190. Rags to Riches: The Scots in India

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0:29No man of any other nation can serve and survive in an Indian province where the chief is a Scot and there is a Scot to be found. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durrumpel. Well, the way he said his name, you can guess. Yes, we're still in our Scottish series. He goes all blue woad on us, doesn't he? Look, I'm going to start with a little story. Settle down at the back. This is the story. Are we sitting comfortably? Okay, we'll begin. This is the story of a young, lanky Scotsman who leaves his shores to go to India. A young man, full of hope, full of wonder, full of questions.

1:10He arrives in this foreign place and immediately misses home, but sees bits of home in India and decides to make a list. A list that will be comforting for a while. It's you, innit? It's me. It's you, innit? You were lanky once. This is a true story. I was lanky once long, long, long ago. Yeah, you were quite the lank. It's true. Okay, so what did lanky William do? So I wrote this list of all the Scots who, in my view, at that point in my life, had done wonderful things for India. I've actually found it on my computer. It used to be in Word Perfect. Amazingly, it somehow transformed itself into Word.

1:47Anyway, at the top of the list was a good Scots boarders boy, Alan Octavian Hume, who founded the Congress Party, believing that a non-revolutionary vehicle for home rule would avoid unnecessary violence. Nearer to home, I wrote on this list, was John Skinner of Montrose, a cousin of the more famous Skinner of Skinner's Horse, who founded both the Bombay Chamber of Commerce and the Bombay Steam Company. And who, along with Dada Boy Pestangy, were the two main promoters of the Bank of Bombay. And we should say Skinner's Horse, for those who don't know, was an elite cavalry unit that was much active during the, what some call the mutiny and some call the First War of Independence.

2:28So that's Skinner's Horse. We'll hear more about James Skinner, I think, towards the second half of the series. But then I wrote down on this list, Lord Dalhousie, who Anita and I both regard as a complete demon and wrote against in our Koh-i-Noor. But anyway, me in 1984, I wrote the father of the Indian railways. Also, there were Scots engineering firms who built up some of the first engines, Sharp, Stuart & Co. of Glasgow, and now Bathnot & Co. of Calcutta. And another of Dalhousie's scheme was the Telegraph, which was supervised by William O'Shaughnessy of Edinburgh University. So the fact that he's on your list makes me think this list is a little bit shaky.

3:04Do go on. Do go on. The three more. Then we'll get the real story, or the other side of the story, certainly. Two Scots, Robert and Charles Alexander Bruce, who in 1833 discovered the tea plant in Assam, and who later successfully transplanted Chinese variety into the Assam Hills, so beginning the process by which chai became India's national drink. and then to doctors, surgeon major Ronald Ross, who first discovered the way that malaria was conveyed by mosquitoes, part of the long tradition of Scots medicine in India that began with my final person on the list, but it's a much longer list, but I'll stop here.

3:42And it was the Scottish surgeon, William Hamilton, who cured Aurangzeb's great-grandson, Farrak Sere, of what was delicately called a malignant distemper, which in plain English, I think was a bad case of V &D. It's an STD, isn't it? It's a very nasty STD. And the Scotsman, William Hamilton, curing pharoxia of this, gave the East India Company their entry and was rewarded free trade in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. So that was my fond imaginings at the age of 18. So 18-year-old Lanky Dalrymple wrapped this list around him like a comfort blanket. Let's just find out how frayed that blanket might have been.

4:22We have a very, very special guest. Historian Andrew McKillop is with us today. to discuss exactly, well, how worthy that list was, but actually in more depth, how Scots built, expanded their empire as a means of restoring the fortunes in the wake of Culloden. So we spoke a lot about how Culloden was sort of a nadir in Scottish history. And how do you come back from that? Welcome to the programme, first of all. Thank you very much for being with us. Oh, thank you very much for having me, Anita and William. I began to sit very uncomfortably as I listened to that list. I saw you were squirming. Also, may I point out, at some point, William is going to go so super Scots in his accent.

