“No Longer Merchants, but Sovereigns of a Vast Empire”: the Writings of Sir John Malcolm and British India, 1810 to 1833

“No longer Merchants, but Sovereigns of a vast Empire”: The writings of Sir John Malcolm and British India, 1810 to 1833 By Jack Harrington Doctor of Philosophy 2009 University of Edinburgh i I declare that the following thesis is entirely my own work ......................................................................................................... ii Contents Abstract iv List of Abbreviations v Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 Analysing Sir John Malcolm as an ideologue of the British empire 16 Structure and aims of the thesis 21 Chapter One: Sir John Malcolm and the British Empire in India 26 Chapter Two: The Political History of India and the creation of an historiography of imperial conquest 59 Acting in History: “Send Malcolm!” 60 The political context for the Sketch of the Political History of India 70 The Sketch of the Political History of India as a book 79 Conclusion 96 Chapter Three: Sir John Malcolm and the History of Modern Asia 99 The Literary Society of Bombay, orientalism and information-gathering 100 The Sketch of the Sikhs 103 The History of Persia 115 Sir John Malcolm and Orientalism during the Napoleonic Wars 132 Conclusion 135 Chapter Four: Sir John Malcolm’s Memoir of Central India: The historic case for indirect rule 136 Sir John Malcolm and the post-war reconstruction of Central India 138 The Report on the Province of Malwa and the Memoir of Central India 146 The History of Malwa as a Hindu Province 147 “The anatomy of Central India” 166 Conclusion 172 Chapter Five: Sir John Malcolm and the Government of India after 1818 177 The significance of the 1820s for Sir John Malcolm's writings 180 Writing about the Government of India 186 The Government of British India 193 British Armies in India 205 The Native states: Direct British Rule as “the Master Evil” 209 Conclusion 216 Chapter Six: The History of the East India Company II: The Life of Robert, Lord Clive 221 The Life of Robert Lord Clive as a book 224 The Context for a life of Clive: “confounding the calumniators of his memory” 226 Malcolm’s history of Clive and the founding of the British Empire in India 233 Macaulay's Review of the Life of Lord Clive 251 Conclusion 254 Conclusion: British India before 1857 and the writings of Sir John Malcolm 258 Bibliography 268 iii “No longer Merchants, but Sovereigns of a vast Empire”: The writings of Sir John Malcolm and British India, 1810 to 1833 This thesis analyses the works of Sir John Malcolm (1769-1833) as key texts in the intellectual history of the formation of British India. It is concerned less with Malcolm's widely acknowledged role as a leading East India Company administrator and more with the unparalleled range of influential books that he wrote on imperial and Asian topics between 1810 and his death in 1833. Through the publication of nine major works, numerous pamphlets and articles and a few volumes of poetry, Malcolm established his reputation as an authority in three major areas. Firstly, the Sketch of the Political History of India (1811) and the posthumously published Life of Robert Lord Clive (1836) remained major sources on the history of the founding of the British empire in India for much of the nineteenth century. Through these histories, he wove the anxieties of the Company's solider-diplomats of the early nineteenth into the narrative of the Company's rise as an imperial power. With the History of the Sikhs (1810) and, to a far greater extent, the History of Persia (1815), Malcolm sealed his reputation as a path-finding orientalist making an early contribution to European knowledge of India's north-west frontier. Lastly, Malcolm's Memoir of Central India (1823), which analysed the history of the region from the rise of the Marathas to the British conquest in 1818, is one of the most sophisticated and politically significant examples of British efforts to construct an Indian past that accounted for British imperial control in the present. This study's detailed examination of his works provides an invaluable insight into how British imperial mentalities in the period before 1857 were shaped by the interplay between trends and events in India and Britain on the one hand and the competing historiographical and political traditions current among British imperial administrators on the other. It demonstrates that British thinking on India was far from unified and was often characterised less by a desire to formulate an ideology for rule – even if this was its eventual effect – and more by bitter divisions between imperial administrators. Malcolm's need to counter the arguments of his opponents among the Court of Directors in the decade after Governor General Wellesley's departure in 1806 and his resistance to more radical commentators on India like James Mill in the 1820s, shaped his writing. Malcolm's influence and the range