Gentlemanly capitalism and British expansion in Asia

It is also possible to discern gentlemanly capitalist influences at work within Britain's expanding empire in Asia. All too often Asia is regarded as a 'special case' in examinations of overseas expansion, and, Cain and Hopkins apart, few attempts have been made to integrate British India into general explanations of eighteenth-century imperialism.

And yet, for all the obvious outward differences resulting from the formal structure and form taken by the empire of the East, there are important similarities that allow British India to be tied into the wider empire, and incorporated within wider patterns of development evident in the imperial state. Three such general similarities are noted briefly here.

First, as elsewhere, the elite of British India endeavoured as far as possible to replicate the lifestyle, behaviour and patterns of sociocultural activity that were evident in the metropolis. The wider effects of this were of course diluted by the fact that the British community in India only ever represented a tiny minority of the population as a whole, but, as elsewhere, the elite strove hard to display all the up-to- date trappings of genteel style and fashion. In a harsh climate this brought them a degree of European-style comfort and luxury, but it also enabled them sharply to define their presence in alien and unfamiliar surroundings. Exchanges between the majority of Britons and the local Indian communities did not extend much beyond business and commerce, and the elite sought refuge, both literally and metaphorically, in what was familiar to them. This was most apparent, perhaps, in the 'White Town' of Calcutta, where, as PJ. Marshall has recently written, members of the elite 'lavished money and effort on creating for themselves the amenities of what they regarded as civilized British urban life', a process that formed a central element within their 'cultural self-sufficiency and insistence on maintaining British norms to the fullest extent'.⁴⁵ In this environment, the elite engaged in a full range of gentlemanly pursuits, and they exhibited all the social cultural characteristics of their metropolitan counterparts.

Such actions served many purposes, but one of the most important was that they allowed the British in India to affirm their associate membership of the international order of gentlemen.

Second, recent work suggests that during the second half of the eighteenth century the British in India also succeeded in creating an adapted form of the 'fiscal-military' state that had been established in Britain after 1688. The East India Company's transition from trader to sovereign during the 1760s and 1770s obliged the British to move far beyond the management of commerce as they were taken into the realms of government and defence, and they became heavily dependent upon the regular collection of territorial revenues and customs duties. As a result, the Company's regime, driven by the need to support a vast army, increasingly resembled the centralized, highly bureaucratic fiscal system that supported the metropolitan state. The administrative settlement imposed upon British India by the Company required active support from an increasing number of civil officers of all types, and these men, confident of their legal authority, began to apply uniform methods and procedures in a variety of different contexts.⁴⁶ Although local circumstances dictated that the Company state could never fully replicate its metropolitan progenitor, the organizational characteristics that it exhibited indicate the extent to which core assumptions about military and fiscal power had been embraced by British elites everywhere.

Third, since the pioneering work of Holden Furber it has been acknowledged that one of the most important dynamics of eighteenthcentury British expansion in Asia was provided by private enterprise.⁴⁷ While vigorous coercive action was always taken by the East India Company against rogue traders and interlopers attempting to establish illegal commercial links between Britain and the East, the Company's monopoly on British trading within Asia itself was never regarded as being absolute in all areas of commercial activity.

Indeed, during the second half of the seventeenth century, the Company had granted 'indulgences' which permitted its servants to trade on their own account. It also issued licences to a small number of 'free merchants' and, unlike other European companies, it had effectively ceded intraAsian trade or the 'country trade' to private individuals. There had long been an informal commercial presence operating within and often well beyond the formal boundaries demarcated by the Company's trade and territory, and thus the British presence in Asia was defined by both private enterprise and 'official' Company activity, with the two often operating in harness.

