In the spring of 1837, the colonial press in India began to carry disturbing accounts of growing agricultural distress in the Agra region of north-central India.Footnote 1 Failed rains and adverse market conditions had created a fast-deteriorating situation as peasant cultivators increasingly found themselves unable to access to enough food to eat. By spring 1838, news of the situation reached Britain, and the metropolitan press began to report on what the Indian Famine Commission would later refer to as “the most grievous famine experienced in Upper India since the commencement of British rule.”Footnote 2 As the death toll crept ever upward, the attention of British colonial philanthropists and reformers was drawn to India by harrowing descriptions of human suffering, mass mortality, the desertion of villages, and desolation of vast tracts of land.
Public responses to news of the famine varied. Calls for private charitable donations to hastily created relief funds were prominent in colonial Indian newspapers but were less common in Britain. In July 1838, the Leeds Mercury carried a rare plea for subscriptions to a relief fund, asking,
[W]hat is the duty of Britain towards her Eastern possessions? The Presidencies and different stations in India are vigorously aiding the sufferers; let the cry of misery in the East be heard and regarded in the West. The writer recollects that while in India in 1824 that more than £10,000 were raised in that country for the suffering Irish—Let this sum now be returned, and “with high interest too”—In London and in the principal towns of the United Kingdom, let those who know and feel the evil, call the friends of humanity and our common Christianity together; and their appeal will be liberally regarded. Her Majesty, and the nation, if properly addressed, must respond to the cry of famine and death . . . May our country exhibit the influence of its divine religion, which declares “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”Footnote 3
The author, James Peggs, was a former Baptist missionary of several years’ residence in India, a prolific campaigner on Indian social and religious issues, and leading advocate for the abolition of sati in the late 1820s.Footnote 4 The call for British public action reflects both the tenor of his previous work, and an emerging sense of humanitarian responsibility to relieve suffering.Footnote 5 The Irish Famine of 1845–1859 is often considered the first national subsistence crisis to attract large-scale international fund-raising activities, with committees in Calcutta in the vanguard of overseas relief efforts. Yet as Peggs's words demonstrate, an embryonic sense of imperial interconnectedness and tentative flows of charity between India, Britain, and Ireland predated that catastrophe. As the Leeds Mercury put it, “If it be said that they are too far off to have a claim on us, the reply is—they are human beings, and that when Ireland suffered a similar visitation the people of India did not think our sister isle too far off.”Footnote 6 Most responses to the famine, however, were characterized by what Michael Barnett terms developmental humanitarianism rather than emergency relief.Footnote 7 The Essex Standard, for example, called not for private charitable giving but for “an immediate inquiry into the causes of such calamities” and for “a system of justice and sound policy” to be introduced to prevent further disasters.Footnote 8 As with the Bengal famine of 1770, that of 1837–38 became the vehicle for a wider debate about the impact of East India Company rule, the nature of Britain's imperial responsibilities in India, and the subcontinent's role within political economy of the post-emancipation British Empire.
Perhaps surprisingly, given its role in catalyzing wider debates about empire in Britain, the Agra famine of 1837–38 has received relatively little scholarly attention, especially when compared to the catastrophic scarcities that blighted India in the second half of the nineteenth century. Sanjay Sharma's excellent Famine, Philanthropy and the Colonial State focuses on the responses of the East India Company's administration and colonial society and their implications for the development of famine policy across the nineteenth century.Footnote 9 Upamanyu Mukherjee's Natural Disasters and Victorian Imperial Culture looks at several nineteenth-century famines and epidemics, exploring the role that disasters play in the justificatory discourses of “palliative imperialism.”Footnote 10 Both works focus on responses to famine in India, however, rather than its coverage in the metropolitan press, in Parliament and East India House, or in the lectures and publications of philanthropic organizations in Britain. This focus may reflect the persistent assumption that such events engendered little interest at home. “The protecting influence of the English press is not shed over India,” a correspondent to the Asiatic Journal lamented in 1838; “the expiring rays of its power scarcely penetrate within the door-posts of our eastern kingdom. The moral force of public opinion is not brought to bear upon the grievances, nor public sympathy attracted towards the sufferings of her population . . . here is an enormous population exposed to a stupendous periodical calamity, and actual deaths occurring by thousands, and the press is silent—as silent as the graves of the victims of famine.”Footnote 11
Lack of coverage of 1837–8 also reflects a long-standing assumption that the early nineteenth century was a period of growing imperial self-assurance and complacency regarding the benefits of British rule in India, which was contrasted favorably with the slave system of the West Indies.Footnote 12 Yet voices were raised in Britain condemning the handling of the famine, emphasizing the colonial state's culpability for the disaster and questioning the impact of British rule on India's prosperity. Indeed, in emphasizing this critical response of sections of the British public to events in India, I complicate the dominant narrative of the 1830s as a period of growing imperial self-confidence by highlighting the continued existence of counter-hegemonic voices within metropolitan British discourses on empire in India. At the same time, I also explore the limitations of humanitarian political economy, arguing that, while colonial philanthropists were critical of the impact of the East India Company's rule, the alternatives they presented remained framed by the logic of imperial capitalism.
In exploring the ways in which news of the Agra famine was received in Britain, I focus primarily on two interrelated but often competing agendas within the metropolitan response. The first is the attempt by colonial philanthropists connected to the Aborigines’ Protection Society, founded in 1837, and the British India Society, founded in 1839, to find a solution to Indian poverty—and to British manufacturers’ dependency on slave-grown cotton from America—in commercial expansion and increased cash crop agriculture on the subcontinent.Footnote 13 The second agenda relates to the role that ideas about Indian impoverishment played in justifying the exportation of Indian indentured labor to support colonial commodity production in other parts of the empire. Debates between the proponents of these opposing schemes are instructive, as they reflect the wider fissures within early nineteenth-century ideas of political economy, in which demands for coercive labor regimes of various types (slavery, convict assignment, indenture) came into conflict with liberal ideals that limited the power of the employer on humanitarian grounds and venerated an idealized image of the free wage laborer. Yet although the two projects appear diametrically opposed, I suggest that they were based on shared assumptions about the nature of Indian poverty and on the potential for cheap Indian labor to fulfil the various needs of the British imperial marketplace.
