We saw in the previous post how the English East India
Trading Company started expanding its territories and how the Mughal dynasty
fell.
Though the Company was becoming increasingly bold and
ambitious in putting down resisting states, it was getting clearer that the
Company was incapable of governing the vast expanse of the captured territories
The Bengal famine of 1770, in which one-third of the local
population died, caused distress in Britain .
At around the same time The Tea Act was passed in 1773. It
gave the Company greater autonomy in running its trade in America , and allowed it an
exemption from the tea tax which its colonial competitors were required to pay.
The Act granted the Company the right to directly ship its
tea to North America and the right to the duty-free export of tea from Britain ,
although the tax imposed by the Townshend Acts and collected in the colonies
remained in force. The Act received the
royal assent on May 10, 1773.
This became one of the major causes for American Revolution
It started with the Boston Tea Party
The Tea Party was the culmination of a resistance movement
throughout British America against the Tea
Act, which had been passed by the British Parliament in 1773. Colonists
objected to the Tea Act because they believed that it violated their rights as
Englishmen to "No taxation without representation," that is they had
to be taxed only by their own elected representatives and not by a British
parliament in which they were not represented. Protesters had successfully
prevented the unloading of taxed tea in three other colonies, but in Boston , embattled Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused
to allow the tea to be returned to Britain . (Source: Wikipedia)
Depiction of Boston
Tea Party (Source: Wikipedia)
This iconic 1846 lithograph by Nathaniel Currier was
entitled "The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor
The notice from the "Chairman of the Committee for
Tarring and Feathering" in Boston
denounced the tea consignees as "traitors to their country". (Source:
Wikipedia)
The Boston Tea Party was a key event in the growth of the
American Revolution.
The Boston Tea Party has often been referenced in other
political protests. When Mohandas K. Gandhi led a mass burning of Indian
registration cards in South
Africa in 1908, a British newspaper compared
the event to the Boston Tea Party. When Gandhi met with the British viceroy in
1930 after the Indian salt protest campaign, Gandhi took some duty-free salt
from his shawl and said, with a smile, that the salt was "to remind us of
the famous Boston Tea Party."
In 1973 the US Post Office issued a set of four stamps,
together making one scene of the Boston Tea Party (Source: Wikipedia)
As we can see the policies which were thought as a boon by
the Company at that point of time actually became a bane because they failed to
see the hidden black swan. They never realized that it would invoke such a huge
resentment.
The English East India Trading Company did not learn from
what had happened to the Mughals. It too ignored many black swans which
indicated that their days were numbered.
For instance, The Parliament of Great Britain imposed a
series of administrative and economic reforms and by doing so clearly
established its sovereignty and ultimate control over the Company. The Act
recognized the Company's political functions and clearly established that the
"acquisition of sovereignty by the subjects of the Crown is on behalf of
the Crown and not in its own right”.
The above was a clear indication of Great Britain ’s
intention of how the company should be and it did not like the way it was
functioning. After all it was getting too ambitious.
Often policies are created without considering the impacts.
And when the effect is felt it is the human ego which prevents the reversal.
Men in power try to suppress to make the policy work. But unfortunately it
doesn’t go well that way. Like the Tallow greased cartridges (which affected
the religious sentiments) and the Doctrine of Lapse of East India Trading
Company
The above two mentioned policies were triggering factors of
the Sepoy Mutiny. This rebellion is also known as India 's First War of Independence,
the Great Rebellion or the Indian Mutiny.
Depiction of Sepoy Mutiny 1857 (Source: Wikipedia)
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 did not occur as a result of
one specific event; it was an accumulation of several events, over time,
resulting in its eventual outbreak.
We would now look at two important events in the first war
of Indian Independence.
I would term these two events as, “The Cartridge Effect” and
“The Bundelkand Effect”.
Two personalities are intimately connected to these events.
Who were they? And what did they do?
And what went so wrong in the policies that it led to the
dissolution of the Company?
