-Caveat Lector-
>From http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,7369,721183,00.html
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Whitewashing the past
The British Library's new exhibition on the East India Company does not tell the
whole story
Mike Marqusee
Friday May 24, 2002
The Guardian
According to the British Library, its new exhibition on the East India Company shows
"how the work of 11 men, from a cold, wet and then relatively poor country, paved
the way for what is now called 'globalisation'". The exhibition's principal sponsor is
Standard Chartered Bank, "the world's leading bank for emergent markets", whose
chairman, Sir Patrick Gillam, lauds "the courageous, creative and truly international
legacy of the East India Company".
Until recently, the champions of today's world trade order have usually given imperial
parallels a wide berth. They prefer to promote globalisation as a universal and
secular creed, not a hangover from the colonial era. But with the increasingly casual
talk of "regime change" and indefinite military occupations, not to mention the barely
disguised calls for a resumption of the white man's burden, it's not surprising to find
the imperial past being invested with a new respectability.
The exhibition has attracted criticism for downplaying the company's role as the
biggest drug trafficker of all time, and its responsibility for the deaths of 17
million
Chinese from opium addiction. The British Library insists it has offered a balanced
account, and the exhibition does acknowledge the "vicious" opium trade and the
deleterious effects of company rule on both China and India. But overall it handles
the company with kid gloves.
Here, "free trade" is a multi-cultural encounter. The company is celebrated as the
bringer to Britain of coffee and tea, muslins, ginghams and calicos, porcelain and
curry. Its legacies are gleaming modern entrepots such as Hong Kong and Bombay,
and "the now familiar Asian presence in and contribution to Britain's rich cultural
diversity". But the concrete and bitter experience of centuries has a way of
resurfacing, as today's protest outside the British Library by members of the Chinese
community will demonstrate.
Clive's victory at Plassey in 1757 secured direct company rule over Bengal, then the
richest province in India. The immediate upshot was the tripling of the land tax and a
famine that killed 10 million people - one-third of the population. Two decades later,
as a result of Cornwallis's "permanent settlement", which imposed English
landlordism on Bengal, 20 million smallholders were dispossessed. Indigenous
industries were crippled by the company's exactions.
With the end of its monopoly in 1813, the import of mill-made goods from Britain
devastated the once-mighty Indian textile industry. "The misery hardly finds parallel
in
the history of commerce," said the governor general, William Bentinck. "The bones of
the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India."
Perhaps in ways neither the British Library nor Standard Chartered intended, this
long discredited, blood- drenched monopoly, licensed by the English state and
backed by its military resources, does offer an apt precedent for our current lopsided
but frantic commercial order. In its day, the company occupied and manipulated the
interstices of a truly global economy. Tea from China was bought with opium from
India; Indian and later British textiles (made from cotton grown in India) purchased
slaves in west Africa, who were sold in the Americas for gold and silver, which was
invested in England, where the sugar harvested by the slaves ensured a booming
market for the tea from China. The big winners sat in the City of London. The more
numerous losers could be found in every corner of the globe.
"The conquest of the earth... is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much,"
Joseph Conrad observed in Heart of Darkness. "What redeems it is the idea only..."
The idea in this exhibition is "trade" - an abstraction carefully disengaged from the
forms it takes in the real world. As portrayed by the British Library, the company was
ever guided by the invisible hand of the market, driven across the seas by the
ineluctable laws of supply and demand.
The early managers of the company were more realistic. Josiah Child, one of its
leading figures during the last quarter of the 17th century, explained its priorities:
"The increase of our revenue is the subject of our care, as much as our trade: 'tis
that must maintain our force..."
Since the most reliable sources of revenue at the time were rent and taxes, the
company had to "establish such a politie of civil and military powers... as may be the
foundation of a large, well-grounded, sure English dominion in India for all time to
come." The company was seeking profit, not "trade", and it was in pursuit of profit
that it turned to armed conquest.
The most arresting item in the exhibition is an enormous chintz from south India
painted with Japanese-style flowers and birds, bamboo tracery and erotic motifs.
Amid this elegant luxuriance, a harsher note is struck by a rectangular strip depicting
an endless file of musket-toting Europeans. Centuries ago, the East India Company
drew a lesson similar to the one recently drawn by the New York Times' laureate of
globalisation, Thomas Friedman: "You can't have McDonald's without McDonnell
Douglas."
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