Liberal imperialism revisited

Pratap Singh was not the only Indian ruler swept up in the tide of colonial alarmism in 1839. As rumours of an anti-British Wahhabi conspiracy came to light, Company authorities dethroned and imprisoned a number of Muslim notables in the Deccan region. In these cases, as in Satara, local animosities cast a long shadow over the legal proceedings; hard evidence of collusion remained elusive and damning documents were revealed to be forgeries with some regularity. Gesturing to the minority of officials who debunked these fabrications, Chandra Mallampalli observes that ‘liberal imperialism’ provided ‘a language for exposing the Company's abuses of power and breaches of the rule of law’.Footnote ¹⁵ But he further suggests that these pragmatic liberal agents, who first and foremost sought to maintain the loyalty of the Muslim aristocracy, may not be entirely worthy of our praise. The fact that their protests ‘arose after the fact of violence diminishes their authenticity and purchase’ and might indicate that they were simply conducting ‘mere rituals of conscience’.Footnote ¹⁶

As a scholarly construct, the concept of liberal imperialism is notoriously slippery. Per Eric Stokes's classic formulation, ‘English liberalism’ in the context of Indian policymaking rested upon the individualist pillars of free trade, Evangelicalism, and philosophic radicalism.Footnote ¹⁷ The acolytes of these doctrines generally supported Anglicization efforts and sought to liberate Hindus from the deadening thrall of their ‘slavish’ religion. Noting the ‘latent authoritarianism’ residing within this liberal thought, Stokes linked James Mill's Utilitarian aspirations to empower the executive government and eradicate the native princely states with Governor General Dalhousie's annexationist ‘modernization’ programme of the late 1840s. More recently, political scientists have exposed the fluctuations in liberal thought from the late eighteenth century onwards. Jennifer Pitts, for instance, elucidates the ways in which Edmund Burke's liberal harangues targeted the Company's systematic abuses and invalidated its leaders’ rationalizations for their arbitrary mode of rule. Burke was especially perturbed by Britons’ ‘excessively constricted circle of sympathy and moral concern’; if colonial agents presumed that they were sent out to lord over a ‘set of vile, miserable slaves’, the affective relations that were essential for good governance would fail to develop.Footnote ¹⁸ According to Pitts, Burkean interventions on behalf of the colonial excluded diminished in frequency following the Hastings trial (1788–95). New theories of ‘imperial liberalism’ increasingly legitimized the Company's despotism by establishing facile dichotomies between backwards and civilized peoples. John Stuart Mill, for instance, posited that barbarians and savages would need to be trained to esteem cooperation and reciprocity before they could flourish under liberal rule.Footnote ¹⁹ If a colonized people rejected these pedagogical overtures, policymakers simply attributed any resistance to ‘cultural intransigence’. Such assimilative failures eventually necessitated the innovation of indirect rule as a new form of governmentality designed to ward off the threat of overhasty modernization.Footnote ²⁰

In light of these ideological shifts, it is hardly surprising that myriad parties interpreted liberal imperialism to serve their particular ends. While some metropolitan liberals sponsored a chauvinistic programme of cultural renovation, non-official Britons residing on the subcontinent invoked liberalism to safeguard their own privileges. They were particularly concerned with issues of European settlement, the composition of juries, press freedoms, and the opening of the Chinese tea trade.Footnote ²¹ As C. A. Bayly has demonstrated, native intellectuals also reformulated the ‘ambient ideologies’ within liberal thought to speak to ‘specific political and economic conflicts within the Indian world’.Footnote ²² The writings of Raja Rammohun Roy, in particular, espoused a kind of liberal constitutionalism that was informed by concurrent political events in Europe. Observing that the ancient Hindu constitution had suffered corruption, Roy proposed various reforms that would promote governmental transparency, individual property ownership, and civilizational blending.Footnote ²³ Beginning in the early 1840s, his civic brand of liberalism was increasingly overshadowed by a more radical strain that endowed marginalized groups like the ryots with inalienable rights.

