A corrupt international society: how Britain was duped into its first Indian conquest

Abstract

This chapter asks to what extent the English School concept of the ‘expansion of an European society of states’ helps us to understand early encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans on the Indian sub-continent. The chapter tests this framework through an in-depth analysis of official correspondence amongst members of the British East India Company at the founding moment of British sovereign authority on the Indian coast in the middle of the sixteenth century. The treaties established by the East India Company to establish forts at places like Armagon and Chennai constitute a key test case for the English School assumption that shared culture is a fundamental prerequisite of international sociability. East India Company servants and the negotiators for sub-continental princes and emperors came from different cultural universes. Would cultural differences prevent them from establishing agreements over who could rule what territory? An English School approach provides us with few resources for under- standing this important historical moment, because it fundamentally misrepresents the thoughts of the primary actors in this historical drama. While Company servants were interested in ‘expanding’ British territory, they had no interest in the expansion of any civilizational standard of rule. While some of the actors in these negotiations had European origins, they did not draw on any discernible ‘European’ norms to determine with whom they would negotiate, or on what terms. While normative concerns helped to shape how Company servants understood their role, these were consistently trumped by base material considerations. Finally, there was no actor resembling a ‘state’ participating on either side of these negotiations. Having established this critical distance from an English School perspec- tive, the chapter responds to the question framed by this volume’s editors: can shared ‘international’ norms emerge in the absence of a common culture? Here, the chapter is more constructive while remaining sceptical of any hope for a resuscitation of an English School agenda. I argue that the lack of a common ‘culture’ between British agents and their sub-continental counterparts presented no significant obstacle to their efforts to realize shared norms for how territorial jurisdiction should be distributed. However, the set of norms that British agents and their sub-continental counterparts shared are not those that have been emphasized by English School theory: war, great powers, diplomacy, balance of power, international law or sovereignty. Rather, the contemporary term that best defines the shared normative orientations of these two sets of parties is ‘corruption’: a shared belief in their mutual prerogatives to profit personally from sovereign institutions and infrastructure, and particularly fortifications. Put simply, since both Company servants and the underlings of sub-continental lords came from parasitic, rent-seeking classes in their respective countries, both were keen to fabricate political institutions that ensured their continued mutual gain. Understanding this phenomenon requires that we abandon misleading the- oretical starting points like a hypothetical ‘society of states’ and focus our attention on the groups and individuals that actually determined when and where the British acquired fortified territory in India. The ‘society’ that defined, negotiated and contested the initial conquest of India, setting the terms for British expansion over the next two centuries, is perhaps best seen as a transnational clique of contending but cooperating agents, who sought to capitalize on the benefits of new international trade. International Relations (IR) scholars commonly seek to use the empirical invalidation of one theoretical paradigm to support or buttress another. Arguments invalidating the power of ideas or norms invariably seek to advance the case for materialist or rationalist frameworks. This case study does not suggest that such an approach would be particularly helpful. Despite the fact that base material interests and the rational interests of traders help to account for much of the behaviour of inter-continental negotiators in this case study, this does not validate the merits of a materialist or rationalist approach. Indeed, the chapter suggests that such approaches do similar injustices to history. In particular, they fail to see that the ‘corrupt culture’ that undergirded the emergence of a rudimentary international society between the British and Indian rulers and allowed this transnational elite to divert public institutions towards private ends, was not a mere post hoc justification of utilitarian interests but a specific way of structuring how interests were perceived and calculated that was peculiar to a specific historical setting. As socio-cultural changes in the United Kingdom began to undermine the culture of ‘old corruption’ in the middle of the eighteenth century, the ability of British and Indian agents to collude in the expansion of British territory also began to give way. Hence, the rather ahistorical models of material forces or rational interests do not help us to understand why the terms of European expansion became more normatively charged over time.