5:01None of us will know it's him anymore. Those of us who listen regularly to the podcast, he will talk like a different man. Andrew is from the Hebrides. Is it Harris? Isle of Harris, yep. We last were in the Hebrides in the previous episodes with Body Prince Charlie landing in Eriskay. Not so far for a while. No, no, not so far. And he passed through Harris briefly on his job X around the West Highlands as he avoided the government troops left, right and centre. But Harris was also owned by a series of Scottish landowners in East India Company service, which is how I came to it. Yeah, so I mean, you're exactly the right person with the right history to talk to about this.

5:36Can we start with a quote from Sir Walter Scott? He called India the corn chest for Scotland. What did he mean by that, first of all? I find it very surprising that I'm actually going to do something I very rarely thought I would do, which is agree with something Walter Scott said. It's actually a highly accurate statement on the fact that by moving its people out to what then and now is one of the major parts of the world's economy, essentially a relatively marginal, poor, wet, cold Scotland was essentially tapping into the world economy and, well, crudely put, begin asset stripping South Asia of large parts of its surplus capital and its produce.

6:17So in that sense, the corn chest for Scotland, what he means is if you send people out, you will get corn, meaning money back. And it's the people for money nexus, which Scotland does very well and for which India is probably the key part of the world where they're doing it most effectively and efficiently. Andrew, you and I have been on stage trying to persuade audiences in Glasgow and North Berwick about the perfidy of their ancestors. Could you just give us a picture for those who are not from here and don't know this, how, in a sense, the Scots have romanticized their imperial past and made the English the villains?

6:50Well, they see themselves as the victims and the heroes. And how far you think that's not an accurate picture? I'm just wondering how long the podcast's got. I mean, in some senses, I think a useful way to start is, I mean, it's noticeable how William's list is quite chronologically specific. It sort of starts with really the end of the era of the company and is really more about the Raj, when sort of British popular culture says the Raj is taking over responsible government, you know, implementing all the sort of modern changes you see. So that feeds into Scottish society's perception of itself as great engineers, great educators, builders of railways, steam lines, etc.

7:30And medicine, of course. So there's this sort of happy coincidence whereby the nature of the colonial regime has activities which resonate with Scotland's sense of itself as an educated, educating nation, etc. etc. What tends to get missed out is A, that was still a very colonial process, and B, it misses the very long backstory where the contact isn't sort of from the area you were talking about, William, on your list, sort of the 1830s onwards. It goes way, way back much further into the age of, you know, the English Eastern Company, which, put it mildly, you know, is predatory colonialism on an extraordinary scale.

8:09And it's a very different type of empire. And they're just, if anything, just as common in that phase as they are in the later phases. Our last episode of Empire was about the bloody aftermath of Culloden. And I said it was a nadir because you saw clan chieftains being stripped of all their powers. You saw lands confiscated, you saw executions and slaughter. And clansmen being sold into slavery, indentured labour. Indeed. So from that point, how soon does the realisation that actually we need to do something, we won't be able to do it here, so we need to find our corn chest? When does that suddenly start dawning?

8:48How long after Culloden? It's instantaneous. We used to think that after the British state breaks up clan power by stripping them of their military and political powers, that it would take till the Seven Years' War for the redeployment of Highland Gaelic troops and large amounts of displaced Scots into British military service. And remind people about what was the Seven Years' War. So the Seven Years' War is the French-Indian War. It kind of breaks out in 1753. And it's in some ways the First World War. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, it's the era when the company under Clive is really beginning to build up military power outside of its original base in the south.

9:25But actually, there's now clear demonstrable evidence that the British state actually takes defeated, imprisoned former Jacobites and batches them into companies and sends them out with ansons. That's actually been shown. You've got lists of prisoners sent out to India. I'd never seen that. How fantastic. Would they be given an ultimatum that, look, mateys, either you go and you fight for us and you do some good for us, or you've seen what happens to your other Jacobite brothers? Yeah, there's a great letter from the war offices, basically tell them that we'll not inquire into their past histories, but they're going to have to join these companies.

10:04And they round up prisoners from Dumbarton Castle, Stirling and Carlisle. And what they're basically saying is you can go in front of the assizes and take your chances with the hangman or probably removal to North America, or you get free service into these companies. So defeated Scots are actually in India by the end of 1747. I didn't know that had been proven. Who's done this work, Andrew? This is fantastic. That was myself. That was yourself. They're very modest to... Toot your bugle. Yeah, it's you. It was a circuitous way of getting around to saying I... I mean, because it is extraordinary that it's the stick, because I knew about the carrot.