In approaching liberal imperialism as an evolving ‘historical constellation’,Footnote ²⁴ we ought to further consider how a selective defence of its key tenets could bring the state itself into disrepute. England's premiere liberal thinkers may have erected a mental barrier between their anti-slavery activism and their colonial politics,Footnote ²⁵ but the same cannot be said of the network of former officials, abolitionists, free traders, and native polemicists who coalesced around Thompson and the BIS. Recurrent allusions to virtual slavery in their rhetoric indicate that there was a reformist register of the language of liberal imperialism—one capable of unifying an array of causes at home and abroad. Going far beyond any ritualization of conscience, it was an adversarial, uncompromising idiom that would only tolerate British dominion in India if certain anomalies were remedied. The colonial regime, Ranajit Guha once argued, relied upon its own persuasive ‘idiom of Order’ to cloak its pernicious nature.Footnote ²⁶ Reformers sought to discard this screen and unmask the Company as an atavistic agent of disruption in its own right. The following sections of this article will both probe their neo-Burkean attempts to stimulate an imperial public consciousness and identify the numerous obstacles that confronted their agitation. A series of case studies will further clarify how reformers intertwined the mistreatment of the ryot, British labourer, and native prince to fashion a stinging reproof of coercive governance.

The search for redress

In the early 1830s, policymakers began to reconceptualize India as a ‘single terrain’ that could be subjected to the ‘unaccountable exercise of British power’ and governed with ‘mechanical regularity’.Footnote ²⁷ The 1833 Charter Act curtailed the provincial governors’ legislative abilities and enabled the metropolitan Board of Control (BoC) to transmit orders regarding ‘levying war or making peace, or treating or negotiating with any of the Native Princes or States’ directly to India through the Secret Committee.Footnote ²⁸ The act also stripped the Company of its remaining trading privileges while retaining its Court of Directors (CoD) as an administrative body. In the metropole, this reshuffle lent an air of inscrutability to Indian affairs. The collision of the BoC and CoD, one director admitted, was ‘calculated to produce delay, incongruities, and sometimes an absolute suspension of the functions of government’ while ensuring the ‘total absence of all responsibility’.Footnote ²⁹

So long as Indians were barred from the halls of political power and obstructed from securing a judicial appeal in sensitive cases, it fell to the reformers to air their grievances by any means necessary.Footnote ³⁰ As the Anglo-Afghan War dragged on, colonial statistician and editor Robert Montgomery Martin asserted that the ‘Hindoo fellow-subjects’ who fought alongside their ‘European brethren’ in the mountainous defiles had earned the ‘poor privilege of raising their voices against oppression’.Footnote ³¹ While earlier reformers had suggested that a single orator could most effectively thrust Indian issues before the House of Commons,Footnote ³² Martin instead sought to reconstitute the Company's lame-duck Court of Proprietors (CoP) as an expert body composed of retired officials. Few stockholders, however, were inclined to transform their forum into the ‘domestic Indian parliament’ that he envisioned.Footnote ³³ Even when dissenting proprietors secured sufficient votes to bring an issue to the attention of the directors, the BoC controlled the flow of official information and could hobble investigations.Footnote ³⁴ In May of 1847, a number of reformers complained that the Secret Committee had concealed papers regarding the dethronement of Pratap Singh for the past 14 months.Footnote ³⁵ Thompson, who had acquired EIC stock solely for the purpose of making speeches in the CoP, predicted that these documents would provide damning evidence of the Bombay government's machinations, but his optimism was ultimately misplaced.Footnote ³⁶

The invigoration of public opinion through pressure-group activism offered an alternative to this institutional impasse. Operating within an enlarged political sphere, the ‘modular’ Victorian reformer was able to flexibly ‘combine into specific-purpose, ad hoc, limited association without binding himself by some blood ritual’.Footnote ³⁷ A defining feature of British abolitionism, in particular, was the ‘constant spillover of individuals into new causes’.Footnote ³⁸ Much as Garrison and Thompson characterized their agitation as non-partisan, they celebrated the fact that the transatlantic abolitionist was typically the scourge of establishment interests. Thompson noted early on that slaveholding stemmed from the exercise of despotic power; upending this system called for the substitution ‘of public, judicial, and responsible authority, for private, arbitrary, and irresponsible control’.Footnote ³⁹ These demands could readily be interpreted as affirmations of radical constitutionalism. Garrison even identified English abolitionists as ‘the genuine reform party of that country’ and predicted that their exertions would ultimately ‘abolish the unholy union of Church and State’, the House of Lords, and the ‘landed monopolies’ altogether. It was the Tory party, after all, that had always been ‘in favor of both white and black slavery’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Established by a coterie of Quakers and Anglo-Indians in 1839, the BIS embodied this capacious spirit of moral uplift. Its members linked the material deterioration of native society with the colonial government's lack of guiding principles and its monopolistic tendencies, which served to ‘endanger the public peace’ and ‘cramp the exertions of industry and the progress of improvement’.Footnote ⁴¹ Zoe Laidlaw and Andrea Major have amply documented the society's rise and fall, noting its supporters’ often-fractious relations with their humanitarian associates in the APS and British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS).Footnote ⁴² This conflict stemmed in part from disagreement over the proper means of eradicating Indian forms of domestic and agrestic slavery; the BFASS demanded immediate, legislative abolition, while reformers generally favoured a less bullish approach. Some, like Quaker BIS founders William Howitt and Joseph Pease, believed that the government should concentrate its efforts on sponsoring free-labour, colonial agricultural production that could undermine the American plantation system.Footnote ⁴³ Others were sceptical that emancipation by fiat would prove practicable. In 1839, Thompson called upon the EIC to inquire into and abolish various forms of Indian slavery so long as such matters came ‘within the legitimate sphere of our authority’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Two years later, a delegation of BIS personnel advised the BFASS that appealing to the upper classes was the only tenable approach, as forced labour was essentially authorized by the caste system.Footnote ⁴⁵ Wantonly liberating presumed slaves would likely constitute religious interference on the part of the Company. Wary of this minefield, reformers charged the colonial administration itself with having innovated new forms of enslavement through its fiscal policies and coercive approach to interstate relations. Under the present system, ‘princes and people [were] bought and sold like bales of cotton’ to appease the Company's investors, who traded in ‘thrones and nations’ in the manner of ‘goods and merchandise’.Footnote ⁴⁶ If the British state, by extension, continued to use the ‘rod of oppression’ to bind its foreign subjects ‘down in slavery’, it would surely meet the fate of Rome, Carthage, and Nineveh.Footnote ⁴⁷

