The Case for India and Reflections on Lawrence’s Participation.

• This Page is perhaps the most profound and I would advocate that ‘The Case For India’ is made compulsory reading particularly for pupils of the two Lawrence School in India. Will Durant mentions the excesses of the East India Company. Sir Henry Lawrence was part and parcel of those excesses..
• Please also read my Page Lawrence’s Hidden History and my Page: Lawrence’s Military Incompetence and within that Post Script – The Indians who should be honoured instead of Sir Henry Lawrence.

When he (Aurangzeb) died his realm fell to pieces, and petty princes set up their rule in numberless divided and ‘sovereign’ states. It was a simple matter for a group of English buccaneers , armed with the latest European artillery and morals, to defeat the bows and arrows, the elephants and primitive musketry of the rajahs, and bring one Hindu province after another under the control of the British East India Company.

SIR HENRY LAWRENCE WAS AN EMPLOYEE OF THE BRITISH EAST INDIAN COMPANY.

in 1757 Robert Clive

• sent $4 million down the river to Calcutta
• accepted presents amounting to $1,170,000
• pocketed from them an annual tribute of $140,000.

Thereafter began an unmitigated rape on the resources of India with some of the details set out below

• Goods bought in India for $2,000,000 were sold in England for $10,000,000
• The Company paid such fabulous dividends that its stock rose to $32,000 per share (in 2022 this would be worth US$ 769000).
• In ten years $30,000,000 were accepted in bribes to either set up or depose a ruler.
• Clive had set up Mir Jaffer as ruler of Bengal for $6,192,875
• Clive’s successors deposed him and set up Mir Kasim on payment of $1,001,345
• Three years later they restored Mir Jaffer for $2,500,825
• Two years later they replaced him with Najim-ud-Daula for $1,151,780

Some of the despicable and exorbitant acts of the Company and the consequences:

• two-thirds of the population fled
• defaulters were confined in cages and exposed to the burning sun
• fathers sold their children to meet the rising rates

Warren Hastings

• Exacted contributions as high as a quarter of a million dollars from native princes to the treasury of the Company
• He accepted bribes to exact no more, exacted more and annexed the states that could not pay
• He allowed his agents to use torture in extorting contributions
• He helped the Nawab of Oudh to rob his mother and grandmother in order to pay the Company $5,000,000
• He occupied the province of Oudh with his army, captured it, and then sold it to a prince for $2,500,000 (Oudh was where Lawrence was Chief Commissionaire and where he perished through his own military incompetence).
• He ‘lent’ a British Army to a Hindu rajah for $2,000,000 and made no complaint when it was used to slaughter and be slaughtered for savage purposes.

By 1858, the crimes of the Company so smelled to heaven that the British Government took over the captured and plundered territories as a colony of the Crown; a little Island took over half a continent. England paid the Company handsomely, and added the purchase price to the public debt of India, to be redeemed, principal and interest (originally at 10.5%), out of the taxes put upon the Hindu people. All the debts on the Company’s books, together with the accrued interest on these debts, were added to the public obligations of India, to be redeemed out of the taxes put upon the Hindu people. Exploitation was dressed now in all the forms of Law—-i.e. the rules laid down by the victors for the vanquished. Hypocrisy was added to brutality, while the robbery went on.

There were some benefactions of British rule, Case for India continued: The price of these benefactions was considerable. It included, to begin with, the expropriation of state after state from the native rulers by war or bribery, or the simple decree of Lord Dalhousie that whenever a Hindu prince died without leaving a direct heir, his territory should pass to the British; in Dalhousie’s administration alone eight states were absorbed in this peaceful way. Province after province was taken over by offering its ruler a choice between a pension and war. In the seventh decade of the nineteenth century England added 4000 square miles to her Indian territory; in the eighth decade, 15000 square miles; in the ninth, 90,000, in the tenth, 133,000. John Morley estimated that during the nineteenth century alone England carried on one hundred and eleven wars in India, using for the most part Indian troops, millions of Hindus shed their blood that India might be slave. The cost of these wars for the conquest of India was met to the last penny out of Indian taxes; the English congratulated themselves on conquering India without spending a cent. Certainly it was a remarkable, if not a magnanimous, achievement, to steal in forty years a quarter of a million square miles, and make the victims pay every penny of the expense. When at last in 1857 the exhausted Hindus resisted, they were suppressed with ‘medieval ferocity’, a favourite way of dealing with captured rebels was to blow them to bits from the mouths of cannon. ‘We took’ said the London Spectator, ‘at least 100,000 Indian lives in the mutiny.’ This is what the English call the Sepoy Mutiny, and what the Hindus call the War of Independence. There is much in a name. See my page First War of Independence and Aftermath

Not only was Dalhousie Lawrence’s superior, but it was he who virtually confiscated the Kingdom of Oudh which is where Sir Henry got his last appointment. As for the Mutiny, Sir Henry Lawrence was killed early on due to his own incompetence and the ruthless suppression was carried out by Lawrence’s acolytes and the ‘establishment’ of which he was very much a part.

