5 - Governing from the Country House: Landscape and the Aesthetics of Colonial Rule in India, 1780–1830

Summary

Arrived in England, the destroyers of the nobility and gentry of a whole kingdom will find the best company in this nation[.] … Here the manufacturer and husbandman will bless the just and punctual hand, that in India has torn the cloth from the loom, or wrested the scanty portion of rice and salt from the peasant of Bengal, or wrung from him the very opium in which he forgot his oppressions and his oppressor. They marry into your families; they enter into your senate; they ease your estates by loans; they raise their value by demand; they cherish and protect your relations which lie heavy on your patronage; and there is scarcely an house in the kingdom that does not feel some concern and interest that makes all reform of our eastern government appear officious and disgusting[.]

In his speech of 1 December 1783 to Parliament on the introduction of Fox's India Bill, Edmund Burke presented his colleagues with the troubling spectre of a socially disruptive class of men easing their way into British society on the basis of their destruction of another society thousands of miles away. Assuming positions that were not theirs by birthright, these returnees from India were exerting a contaminating presence in the metropole, marrying the daughters of the aristocracy and gentry, buying country estates, taking up seats in Parliament and positioning themselves as the financial sponsors of their social superiors. The elevating mechanisms of their wealth, for Burke, could not – and should not – conceal its iniquitous origins, the basis of which was the destruction of another longstanding social order which had been affected in its entirety by the East India Company's (EIC) mercantile imperialism, from the peasant in the field and the weaver at the loom, to the Indian ‘nobility and gentry’ that these so-called ‘nabobs’ had usurped.3 Burke thus articulated the destabilising social consequences of East Indian wealth for both India and Britain, connecting the Company's practices in the subcontinent and its employees’ return to Britain to the erosion of two traditional social orders. In Britain itself, he envisaged these Indian returnees as firmly embedded within an elite social, political and economic class (enjoying advantageous marriages, country houses, parliamentary seats and financial status), but he configured them, through the repetition of ‘they’, as irrevocably other.