By exploring the relationship between responses to the famine and political and commercial debates about India's productivity and labor resources, I build on a recent resurgence in interest in the history of humanitarian intervention.Footnote 14 The interaction between humanitarian sentiment and the social, political, and economic interests of the state have become important and controversial themes, especially in the context of the complex relationship between the emergence of humanitarianism and transnational histories of imperial expansion and exploitation.Footnote 15 Discourses of colonial philanthropy redefined how debates about imperial relations were framed, but as I argue here, they did not necessarily alter the underlying political and economic impetuses that drove them. By challenging the justificatory discourse of “civilizing mission,” postcolonial and revisionist scholars have explored its role in masking economic exploitation and imperial violence and revealed more complex motivations underpinning various policies, practices and reforms.Footnote 16 As Lambert and Lester point out, the philanthropic dimensions of imperial expansion were co-constitutive with the more overtly exploitative ones, existing in an uneasy relationship with the coercive power of the colonial state.Footnote 17 Humanitarian agendas functioned within this complex matrix of moral, economic, political, and pragmatic imperatives, which produced fissured and contested ideological formations that were applied unevenly across different colonial sites.Footnote 18 This pattern is particularly evident in the 1830s and 1840s, as sentimental humanitarian rhetoric about the plight of Britain's suffering Indian subjects increasingly intersected with commercial and political agendas regarding the subcontinent's productive potential.
Disasters, as Mukherjee points out, are important “touchstones” in separating those who focus on the supposed improvements wrought by colonialism from those who seek to critique its impact and evaluate its multifarious costs.Footnote 19 Metropolitan British responses to the famine in Upper India reflected this fundamental dichotomy between those who presented it as a natural disaster and those who held the East India Company accountable. Thus, as Darren Zook has argued in the context of late-nineteenth-century famine narratives, accounts of the 1837–38 catastrophe were less a description of the famine as a specific event and more of an elucidation of “the political agendas of various groups of witnesses.”Footnote 20 In this article, I explore how prevailing attitudes toward India's environmental and climactic vulnerability intersected with concerns over the impact of the East India Company's policy, the needs of the global imperial labor market, and reformist prescriptions for India's future productivity. In doing so, I point to a discursive agenda that sought to politicize the immiserated Indian landscape within the framework of an ongoing realignment of Britain's imperial strategies after the Emancipation Act of 1833. I begin by contextualizing metropolitan British responses to the 1837–38 crisis in terms of debates about the causes of famine in colonial South Asia and by outlining how these issues intersected with the immediate concerns of the late 1830s. I then explore the ways in which the famine was used to mobilize support for the competing agendas of colonial philanthropists who championed East India reform and the West Indian lobby that advocated for the indentured labor system. Using the rhetoric of newly formed organizations for colonial reform, such as the Aborigines’ Protection Society and British India Society, together with debates at East India House and in the press, I assess the ways in which ideas of agricultural distress in India informed wider debates about imperial humanitarian responsibility, colonial commodity production, free trade, slavery, and labor migration in the formative decade after the Emancipation Act.
Unnatural Disasters: Famine in Early Colonial India
The history of British India is punctuated by catastrophic famines. Two great famines in Bengal marked the beginning and end of the colonial period—in 1770 up to ten million people, or one-third of the population, are thought to have died, while 1943 saw the loss of three million lives as surplus grain was redirected to help the war effort. Numerous other serious scarcities, with death tolls numbered in the hundreds of thousands, took place in various parts of India in the intervening years. Zook argues that, in the late nineteenth century, subsistence crises became inextricably connected with India, as “the geographic landscape of famine was transformed into the mental landscape of chronic poverty.”Footnote 21 These discourses had a long pedigree in colonial accounts, dating back to the late eighteenth century, that presented India as a land of decay and attributed agricultural vulnerability to India's capricious climate and “tropical backwardness.”Footnote 22 As late as 1880, the Famine Commission claimed that scarcities were traceable “in all cases” to “seasons of unusual drought, the failure of customary rainfall leading to the failure of food crops on which the subsistence of the population depends.”Footnote 23 This discourse allowed colonial observers to eschew any connection between imperial exploitation and agricultural crisis, placing the blame instead on the vagaries of the Indian weather.Footnote 24 Some contemporaries did question how natural these disasters were, however, creating tensions between interpretations that focused on climate and those that acknowledged varying degrees of colonial culpability.Footnote 25
During the Bengal Famine of 1770, rumors circulated that East India Company agents were guilty of directly exacerbating the crisis. An anonymous letter published in the Morning Chronicle asked, “How is it possible to justify the servants of the EIC, or to clear them, from the charge of rapine, oppression, injustice, and even murder, when it is plain that they were the immediate cause of a late dreadful famine in India, owing to their unbounded avarice?”Footnote 26 The company's Court of Directors asked the governor general of Bengal, Warren Hastings, to investigate claims that company officials had engaged in speculation in the grain market, but no Britons were ever prosecuted over it. The 1770 famine did act as a catalyst for a wider-ranging debate about the East India Company's activities in India, however, culminating in the unsuccessful impeachment of Hastings between 1788 and 1795. Edmund Burke, who orchestrated the impeachment trial, accused the company of making “ill use” of the calamity and aggravating the distress for the advantage of individuals.Footnote 27 Meanwhile, Adam Smith blamed the catastrophe on the company's interference in the grain market. “The drought in Bengal,” Smith maintained, “might probably have occasioned a very great dearth. Some improper regulations, some injudicious restraints imposed by the servants of the East India Company upon the rice trade, contributed . . . to turn that dearth into a famine.”Footnote 28 In The Wealth of Nations, Smith argued that the self-interest of the grain trader was the best security against famine, as market mechanisms meant that optimal selling strategies would spread consumption over the harvest year and reallocate grain from areas in relative surplus to those in relative deficit.Footnote 29 That faith in the palliative effects of free trade was belied by experience, although the laissez-faire approach it ushered in had a long-lasting influence, both on later famine policy and on the political economy of organizations like the British India Society.
