The British in India

 The Indian sub continent was home to some of the world's great civilisations and was part of the most powerful empires. We need think only of the Mughals, but long before that Ashoka and the ideas of peaceful kingship in Buddhism. The country was populous and land was well used in agriculture. It is large, and peoples from different parts are quite distinct in language and culture. It is a place of great art; Indian textiles were the envy of the world, but so too many other crafts. The Silk Road ran across the top of the sub continent and so it is hardly surprising that influences from east and west filtered through.

As I explain in this link British merchants saw their counterparts in other countries taking the lead in international trade and they persuaded ElizabethI that England should follow suit.

The East India Company, founded in 1599, competed with companies from other European nations for full control of the overall governance of India with the objective first of trade. In order to do this it recruited 'sound men' educated later at Haileybury. Alongside civilians, the company had a small army of Englishmen educated at Addiscombe. There were exceptions, the Bombay Burmah Trading Company had a tradition of taking graduates from Kings College, Cambridge. Nepotism was the order of the day, and David Gilmour in his highly readable The British in India traces many generations of families who went out to serve. The word Service is important for to many it was a vocation. To others it was an opportunity to amass a fortune, although probably as many lost fortunes. The British upper middle class featured widely, sending second or third sons. Many families made their homes in India although much of the subcontinent failed to offer anything like comfort to young wives. Unlike Africa, there was no push for settlers nor any strong missionary activity. Nevertheless those who did come believed that their culture was superior and should be adopted. In the nineteenth century much changed and the scope for making fortunes all but disappeared.

David Gilmour makes a number of fundamental points. It was all about trade. When the East India Company arrived they established factories (as opposed to manu-factories) in a number of coastal areas which were staffed by 'factors' who would buy and sell with the local princes. The British were not alone, traders from France, Denmark and Holland also set up factories; Bombay was established on land leased from the Portuguese. There was relative harmony, broken perhaps by the old rivalry between the British and the French when the latter took Madras in 1746 and occupied it albeit briefly. No country brought large numbers of people, even in the bigger centres of population Europeans would be counted in the hundreds; no country brought many soldiers; there may have been for example British officers but most of the other ranks would be Indian. This changed, but only to a degree after the Rebellion in 1857.

The Great Rebellion or First War of Independence, or Indian Mutiny as the British Press preferred, was viciously cruel on both sides. The East India Company had its own army paid from its trading profits and reinforcements were sent from the UK. Kanpur was the place of a massacre of hundreds of British men, women and children, and the retaliation which followed saw the British killing everyone who was suspected of being a rebel. The rebellion was eventually quashed, the East India Company abolished and India became part of the Empire with an Indian Civil Service ‘whose high-minded and disinterested ethos was very different from that which had prevailed before’. There was an Indian Army with a high proportion of British troops and a Viceroy answerable to the new post of Secretary of State for India. Thus began a new chapter in Anglo-Indian relations.

In terms of manufacture, Kanpur (Cawnpure) became, with the coming of the railway in 1859, the 'Manchester of the East'. I wrote of this in my book, MacRoberts Reply.

Gilmour suggests that rather more Scots came to India to carry on business than did the English and he wonders whether their more appropriate university curriculum helped. As I have noted elsewhere, the English universities, essentially Oxford and Cambridge, were wedded to the classics whereas business requires engineering and accounting skills amongst many others. Most of British business in India was under the control of managing agencies. The largest was Tata founded by a Parsi family; the next four were Scottish: Andrew Yule, Inchcape, James Finlay and Burn & Co. Those men involved in business were known as boxwallahs. Gilmour explains that the word Wallah means man and the prefix describes what he does. The 'box' would contain samples of what he had to sell, and the term was stretched to encompass a much bigger business world. British India was hounded by class distinctions based both on birth and occupation. Boxwallahs and manufacturers were looked down upon by the ruling elite as they were in England. In many ways this echoed the Hindu cast system.