of topics he wrote about make him an ideologue of empire and a pioneer of British orientalism and the historiography of British India. Malcolm's body of works is the most comprehensive and prominent example of how the British responded intellectually to their empire in India in the generation after the Trial of Warren Hastings and before the first Anglo-Afghan war. iv List of Abbreviations Add MSS Additional Manuscripts BL British Library Eur MSS European Manuscripts IOR India Office Records H/ Home Miscellaneous Series NLS National Library of Scotland v Acknowledgements I am grateful to the School of History and Classics of the University of Edinburgh, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and the Alywn Ruddock Bequest of the Institute of Historical Research for their generous research grants. I have benefited immensely from the advice and support of many people but I wish to expressly thank Dr Nicholas Phillipson, Dr Markus Daechsel, Mr Owen Dudley Edwards, Dr Richard MacKenney, Dr Ben Schiller, Dr Tom Webster and Dr Moritz Baumstark. Ian “John” Malcolm, who is currently preparing a biography of his distant relation and namesake, has been an excellent source of informed debate about the details of Sir John Malcolm's career. Lastly, I am deeply indebted to Dr Sophie Heywood and Dr Olena Heywood for proof-reading my work in its final stages and to my parents for their warm encouragement. vi Introduction This thesis is an intellectual biography of Sir John Malcolm (1769-1833). Famous as an administrator, soldier and diplomat from the time of the Napoleonic wars until his death in 1833, Malcolm was also an influential orientalist, a pioneering historian of the East India Company and one of its most important ideologues. Recent studies of the intellectual history of the British empire have acknowledged Malcolm's role as part of a larger group of imperial administrators including Sir Thomas Munro and Mountstuart Elphinstone.1 However, the following study demonstrates that the unequalled range of Malcolm's interests and the sophistication of his historical analysis of imperial problems make him by far the most comprehensive contemporary commentator on this crucial period in the consolidation of the British empire in India. His vision of Asia and of British India sheds light on the drive towards imperial expansion after the Trial of Warren Hastings, in the era of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and beyond. Whereas his earliest works had encouraged the British to take on a more dominant and assertive role in India-wide power politics, as Britain's position became more secure after 1818 he began to caution against the replacement of indigenous power structures and ruling elites with rationalised British government. By examining Sir John Malcolm as a key thinker in the history of British India before the uprising of 1857, this thesis will assess many of the more neglected issues and writers connected with the growth of British imperial ideologies and understanding of South Asia. Having come to prominence after 1798, serving under Governor General Richard Wellesley, Malcolm eventually rose to become Governor of Bombay from 1827 until 1830. During these years he played a central role in bringing western India under British political control. This thesis is concerned less with his career with the East India Company and more with the unparalleled range of influential books that he wrote on imperial and Asian topics between 1810 and his death in 1833. 1 See for example, Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford, CA, 1994), pp. 63-98. 1 Through the publication of nine major works, numerous pamphlets and articles and a few volumes of poetry, Malcolm established his reputation as an authority in three major areas. The Sketch of the Political History of India (1811) and the posthumously published Life of Lord Clive (1836)2 remained major sources on the history of the founding of the British empire in India until well into the twentieth century. Through the History of the Sikhs (1810) and, to a far greater extent, the History of Persia (1815), Malcolm sealed his reputation as a path-finding orientalist making an early contribution to European knowledge of India's north-west frontier. Lastly, Malcolm's Memoir of Central India (1823), which analysed the history of the region from the rise of the Marathas to the British conquest in 1818, is one of the most sophisticated and politically significant examples of British efforts to construct an Indian past that accounted for British imperial control in the present. Individually, these works made Malcolm a leading authority on the topics they considered throughout the nineteenth century. Taken together they show how one individual reflected and, to a very large degree, shaped the ideological supports of British India in the three decades of sustained imperial growth after 1798.

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