In the wake of the 1770 crisis, British officials in India began to seek ways of preventing future crises. An early articulation of “civilizing mission,” the building of public granaries and botanic gardens, together with sporadic interventions to feed hungry children, or prevent slave-trafficking of famine victims, represented the East India Company's attempts to claim legitimacy by accepting some traditional duties of Indian rulers.Footnote 30 They were also inextricably linked to the articulation of “palliative imperialism,” which justified the colonial presence by positioning the British as resolvers rather than instigators of India's natural disasters.Footnote 31 Confident in the power of European scientific knowledge, Sir Joseph Banks believed that new agricultural technologies would eventually result in the “abolition of famine.”Footnote 32 The reality was very different; serious scarcities continued to blight India, and their frequency and severity were exacerbated under colonial rule. As Ravi Ahuja points out, “Transformations and higher levels of integration of the subcontinent's political, economic and social structure merely changed the causes of famine,” as increasingly climactic events were compounded and exacerbated by the functioning of market forces, speculation, and misdirected state intervention.Footnote 33
The early nineteenth century saw the development of functioning British systems of colonial governance, and the so-called “Era of Reform” of the 1820s and 1830s is often portrayed as “a laboratory for the creation of a liberal administrative state.”Footnote 34 The East India Company sought to project an image of slow but progressive improvement of India that granted the inhabitants “good government . . . security to personal freedom; [and] security to their possessions.”Footnote 35 The reality was more chaotic, however, as laissez-faire economic policies and individual taxation eroded collective social networks and damaged agricultural productivity.Footnote 36 Increased tax demands were not accompanied by investments in the land, as the colonial state appropriated the revenues to pay for export goods and military spending.Footnote 37 As a result, the state failed to implement any extensive infrastructural improvement and offered only the most basic and reactive systems of famine relief. As early as 1789, Indian commentators were criticizing the East India Company for failing to continue traditional practices of “sinking wells, digging reservoirs, building bridges or planting orchards.”Footnote 38 The “Permanent Settlement” instituted by Cornwallis in 1793 was lauded by colonial officials for providing Indians with security in their landed property, but in practice it resulted in higher taxation that hit the peasantry particularly hard. The impact was exacerbated by inflexible and arbitrary methods of revenue collection that made little allowance for poor harvests, or times of extreme dearth.Footnote 39 This system undermined farmers’ ability to cope with seasonal hardship, compounding rural poverty and increasing vulnerability to starvation.
The 1837–38 famine represented the culmination a period of distress and economic depression caused by a combination of adverse climatic, ecological, and market conditions that Christopher Bayly calls the “scarcity cycle of the 1830s.”Footnote 40 Indications of impending famine in the Doab and trans-Yamuna tract of the North-West Provinces (the region between Delhi and Allahabad) were apparent from the summer of 1837 onward. The failure of the summer and winter rains resulted in the loss of both the kharif and rabi crops, inflicting a double blow to regional agricultural productivity.Footnote 41 By the beginning of 1838, famine conditions were established, and the death toll was rising rapidly. Initially, the East India Company continued the laissez-faire approach that had characterized their response to previous famines, but by early 1838 the situation was so bad that the governor general, Lord Auckland, who had recently toured the famine-stricken regions, admitted that “the largest expenditure is required in order to palliate the evil, and prevent the total depopulation of the country by starvation and emigration.”Footnote 42 With public scrutiny of the situation growing, the company was forced to intervene in an attempt to mitigate the crisis.
The colonial state's relief efforts were influenced by ideologies underpinning recent Poor Law reforms in Britain and Ireland. As David Nally notes, these created a legal distinction between poverty and indigence, between the able-bodied pauper and the laboring poor. The New Poor Law ended the practice of “outdoor relief” and dictated that conditions of state relief in workhouses must, on principle, be worse than those experienced by the lowest-paid laborer outside.Footnote 43 In India, these principles were reinforced by orientalist assumptions about the Indian's natural indolence, leading the East India Company to eschew gratuitous relief in favor of forcing the destitute to labor on “works of public utility” in return for food. Although the colonial state presented this as a charitable intervention, the system offered little more than starvation rations in return for backbreaking physical labor. Nonetheless, demand for the scheme grew, and colonial officials soon began retrenchments, cutting the already meager “wages” and instituting an “every other day” policy for recipients. Wary of open-ended responsibilities and rising costs, officials considered it enough to limit rather than to prevent mortality.Footnote 44 Anyone incapable of physical labor was cast back on private charity, with famine relief funds set up in Calcutta and other urban centers. However, these voluntary relief committees, too, were influenced by metropolitan ideas about the deserving and undeserving poor, and they rejected the Indian practice of freely distributing cooked food from open-air kitchens. Instead, they channeled relief efforts through residential poor houses, where strict tests of need could be applied, with the result that many died before they could reach the relief centers.Footnote 45 Michael Barnett describes the East India Company's response in 1837–38 as a major humanitarian failure, referring to the “heart-breaking” response of a colonial state caught between the growing “recognition of its special responsibilities to the colonized” and its own financial and political interests and ideology.Footnote 46
Back in Britain, news of the famine prompted questions about the East India Company's culpability for the disaster, both in terms of the inadequate response to the immediate crisis and of the long-term impact of colonial policies on India's rural economy. The company's Court of Directors maintained that the famine, though deplorable, had arisen from natural causes, and that the company's presence in India had only bestowed “the blessings of good government and security” on the subcontinent. Others disagreed; East India reformers such as Robert Montgomery Martin and Sir Charles Forbes repeatedly lobbied the company's Court of Directors regarding its responsibility for Indian agricultural distress. “Did they not wring a most enormous revenue from the bowels of the land and the blood of the people?” Martin asked the Court of Directors in 1839. “Yes, England had levied in India in 60 years, no less than one thousand million sterling. And what had they given in return for it? Famine—nothing but Famine!”Footnote 47 It was a theme that speakers for the Aborigines’ Protection Society and British India Society would take up with vigor in their critique of the East India Company's rule. In the remainder of the article, I discuss the wider context in which metropolitan responses to the 1837–38 famine were situated, before exploring two competing ways in which the famine entered these debates: as a catalyst for emerging calls for the expansion of colonial commodity production on the subcontinent and as a justification for the exportation of Indian labor to other part of the empire through the indentured labor system.
