Exalted Order: Muslim Princes and the British Empire 1874-1906

EXALTED ORDER: MUSLIM PRINCES AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE 1874-1906 KRISTOPHER RADFORD A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAMME IN HISTORY YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO OCTOBER 2013 © KRISTOPHER RADFORD, 2013 ABSTRACT This dissertation charts the genealogy of a particularly British Indian form of colonial government called indirect rule. Indirect rule, which came to be deployed across several Muslim dominated states of Africa and Asia in the late Victorian period, was by that time a century old British colonial strategy. First employed by agents of the East India Company in the middle of the eighteenth century, this form of imperialism subsumed many of the states which comprised the Indian political landscape in the post- Mughal period. These so-called princely states were not conquered outright by the British, but rather came under their control though a range of technologies, from the deployment of powerful agents and coercive treaties, to the establishment of a discursive framework which conceived of these states as ‘oriental’ and hence requiring of a special form of government. Indirect rule, however, was never the most common form of administration in the British Empire. Even in India, direct rule, where precolonial social and political structures were replaced by new modes of government, was much more common. This work, therefore, explores why in the last quarter of the nineteenth century the architects of British rule in Malaya, Egypt, the Persian Gulf, Zanzibar, and Northern Nigeria all elected to impose variants of this unusual form of government invented in eighteenth-century India. It does so by examining the ideas, assumptions, and strategies of the officials who were chiefly responsible for the form of these colonial regimes through a variety of archival and other documentary evidence. In so doing this work seeks to demonstrate that British Indian ideas and technologies had a definitive impact on the development of the British Empire across Africa and Asia. ii For Robyn iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In reflecting on the span of this project, from its conception, through research, writing, and editing I am struck by how lucky I was to have so much support from so many quarters. Preeminent on this list is my supervisor Professor Douglas Peers. For the entire span of my graduate career Doug has helped me to follow my own interests, all the while keeping me historiographically current, and valiantly editing my oft-impermeable drafts. The generous time he has devoted to me over the past several years is all the more appreciated, as I was only one of a myriad of obligations in his frenetic life. My dissertation committee, Professors Thabit Abdulla, Stephen Brooke, and Sabah Alnasseri of York University, and Dane Kennedy of George Washington University, are also to be singled out for their useful help in completing this work. I must also thank Professors Bob Wakabayashi and Bill Irvine who, of the often overwhelmingly large department of history at York, repeatedly took the time to help me out in the last few years. Indeed, though large, the department was a wonderfully friendly place of which I will always be fond. York, however, is a titanic bureaucracy, and the heroic efforts of Lisa Hoffmann and Karen Dancy, whose role as graduate programme assistants, cannot be underestimated in helping me survive it. It is the graduate community in particular that makes the department such a happy place, and a few of my colleagues deserve special thanks. Sara Muscat, Katie Bausch, Dr Dan Bullard, and David Zylberberg who helped me through courses, comps, barricades, research, and writing, exemplify York history at its best. iv I have, however, racked up debts far beyond York. The University of Toronto gave me both friends and facilities. This dissertation would have been much more difficult to write had it not been for the excellent company of Dr Patrick Mannion, Michael Newmark, and my life-long friend and occasional roommate, Brandon Corcoran. In Calgary I have to thank Shannon Murray and Ryan Blaney for the most happily distracting friendship, and Judy Gifford and Dr Jessica Gifford, a second family who constantly spoil me. Finally Meig McCrae and Garry Stewart, my friends on three continents, made my time at Oxford a delight. My luck, apparently, has known no bounds, as I have also been the recipient of the generous support (moral and material) of my parents Peg and Don Radford, and my brother Jeff. It is said that travails improve a work. This one, therefore, must be very poor indeed, as these past years have been so pleasant, in no small measure because of the people mentioned above. Without doubt, however, and without peer, Robyn Gifford has from start to finish been the perfect partner and to her go the greatest measure of my gratitude. The perennial canard is that everything, graduate school especially, used to be far better and is only getting worse, but like Evelyn Waugh, ‘I rejoice that I went when the going was good.’ K.D.R. Vancouver B.C. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Dedication iii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents vi Introduction 1 Part One Chapter I India 1757-1857: the Genesis of Indirect Rule 26 Chapter II India 1858-1912: the Exemplar of Indirect Rule 78 Part Two Chapter III Malaya 126 Chapter IV Egypt 183 Chapter V The Persian Gulf and Zanzibar 245 Chapter VI Northern Nigeria 306 Conclusion 367 Bibliography 381 vi Introduction In April of 1882, British forces occupied Egypt after a prolonged political dispute. At the same time, British agents were in the midst of absorbing a number of states of the Malay Peninsula. Less than a decade later the island state of Zanzibar, off the east coast of Africa, was annexed by the British and a few years after that the Persian Gulf states were likewise acquired. Finally, at the turn of the twentieth century, an army of African soldiers raised by the British conquered the remnants of the Sokoto Caliphate in Northern Nigeria. This string of conquests was not part of a great scheme to expand an already large empire; indeed, it was not even undertaken by a single branch of the British Government. The Foreign Office controlled Egypt and Zanzibar, the Colonial Office was responsible for Malaya and Nigeria, and the Government of British India, reporting to the Secretary of State for India, was the paramount authority in the Persian Gulf. Moreover, these disparate territories, spread across half the globe on two continents, were not even conquered for a single purpose: some were taken primarily for their strategic importance while others were seized because of their economic value. However, all of these territories, from tiny Kuwait to densely populated Egypt, were conquered by co-opting Muslim princes through what was known as ‘indirect rule’. The term indirect rule was popularised in the early part of the twentieth century by Lord Lugard, himself an architect of British rule in Nigeria.1 However, it is far older than that conceptually: indirect rule in the British Empire was a product of an earlier 1 Frederick Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (London: Blackwood, 1922), 199. 1 period of expansion and can be traced back to when the agents of the English East India Company suddenly found themselves in charge of a rapidly growing territorial empire in India in the middle of eighteenth century. As Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper argue in their Empires and World History, imperialism was the usual form of human government, and essential to all forms of imperialism was collaboration between the coloniser and colonised.2 Across world history there are examples of local rulers, subjugated but not relegated, by more powerful regional actors. The most famous examples of from antiquity are Herod, King of Juda, and Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, who were both clients of Imperial Rome. Thus, as Burbank and Cooper show, where there was imperialism there was often some sort of client relationship or collaboration. This work is broadly in agreement with this view, yet indirect rule as understood and practiced by the British was more than an unequal bilateral power relationship. The central goal of this work is to illustrate that this form of colonialism, as deployed across Muslim-ruled Africa and Asia, was a product of the Victorian conceptualisation of their relationship with ‘oriental’ states as experienced through their earlier conquest of India, and in particular how they sought to consolidate authority over what had been states under Muslim rulers. This dissertation charts the genealogy of indirect rule as a distinctly British Indian answer to the problem of governing subject peoples. Indirect rule, after having being used across much of South Asia in more than 600 ‘princely states’ was in turn redeployed to other parts of Asia and in Africa. This Indian form of indirect rule, however, was 2 Jane Burbak and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 366. 2 never the only nor even the most common manifestation of colonial government in the British world. Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British were far more likely to displace pre-colonial leaders and impose direct rule. Even in India, where indirect rule was first widely deployed, only about a third of the subcontinent fell under this form of control, the remainder being placed squarely under British

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