The East India Company's Charter and Indian Slavery

Left: India in 1805. Right: India in 1856.

The East India Company’s charter was renewed by Parliament every twenty years. Successive renewals had strengthened the government’s hold on the Company, and the Charter Act of August 28, 1833 contained some drastic amendments. Known as the Saint Helena Act, since it transferred control of that island from the East India Company to the Crown, it included many of Ellenborough’s recommendations. The Company surrendered all its monopolies as a trading corporation, including the monopoly of the China trade – incidentally encouraging the growing private trade in opium, which was cultivated in India and smuggled into China to be used illegally as a narcotic. While the presidencies of Madras and Bombay each kept its own governor, army and civil service, both surrendered their legislative functions to Bengal. The Governor-General of Bengal became Governor-General of India, with an advisory Council of six members rather than the previous three. Direct rule by the Company had extended in recent decades to the ‘ceded and conquered territories’, a concatenation of landlocked territories bounded on the south and east by Bengal and the princely state of Oudh, and including a long stretch of the Ganges, the whole of the Jumna/Yamuna, and the cities of Panipat, Delhi, Agra, Aligarh and Allahabad. These became the new province of Agra, under a lieutenant-governor, before being renamed the North-Western Provinces in 1836. Beyond the fringes of Company territory, its Agents or Residents wielded soft power by treaty until the opportunity arose to annex or encroach on one more independent state.

The debate on the charter renewal bill in 1833 was hot-tempered in both houses of Parliament. James Silk Buckingham, the new, radical MP for Sheffield, who had been expelled from India ten years earlier for vilifying the East India Company in his Calcutta Journal, called it ‘preposterous’ and ‘an absurdity’ to propose giving ‘a Joint-Stock Association, composed of such heterogenous materials as the East-India Company, the political administration of an empire peopled with a hundred millions of souls’ (Hansard, Commons, 10 July 1833, 3 ser. 19.479). Lord Lansdowne blandly expressed the contrary, establishment Whig view, that

[n]othing but the fullest and most entire confidence in them [the Company], justified by past experience of their good conduct and ability in administering the affairs of India, could have induced the Legislature to intrust them with such a charge. Indeed, it appeared to him the proudest day in the existence of the East-India Company to be so honourably intrusted with the government of 60,000,000 of people. [Hansard, Lords, 5 August 1833, 3 ser. 20. 317]

Lord Ellenborough, after supporting many of the proposed reforms, thought the bill had gone too far. He objected to the transfer of legislative power to Bengal, since he was afraid it would overwhelm the Governor-General and his council with responsibilities. He disliked the sweeping abolition of monopolies, since he believed the Company’s revenues would suffer; disliked the proposed opening of civil service posts to Indians and half-castes, since he believed that half-castes, whom he thought ‘not as trustworthy as the natives’, would monopolize the jobs at Indians’ expense; and even objected to a clause abolishing slavery in India, claiming to be astonished ‘that such a proposition should ever have entered the head of any statesman.’ Clearly a disciplinarian, he claimed that, given more time at the Board of Control, he would have replaced the months-long sailing voyages between England and India with steampower, for ‘unless our subjects in that Empire were brought more immediately under the control of the Government at home, they would be much more likely to do wrong, being without the fear of immediate punishment (Hansard, Lords, 5 August 1833, 3 ser. 20.309-16).

Harvesting sugar cane. Credit: The Leprosy Mission International. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) (via The Wellcome Collection).

Ellenborough’s former Prime Minister, the ultra-conservative Duke of Wellington, backed him up him on the slavery question, defending a practice he had seen as central to Indian society during the Mysore and Maratha Wars. ‘There was hardly a family in India which was without domestic slaves; certainly there were no Mussulman families who had not female slaves, and any attempt to deprive the Indians of their slaves would inevitably produce the greatest dissatisfaction, if not absolute insurrection’ (Hansard, Lords, 9 August 1833, 3 ser. 20., 447.14). Lord Auckland (George Eden, 2nd Baron Auckland, Governor-General of India 1836-42), then stood up. Although a rare and usually unimpressive parliamentary speaker, he asserted Whig principles of human freedom in the spirit in which his father, the first Lord Auckland, had promoted the Slave Trade Abolition bill of 1806. Parliament had just passed the 1833 act abolishing slavery throughout the British colonies, with the stated exception of the East India Company’s possessions, St Helena and Ceylon. Vast sums would be paid out in compensation to West Indian plantation-owners and others. Eden argued that the Indian abolition proposal had been ‘framed with the utmost caution consistent with the destruction of an odious system; as well as the utmost care not to interfere with the domestic manners of the natives’ (Hansard, Lords, August 5, 1833, 3 ser. 20., 324). It remained a pious hope, however, as Ellenborough must have realized when, as Governor-General ten years later, he approved the very limited Indian Slavery Act, which merely forbade the sale of persons in a state of slavery and the enforcement of rights of ownership over slaves in the courts of the East India Company’s territories.

Related Material

Prospects of India: Emily Eden and her brother Lord Auckland [the next Governor General of India], 1830-35

Bibliography

Hansard (search page of Hansard on the web)