“Beggars in Their Native Land”: Indian Poverty and British Colonial Philanthropy
It is sometimes assumed that the negative impacts of colonial rule went largely unacknowledged in early nineteenth-century Britain. Yet public unease with the nature of the East India Company's governance, and particularly with the severity of the land tax, was apparent throughout the 1820s and 1830s, alongside more optimistic interpretations of colonial benevolence. Liberalism was not a coherent doctrine, for while most believed that the human condition could be improved, prescriptions for achieving this varied. Radical attitudes to reform clashed with more conservative ideas and the day-to-day exigencies of colonial rule. Thus, the decade that witnessed the anglicizing administration of Lord William Bentinck, epitomized by the prohibition of sati (1829) and Macaulay's Minute on Education (1835), also saw growing criticism of the East India Company, as metropolitan British reformers accused the company of doing too little, acting too slowly, and prioritizing its profits over the condition of the people.Footnote 48 “The fatal mistake in India is to consider the natives merely contributors to the advantages of the East India Company,” Irish reformer and antislavery activist Daniel O'Connell told Parliament in 1831: “The country is really theirs, not ours, and we are criminal in not considering their interests and indefeasible rights as the paramount object of our solicitude.”Footnote 49
As Maurice Bric points out, O'Connell was drawn to debates about India because they provided him a platform for discussing imperial responsibility to relieve the suffering of “universal man.” This discussion resonated with debates about Ireland at a time when questions about the repeal of the Act of Union and about rural poverty and land management there were becoming increasingly contentious.Footnote 50 Indeed, contemporaneous debates over the Irish Poor Law provide an important comparator to those about famine in India. In both cases, the long-established idea that impoverishment was an indicator of inherent backwardness was increasingly being challenged by reformers who attributed it instead to British misgovernance and neglect. Likewise, in both places, ideas about managing rural destitution through local investment in infrastructure and the reclamation of wasteland for agricultural development were ultimately subordinated to schemes that sought to drive smallholders from the land and forced the poor to seek a subsistence as mobile landless wage laborers.Footnote 51 These policies ultimately resulted in mass emigration from both India and Ireland in the mid nineteenth century. Such conflicts also reflected wider divisions in British imperial political economy, between those who supported coercive labor discipline to ensure a malleable workforce for plantations and other large-scale enterprises (whether in the India, Ireland, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, or the Cape), and those who promoted a more liberal “free labor” relations on humanitarian grounds.Footnote 52 Such debates were thrown into sharp relief in times of famine, as widespread distress and rising mortality forced the issue of agricultural precarity and labor mobility into the spotlight, and Malthusian ideas about population control were juxtaposed with humanitarian impulses to relieve suffering.Footnote 53
The late 1830s saw an upsurge in philanthropic interest in agricultural labor conditions in India. While the late eighteenth century had seen heated political debate about the tangible impacts of the East India Company's rule, by the early nineteenth century, British philanthropic interest in the subcontinent tended to be more concerned with its moral rather than its material condition. Galvanized by a rapidly expanding missionary movement and epitomized by the campaign against sati in the 1820s, focus tended to be on the spiritual salvation rather than the physical welfare of India's inhabitants.Footnote 54 When agricultural conditions did attract evangelical attention, it was in the context of abolitionist attempts to position India as a “free labor” supplier of colonial commodities that would undercut the slave-grown produce of the West Indies. Influenced by the economic arguments of Adam Smith, leading abolitionist James Cropper argued for an equalization of the sugar duties to allow “free-grown” Indian sugar to be imported on the same terms as West Indian produce, on the basis that free labor would always outperform slavery in an open market.Footnote 55 As a result, in the 1820s it was the West India lobby rather than the antislavery movement that was most likely to highlight the impoverishment and insecurity of “free” Indian laborers.Footnote 56
In the late 1830s, shifts in the landscape of British colonial philanthropy created space for a reappraisal of Indian conditions and the impact of the East India Company's policies on Indian socioeconomic structures. The successful termination of the campaigns against slavery in 1833 and apprenticeship in 1838 had freed British abolitionists to turn their attention to issues in other parts of the world, including the continued existence of slavery in the American South, Cuba, and Brazil and the wider impacts of colonialism on “native” populations globally.Footnote 57 Thus, Catherine Hall notes, although concerns about conditions in the newly emancipated sugar colonies remained prominent in public debate, the late 1830s saw a shift in focus from slavery itself to larger questions of “what would come after” and how Britain's “native subjects” should be governed.Footnote 58 The widening horizons of the Victorian antislavery movement were captured in the geographically expansive remit of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (1839), while concern about the treatment of indigenous populations was epitomized by the Select Committee on Aboriginal Peoples (1835–1837) and the formation of the Aborigines’ Protection Society (in 1837).
The 1830s also witnessed the intensification of debates about free trade and free labor, as different interest groups within Britain sought to (re)negotiate their access to various imperial opportunities. Mauritian and West Indian planters had long been vociferous in their defense of the protective tariffs that gave their slave-grown commodities a commercial advantage in the home market. After Emancipation, they found their former slaves often unwilling to work on the terms they offered. Their expectations regarding the continuation of plantation labor were also at odds with the ideals of evangelical domesticity encouraged by some missionaries, which included the withdrawal of female field labor and the establishment of communities of smallholders working their own land.Footnote 59 From 1834 onward, planters began to turn their attention to India as a potential source of cheap labor, as they fought to defend their profit margins from African wage demands. Meanwhile, the Charter Act of 1833 had ended the East India Company's commercial operations and opened India to potential European settlement. This gave renewed life to debates, ongoing since the removal of the company's trading monopoly in 1813, about the role of independent enterprise in unlocking India's commercial potential.Footnote 60 Debates about Indian agricultural precarity were thus intimately connected to economic agendas that sought to exploit the colony's natural and labor resources, as well as to abolitionist and humanitarian imperatives and agendas. This uneasy union between humanitarian and commercial imperatives was at the heart of responses to the 1837–38 famine by organizations like the Aborigines’ Protection Society and British India Society.
The Aborigines’ Protection Society was founded by Dr. Thomas Hodgkin in 1837 to raise public awareness of the impacts of colonial expansion on indigenous populations and to pressure government to adopt more ethical policies toward them. Zoë Laidlaw notes that although the Select Committee had focused on Britain's settler colonies, “the APS cast its net more widely when deciding who needed its protection.”Footnote 61 Though it too largely focused on Britain's settler colonies, India was increasingly perceived as presenting its own unique set of problems. The continued existence of slavery on the subcontinent after 1833 and experiments with Indian indentured laborer were both causes of abolitionist concern. When news of the Agra famine reached Britain, members of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, led by Quaker industrialist and antislavery activist Joseph Pease, turned the organization's attention to India, securing the abolitionist orator George Thompson as their main spokesman on the issue. The resulting political and economic critique of the East India Company's governance went well beyond the remit of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, however, and a new organization, the British India Society, was founded in July 1839.
Unlike the missionary movement, or earlier campaigns against Hindu socioreligious practices such as sati, the British India Society prioritized material improvement over spiritual conversion or moral reform. Indeed, the society rejected any suggestion of religious interference, and even removed the word “Christian” from its published prospectus, replacing it with the word “humane.”Footnote 62 Thompson told a meeting in Manchester in 1839, “I avow that we are neither a commercial society, a religious society—that is, having no religious object—still less a political society, but a society for diffusing information and directing public feeling and intellect, with a view to the advancement of the true welfare, in all respects, of the natives of India.”Footnote 63 Such claims were somewhat disingenuous, of course, as commerce, religion, and politics were all tightly interconnected in the worldview of the British India Society. The organization did diverge from previous traditions of evangelical reform, however, by focusing on the damaging social, economic, and political impacts of colonialism rather than on India's own perceived spiritual and civilizational shortcomings.