In terms of businesses, there were minerals to extract and engineers in the Kolar Gold Field in southern India were Cornish, the tinplate company was run by Welshmen. Tata Iron and Steel at Jamshepur employed men from just about every European nation. Tea planting was a substantial business, coffee was also grown but proved a difficult crop. Jute was important and here the skills came from Dundee which town imported the Indian crop. In time British factories were established in India to process the jute. Edward Parry, a Welshman, founded Parry's brewery which was the most famous trading company in the south of India. Edward Dyer from Devon ran an even larger brewery company in Simla, Rawalpindi and Mandalay. Later, Hodgsons produced India pale ale and Parry’s, Naval Gin. The coming of ice factories in 1878 was welcomed with open arms.

Burmah Oil and the Assam Oil companies began production in the 1890s. In Burmah, teak was big business with MacGregors as the major company. George Orwell, whose parents were born in Bengal, wrote of this in Burmese Days. John Maxwell established his plantation of Indigo Blue near Kanpur and this was big business in Bengal until synthetic indigo was produced in Germany, along with aniline dyes. Other raw materials included rubber and cinchona for quinine, lac and shellac for gramophone records, and Opium.

Gilmour's book focuses on many aspects of the lives the British people who went out to India. There was much sport and of course the British brought cricket to the subcontinent. The current primacy of Indian cricket is perhaps an example of the colonised becoming the coloniser Indian cricket. Tata surely is another.

Homes for the British were often substantial bungalows, but furniture tended to be sparse given the ravages of insect infestation. Some would have English furniture copied by local craftsmen. For much domestic equipment there was mail order and the Army and Navy Stores in Calcutta and Bombay. Ceiling fans were introduced after the First World War manufactured by Crompton Parkinson and GEC. By the time of the Second World War they were being manufactured locally.

India had produced fine cotton since ancient times. The demand for cotton fabrics in East Africa grew such that a trade began in slaves from Africa to pick cotton for princes in India. Britain had long been a market for Indian cotton fabrics and I tell elsewhere of the rise of Lancashire using raw cotton from the New World. As the grip of the East India Company weakened with legislation passed in 1813 the import of finished cotton goods was restricted and the import of Indian raw cotton into Britain was encouraged; India was to be the customer for finished British goods and the provider of raw materials, principally cotton. Manchester merchants continued to import raw cotton from America, but the American civil war created a cotton famine and renewed attention turned to the cotton growers of India.

The next logical step was to bring the mechanised cotton mill to India and import firstly yarn and then finished cloth into England. The first such mill was set up in 1818 but it was not until the 1850s that mills set up in Bombay, Broach and Ahmedabad were to become successful. The very early mills were powered by water, but steam provided by British manufacturers took over. Some mills were British owned, but increasingly Parsi merchants took hold of the industry; they had previously been significant growers and exporters of raw cotton. Early on it was yarn that was produced but soon both spinning and weaving were undertaken by such companies as the Bombay Spinning and Weaving Mill and the Oriental Spinning and Weaving Company. The Empress Mill at Nagpur set up by the Tata family in 1877 was the largest to date. Further mills followed in Calcutta. By 1890, India was exporting 170 million pounds of cotton twist and yarn a year.

Goods and people travelling from England to India first went by sailing ship down the coast of Africa round the cape and on to Madagascar before crossing the Indian ocean. The trip was long and hazardous. Ships could be blown off course and reach south America before re-setting course to the west. Sailing ships seldom survived serious storms and if they did there was the danger of pirates and then the enemies of the British state: Portugal, France or Holland. We look to shipyards on the Thames for these 'East Indiamen' as these ships were known. The coming of steam eliminated the wind enemy and speeded the journey; for passengers there came the alternative of passage by ship to the eastern end of the Mediterranean and then overland to another ship on the Red Sea for the onward journey. Later the Suez Canal would further shorten the journey. The problem now was refreshing supplies of coal for the engines. Welsh coal would be shipped to coaling ports. I offer my father's description of the process in Port Said on his way to trade in East Africa in my book Dunkirk to D Day. Of the ships, Maudslay Sons and Field on the Thames built steam powered iron hulled ships for the East India Company as did yards on the Clyde. I tell the story of a Dublin yard supplying a ship to the East India Company. India was getting everywhere.

