to the rebels failed to ignite a general uprising. ‘Three-fourths of the Bengal army – the whole of the Madras and Bombay – and the entire non-military population from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas, have stayed aloof … could there be stronger evidence that, in spite of numerous errors, British rule is regarded by the natives of India as a blessing rather than a curse?’137
Even the ‘barbarous and treacherous massacre of the garrison at Cawnpore’, which, unlike the Times it declined to describe in detail, scarcely troubled its confidence in the future of empire.138 In fact, the mutiny was soon viewed as little less than a blessing in disguise. A month later, it offered ‘The Bright Side of the Picture’ in a tone of elated Benthamite optimism. The English character perhaps required such a shock to ‘startle and energize us’ – ‘a Crimean winter to convince us of the defects in our military administration, and a universal mutiny to open our eyes in India’. The sheer scale of the disaster gave British statesmen that rare thing, ‘carte blanche – an unencumbered field … we are free to act as on the first day of our Imperial existence’.139 This notion became the refrain of the Economist. ‘No event less horrible could have strengthened our hands so powerfully.’ If the sepoys had only committed garden-variety cruelties, ‘the Government would have been assailed at once by a strong party likening the revolt to that of the American colonies, and recommending the nation not to resist a patriotic movement … Eloquent voices would have been raised as Mr Bright’s was formerly, to warn the nation that a due retribution had come upon them for a selfish feeling of grasping ambition.’
Yet now all these doubts and fears are absolutely stilled … Every Englishman knows that to abandon India, would be to commit a far worse sin against the millions of Hindoos than against our own nation … to the horrors of a military anarchy compared with which the reign of terror in the French revolution was a model of justice and mercy … In Europe too they see how helpless are the Indian races to restrain their own superstitions and their own passions – that no reverence for law, and civil order, and social obligations, adequate for the rudest form of self-government is yet written on their minds … Commerce with India would be at an end were English power withdrawn.140
British forces regained the initiative at the turn of 1858, with the active help or acquiescence of princely states in upper and central India, and the diversion of regiments from Crimea, Persia and China. Imperial troops, reconquering or relieving besieged cities – in Delhi, Cawnpore, Lucknow and elsewhere – exacted terrible revenge on whole populations deemed guilty of aiding rebels. The Economist noted with approval ‘the stern vigour afforded by daily executions of mutineers of every rank’ – some were shot from the mouths of cannons – but wondered whether journalists and officers calling for the head of every sepoy in a mutinous regiment, even those who had committed no violence, had thought through the domestic reaction that might ensue: ‘it is at least worthy of consideration’, it submitted, ‘whether the deliberate execution of 35,000 men or more is a measure which the people and Government of England are prepared for’.141 When the East India Company itself failed to survive the uprising, London henceforward assuming direct control of the new British Raj, the Economist gave the change a warm welcome.
Noblesse Oblige: Wilson in India
One reason why the Economist embraced the new model of government for India became clear a month after a state of peace was declared. ‘James Wilson’, the Times announced on 5 August 1859, had consented to become ‘Chancellor of the Indian Exchequer’, tasked with mopping up the cost of the mutiny. As in Crimea this had exceeded Economist estimates, with the death toll from the disproportionate British retaliation against Indian troops and civilians in the hundreds of thousands.142 The new appointee, the Times opined, ‘will carry with him habits of business and financial ability hitherto but too rarely exhibited on the banks of the Hooghly, and if he succeeds in making India solvent, and in proving that she can pay her own way, he will have rendered a public service which cannot be too highly appreciated.’143 Wilson went on a farewell tour. He appeared with Bowring at a banquet given by the mayor of Liverpool. The Cotton Supply Association met with him in Manchester. Bradford’s Chamber of Commerce asked him to induce the Indians to clip their sheep only once in nine months for finer fabrics. And after thirty-five years he returned to Hawick. Around ‘70 Scotch gentlemen’ were there to toast him, and amidst their cheers he summed up his work since leaving home. ‘We have at last solved that great problem in politics – that the real interests of society, well understood, were common to all alike.’ In India – whose interests were also ‘to an extent, identical’ with those of Britain – he promised to raise revenues and cut the cost of the army, which had more than doubled from £11,000,000 in 1855. ‘I say if you cannot govern the country and keep the internal peace for less than £21,000,000 you must abandon it altogether.’144
During his valedictions Wilson gave effusive thanks to Palmerston, who had interceded on his behalf many times since 1848. Confessing that he had initially declined the offer of a position as secretary at the Board of Control, a parliamentary body that supervised the East India Company, he reported that ‘the noble Lord begged that I reconsider’ telling him that ‘a man who enters public life must not confine himself to those few questions of which he considers himself master’. In 1856, Queen Victoria had blocked Wilson from a governorship in Australia, considering it bad form for a commoner to run a place bearing her name. But in 1859 Palmerston, now prime minister, made him vice-president of the Board of Trade, before offering him such an exalted post in India – sweetened with promises of a title and cabinet place within five years.145 Yet it was his time on the India Board, Wilson reflected, without which ‘I could not have assumed the duty which has now devolved upon me’.
In that earlier stint in the Commons Wilson had indeed pushed for the kind of economic development the East India Company had been slow or unwilling to pursue. Railway construction was his main concern, sharing the view of Bright and other Manchester men that this would open the vast interior to British industrial goods and ease extraction of raw materials like flax, wool, indigo, sugar and above all cotton, where Britain was too reliant on the American South. His daughter Emilie remembered her father ‘planning these Indian lines of railway on the dining-room table – lines over which eleven years later he himself was destined to travel’.146 He pressed administrators to open the port of Karachi, hoping to tempt ‘native dealers from Kabul’, and personally carried wool and cotton samples to factories in Leeds. But to these goals Wilson added another, a direct extension of his concerns as editor and proprietor of the Economist, and now Chancellor of India: security of investment.147
‘Wilson believed that he originally suggested’, Bagehot – his successor at the Economist – would record, ‘the peculiar form of state guarantee upon the faith of which so many millions of English capital have been sent to develop the industry of India.’148 Peculiar because, as Wilson realized even before his arrival there, and with no less an authority than Mill to back him up, for liberal outcomes a compromise with liberal principles might be needed – at least when it came to what were commonly considered backward races.149 Bagehot, who was even more alive to this problem, praised Wilson for his pragmatism: ‘the necessity on the one hand, in an Asiatic country where the state is the sole motive power, of the Government’s doing something – and the danger on the other of interfering with private enterprise, by its doing, or attempting to do, too much’.150 Wilson took leave of Britain telling his audiences, ‘I am one of those who believe that what is right in one part of the world cannot be wrong in another’, for ‘human nature is human nature the world over’.151 In practice, however, he behaved as though India required very different measures to springboard capitalist development.
Wilson arrived in Calcutta in November 1859 with his wife and three eldest daughters, before setting out to meet the new viceroy of India, Lord Canning, on a tour of the Upper Provinces. He soon got to work, seeking to apply in under one year policies that had taken decades to enact in England. His
