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THE MUTINY AND THE MERCHANTS*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2016

TIRTHANKAR ROY
TIRTHANKAR ROY*
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
*
Economic History Department, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London, wc2a 2aet.roy@lse.ac.uk
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Abstract

The historiography of the Indian mutiny (1857–8) suggests that livelihood classes responded to the episode differently, but pays more attention to the agricultural classes than the urban commercial ones in studying the response. This article revises the economic history of the rebellion by showing that commercial interests were influenced by concerns over security of property, and that they, as much as landed interests, shaped the course of the rebellion.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 59 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 393 - 416
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank two referees and the editors of the journal for detailed comments and suggestions that led to major revisions and improvements in the article.

References

1 R. C. Majumdar, The Sepoy mutiny and the revolt of 1857 (Calcutta, 1963), p. 99. Sipahi or sepoy referred to the Indian (mainly infantry) soldiers in the East India Company army. Most mutineers belonged in ‘native infantry’ and irregular regiments. See the next section for a fuller discussion of the historiography.

2 Because the mutiny turned into a civil rebellion, the appropriateness of the term ‘mutiny’ to describe the episode is disputed. Alternative terms include uprising, rebellion, mutiny-rebellion, revolt, and the first war of independence. In this article, ‘mutiny’ is retained. The reasons for continuing with the term are that it is handy and conventional, and that none of the alternatives is completely satisfactory either. As Clare Anderson writes, no matter what we call it, ‘it is impossible to capture the essence or meaning of the revolt in…simplistic, singular ways’, The Indian uprising of 1857–1858: prisons, prisoners and rebellion (London, 2007). Furthermore, in this article, the character of the revolt is not the main issue under investigation.

3 Eric Stokes, The peasant armed (Oxford, 1986).

4 I use the word capitalist as a convenient short-hand for urban merchants and bankers, and not in a technical sense. The groups in question are discussed in more detail below.

5 T. R. Metcalf, The aftermath of revolt: India, 1857–1870 (Berkeley, CA, 1965); Stokes, Peasant armed; Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Awadh in revolt, 1857–1658: a study of popular resistance (Delhi, 2002); Biswamoy Pati, ed., The 1857 rebellion (Delhi, 2007); and Crispin Bates, ed., Mutiny at the margins: new perspectives on the Indian uprising of 1857, i of vi (New Delhi and Thousand Oaks, CA, 2013).

6 William Dalrymple, The last Mughal (London, 2006), contains an index entry on ‘moneylenders’, and a brief discussion on bankers of Delhi, pp. 319–20; M. Farooqui, ‘The police in Delhi in 1857’, in Bates, ed., Mutiny at the margins, i, pp. 98–128, has a longer discussion on bankers.

7 Neal, Larry, ‘Interpreting power and profit in economic history: a case-study of the Seven Years War’, Journal of Economic History, 37 (1977), pp. 20–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; A. Shleifer and R. Vishny, The grabbing hand: government pathologies and their cures (Boston, MA, 1999); Geoffrey T. Mills and Hugh Rockoff, eds., The sinews of war: essays on the economic history of World War II (Ames, IA, 1993).

8 Mancur Olson, The rise and decline of nations (New Haven, CT, 1982).

9 C. A. Bayly, Indian society and the making of the British empire (Cambridge, 1988), p. 179. For a similar view, Burton Stein, A history of India (Chichester, 2010), p. 222.

10 British Parliamentary Papers (BPP), Further papers, no. 5 relative to the mutinies in the East Indies, paper no. 2295 (London, 1857); BPP, Further papers (no. 7, in continuation of no. 5) relative to the mutinies in the East Indies, paper no. 2363 (London, 1857); India, Narratives of events regarding the mutiny in India of 1857–1858 and the restoration of authority, i (Calcutta, 1881); BPP, Papers relating to the mutiny in the Punjab, in 1857, paper no. 75 (London, 1858); BPP, Further papers (no. 6 in continuation of no. 4) in relation to the mutinies in the East Indies, paper no. 2330 (London, 1857); BPP, Appendix (A) to further papers (no. 5) relative to the mutinies in the East Indies, paper no. 2302 (London, 1857). Two further compilations – BPP, Further papers (no. 8, in continuation of no. 6) relating to the insurrection in the East Indies, paper no. 2448 (London, 1858), and BPP, Further papers (no. 9, in continuation of no. 7) relating to the insurrection in the East Indies, paper no. 2449 (London, 1858) – consisted of despatches to the Board of Control in London, and have been used sparingly in this article.

