomans declared war on October 4.
On November 30, at the port of Sinop on Black Sea coast of northern Turkey, the Russians attacked a small fleet of Ottoman warships and transports, which had chosen to remain at port under the protection of shore batteries. The Turks refused to surrender and were ordered by their superiors to fight to the last man. The wooden Turkish ships burned, and of the 4,400 Turkish seamen, 3,000 were killed. Then the guns of the Russian ships destroyed the port and its defensive installations. The Russians had performed efficient naval warfare, without violating any article of war, but, on December 12 and 13, British newspapers screamed of atrocities and massacre.
Anti-Russian fervor raged in Britain. After Russia's attack at Sinop it was widely believed in Britain that Turkey was unable to defend itself against the Russians and that the Russians had to be defeated. The anti-Russian fervor spread to parliament. Many liberals had been opposed to war because wars cost money, but their reluctance was overcome. The British saw the Russians as seeking to control the straits. They feared the Russian navy breaking out of the Black Sea and threatening their route on the Mediterranean Sea. And they were afraid of Russia dominating the Baltic Sea. Emotions and patriotism in Britain were aflame, and the British were confident in the power of their navy, believing that their navy was infinitely more powerful than the Turkish fleet at Sinop had been.
Amid the war fever, a rumor was passed around that Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, was a Russian agent. Prince Albert was German and the German state of Prussia was reluctant to join the British and French in a coalition against Russia, which was on Prussia's eastern border. Germans did not want their more powerful Russian neighbor overrunning their lands, but many in Britain saw German reluctance instead as supporting Russia and as making themselves tools of Russia's ambitions. A newspaper in Scotland circulated the treason charges, and a few other newspapers in Britain repeated the accusation. In London, thousands waited by the doors of the Tower to see Prince Albert escorted into that prison, and rumors were afloat that Queen Victoria intended to stand by her husband and go with him. Defenders of Prince Albert were able to squash the rumors, which Prince Albert labeled as the "stupidest trash." Publicly, Albert described himself as having the sentiments of the British, and, as if to prove his point, he described Nicholas I as "a tyrant and the enemy of all liberty on the continent." The Turk, he wrote, "is a fine fellow."
By January, 1854, a fleet of British and French warships had passed through the straits and into the Black Sea. In March, Britain, France and Turkey formalized an alliance, and, at the end of the month, Britain and France declared war. Following the declaration of war, Queen Victoria wrote of "the great sinfulness" of Russia as having "brought about this War." She spoke of the declaration of war as "very dignified" and added "May God give it his blessing and grant that as little blood as possible be shed." Later she wrote, "...our conduct has been throughout actuated by unselfishness and honesty."
On April 22, the British navy shelled the Russian port city of Odessa. And Queen Victoria relished the virtue of attacking only military targets. "The town," she wrote, "has not been touched."
In June, British and French warships sailed through the Gulf of Finland and reconnoitered the Russia navy base at the island of Kronstadt, near St. Petersburg. In August, 10,000 French troops and 1,000 British besieged and forced the surrender of Russian forts at Bomarsund, amid islands in the middle of the Baltic Sea. In August, a squadron of British warships bombarded Kola, near Murmansk, in Russia's far north. Austria seeking advantage for itself, threatened to enter the war on the side of the Ottoman Empire, and Russia responded by withdrawing from Walachia and Moldavia, allowing Austria to move its troops there with confronting them.
The British and French attacked at the Russian naval base at Sevastopol, on the Black Sea, which the British saw as a threat to their interests in the East. On September 14, 1854, a British and French force, already weakened by cholera, with a few thousand Turks landed thirty miles north of Sevastopol. On September 20, at the Alma River, a major battle was fought - a battle that was more like a riot than military maneuvers. Many were lost on both sides, but the Allies held. News of the war traveled slowly, and, on October 3, Queen Victoria wrote to her uncle, Leopold of her "noble troops" having behaved "with a courage and desperation which was beautiful to behold." Twenty days later she added: "My heart bleeds for the many fallen, and I consider that there is no finer death for a man than on the battlefield!"