The British India Society combined discourses of colonial philanthropy and universal abolitionism with a critique of the East India Company's policies and practices, advocating an interlocking series of reforms designed to “regenerate” India and reposition it within global networks of trade and commodity production. At the heart of the agenda of the British India Society was the idea that expanding cash crop agriculture and removing artificial restrictions on Indian trade would allow the subcontinent to become a “free labor” producer of sugar, cotton, and other colonial commodities. This approach, it was argued, would both undermine the economic competitiveness of slave-grown produce of Cuba, Brazil, and the American South and bring prosperity to England by securing a reliable supply of cheap, “free grown” cotton. “Do justice to India,” George Thompson exhorted his listeners, “and banish the demon of intestine warfare from Africa! Do justice to India and drive the miscreant man-thief from the banks of the Niger and Gambia! Do justice to India and see the fetters fall from the limbs of the slave! Do justice to India and see your wharves covered, your warehouses filled and your looms made busy, and your populations clothed by the produce of the East, with the fruits of the industry of the conquered and countless millions, who cry from the banks of the Ganges, and the Brahmapootra and the Indus!”Footnote 64
In calling upon his audience to challenge slavery and colonial exploitation by becoming patrons of India's “peaceful, bloodless and anti-slavery commerce,” Thompson drew on economic strategies for undermining slavery that had been pioneered by James Cropper in the 1820s.Footnote 65 The Smithian principles and assumptions that had underpinned the campaigns to end the East India Company's monopoly, open India to independent commerce, and level the commercial playing field by equalizing the sugar duties were thus central to the political economy of the British India Society.
The intertwining of commercial and philanthropic agendas allowed the British India Society to attract an eclectic membership and draw on diverse communities of support. Its inaugural meeting was chaired by the leading parliamentary abolitionist, Lord Brougham, while the audience included some of the leading lights of the British antislavery movements and the American abolitionists Rev. John Keep from New York and William Dawes from the Oberlin Institute, whose report of the meeting appeared in William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator.Footnote 66 Also present were “old India hands” such as Charles Forbes, Major General Briggs, and Francis Carnac Brown, as well as East India merchants and members of the Indian aristocracy and entrepreneurial elite: Nawab Iqbal al-Daula of Awadh; Prince Jamh ood-Deen (son of the late Tipu Sultan); Mir Afzal Ali and Mir Karim Ali (agents of the Raja of Satara); and Jehangeer Nowrojee, Hirjeebhoy Merwanjee, and Dorabjee Muncherjee of Bombay.Footnote 67 In keeping with the overlapping nature of philanthropic campaigns in this period, several key (or future) members of reformist organizations such as the Aborigines’ Protection Society, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and the Anti-Corn Law League were present, while the British India Society also later courted the support of traders and manufacturers in urban centers like Manchester.Footnote 68 Relationships between the various groups were not always harmonious, however, as British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and the Anti-Corn Law League clashed over tariffs on slave-grown sugar, while the British India Society resented the Anti-Slavery Society's refusal to include conditions in India in its remit. The Anti-Corn Law League wanted to resolve free trade issues at home before turning its attention to India, while members of the British India Society worried about the moral fiber of its commercial allies.Footnote 69 As early as September 1839, Thompson noted the problems inherent in mobilizing the merchant classes, writing to reformer Elizabeth Pease that he was wary of “the value of the co-operation of commercial men, who are merely such, and do not see the force of moral principles. We must not rely on them or expect them to aid us in doing the great work, except when they can promote some special object of their own.”Footnote 70
Debates about Indian poverty and productivity intersected with domestic concerns, as economic depression, rapid industrialization and urbanization, and debates about the new Poor Laws in England and Ireland all raised questions about how best to manage impoverishment among the laboring classes. The harrowing depictions of famine in India in 1837–38 foreshadowed a politicization of hunger that was deployed much closer to home during Britain's “Hungry Forties.” As Peter Gurney has demonstrated, the horrors of starvation were invoked in both Anti-Corn Law League and Chartist rhetoric in the early 1840s. In particular, their emphasis on access to bread as vital to the maintenance of a “civilized” working class resonated with both racialized depictions of impoverished Irish “potato-eaters” and accounts of famine-stricken Indians reduced to eating vermin and carrion, or even to cannibalism.Footnote 71 The Chartists, for their part, were critical of colonial exploitation of the working man overseas but were even more hostile toward metropolitan elites who focused their attention on distant others rather than addressing the problems of the English working class and were known to disrupt meetings of the British India Society on these grounds. As a result, leading members of the society were keen to emphasize the benefits of a regenerated India for the British laboring classes.Footnote 72 In a private letter to Elizabeth Pease, George Thompson remarked, “I begin to feel as though every smoking chimney, every noisy machine, and huge brick edifice, and piled up cotton wagon, and pale faced factory child, called me to go forward with all boldness and earnestness in the cause of the slave in America—which is the cause of India. The enterprises must be wedded and proceed indissolubly together, till they together triumph.”Footnote 73 Thus, as Rob Skinner and Alan Lester point out, “the long-distance webs of concern spun by humanitarians” did not exist in a vacuum but intersected with commercial and political interests and were “intrinsic to the politics both of empire itself and of nation-state formation.”Footnote 74 Expressions of humanitarian horror at the famine became entwined with political debates about how India should be governed, while prescriptions for its relief encompassed debates about how its supposed reserves of surplus labor could best be utilized in the service of colonial commodity production, in India and elsewhere.
“We Must Regenerate India”: Humanitarianism and Colonial Commodity Production
The speeches and writings of the Aborigines’ Protection Society and British India Society contain some the most vocal discussion in Britain of the 1837–38 famine. One of the first independent publications of the British India Society, the pamphlet British Subjects Destroyed by Famine, provided details of “a succession of Famines, which have destroyed the lives of immense multitudes of human beings” under the East India Company's rule.Footnote 75 British India Society speakers provided traumatic detail of the hardships suffered by the Indian peasantry, drawing on an increasingly well-established stock of imagery: deserted villages, mothers unable to nourish their infants, children destroyed, abandoned, or sold into slavery, rivers blocked by corpses, the dead and dying lining the roads, and wild animals feeding indiscriminately on the living and the dead. The British India Society's agenda was not one of immediate relief, however, but of long-term colonial reform. Thus, although the pamphlet concluded by noting, “Facts like the above, make an irresistible appeal to the heart of the humane reader, and naturally originate the enquiry—What is to be done?,” the organization did not seek to collect donations or to pressure the East India Company into dealing more effectively with the immediate crisis. Rather, it used the famine to illustrate the need for long-term reform: “It is not [our] object to beget a feeling of uninfluential and helpless compassion; but to follow every statement of the necessities of the natives of India, by a clear exhibition of the means by which such necessities may be supplied . . . British India possesses within itself the capability, when rightly developed, of preventing the recurrence of the appalling events which are now recorded.”Footnote 76
Speeches given by George Thompson, Daniel O'Connell, and others in support of the British India Society made extensive use of images of Indian suffering to appeal to the empathetic concern of the man or woman of feeling. Indians appeared in these accounts either as emaciated bodies, bleaching bones piled up by the roadside, or distended corpses blocking rivers, or as helpless, homogenous masses whose patient suffering stood as a silent testimony against the East India Company's misrule. Gendered depictions of starvation emphasized the trauma of mothers unable to nourish their children in order to evoke sympathetic charity for the innocent victims of famine. Similar approaches had been used during the antislavery, anti-sati, and missionary campaigns to mobilize support among British women, who were presented as the natural champions of their less fortunate sisters overseas. As Hall notes, the “suffering bodies of enslaved women and their children evoked a compassion that came to be understood as a moral imperative—the personal body that bore children, suckled and nourished them, was a common bond between those who suffered and those who would help.”Footnote 77 Daniel O'Connell asked a meeting of the British India Society in 1839, “If there was a love stronger than another in this world, was it not the love of a mother for her offspring? To what miserable state must a mother be reduced before she in the night took her dear child and deprived it of life, so that she might not have the torture of seeing it die of starvation in the morning?”Footnote 78 His question reflects the affective power of maternal distress, but it also hints at a dark inverse, as natural affection is perverted by the distorting power of extreme want. As Margaret Kelleher has demonstrated, such images would be repeated numerous times during subsequent famines in both Ireland and India.Footnote 79 Functioning behind this sentimental humanitarian rhetoric, however, was a set of political agendas that sought to find the solution to Indian poverty in the further opening of India to British commercial interests.