10:37I knew, you know, the Whig government put in financial incentives to say, look, you know, if you join our enterprise overseas, you can be enriched. You can get some of that power and dignity back. But I didn't realise there was actually, you know, it's this or the noose. Do we know how many? I mean, roughly how many people then were offered that choice? It doesn't sound a lot, but William will know that in a sense, the British, either through company or crown forces, doesn't actually have a lot of manpower in India at this 1740, 1750s. They send out six companies of 100 men. It's a full regiment, in effect.

11:08And to the Carnatic? Exactly, William. They're committed to the Carnatic. We were going to talk about this later, but since we're on the subject now, we might as well just cover this bit now. Now, you have a weird rematch of Culloden, don't you, in the Carnatic Wars, where you've got Stringer Lawrence, who was on the government side at the Battle of Culloden, and facing him on the French side, now in southern India. The Carnatic, we didn't explain, is the east coast of India facing towards the Bay of Bengal. And tell people more about who's fighting who in the Carnatic War. It's basically the French East India Company, the Compagnie des Indes, which is incidentally found by an exiled Scot, John Law of Loriston.

11:48I'm speaking from Edinburgh today, and John Law is a native of this city. But he goes and founds the French East India Company. And so you have the troops of the French East India Company led by two, among others, as well as Dupley, who's the famous general, there's two of Law's sons fighting in the Carnatic War on the French side. So you've got two exiled Scots leading the French East India Company army. Who would describe themselves as Jacobites. I mean, would they self-identify, to use the terminology of the day, as Jacobites on the French side? That's a good question. They would probably see themselves as subjects of his most Christian majesty, meaning in a way they're kind of becoming French.

12:27They're not quite so content to see themselves as sort of disaffected exiles. The second generation were born in France, weren't they? So they'd never been to Scotland. But also, British East India Company's armies are led by somebody called Stringer Lawrence, who'd fought on the government side at Culloden, and facing him is Lally. Tell us about Lally. Was he an Irish Jacobite who'd been one of the wild geese? What are they? Much like far better known variant, the Scottish Jacobitism, there's also Jacobitism in Ireland, namely the attempt to restore the Stuarts. That, unlike the persistent sort of revolts you get in Scotland or risings you get in Scotland, Irish Jacobitism is smashed really in the 1690s fairly definitively.

13:08And as part of the settlement of that war between William of Orange and the Irish Jacobites, they are interestingly allowed to exile themselves to France. and about 12 ,000 Irish troops are allowed to head off into honourable French service. In other words, they can join the French army, etc. And Lally, whose family are from Galway, are part of that displaced Catholic Jacobite tradition. He's serving as a senior French officer for the Compagnies des Andes, but his family route is directly connected into the defeat of the same movement which Stringer Loras does in Scotland. Oh my gosh, so it is almost an action replay of Culloden.

13:46taking place over the waters and in India. Just as some of our listeners, it may have seemed odd on a series of empire that we did the Battle of Culloden, but you cannot understand the Scots and empire unless you look first at what happens at Culloden and the way that the Jacobites then go out and have the rematch in India. So you have the Carnatic Wars. Does that open the door then to a flood of Scots who then see that the future is India and the future is here and now? How much is the volume or the traffic that then comes over from Scotland to India? William himself has written very eloquently on this.

14:19It's not as if there are Scots, your William Hamilton, for example, sort of floating around the English company, you know, in very small numbers. But yeah, the arrival of those former Jacobite prisoners marks the first big sort of structural influx of Scots. So that's why you're quite right to raise Culloden. But what's happening in the Carnatic is, in a sense, The war between the Compagnies des Andorreontales and the English East India Company is kind of, as William was written so brilliantly about, is happening through proxies. So you've got the companies, respective companies backing contenders for what are majorly important regional kingdoms, Karnataka, Tanjore, various of these southeastern Indian states in what is now really Tamil Nadu, the state of Tamil Nadu.