Here are the words of Macualay included in the Case for India::

”During the five years which followed the departure of Clive from Bengal, the misgovernment of the English was carried to such a point as seemed incompatible with the existence of society…The servants of the Company … forced the natives to buy dear and sell cheap…Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while 30 millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness. They had been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never under tyranny like this. Under their old masters they had at least one resource: when the evil became unsupportable, the people rose and pulled down the government. But the English Government was not to be shaken off. That Government, oppressive as the most oppressive form of barbarian despotism, was strong with all the strength of civilisation.”

A report to the House of Commons by one of its investigating committees in 1804 stated ‘It must give pain to an Englishman to think that since the accession of the Company the condition of the people of India has been worse than before.’ In 1826 the English Bishop Heber wrote: ‘The peasantry in the Company’s provinces are, on the whole, worse off, poorer, and more dispirited, than the subjects of the Native Princes … I met with with very few men who will not, in confidence, own their belief that the people are overtaxed, and that the country is in a gradual state of impoverishment. James Mill, historian of India wrote : ‘Under their dependence upon the British Government …. the people of Oudh and Karnatic, Two of the noblest provinces of India, were, by misgovernment, plagued into a state of wretchedness with which …. hardly any any part of the earth has anything to compare.’ ‘I conscientiously believe,’ said Lt. Col. Briggs in 1830, ‘that under no Government whatever, Hindu or Mohammedan, professing to be actuated by law, was any system so suppressive of the prosperity of the people at large as that which has marked our administration.’ F.J. Shore, British Administrator in Bengal , testified as follows in the House of Commons in 1857:

The fundamental principle of the English has been to make the whole Indian nation, subservient in every possible way, to the interests and benefits of themselves. They have been taxed to the utmost limit; every successive province, as it has fallen into our possession, has been made a field for higher exaction; and it has always been our boast how greatly we have raised the revenue above that which the native rulers were able to extort. The Indians have been excluded from every honor, dignity or office which the lowest Englishman could be prevailed upon to accept

THE TWO PARAGRAPHS ABOVE SUM UP WHAT LAWRENCE WAS ABOUT. OUDH MENTIONED WAS ALREADY IMPOVERISHED AND LAWRENCE WAS KEEN TO ‘SURVEY, SURVEY, SURVEY AND THIS COULD ONLY HAVE BEEN FOR THE PURPOSES OF TAXATION.

• Quote from a report by an Englishman written for the Bombay Administration ‘Every effort, lawful and unlawful was made to get the utmost out of the wretched peasantry, who were subjected to torture, in some instances cruel and revolting beyond all description, if they would not or could not yield what was demanded’
• ALTHOUGH THIS QUOTE WAS MADE BY AN ENGLISHMAN FOR THE BOMBAY ADMINISTRATION, SIR HENRY LAWRENCE, AN EMPLOYEE IN THE BENGAL PRESIDENCY WAS EQUALLY, IF NOT MORE RUTHLESS. HERE IS WHAT SIR HENRY’S OWN HISTORY SHOWS:
• In 1833 Lawrence was appointed an assistant to the Revenue Survey of India. The ‘raison d’être’ for the Revenue Survey of India was to exact the maximum tax (which is what ‘revenue’ is) from Indians for the benefit of the shareholders of the East India Company. Here is the quote of  the secretary to the Board of Revenue marked for the attention of the Lieutenant Governor of the North-West Provinces:
• “Captain Lawrence is one of the most experienced and zealous of the officers employed in the survey, and has conducted the process of double survey more successfully than perhaps any other…Captain Lawrence is prepared to guarantee a complete survey of three thousand square miles per annum when the villages average one square mile each.”
• Lawrence remained in this post until 1838. This extract from The Victorian Web quotes Lawrence as saying: “bayonets and red coats” remain essential, and he asks rhetorically, “how could any Government, however beneficent, subsist for a day simply by its civil policy on the ruins of such a tempest-tost land? How in a day convert tribes who have lived only by war to habits of peace; how make cultivators, who for centuries have never paid a rupee, but under fear of the sword or the scourge — how induce them to pay their dues, unless they know that the civil officer has the power of calling in the military : and that the latter is prompt and bold? In other words, Lawrence went about his job of exacting taxes knowing that he had military backing to exact such taxes.
• Just before he took up his appointment as Chief Commissionaire of Oudh: ‘Henry’s attitude toward his new assignment fluctuated between misgivings over his health and excitement at the opportunity vouchsafed him. ‘I have nearly given way more than once,’ he wrote (to) Charlotte, expressing his mixed feelings, ‘but the very offer of the Governor General is a sufficient salve for my Punjab sores.’ In Mount Abu, he had already been in touch with with officials in Lucknow, and his excitement during these weeks may perhaps be judged by a letter to Major Thuillier, written in late February. ‘One of my first official requisitions, ‘ he wrote, ‘will be for surveys, surveys, surveys.’ SURVEYS WERE CONDUCTED FOR THE PURPOSES OF TAX EXTORTION!