The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784: A grand strategic interpretation by G.J. Bryant (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784: A grand strategic interpretation by G.J. Bryant Joshua Ehrlich The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784: A grand strategic interpretation By G.J. Bryant. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2013. The Emergency of British Power in India addresses a classic historical question: how the British East India Company evolved in the eighteenth century from a trading corporation into the dominant political power in South Asia. Looking at the “roles, opinions and contributions” of the Company’s leadership, it seeks to explain the transformation on military-political grounds (x). “The grand strategic history of British engagement in India,” it argues, “morphed from a reactive-defensive phase (1746 to 1761), primarily externalised against the French menace, to a proactive… phase (1757 to 1784), internalised to problematic relations with the Indian states” (29). Part One examines the first phase, in which successive wars between Britain and France militarized the contest between their respective India companies for control of European trade with the subcontinent. Chapter One examines the onset of hostilities during the War of Austrian Succession, the largest consequence of which for the British Company was the traumatic, albeit temporary, loss of Madras in 1746. This disaster, coupled with French interference in dynastic struggles in the Deccan and Carnatic, stirred the Company from complacency, prompting it to make local alliances and engage its counterpart in a proxy war—the subject of Chapter Two. Chapters Three and Four treat the climax of the Anglo-French rivalry, in the Carnatic and Bengal respectively, during the Seven Years’ War. In the author’s analysis, the British Company’s forces were hampered by a comparative lack of coordination, both with the London directorate and between the far-flung governments of the three presidencies. Yet the manpower and revenues of the Compagnie des Indes proved less stable, and the low priority Versailles accorded the eastern theater made it loath to allocate resources there. The British Company won a decisive victory in 1761. Even at this point, however, the author attributes to its leadership an overriding concern with securing trade and profits rather than building an empire. Part Two traces the evolution of the Company’s “reactive” posture into a “proactive” one through its military and political entanglements from 1762–84. Chronologically overlapping chapters on Bengal (Five and Seven), Madras (Six and Nine), and Bombay (Eight) treat the Company’s efforts to manage perceived threats from Indian “country” powers and prevent the French from regaining their former position. These chapters witness increasing coordination between the Company’s presidencies and the extension of its military and political thinking into the heartland and into the future. According to Bryant, officials were coming to understand Indian politics in terms of a balance of power among states, which the interests of peace and stability demanded they maintain. Differences persisted as to the means appropriate to this end. The directors reiterated their longstanding aversion to territorial conquest, but leaders in India—notably Warren Hastings—were prone to “realpolitik,” wielding the sword or the olive branch as necessary (224). In any case, there was now “no denying that the Company was itself on the way to becoming a highly active ‘country’ power” (151). While finding that the Company engaged increasingly in “‘imperialist’ behaviour,” Bryant concludes that it did not, in the period before 1784, “evolve a conscious imperial ambition to dominate India” (325). He argues instead for something like path dependency: despite the lack of a “collective perception of where it might lead in the long run,” “a generally coherent pattern of responses to specific threats did begin to emerge” (325, 327). Drawn repeatedly into conflict by its pecuniary interests, pursuing only limited and intermittent territorial conquests, insensible to any greater destiny, the Company nonetheless emerged as the dominant power in Indian politics. There is nothing particularly novel about this interpretation: commentators and historians have advanced versions of it since at least the turn of the nineteenth century. The author dismisses recent accounts, which have traced the Company’s imperial ambitions as far back as the 1600s, on the basis of a rigid distinction between the concerns of a government (“the security...