Although the British India Society made space within its organization for direct Indian involvement, inviting Indian delegates to speak on its platform and maintaining links with commercial and civic organizations in Calcutta and Bombay, the “oppressed multitudes of Hindustan” described in its speeches and publications were presented as passive victims: downtrodden, long-suffering peasants rendered incapable of defending themselves by the physical inertia of extreme hunger. “Jackals and vultures approached and fastened upon the bodies of men, women and children before life was extinct,” Thompson reported. “Madness, disease, despair stalked abroad, and no human power present to arrest their progress.”Footnote 80 In reality, the famine of 1837–38 was not characterized by Indian passivity but rather witnessed a dramatic upsurge in “famine crime” as people struggled tenaciously to survive. G. R. Girdlestone later remarked on the “spirit of lawlessness and freebooting,” when “neither the stores of the merchants nor the grain in transit was safe from attack” and “the starving people forgot all rights of possession, and violently laid their hands on their neighbours’ supplies.”Footnote 81 Indeed, Sharma notes, the colonial state's initial impetus toward providing famine relief came not from humanitarian sentiment but from a desire to prevent a breakdown of law and order.Footnote 82 In emphasizing only passive victimhood, however, British India Society speakers were making a specific rhetorical choice to render helpless, starving Indians suitable recipients of British charity. As Laidlaw has pointed out, the subcontinent represented an ambivalent case for an organization like the Aborigines’ Protection Society, which usually focused on “primitive tribes” disrupted by settler colonialism. India was different kind of colonial frontier, and Mughals, Brahmins, and wealthy zamindars had more complex relationships with colonialism than the “noble savages” of romantic primitivist imaginings.Footnote 83 Famine sufferers, on the other hand, like the “hill tribes” inveigled into the “coolie trade,” represented the kind of “helpless victim” of colonial exploitation that could both garner sympathy and act as a powerful and relatively unproblematic indicator of the negative consequences of the East India Company's misrule.Footnote 84
Although it claimed not to be the enemy of the East India Company, the British India Society provided a searing critique of the company's activities in India and explicitly blamed the famine on colonial policies of excessive taxation and underinvestment. “Do you ask why this wholesale destruction of human life?” Thompson asked his audience, continuing,
I reply, and while I do so, I am fully aware of the nature of the accusation I bring against the government of India, at home and abroad, and am ready to sustain it—because the people have been virtually robbed of their soil—deprived of the fruits of their industry—prevented from accumulating the means of meeting a period of drought, and are thus doomed to death should the earth refuse, for a single season, to yield its increase. Our government . . . has been practically one of the most extortionate and oppressive that ever existed, and . . . our revenue system in India is one of habitual extortion and injustice, leaving nothing to the cultivator but what he is able to secure by evasion and fraud.Footnote 85
By stating that famines across the period of East India Company's rule were “not traceable to war, or . . . the divine hand,” Thompson repositioned the famine as a man-made disaster with a human cause. However, rather than using this admission of colonial culpability to reject the imperial exploitation of the subcontinent altogether, he called on another, different set of Britons—the philanthropic and private commercial communities that formed his audience—to bring about the “improvement” of the subcontinent and to rescue India from the slow creep of jungle that accompanied her supposed decline into savage, uncultivated wilderness.
The image of fertile tracts of land being slowly reclaimed by jungle appeared repeatedly in British accounts of the subcontinent, as a marker of its supposed backwardness.Footnote 86 As Arnold notes, the term “jungle” could be used in a variety of ways to describe a range of different topographical and vegetational conditions, being frequently used to describe “land that had fallen out of cultivation and so epitomized the decay of civilized society and the encroachment of untamed nature.”Footnote 87 It also chimed with a British radical tradition that saw obscenity in unproductive land: “Why are huge forests still allowed to stretch out with idle pomp and all the indolence of Eastern grandeur?” Mary Wollstonecraft asked of Britain's own unexploited spaces. “Why does the brown waste meet the traveller's view, when men want to work?”Footnote 88 The British India Society was adamant that bringing jungle and desert areas back under cultivation would provide both subsistence for Indians and trade benefits to Britain. “Rescue from poverty and nakedness the Hindoo and Mohamedan on the plains of India,” Thompson challenged his audience; “put it in the power of the natives of India to cover his head with a turban and his shoulders with a scarf, and you instantly create a demand for the manufactures of your own country, which will put in requisition all the energy and skill of your labouring population.”Footnote 89 Such arguments were used to support calls for both the equalization of trading conditions between the subcontinent and other parts of the empire and the commercial expansion of cash crop agriculture into uncultivated tracts and jungles of India.