11 See Rosemary Seton, The Indian ‘mutiny’, 1857–1858: a guide to source material in the India Office Library and Records (London, 1986), for description of the departmental resources.

12 G. B. Malleson, Kaye's and Malleson's history of the Indian mutiny of 1857–1858 (London, 1914), i–vi. This consolidated edition consists of three volumes produced by John Kaye in 1864, and three follow-up volumes by Malleson prepared in 1888.

13 George Forrest, Selections from the letters despatches and other state papers of the military-department, the government of India, 1857–1858, i–iii (Calcutta, 1898–1902).

14 A. R. D. Mackenzie, Mutiny memoirs (Allahabad, 1892), p. 93.

15 Narayan, Badri, ‘Popular culture and 1857: a memory against forgetting’, Social Scientist, 26 (1998), pp. 86–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Syed Najmul Raza Rizvi and Saiyid Zaheer Husain Jafri, eds., The great uprising of 1857: commentaries, studies and documents (New Delhi, 2009), Section C.

16 India, Press-list of ‘mutiny papers’ 1857, being a collection of the correspondence of the mutineers at Delhi, reports of spies to English officials and other miscellaneous papers (Calcutta, 1921), p. ii. Emphasis added.

17 Farooqui, ‘Police in Delhi’.

18 Dalrymple, The last Mughal, pp. 319–20.

19 India, Press-list.

20 ‘One important line of distinction was between those who were broadly urban and those who were broadly rural bankers’, Bayly, C. A., ‘Patrons and politics in northern India’, Modern Asian Studies, 7 (1973), pp. 349–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Tom Kessinger, ‘Regional economy: north India’, in Dharma Kumar, ed., Cambridge economic history of India, ii:1757–1970 (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 265–6; India, Statistical abstract relating to British India (London, various years).

22 For two representative selections, Ainslee T. Embree, ed., 1857 in India: mutiny or war of independence? (Boston, MA, 1963), and Pati, ed., The 1857 rebellion.

23 See Michael Barthorpe and Douglas Anderson, The British troops in the Indian mutiny, 1857–1859 (Oxford, 1994); Roy, Kaushik, ‘The beginning of “people's war” in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 42 (2007), pp. 1720–8Google Scholar; Dasgupta, Sabyasachi, ‘The rebel army in 1857: at the vanguard of the war of independence or a tyranny of arms?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 42 (2007), pp. 1729–33Google Scholar, on military history; Christopher Herbert, War of no pity: the Indian mutiny and Victorian trauma (Princeton, NJ, 2007), on representations; Brodkin, E. I., ‘The struggle for succession: rebels and loyalists in the Indian mutiny of 1857’, Modern Asian Studies, 6 (1972), pp. 277–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stokes, Peasant armed; Bayly, Indian society; Mukherjee, Awadh in revolt; Tapti Roy, The politics of a popular uprising: Bundelkhand 1857 (Delhi, 1994), on rebel action and intentions. A recent collection of essays, Biswamoy Pati, ed., The great rebellion of 1857 in India: exploring transgressions, contests and diversities (London, 2010), contains new research on marginal groups and women. On institutional effects, see Klein, Ira, ‘Materialism, mutiny and modernization in British India’, Modern Asian Studies, 34 (2000), pp. 545–80Google Scholar; Metcalf, The aftermath of revolt; Jagdish Raj, The mutiny and British land policy in north India, 1856–1868 (New York, NY, 1965).