The private sector in India was remarkably vigorous, its innovative and diversified activities often being based upon partnerships between Britons and local traders and bankers. Naturally, the Company protected its own position as a trader in bulk commodities, but it allowed individuals plenty of scope for initiative. Such a policy ran obvious risks, such as when private traders became involved in disputes with local rulers, or Company servants became heavily indebted to Indian merchants, but there were plenty of advantages for the Company. By trading on their own account, Company servants could accumulate the large fortunes that would, they hoped, secure them a comfortable retirement in British landed society, and not only did this make the East India service attractive to adventurers, but it also gave the Company access to a large pool of private British funds that acted as an important local source of credit and working capital. Over time, the flourishing private sector took on an institutional form as partnerships established a large number of banks, industrial concerns, shipping companies and agency houses. Most notably, this sector came to dominate the 'country' trade, the expansion of which was of great importance to the Company because it allowed funds to be transferred from India to Canton in China where investment could be made in the all-important tea trade.

Growing involvement in the China trade helped private traders to reassert themselves in eastern seas and this enabled a new sphere of British influence to be established. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, private traders from India had broken out of a traditional Asian maritime commercial system, and they moved far and wide, with their reach eventually extending from Australia to Britain. Thus, to take one late-eighteenth-century example, British private traders in Bengal were able to exploit important transoceanic commercial linkages that touched three continents as they endeavoured to transfer goods and funds to Europe via the United States of America.⁴⁸ In the words of PJ. Marshall, the operations of India-based British merchants 'now spanned the world',⁴⁹ and their activities well illustrate how, in certain instances, the process of global expansion and integration could be driven by powerful commercial impulses emanating from the periphery as well as the metropolis. This underscores the important yet often overlooked point that Britain's emerging global empire was given shape and definition not only by those looking out at the world from Britain, but also by those at the outer reaches who were capable of independently establishing links of their own with other parts of the world, as well as with the metropolis itself.

Conclusion

The examples offered by North America and India suggest that the different overseas spheres in which Britons moved during the eighteenth century perhaps had more in common than might have been first thought. In part, this was because these separate spheres were connected by the international order of British elites whose attitudes and assumptions were informed by a shared commitment to the gentlemanly ideal and the pursuit of enterprise. As the American Revolution demonstrated, this was not enough to override the tensions and divisions between core and periphery that could be caused by constitutional and political crisis, and more generally, one of the greatest perceived threats to the wellbeing of the metropolis always lay in the unfettered expansionist actions of gentlemanly capitalists in the wider world.

Nevertheless, those located at the outer reaches of the eighteenth-century empire established social, economic and administrative systems that possessed many of the characteristics embodied in the metropolitan gentlemanly capitalism defined by Cain and Hopkins, and this helped to integrate Britain's diverse territories and possessions into a greater whole. The British had always adopted a flexible and broad-based approach to overseas activity, and when this legacy was harnessed to an increasingly strong belief in the value and importance of a global empire the potentially devastating loss of America became only a momentary setback to the processes of worldwide expansion and growth.

Notes

1 For recent discussions of the increasingly central place of empire in eighteenth-century political consciousness, see Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England 1715-1785 (Cambridge, 1995) and Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire. British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2000). For the part played by the empire in the creation of a British identity, see the hotly debated study by Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, 1992).

PJ. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism 1688-2000 (London, second edition, 2001), esp. pp. 23-103.

David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community (Cambridge, 1995).

Holden Furber, John Company at Work: a Study of European Expansion in India in the Late Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1951), p. 159.

Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, p. 59.

PJ. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688-1914 (London, 1993), pp. 467-8.

The overseas empire of the eighteenth century itself is discussed primarily in ibid., pp. 84-6, 320-3.

For a critical discussion of gentlemanly capitalism in an eighteenth-century metropolitan context, see H.V.

Bowen, Elites, Enterprise and the Making of the British Overseas Empire, 1688-1775 (Basingstoke, 1996), passim.

David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), p. 8.

See, for example, PJ. Marshall, 'Introduction' in idem (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. II: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 4-9.

H.V. Bowen, 'British Conceptions of Global Empire, 1756-1783', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 26 (1998), pp. 1-27.

This emerges from a recent study of the late-eighteenth-century press, Jeremy R. Osborn, 'India, Parliament and Press under George III: a study of English attitudes towards the East India Company and empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries' (University of Oxford D. Phil. thesis, 1999). For a detailed study of this theme, see PJ. Marshall and Glyndwr William, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London, 1982).