The focus on the need to reclaim wasteland was so prominent in the rhetoric of the British India Society that it was affectionately parodied in a poem by John Backhouse, in which wild animals meet to plan their resistance to reformist attempts to cultivate their habitat; as a result, the Durham branch of the society was nicknamed “The Tiger-Expelling-From-Jungle Society.”Footnote 90 The society's emphasis on the slow creep of the jungle was at odds with the history of ecological change in India, however, which saw the erosion of tropical forests and natural habitats. Indeed, the society's focus on reclaiming what they considered wasteland for cultivation was part of a wider penetration by capitalist economic forces that played a key role in the transformation of tropical environments through the rapid clearance of forests for logging or agriculture.Footnote 91 As Richard Grove has pointed out, however, the relationship between imperial economic imperatives toward deforestation of the kind articulated by the British India Society and the actions and ideology of the colonial state with regard to environmental issues did not always align. Debates about the environmental impact of various forms of deforestation took place in a range of colonial locales, and serious concerns were expressed about the impact of jungle clearance and its relationship to famine in India from the 1820s onward. Indeed, after 1837–38, fear of the unrest and social instability that might result from repetitions of this crisis made the colonial state more responsive to arguments in favor of forest conservation. The medical service, into whose ambit scientific discussion of environmental issues fell, used arguments about the connections between deforestation, increasing aridity, and temperature change on a global scale to push for greater government controls over deforestation.Footnote 92 The calls by the British India Society for jungle clearance in favor of cash-crop agriculture can thus be considered regressive in environmental terms and at odds with their proclaimed desire to promote the prosperity of India's peasant population and productiveness of its soil. This seeming paradox is explained when we consider that the society's model for Indian prosperity was based on economic determinants of market forces and wage labor rather than on a scientific understanding of the impacts of their plans on India's ecology. The British India Society might criticize the East India Company for exacerbating the conditions by which scarcity could deepen into famine, yet the society itself was bounded by the wider imperial paradigm that saw solutions only in the expansion and refinement of India's place within wider imperial and capitalist networks.
“A Wage Scarcely Sufficient to Keep Body and Soul Together”: Indian Poverty and Indentured Labor Migration
Reporting on the Agra famine in October 1838, the Caledonian Mercury in Edinburgh noted, “myriads of working people have been reduced to starvation through the general system of making their subsistence contingent upon a certain proportion of the produce they raise, instead of paying them a fixed amount regularly in the shape of money wages.”Footnote 93 This interpretation resonates with debates in Ireland around the same time, and it is indicative of an emerging colonial tendency to understand poverty and famines as resulting not from a shortage of food but from an absence of work.Footnote 94 It was partly this ideology, together with a commitment to metropolitan ideas about labor discipline for the poor, that led the colonial state to focus its relief efforts on providing employment on public works. These half-hearted efforts provoked censure; the Agra Ukhbar, for example, attacked the colonial government for “half-admitting” the humanitarian principle of relief, while at the same time trying to extricate itself from financial and moral responsibility by pursuing “a course as unsound as it was inhuman—to reduce the wages so low that the poor must disappear by death or emigration.”Footnote 95 This ideology also underpinned the British India Society's suggestion that improved cultivation would result in the uplift of the “impoverished multitudes of Hindoostan” through the creation of employment in a regenerated agricultural sector. While framing its interest in India as a humanitarian intervention on a grander scale than the colonial state's limited emergency response, the British India Society still envisaged wage labor as the route to salvation.Footnote 96
The “regeneration” of India's agrarian sector through cash-crop agriculture was not the only solution presented for India's apparent crisis of underemployment. Debates about the role of migrant wage labor as an antidote to famine also underpinned defenses of the indenture system in the late 1830s. This system, in which Indian laborers were exported under contract to serve for a fixed term (usually five years), sought to tap into the subcontinent's supposedly inexhaustible reserves of surplus labor as a replacement for formerly enslaved Africans on the plantations of the Caribbean and Mascarenes. Planters in Mauritius had begun to recruit Indian indentured laborers even before the formal end of Apprenticeship; between 1834 and the temporary suspension of Indian emigration in 1838, as many as 25,468 Indian workers arrived on the island. Impressed by this apparent success, planters and settlers in other parts of the empire turned their attention to India. The efforts of two former plantation owners, John Mayo and John Mackay, to introduce Indian “hill coolies” into New South Wales as shepherds and farm hands proved unsuccessful, but the plans of prominent Guiana planters including John Gladstone bore fruit, and 396 Indian workers were imported between 1836 and 1838. Concerns about deceptive or coercive recruitment practices, high mortality rates at sea, and harsh conditions on the plantations led to the suspension of the system in 1838, however, and a virulent debate ensued about the nature and desirability of indentured migration. When the system was reinstated in 1842, it was under strict government control.Footnote 97
The planters’ arguments in favor of “assisted labor immigration” revolved around the commercial necessity of continuing sugar production in the former slave colonies. They argued that the efficient production of sugar could be achieved only via the plantation model, and that plantation production must expand to meet the ever-increasing demand for affordable sugar.Footnote 98 Without immigration, they argued, sugar plantations would fail, cultivation would grind to a halt, and productive regions would fall into disuse and be reclaimed by forest and sea.Footnote 99 The result would be ruin for planters, misery for former slaves, and economic and social disaster for the islands. These concerns were shared by observers in Britain. In a series of lectures in Oxford in 1839–1841, the free trader, academic, and future colonial secretary Herman Merivale called for “copious immigration” to the larger sugar colonies to bring down the cost of labor, thus averting the threat of serious scarcities and high sugar prices and securing the colonies’ future.Footnote 100 Antislavery campaigners, including members of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, the British India Society, and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, on the other hand, vehemently opposed the indenture system. Labor migration might be considered a good thing, but only if prospective migrants entered the contracts voluntarily and were capable of fully comprehending their terms. Transporting “ignorant and helpless beings” from India was deemed to contravene these criteria.Footnote 101 When pressed on the issue at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840, Daniel O'Connell summed up the feelings of many present by pronouncing, “I am fully persuaded that you might as well proclaim the slave trade again as proclaim the admission of the Hill Coolies into our West India colonies; and I am equally convinced that the planters in Mauritius are the worst guardians that could be appointed to protect these labourers. I would rather be a party to the total annihilation of that unfortunate race, than to their being subject to a new species of slavery.”Footnote 102
The rationale of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society for excluding Indian migrants from the global labor market was based on orientalist and racialized assumptions about Indian's lack of agency, the likelihood of abuse within the recruitment system, and the potential for bad faith on the part of the planters and their agents, as well as concern about the impact of indentured Indian immigration on wages and social structures in newly emancipated Caribbean. By contrast, the impact of emigration on the social and economic worlds the migrants were leaving behind as conspicuously absent from the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society's debates. Concerns with the relationship between labor migration and Indian conditions were apparent in debates about indenture on other platforms, however. At East India House, for example, the focus was less on indenture as “a new species of slavery” and more on the dynamics between competing sites of colonial commodity production and the respective influence of the East and West Indies in imperial decision-making.Footnote 103