24 Shlomo Avineri, ed., Karl Marx on colonialism and modernisation (New York, NY, 1969).

25 S. B. Chaudhuri, Theories of the Indian mutiny, 1857–1859 (Calcutta, 1965), p. 144.

26 Khan, Iqtidar Alam, ‘The Gwalior contingent in 1857–1858: a study of the organisation and ideology of the sepoy rebels’, Social Scientist, 26 (1998), pp. 53–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Habib, Irfan, ‘The coming of 1857’, Social Scientist, 26 (1998), pp. 6–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Majumdar, Sepoy mutiny, p. 101.

28 Ibid.

29 Roy, Politics; Mukherjee, Awadh in revolt.

30 For one example, see Habib, ‘The coming of 1857’, p. 13.

31 C. A. Bayly, ‘Eric Stokes and the uprising of 1857’, in Stokes, Peasant armed, p. 232.

32 BPP, Further papers, no. 5, p. 55.

33 India, Press-list, pp. 100–1.

34 Ibid., pp. 106, 311.

35 Ibid., p. 384.

36 Ibid., p. 373.

37 Ibid., p. 3.

38 Ibid., p. 406.

39 Ibid., p. 102.

40 Dalrymple, The last Mughal, p. 320.

41 India, Press-list, pp. 272–4.

42 Ibid., p. 4.

43 Majumdar, Sepoy mutiny, pp. 81, 110, 158.

44 India, Press-list, pp. 4, 8.

45 Ibid., p. 5.

46 Ibid., pp. 8, 98, 117, 278.

47 Farooqui, ‘Police in Delhi’, pp. 104–5 on ‘bankers’.

48 Mukherjee, Awadh in revolt, p. 140; W. Dalrymple, ‘Logistic failure on the part of the rebels in 1857’, in G. Rand and C. Bates, eds., Mutiny at the margins: new perspectives on the Indian uprising of 1857, iv of vi (New Delhi and Thousand Oaks, CA, 2013), pp. 61–75.

49 India, Press-list, p. 11.

50 Malleson, Kaye's and Malleson's history, v, p. 335.

51 Ibid., vi, p. 127.

52 BPP, Appendix (A) to further papers (no. 5), p. 299.

53 Ibid., pp. 35, 38–9, 53.

54 N. A. Chick, Annals of the Indian rebellion (Calcutta, 1859), p. 677. More on the role of merchants in Nana's government can be found in a source discussed in Nag, Pankaj, ‘1857: need for alternative sources’, Social Scientist, 26 (1998), pp. 113–47Google Scholar, see p. 123.

55 Forrest, Selections, ii, p. 126.

56 Chick, Annals, p. 679.

57 BPP, Further papers, no. 5, p. 102.

58 Chick, Annals, p. 678.

59 Ibid., p. 679.

60 Ibid., p. 688.

61 India, Narratives of events, p. 583.

62 Forrest, Selections, ii, p. 82.

63 Saul David, The Indian mutiny: 1857 (London, 2002), explores the soldiers' motivations.

64 Kanpur was retaken by the British in July, and was briefly reoccupied by the rebels after a victory by the Gwalior Contingent on 25 Nov. 1857.

65 Meerut, India, Narratives of events, pp. 306, 335. Deposition of Babu Coylash Chandra Ghose, Sundar Dass, merchants of Meerut, pp. 336–7, 342. See also p. 345.