Coal was to become essential to industry in India and the first coal mine was sunk in Bengal in the late eighteenth century, but produced coal of an inferior quality to that shipped from Britain. In 1808, the Court of Directors of the British India Company seeing the cost of coal imports suggested that Ordnance Works should be shifted to Britain. I explore below the extent of Ordnance work then in India. In relation to coal mining, the government employed a mining engineer, William Jones, to carry out a full survey. He found a rich seem of coal at Raniganj. He failed to make a success, but laid the foundation for Indian coal mining. The coal from the Raniganj mines had to be transported by river 150 miles to Calcutta; however the river Damodar was only navigable for 10 weeks of the years and so coal had to be stored on the river bank to await shipment. The constant sunshine evaporated tar and coal-oil so reducing its burning quality. Coal was later discovered closer to Calcutta and the coming of the railways addressed the problem of transport.

The coming of the railways brings into the story two branches of the army: engineers and sappers for it was military engineers who largely built the railways and also the canal and drainage schemes. They also put on the architect hat, designing a great many buildings borrowing British styles. In 1853, the first railway line was opened running from Bombay to Thana by the Great Peninsula Railway. Others followed and by 1859 the East India Railway had received from Britain 77 locomotives, 228 coaches and 848 freight wagons. In 1895 the first locomotive was wholly built in India at Ajmer Works. Of British manufacturers, the Metropolitan Railway Carriage and Wagon Company Ltd in particular falls to be mentioned.

Fundamental to railways was the production of iron and steel. I have already noted the Jamshedpur steel works which was founded by the Tata family in 1907. Before this the first blast furnace in India was set up at Kulti in 1870. Subsequently the Ordnance Factory Board established the Metal and Steel Factory in Calcutta in 1872. Before any of these, bulk steel was shipped largely from Britain, although India did have long tradition of making fine steel. I noted elsewhere that iron works in Stockton cast rails for the Indian rail system. Examples of such rail stamped 'Stockton 1891' were re-used in the single track railway in what was Persia.

The Army in India was part British and part Indian and its predecessors had long since set up their own supply arrangements. The manufacture of Ordnance, that is arms and other equipment, for the Indian army, goes back to the early days of the East India Company with the making of gunpowder from saltpetre which was in plentiful supply. In the eighteenth century, brass cannon were cast and later cannon cast from iron. Rifles were imported until the early twentieth century, given the precision demanded by modern rifle design. Saddlery was made in Cawnpore as was army clothing: John Stewart's harness and saddle factory was supplying all the leather equipment of the British armies in Asia. For a long time army vehicles were also imported. There were Ordnance factories in all the major centres and their successors have now become a major force in the Indian economy. I write on Ordnance supply in the Second World War in Dunkirk to D Day when my father was sent out to review arrangements for a possible land war against Japan.

As with Africa, a good number of British companies established a significant presence in India. Today, several much loved British brands have found new homes there: BSA and Royal Enfield to name but two.

Further reading

• David Gilmour, The British in India (Allen Lane, 2018)
• Ray, Indrajit, and Krishna Paul. “BEGINNINGS OF COAL INDUSTRY IN BENGAL.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 61, 2000, pp. 836–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44148157. Accessed 4 Aug. 2025.
• Sahoo, Rajib Lochan. “INDIAN COTTON MILLS AND THE BRITISH ECONOMIC POLICY, 1854-1894".” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 76, 2015, pp. 356–67. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44156602. Accessed 4 Aug. 2025.
• https://victorianweb.org/technology/railways/india/chronology
• Young, H. A. “THE INDIAN ORDNANCE FACTORIES AND INDIAN INDUSTRIES.” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, vol. 72, no. 3715, 1924, pp. 175–88. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41356452. Accessed 4 Aug. 2025.