Bowen, 'British Conceptions of Global Empire', pp. 13-19.

Armitage, Ideological Origins, pp. 170-1, 176-80.

See H.V. Bowen, 'Perceptions from the Periphery: Colonial American views of Britain's Asiatic empire, 1756-1783' in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (eds), Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the New World, 1500-1820 (New York, 2001).

N.A.M. Rodger, 'Sea-power and Empire, 1688-1793' in Marshall (ed.), History of the British Empire, pp. 169-83.

Michael Duffy, 'World-wide War and Imperial Expansion, 1793-1815' in ibid., pp. 184-207.

C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian. The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830 (London, 1989), 100-32.

T.H. Breen, 'An Empire of Goods. The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690-1776', Journal of British Studies, XXV (1986); Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675-1740. An exploration of communication and community (New York, 1986).

There is a vast and growing literature on this subject, but for a detailed and influential elaboration on these themes, see Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness. The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, 1988).

Cary Carson, 'The Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: why demand?' in Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (eds), Of Consuming Interests. The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, 1994), p. 690.

Richard L. Bushman, 'American High-style and Vernacular Cultures', in Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole (eds), Colonial British America. Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, 1984), p. 359. Bushman's views are discussed further in his The Refinement of America. Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992).

These are examined and documented in detail in Carson, 'The Consumer Revolution' (quotation on p. 495).

Bushman, 'American High-style and Vernacular Cultures', pp. 366-7. A similar point is made with reference to the Chesapeake in Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, 'Changing Lifestyles and Consumer Behavior in the Colonial Chesapeake' in Carson etal. (eds), Of Consuming Interests, pp. 59-60. Steele, English Atlantic, p. 268. Carson, 'The Consumer Revolution', pp. 149-52. Of course, colonial condemnation of English cultural and social forms, and the boycott of goods, was to gather pace during the political crisis of the 1760s.

Ian K. Steele, 'The Empire and Provincial Elites. An Interpretation of Some Recent Writings on the English Atlantic, 1675-1740', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, VIII (1980), 18.

For discussion of this, see Carson, 'The Consumer Revolution', pp. 508-9; Bushman, 'American High-style and Vernacular Cultures', pp. 370-6.

Kevin M. Sweeney, 'High-style Vernacular: Lifestyles of the Colonial Elite' in Carson etal. (eds), Of Consuming Interests, pp. 2, 32-6, 13. Thus, for example, a relatively small and dispersed colonial population could not support a commercialized leisure industry of the type that attracted widespread participation from the metropolitan elite (Carson, 'The Consumer Revolution', pp. 507-8).

Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982), pp. 118, 132; Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves. The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake 1680-1800 (Chapel Hill, 1986), pp. 276-7. For the 'ideal of cultivation' in a colonial context, see Bushman, 'American High-style and Vernacular Cultures', pp. 352-60.

For discussions of this process in Britain, see Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class. Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660-1730 (London, 1989), pp. 5-9; Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540-1880 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 23-5.

For the ways in which 'competitive consumption' helped to redraw social lines, see Sweeney, 'High-style Vernacular', pp. 28-31.

Karin Calvert, 'The Function of Fashion in Eighteenth-century America' in Carson et al. (eds), Of Consuming Interests, pp. 252-83 (esp. 260-74).

See, for example, the cases cited in Robert E. Brown and B. Katherine Brown, Virginia, 1705-1786. Democracy or Aristocracy? (East Lansing, 1956), pp. 34-42.

Bushman, The Refinement of America, pp. xvii-xix.

This was most obviously reflected in some of the practices associated with debt, creditworthiness and business agreements. In some contexts, the form taken by such arrangements was entirely based upon a gentleman's social standing and his word of honour. For a discussion of this with reference to the Chesapeake planter elite, see T.H. Breen, Tobacco Culture. The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution (Princeton, 1986).