66 India, Narratives of events, p. 521.

67 Ibid., p. 56.

68 Ibid., p. 461.

69 Ibid., p. 406.

70 BPP, Further papers (no. 7, in continuation of no. 5), p. 7.

71 India, Narratives of events, p. 47.

72 Ibid., p. 249.

73 Petition of Khodabuksh Khan, BPP, Further papers (no. 7, in continuation of no. 5), p. 223.

74 India, Narratives of events, p. 464.

75 BPP, Further papers (no. 8), pp. 714–16.

76 Malleson, Kaye's and Malleson's history, iv, p. 364.

77 Ibid., pp. 2, 381.

78 BPP, Papers relating to the mutiny in the Punjab, in 1857, p. 116.

79 Malleson, Kaye's and Malleson's history, iv, p. 386.

80 Chick, Annals, p. 770.

81 India, Narratives of events, p. 487.

82 BPP, Further papers (no. 7, in continuation of no. 5), p. 15.

83 BPP, Further papers, no. 5, pp. 86–7.

84 Lionel Showers, A missing chapter of the Indian mutiny (London, 1888), p. 40.

85 BPP, Further papers (no. 7, in continuation of no. 5), p. 275.

86 John Pemble, The Raj, the Indian mutiny and the kingdom of Oudh, 1801–1859 (Delhi, 1960), pp. 203–4.

87 William Forbes-Mitchell, Reminiscences of the great mutiny, 1857–1859 (London, 1897), pp. 29–30. Bazaar kotwal would roughly translate into supplies inspector.

88 Forbes-Mitchell, Reminiscences, pp. 29–30.

89 Punjab, Mutiny records (Lahore, 1911), p. 6.

90 Malleson, Kaye's and Malleson's history, iv, pp. 359–60.

91 India, Narratives of events, p. 74.

92 BPP, Appendix (A) to further papers no. 5, p. 244.

93 BPP, Papers relating to the mutiny in the Punjab, in 1857, p. 75.

94 Bayly, ‘Eric Stokes and the uprising’, pp. 232–3.

95 F. S. Growse, Mathura: a district memoir (Lucknow, 1883), pp. 14–15; C. E. Buckland, A dictionary of Indian biography (London, 1905), p. 242.

96 Loke Nath Ghose, The modern history of the Indian chiefs, Rajas, Zamindars (Calcutta, 1888), p. 477.

97 Malleson, Kaye's and Malleson's history, iii, pp. 190–1.

98 Ibid., vi, p. 120.

99 BPP, Further papers (no. 6, in continuation of no. 4), p. 158.

100 India, Narratives of events, p. 488.

101 Ibid., p. 488.

102 Forrest, Selections, i, pp. 36, 382–3.

103 Malleson, Kaye's and Malleson's history, ii, p. 384.

104 Punjab, Mutiny records, p. 17.

105 Ibid., pp. 88–9.

106 Forrest, Selections, i, p. 333, telegram from Brigadier-General J. G. S. Neill.

107 India, Narratives of events, p. 176.

108 Debendranath Tagore, Jiban Charit (Calcutta, 1911), pp. 159–65.

109 India, Narratives of events, p. 202.

110 BPP, Further papers (no. 7, in continuation of no. 5), p. 88.

111 BPP, Further papers (no. 6, in continuation of no. 4), p. 31.

112 Malleson, Kaye's and Malleson's history, iii, p. 19.

113 Ibid., iv, p. 291.

114 Ibid., v, p. 101.

115 Ibid., iii, p. 11.

116 A Hindu, ‘The mutinies and the people or statements of native fidelity, exhibited during the outbreak of 1857–1858’ (Pamphlet) (Calcutta, 1858), pp. 139–40.

117 Ram Gopal Sanyal, The life of the Hon'ble Rai Kristo Das Pal Bahadur (Calcutta, 1886), p. 189.

118 Malleson, Kaye's and Malleson's history, v, p. 35.

119 Buckland, Dictionary of Indian biography, p. 42.

120 Ghose, Modern history, p. 514.

121 BPP, Appendix (A) to further papers (no. 5), pp. 92, 97.

122 BPP, Further papers, no. 5, p. 50.

123 BPP, Further papers (no. 7, in continuation of no. 5), p. 3.

124 Charles John Griffiths, A narrative of the siege of Delhi with an account of the mutiny at Ferozepore in 1857 (London, 1910).

125 BPP, Further papers (no. 8), p. 109.

126 Malleson, Kaye's and Malleson's history, iii, p. 238.

127 BPP, Further papers (no. 7, in continuation of no. 5), p. 84.

128 Malleson, Kaye's and Malleson's history, iii, pp. 152–3, 159.

129 Ibid., v, pp. 240, 304–10; India, Narratives of events, pp. 620–1.

130 BPP, 1862 (53), East India (native merchant claims): papers relating to the claims of Tarrachand Seetaram and other native merchants of Bombay.