The first experiments with indentured labor predated the 1837–38 famine, of course, and the indenture system itself cannot be understood as a response to that crisis. However, from 1838 onward, news of the calamity formed the backdrop to debates about indenture, as arguments in favor of labor migration were shaped by colonial discourses on Indian poverty, as well as metropolitan debates about the value of mobile, landless labor.Footnote 104 The 1837–38 famine reinforced the assumption that poverty-stricken Indian peasants would benefit from migrating and would be grateful to accept long contracts and relatively low wages to secure a subsistence. Although in practice the majority of the first indentured migrants did not come from famine-affected regions, prevalent images of widespread agricultural distress created a context in which indenture could be presented not only as a legitimate form of free labor but also as a desirable and necessary escape route. The governor of Mauritius, Sir Lionel Smith, remarked, “In the vast population of India, poverty and distress but too often appear in the most appalling forms. Among the few resources open to the sufferers for escaping these calamities, one is emigration to Mauritius, where a constant and large demand for their labour exists.”Footnote 105 Abolitionists, and subsequent historians might condemn indenture as a “new species of slavery,” but those who supported it argued that laborers who were already used to undertaking internal migrations to find employment and to escape hardship should not be deprived of the “outlet” that Mauritius and the Caribbean could potentially provide.Footnote 106 Declared the London Courier, “It is not proposed to seize on poor helpless savages, and send them closely packed in a filthy slave-ship to a country where they will be forced to labour for others. It is simply proposed to convey men, who are starving on a wage scarcely sufficient to keep body and soul together, to a country where they will immediately receive much higher wages.”Footnote 107
If supporters of indenture presented it as an escape route for India's impoverished “surplus” population, those with a sustained interest in India questioned both the morality of the indenture trade and the assumptions on which it was based. As long as large swathes of the subcontinent remained uncultivated, one member of the East India Company's Court of Proprietors argued, India could not be considered to have “anything like a superabundant population.”Footnote 108 From this perspective, the apparent excess of Indian labor was not a result of inexhaustible human resources but the chronic underdevelopment of India. The “poverty, misery, famine, and desolation to which the people of India were subjected” did not constitute a moral justification for labor exportation, Robert Montgomery Martin maintained, but rather was a damning indictment of failures of colonial governance. It was disgraceful, he declared, that by sanctioning indentured migration, the East India Company should “proclaim to the world that they were not able to provide for their own people in India.”Footnote 109 For the reformist sections of the East India lobby, including the British India Society and those associated with it, the solution to underemployment and poverty in India was not to export its labor but rather to improve conditions on the subcontinent by increasing productivity in agriculture and commodity production there. “If any portion of the population were distressed,” a member told the Court of Proprietors, “every wise and reflecting man, instead of counselling the emigration of those persons, would say ‘Let us exert ourselves and devise means to procure employment for these people; let us enable them to expend their labour on their own soil, in the active cultivation of those articles that are so necessary for their own use, that are the growth of their own country, and the production of which must be so beneficial to us.’”Footnote 110 Such arguments couched opposition to labor exportation in humanitarian terms, yet simultaneously accepted the logic of imperial capitalism as a solution to Indian poverty.
Conclusion
News of the Agra famine both catalyzed a new critique of conditions in East India Company-controlled India and fed into ongoing debates about India's potential role in filling the labor and commodity production needs of the post-emancipation empire. Though seemingly diametrically opposed, schemes to export “surplus” Indian labor to the sugar colonies under the indenture system and anti-indenture plans to utilize that labor to grow colonial commodities within India both relied on a shared set of assumptions about the availability and affordability of Indian labor. Low Indian wages were justified by reference to long-standing orientalist tropes about the limited material needs and wants of the Indian peasant, as well as to India's perceived climactic vulnerability and demographic excess. Such interpretations were reinforced by reports of severe agricultural distress and famine in the late 1830s, allowing capitalist mobilization of Indian labor within and beyond the subcontinent to be reimagined as humanitarian intervention. Yet observers at the time and since have questioned the supposed morality of schemes that relied on offering “free” Indian labor only meager remuneration, wherever in the world that labor was employed.Footnote 111
Though couched in humanitarian language, the British India Society saw the solution to Indian impoverishment in the refashioning of India to fit to the needs of British imperial commerce by transforming it into a site of colonial commodity production and a market for British manufactures. These supposedly philanthropic schemes paid little regard to the impact of cash-crop agriculture on rural security, or the implications of an influx of manufactured goods for existing socioeconomic institutions and artisan communities. Indeed, although ostensibly intended to lift Indians out of poverty, the wider economic argument relied on the assumption that Indian labor was cheaper than the various alternatives. Industrialist John Chapman inadvertently captured the tensions inherent in the arguments of the British India Society when writing to Thompson in 1842 about new machinery for processing raw cotton. “Without the low price of Indian labour this must be a very expensive process,” he admitted; “it would certainly be impossible to continue its use were the state of India to improve so that labour came to its due price.”Footnote 112 Such admissions reveal the inherent contradictions within imperial and humanitarian political economy. Both Sumit Sarkar and Blair Kling have noted the fundamental paradox of an organization that was apparently prepared to benefit from the “semi-slavery” of low Indian wages, while presenting itself as fighting for “Justice to India.”Footnote 113 Thus, although its arguments were couched in the language of humanitarian intervention and the emerging indenture system was decried as slavery by the back door, the British India Society's prescriptions for India were as closely intertwined with the emerging post-emancipation capitalist economy as those of the supporters of labor migration. The issue at stake in both pro- and anti-indenture responses to famine in India was not whether hungry Indians should be expected to work but where and for whose benefit they should carry out that labor.
The British India Society was relatively short-lived. After an initial wave of enthusiasm on its formation in 1839, it soon fractured, and it was defunct by 1843, having achieved little of what it set out to do. Some historians have traced connections between the British India Society and its counterpart in Calcutta, the Bengal British India Society, and later organizations such as the British India Association, and even the early manifestations of the Indian National Congress, although this is a fractured genealogy at best.Footnote 114 Others, such as David Turley, have written off the British India Society as “a mixture of unconventional religion and radical politics,” whose brief existence only indicated the further fragmentation of the British antislavery movement.Footnote 115 Yet the wide-ranging implications of the society's agenda and its vitriolic criticism of the East India Company's rule provide a valuable opportunity to reassess metropolitan British interpretations of colonial activities in India, as well as the British sense of imperial, moral, and humanitarian responsibility toward the subcontinent and its inhabitants. The society's use of the famine to mobilize support demonstrates how intertwined humanitarian impulses were with commercial and strategic imperatives, as various possible imperial futures were (re)negotiated following the formal end of slavery in the sugar colonies in 1833–34. Debates about poverty in India in this period thus resonate with similar discussions in other parts of the empire, including the West Indies, Ireland, and even England itself, and demonstrate some of the challenges, limitations, and paradoxes of humanitarian political economy during this formative period.