37 Edwin J. Perkins, 'The Entrepreneurial Spirit in Colonial America: the foundations of modern business history', Business History Review, LXIII (1989), 160-86.

38 See, in general, Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, pp. 11-138; Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, pp. 92-100; Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, pp. 261-313; Paul G.E. Clemens, The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland's Eastern Shore. From tobacco to grain (Ithaca, 1980), pp. 120-67. For the relationships within families and the lifestyles of the Virginia and Maryland gentry, see Daniel Blake Smith, Inside the Great House. Planter Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society (Ithaca, 1980). For details of the general improvement in living standards in the Chesapeake after the 1680s, see Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, 'The Standard of Living in the Colonial Chesapeake', William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, XLX (1988), 135-59 and idem, 'Changing Lifestyles and Consumer Behavior'.

39 Aubrey C. Land, 'Economic Base and Social Structure. The Northern Chesapeake in the Eighteenth Century', Journal of Economic History, XXV (1965), 639-54; idem, 'Economic Behavior in a Planting Society. The Eighteenth-century Chesapeake', Journal of Southern History, XXXIII (1967), 469-85; John Bezis Selfa, 'Planter Industrialists and Iron Oligarchs. A comparative prosopography of early Anglo-America ironmasters', Business and Economic History, XXIII, 66-7.

40 Clemens, Atlantic Economy, pp. 134-5. For the development of varying patterns of diversification evident among the elite of Maryland, see Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony. Life in Early Maryland, 1650-1720 (Princeton, 1982), pp. 79-91.

41 See, for example, Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1955), pp. 101-2, 134-42, 192-7; Virginia B. Harrington, The New York Merchant on the Eve of the Revolution (1935, reprinted Gloucester, MA, 1964), pp. 11-37, 126-63; Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise. Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, 1986), pp. 11-164. For a recent discussion of the material world of these individuals and their influence on those around them, see Carson, 'The Consumer Revolution', pp. 607-10.

42 For some comparisons that underscore this point, see Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise, pp. 139, 158-61.

43 Sung Bok Kim, 'A New Look at the Great Landlords of Eighteenth-century New York', William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. series, XXVII (1970), 579-614 (esp. 595-600).

44 Alan Gallay, The Formation of a Planter Elite. Jonathan Bryan and the Southern Colonial Frontier (Athens, GA, 1989). For the development of elite culture and the adaptation of the gentlemanly ideal to conditions in this region, see Richard Waterhouse, A New World Gentry. The Making of a Merchant and Planter Class in South Carolina, 1670-1770 (New York, 1989).

45 PJ. Marshall, 'The White Town of Calcutta under the Rule of the East India Company', Modern Asian Studies, 34, 2 (2000), 308-9. For studies of British social life in India during this period see, for example, Percival Spear, The Nabobs. The Social Life of the English in Eighteenth-century India (Oxford, 1932; new impression, 1980) and S.C. Ghosh, The Social Condition of the British Community in Bengal 1757-1800 (Leiden, 1970), republished as The British in Bengal. A study of the British society and life in the late eighteenth century (New Delhi, 1998).

46 For the long-term evolution of the Company state and comparisons with the British domestic state, see C.A. Bayly, 'The British Military-Fiscal State and Indigenous Resistance. India 1750-1820' in Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War. Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994), 325-30.

47 Furber, John Company at Work; idem, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient 1600-1800 (Minneapolis, 1976). For the importance of private trade, see also PJ. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: the British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1976) and I.B. Watson, Foundations for Empire: English Private Trade in India 1659-1760 (New Delhi, 1980).

48 Amales Tripathi, Trade and Finance in the Bengal Presidency 1793-1833 (2nd revised edition, Calcutta, 1979), pp. 79-80.

49 PJ. Marshall, 'Private British Trade in the Indian Ocean before 1800', in Ashin Das Gupta and M.N. Pearson (eds), India and the Indian Ocean 1500-1800 (paperback edition, New Delhi, 1999), 299.

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Source: Akita Shigeru. Gentlemanly Capitalism, Imperialism and Global History. Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.,2002. — 279 p.. 2002

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