The Russians were not giving up as the British as expected. The British and French had better weapons, their rifles having a range of 1000 yards (an extreme distance for their marksmen) while the Russians were still using old-fashioned, smooth bore, flintlock muskets with a range of only 200 yards (a yard a little less than one meter) and, according to the British, taking little care to shoot straight. But the Russians, it is said, were willing to fight to the death for their faith and for Holy Russia, urged on by the priests who had accompanied them into battle.
The Russians believed that spirit counted, while economically and technologically, Britain and France - the world's two most technologically advanced powers - were in better shape than they. With their warships, the British and French dominated the Black Sea and transport to the Crimea was easier than Russian transport across land. Having few rail lines, the Russians were using horse drawn supply wagons, inefficient in that much of what was carried was feed for the horses. And during the rains of autumn the hundreds of miles of land they had to cross was mud.
On October 25, a few miles north of Sebastopol, at the Battle of Balaclava, was what became known as the "Charge of the Light Brigade," a charge of 600 cavalrymen with swords drawn, against Russian artillery and a well-defended position, a suicidal mission, the product of an inept command about which the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote, including the words,
Someone had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die.
The British had gone to war without foreseeing the need to supply its troops over a long period with food and medical assistance. Money was raised in Britain for medicines for the troops, and, in late October, Florence Nightingale left Britain with 38 nurses heading for the Crimea. Already, studying on her own, she had made herself an expert in hospital administration. At the front she organized care for the wounded, cleaned up the care areas and cut mortality rates. It was a beginning for the nursing profession in Europe.
The winter of 1854-55 was miserable for Russians and the Allies in the Crimea. British soldiers are described as having been "clothed in rags, cold, hungry and short of everything." In March Nicholas died, at almost fifty-nine years of age - some researchers suspecting that he had poisoned himself after having receiving news of the disastrous Russian defeat at Evpatoria (Yevpatoriya), about forty miles north of Sebastopol. In the spring, for the Russians the route to the Crimea became again a sea of mud.
In September, the Russians abandoned its battle areas in the Crimea. The son of Nicholas, Alexander II, was ready to make peace, and so too were the Allies. The war - the first to be photographed - came to its formal end at a conference in Paris from late February to late March, 1856. The treaty produced by that conference, signed by Britain, France and Austria, attempted a new international order. It guaranteed Turkey's independence and territorial integrity. It moved Russia back from the mouth of the Danube River, gave Bessarabia to the Ottoman Empire and left "His Majesty the Sultan" with suzerainty over Walachia and Moldavia. The Black Sea was declared a neutral zone, open to all nations (through the straits) but not to warships, with Russia under instructions not to maintain a navy or coastal fortifications on its Black Sea shores. Russia was obliged to give up its claim of protector of Orthodox Christians within the Ottoman Empire. And an international commission was to assure safe navigation on the Danube River.
The Russians are said to have lost 40,000 killed in action and 60,000 to disease. France is said to have lost 20,240 killed in action and 75,375 to disease. Britain's loss was 4,602 killed in action and 17,580 to disease. Figures for the Turks are unknown.
The British saw the war as a success in that the Russians had been stopped. Tsar Alexander II saw the war as having exposed Russia's backwardness. Russia, he believed, would have to modernize economically and socially if it were to be a great power.
And in Britain had come a minor cultural change. During the Crimean War smoking had come into fashion among upperclass men - men who, before the war had looked upon smoking as vulgar, while common military men had been inclined to smoke as a demonstration of their worldliness and daredevil attitude. Beards had also come into fashion - all this an imitation of Britain's military men in the Crimea, viewed by the nation as war heroes.
Recommended Books
A New History of India, Sixth Edition, by Stanley Wolpert, Oxford University Press, 2000.
The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Third Edition, by Bernard Lewis, Oxford University Press, 2002.
Russia since 1801: The making of a new society, by Edward C Thaden.
The Crimean War by Andrew D Lambert, University of Manchester Press, 1990.
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