“True to Their Salt”: Mechanisms for Recruiting and Managing Military Labour in the Army of the East India Company During the Carnatic Wars in India

Summary

South Asian personnel were critically important to the British military effort in the Carnatic Wars (1746-1748, 1749-1754, 1757-1763). Since European personnel were relatively few in number, they were compelled to augment their strength with a trained cadre of indigenous men. As in other theatres of war in the period 1746-1763, the recruitment of military labour into armies from beyond the parent state was common. In North America, Europe, and South Asia, native or mercenary forces were employed with an emphasis on the steady improvement of their efficiency and cost-effectiveness although quality was linked to the tasks they were to perform.

Drawing on the background to the Carnatic Wars, this chapter analyses the types, recruitment patterns, and uses of military labour, offering a comparison between those drawn from Europe and the subcontinent, including the assessments made by contemporaries. In contrast to recent historiographical trends that seek to emphasize ideological judgements about the use of South Asian labour, archival records suggest the British were eminently pragmatic in their decisions about manpower. They interpreted conditions in India through their own experiences, looking for particular “types”, but they also borrowed from local practices, particularly when the sheer demand for trained manpower in the 1750s outweighed any ideological considerations. Nevertheless, the British were aware of the need to acknowledge cultural sensitivities, and the Company army was not entirely converted to a “European” model.

In order to assist in making wider comparative judgements about military labour in this period, it is possible to identify here certain taxonomies and evolutionary trends in common with other areas of global labour history research. The army of the East India Company in the period 1746-1763, regardless of its quality, represents a shift from a force consisting of European “conscript professionals” with a handful of “ethnic conscripts” and “ethnic mercenaries”, led by an officer corps that was in part “mercenary professional”. By the end of the Third Carnatic War, the troops of the East India Company resembled “ethnic professionals”, augmented by auxiliaries who might still be categorized as “ethnic mercenaries”, thus constituting a “mixed force” of labour types. The European contingent, raised by a combination of voluntarism and “crimping” (impressment), remained either “professional mercenaries” or “professional conscripts”.