The Honourable Company. By John Keay

The Honourable Company

A History Of The English East India Company

John Keay

Harper Collins. First Published 1991.

This is a history that lies between a popular account and a serious scholarly tome, like both the previous histories (of India and China, respectively) by Keay that I have read. I rather suspect Keay has gone through a huge amount of secondary literature to produce this engaging, ancedotal tale of how a small band of adventurers and unscrupulous fortune-seekers came to rule a large part of the world and maybe about a quarter of the world's population over a period of about two centuries. 

The story starts in about 1600 with the quest for spices. The English (the English East India Company) were not the first, with the Dutch and the Portugese there before them, but perhaps they were the most agressive, especially at sea. This enabled them to range the world and establish contacts and 'factories' (or warehouses), and acquire monopolistic trading rights from rulers, small and large, all over the Asia. The company also persuaded (and bribed or otherwise forced) a succession of Kings of England to grant them monopoly to trade with the East. What initially started as a trade of money or goods from England for goods (spices, cotton) from the East, developed over a period of time into a monopoly of the trade within the Asian countries, i.e. buying at throw-away prices from the India and selling at (literally) exorbitant rates to China. The factories slowly expanded to land grants from local rulers, whose sucession to the 'thrones' the company often manipulated, obviously to its own benefit. Thus land revenue from the land grants started replacing trade profits as the company's chief source of income. From almost the beginning, negotiations were backed up by armies and the threat and conduct of war. Especially in India, the company took full advantage of the huge vertical and horizontal divisions in the society - numerous small kings acting without any strong central authority and always ready to make Machiavellian pacts with anyone who would offer short term benefits; governance that existed only to enrich the royal coffers; a feudal system to effect this transfer of wealth from the people upwards; and a populace that was largely immune to ideas of unity or appeals for support by one 'foreign' invader (their current ruler) against another (the Company). The 'dark ages' that followed the dissolution of the mighty Moghul empire (after the death of Aurangzeb) probably contributed a great deal to the Company becoming the ruler of large tracts of the vast sub-continent, almost without realizing it, and without apparently wishing for it, except occasionally by dreamers such as Clive. Much the same scenes were repeated across Asia, but in more limited ways in countries that had a strong central authority, like China or Japan. Eventually the King and Parliament of England decided to do for themselves what they had been doing for the company - sending armies and navies and administrators across the seas to rule alien peoples. (Actual armies were sent out only in the beginning. As the administration became more and more sophisticated, it became necessary only to ship out officers - the soldiers or sepoys could be recruited easily and cheaply from the local population.) And thus began the British Raj, which lasted another 150 years or so. Keay concludes his account in the early 1800s, when the East India Company has ceased to exist in all but name, and before the first War of Independence in 1857, after which Victoria became Empress of India. 

Keay's writing, as always, is smooth and easy to read, interspersed with frequent sardonic turns of phrase or ironic quotations from contemporary literature, letters and other documents. The pattern in his story telling is not apparent, and the book, as a long series of anecdotes, focuses on one adventurer after another, rather than on any overarching theme. Thus he conveys the impression that the entire history of the British overlordship over half the world is the consequence of a succession of accidents and coincidences. Victories in the encounters were often, however, made possible by technological superiority, especially at sea, and by more sophisticated battlefield strategies, not to say more focussed and single-minded administration of limited resources, and better negotiating skills. So let me enumerate what I learn from Keay's book as possible reasons why whatever happened (British Raj), happened: 

• The adventurous spirit of the Europeans
• Their superior sailing and navigational technology
• 'Dark ages' after the Moghul empire
• Vertical and horizontal divisions in Indian society
• The greater ruthlessness and single-mindedness of the Europeans, particularly the British
• Better battlefield technology and skills

I am not sure this is enough to explain the advent of colonial Indian history, and apparently neither does Keay. Actually he doesn't even try - he just sticks to telling the tale, or rather, the tales. While, on the whole the narrative is not tendentious, he does leave out details of many of the horrors perpetrated by the English - the opium wars in China and the various oppressions of farmers and artisans in India. But, to be fair to him, he also does not dwell at any length on the oppressions practised by the native rulers on their own populations.