15:03And as that happens, the companies are changing themselves. So they're moving from being commercial, largely trade-orientated. Increasingly, they're raising taxes to support a military machine, and they're needing much, much more manpower. So you move from needing merchants to needing military officers. And there's also a sense, isn't there, Andrew, that in the period of the Carnatic Wars, which is the 1740s, both before and after Cologne, that you've got the company making at that decade possibly more money by being a mercenary lending force. They lend out their troops, whether the Indian trained sepoys or these Scots, press ganged Scots out of the prisons in Stirling and so on, to rival rulers.

15:44So, for example, you have a disputed inheritance of the Nizam of Hyderabad, and the French company and the English company back different claimants. And so you have the idea being that if you manage to seize control of the Nizam of Hyderabad and run his army, a whole chunk of central India is yours for the taking. Well, absolutely. If you're the muscle, then you'll get the cash as a result. And what ultimately happens after these numerous battles and three major Carnatic wars is that British dominance prevails. The French are pushed right into a corner. French East India accompanies. It's Pondicherry, isn't it?

16:21That's sort of the place that they inhabit. So you've now got Scots who have fought. They've got Nisams, Nawabs, etc. in their pockets. And they are in a position then to make the corn that was predicted. And a lot of it. Can we start talking about some people in particular? I suppose it's great to have Stringer-Lawrence in, if only to demonstrate that what's going on here doesn't just involve Scots. He's a Londoner, actually. But what he represents is a really important process by which professional British officers, such as Stringer-Lawrence, who fights at Culloden on the government side, are beginning to go well.

16:57After 1748, the British army downsizes, etc. Just as the company is beginning to trade military expertise as a key commodity in these Indian civil wars. So you start to get a drift and then a rush of these professionally trained military officers out into a new employer. They're basically saying, here's my CV. I need employment. It used to be that these were merchants, but now you're getting military types and tax raising types. So you're getting more bureaucrats more. And in that context, someone like Stringer Lawrence is taking the professional ethos of the British army and sort of layering it into the nascent Sepi armies that are being developed by the company.

17:39And Robert Clive is his protege, isn't he? Robert Clive, who's previously an accountant, is trained up as a ruthless soldier by Lawrence. At the same ruthlessness that we saw the English army have after Culloden, is taught into Clive, who then uses the same tactics in India. People who haven't listened to our entire India series, why haven't you? Where have you been? But Robert Clive is not William's favourite man, is he? I mean, just a quick summary of what Robert Clive means to you. Robert Clive is an extraordinary character, whatever you think of him. And he's the kind of Lord Voldemort figure in my book, The Anarchy.

18:13He always wins. He wins on the battlefield against first the French in the Carnatic Wars, then against Sirajah Daulah in Bengal. he then comes home and defeats all his enemies in the company and seizes control of the directorship particularly someone called sullivan is sort of vanquished in the boardroom by his life and finally in the final phase of his life he enters parliament and survives successive inquiries into his corruption and his big moment comes when he stands in the middle of parliament and he's asked by the opposition why when he took bengal he just put jewels into his pockets and took a 10 % cut for his own personal bank account.

18:53And his reply, which goes down a bit like a Boris Johnson joke in Parliament today, where all the MPs forget any issues of morality and just laugh at his jokes. He replies, my lords, the treasuries of Mashidabad were thrown open before me. The bankers were groveling at my feet. My lords, I am astonished at my own moderation, he says. And they all laugh around and nothing happens. It's Boris Johnson's Christmas parties all over again. Well, I'm very aware that we so far have done a Scots in Empire episode without talking about Scots. We've talked about two Englishmen. So can we talk about the Tipu Sultan factor in this?

19:31Because then we do have Scots coming to the fore. So, Andrew, would you agree that it's the next phase of the East India Company conflicts in India, where we really see the Scots at the forefront? and that is Tipu Sultan of Mysore. He's the very military son of Haider Ali, and the father and the son have seized the old Hindu state of Mysore, re-jigged it, taken it over, and turned it into an amazing military machine aimed at the East India Company. Because you've got men like Hector Munro, Sir David Baird from East Lothian, and the ill-fated William Bailey from Loch Ness. These are the people who are fighting to put.

