The Hidden Wound

THE OFFERING

In 1778, the directors of the Honourable East India Company installed an extravagant new painting in their London headquarters, East India House. Like much corporate art before and since, the quality of the painting was generally regarded as poor, with one commentator describing it as 'a work too feeble to confer any credit either on the artist or his employers'. But the directors were not seeking applause for the artistic merit of their commission. Ten feet across and over eight feet high, Spiridione Roma's giant allegory of The East Offering Her Riches to Britannia was designed to impress (see Illustration 1.1). Fixed to the ceiling of the Company's revenue committee room, where the directors monitored the flow of profit and loss, the purpose of The Offering was simple: to convey the commercial domination that the Company had now achieved in Asia.

At the heart of the painting is the relationship of three women, each representing their country. The scene is an Asian shoreline. Sitting high on a rock to the left, a fair Britannia looks down on a kneeling India who offers her crown surrounded by rubies and pearls. Beside her, China presents her own tribute of porcelain and tea. From a grove of palm trees to the right comes a convoy of labourers carrying bales of cloth, along with an elephant and a camel, all directed westward by a stern Mercury, the classical god of commerce. The British lion sits at Britannia's feet, as does Old Father Thames, a sign that it was to London that much of this wealth would flow. Far off, beyond the figures, one of the Company's famous merchant ships sails into the distance, laden with the treasure of the East, its striped ensign fluttering in the wind.

For The Offering, Spiridione drew on a long line of similar depictions of European trading supremacy. The early success of the Honourable Company's main rival, the Dutch United East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie – VOC), had provided Pieter Isaacsz with the inspiration he needed for his 1606 painting symbolising Amsterdam as the centre of world trade.

In Isaacsz's allegory, Amsterdam holds a horn of plenty in her right hand, and with her left controls the globe. Servants offer her pearls, while three VOC ships command the centre of the painting. A century later, in 1729, the English Company had enlisted the fashionable Dutch sculptor Michael Rysbrack to create a grand marble chimney piece for its new headquarters. On the left of the carving sits Britannia, receiving a treasure chest from a woman representing Asia, escorted by two other women, one leading a camel, the other a lion; two Company ships frame the piece on the right. Importantly, Britannia and Asia look each other in the eye, as if to symbolise that this was still an age when the Company based its wealth on exchange. The English Company had certainly gained ground, but still lagged its Dutch rival, and was also starting to face tough competition from new French Compagnie des Indes.

By 1778, however, there was little doubt that 'John Company', as it has become known, had replaced 'Jan Compagnie' as master of Europe's trade with Asia. Years of argument over trading rights with local rulers in India had culminated two decades earlier in the takeover of Bengal in 1757. Combining economic muscle with its small but effective private army, the Company's forces under Robert Clive had defeated the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey (Palashi), 90 miles north of its trading base of Calcutta (Kolkata). The Company quickly installed Mir Jafar – a general who had betrayed the defeated Nawab – as the first of a series of puppet rulers of Bengal. More of a commercial transaction than a real battle, Plassey was followed by the systematic looting of Bengal's treasury. In a powerful symbol of the transfer of wealth that had begun, the Company loaded the treasury's gold and silver onto a fleet of over a hundred boats and sent them downriver to Calcutta. In one stroke, Clive had netted £2.5 million for the Company and £234,000 for himself. Today this would be equivalent to a £262 million corporate windfall and a cool £24.5 million success fee for Clive. Historical convention views Plassey as the first step in the creation of the British Empire in India. It is perhaps better understood as the East India Company's most successful business deal.

In the decade that followed, the Company used its dominant position to monopolise the foreign and internal trade of Bengal, driving out Asian, Dutch and French merchants in the process. In August 1765, the Company's supremacy was formally recognised by the impoverished Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II with the grant of Bengal's diwani. This office of state gave the Company control over tax collection for more than 10 million people. For a stock market-listed company with profit as its primary motive, this acquisition of a country's public finances was truly revolutionary. Not surprisingly, the Company's share price boomed when news of the acquisition reached London's financial markets in April 1766.

Just as Spiridione portrayed, the wealth of the East began to pour into England. This represented an extraordinary turnaround. Before Plassey, the 'balance of trade was against all nations in favour of Bengal', wrote Alexander Dow in his 1773 History of Hindostan. Bengal had been 'the sink where gold and silver disappeared without the least prospect of return'. Now that flow was reversed. Monopoly power and windfall revenues combined to create unrivalled purchasing power that bought ever-increasing quantities of Eastern goods to European markets. In spite of tough trade barriers against cheap Indian calicoes, Bengal's textiles, notably the soft Dhaka muslins, were still an essential fashion item for Britain's female elite. Indeed, Spiridione's Britannia seems swathed in muslin. But tea was now the Company's prize commodity, and the riches of Bengal helped to boost shipments from the Company's Chinese subsidiary in Canton (Guangzhou) three-fold in the five years following 1768. The annual consumption of tea rose to some one pound for each man, woman and child in England. On the streets of London, the Company also made its presence felt, not least at its imposing headquarters on Leadenhall Street, the huge dock complex in Blackwall and the fine merchant houses around Stepney Green. For a Parliamentary Select Committee investigating the Company's affairs five years later, 1778 – the year of Spiridione's triumphal portrayal of commercial success – would be seen as 'the high flood tide' of its exports from Asia.

MISSING ELEMENTS

The East Offering Her Riches to Britannia provides us with a fascinating window onto the ways in which the...