20:19Tell us about that conflict. I think you're absolutely right. It's the wars against what you would argue is one of the big regional rising powers, the very effectively run state of Mysore. And in those wars, which were the 1760s, again in the 1780s, and then finally in the 1790s, that sees two things happen. One, the number of Scottish officers that are beginning to populate the Presidency Army of Madras, which is now increasing from a sort of an original about one in eight to about one in five to one in four. In other words, the officer corps is becoming very Scottish. And to put that into context, Scotland's weight of population in terms of Britain and Ireland is about 12%.

20:58There's almost twice as many Scots inside per head at the military elite style. But then increasingly, the wars against Tapu force the British state to commit more of its own regular regiments. And what you see is a string of regiments raised in Scotland, the sort of 89th Highland Regiment, first the 73rd, 74th, 75th, 76th. These are all Highland regiments. And these officers are largely Scottish. And that makes the Scottish military elite very heavily Scottish, totally disproportionately so, in fact. And again, with the story of William Bailey's troops who land in Madras in the middle of the war against Tipu and are marched down to fight the ill-fated Battle of Polylor.

21:40These again are Highlanders who are trying to prove themselves loyal to the government after the failure of Culloden. These regiments are, including the one that Bailey leads to disaster at Polyleur, they're named Highland, but they also have large amounts of Scotland's new urban poor. They're a mishmash of people who are still trying to regain their lands. They're trying to fight for forgiveness, as it were. But you've also just got economically poor people who are sort of being committed into regiments. And you're right, when they go to Polyleur, they basically get wiped out. So they get wiped out, but a lot of them get taken prisoner as well by Tipu Sultan.

22:17And a lot of them end up converting to Islam. Is that, again, because these are survivors and they're going to do whatever they need to do to survive? Or is this a real pledge of allegiance? Because we didn't really want to fight you anyway. We were just fighting you because we had to. I don't think we've got any examples of officers converting to Islam. Well, you have James de Rimpel, who's captured at Poli Law. And I don't know whether he converted to Islam, but he married a begum from Muchli Putnam, the daughter of Nawab of Mazuli Putnam, as it's called at the time. And she is a great granddaughter of Nur Jahan's sister.

22:52So it's right to the Mughal line. That's impressive. That's social climbing and something. Yeah, it really is social climbing. Drupal stood well. They always do, William. Some soldiers do. The conditions are such that if you convert to the faith, you're not allowed to hold fellow Muslims in conditions that there was a way out of it. Most of those soldiers, however, when the peace comes, they're then basically persona non grata. They kind of have to stay in Mysorian service or they join French regiments. It's rough for them, isn't it? They're offered these sort of choices that, you know, either do this or you'll die.

23:26Join the regiment or you'll die and either convert or you'll die. Andrew, some of the records of that grim imprisonment are from Scots officers and men describing their captivity. Can you tell us about them? Yeah, so I mean, when you're basically locked in either Hyderalli or Tupu Sultan's dungeons, you don't have a lot to do. So a lot of these kind of burnt time by keeping narratives of their imprisonment. And precisely because so many of these officers are Scots, we've got like John Walker of Boland's great narrative. There's the Leslie narrative, which kind of explain the really interesting insights into how Scots see themselves, but also how they kind of understand or think they understand South Asian society.

24:09And what do they say? Because we won't have read these. It's fascinating the way they pick up in this idea that there's a sort of authentic India and people like Tapu and his father are sort of, you know, Islamic intruders. They're sort of conquerors. And what do they say about every accusation is a confession. You know, they're kind of projecting sort of narratives of recent conquest onto, of course, an Islamic society that's been in India for many centuries in this part. So they're trying to sort of other the Mysorean state and its Islamic leadership by saying, you know, we're really here to help the poor Hindus.

24:43Is it, dare I say, an Operation Freedom kind of situation? I hate to say it, but yes, kind of is getting close to that. But, you know, in other words, they're envisaging India the way it works for the East India Company. But they also note that they draw very noticeable comparisons. They see hilltop towns and forts and they think, they say, oh, it's just like Edinburgh. They think of the military elites in Mysore as, you know, these are really good, proud warriors, a bit like ourselves. You know, so there is odd cosmopolitan equivalencies being drawn as well. And, you know, they note with great, almost perverse pride that Tipu and Haider Ali note that they say, we recognise in the British, but we know that you guys are Scots and you're somehow a different bunch.