In gauging the appeal and utility of virtual-slavery rhetoric, we must venture beyond the confines of the BIS and chart the formation of broader reformist networks that persisted from the mid-1830s to the late 1840s. Howitt, for instance, helped sow the seeds of India reformism in 1838 with his brazen Colonization and Christianity tract, which provided a compendium of Company offences. In subsequent years, he published Thompson's Satara articles, took up the cause of free trade, and joined the Garrisonian ASL. Thompson could also depend on the counsels of Major General John Briggs, a former political agent who had been stationed at numerous princely courts and boasted an extensive knowledge of historical land-taxation practices. Sympathetic personnel in the transatlantic-abolitionist community further supplemented the ranks of the India reformers and infused critiques of monopolization and arbitrary power with a spiritual aversion to coercive practices in their entirety.Footnote ⁴⁸ Garrison himself travelled to Britain to attend the invidious 1840 World Anti-Slavery ConventionFootnote ⁴⁹ and returned in 1846 to castigate the Free Church of Scotland for receiving donations from Southern slaveholders.

Despite such wide-ranging support, Thompson's India-reform campaign was at a disadvantage compared to other radical and middle-class movements that proliferated at the time. From the outset, it was largely conceived as a pedagogical exercise; the metropolitan public had to be informed of concealed misdeeds abroad before they could awaken to a sense of their duty. As such, the movement revolved around lectures and petitioning, but lacked the more rambunctious or convivial elements that traditionally characterized the British mass platform.Footnote ⁵⁰ India reformers acknowledged that swaying public opinion would be a gradual process and predicted that they ‘must be defeated twenty times’ before they could succeed in their endeavours.Footnote ⁵¹ By 1841, Elizabeth Pease, the daughter of Joseph, was urging Thompson to controversially ‘strike for the Abolition of the Company's charter’, as it was a ‘plain issue, and the people would understand it’.Footnote ⁵² At the same time, working through established political channels threatened to alienate radical American abolitionists, as Garrison's rather extreme doctrines of non-resistance and moral suasion precluded his followers from holding public office.Footnote ⁵³

In excavating the reformers’ agitational techniques, I do not wish to impart a false homogeneity to a heterogeneous movement. Some ‘conservationists’, like Thompson and Briggs, sought to retain native institutions ranging from the village municipality to the princely court. Anglicization was wholly irrelevant to their ideal of responsible governance, as they anticipated that access to global markets would naturally result in the Indians’ material uplift.Footnote ⁵⁴ Like these reformers, Martin challenged the home government's fiscal policies and sought to implement a system of ‘real’, reciprocal free trade between Britain and India.Footnote ⁵⁵ But he ultimately went one step further by casting this economic pivot as a first step in a broader integrationist programme that necessitated the promulgation of England's ‘language and laws and literature’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Whereas Thompson and his radical allies were inclined to rebuke Company personnel directly, Martin typically limited his attacks to the ruling ministry and the BoC.Footnote ⁵⁷ Despite these divergences, the trope of virtual slavery provided India reformers of various stripes with a common rhetorical mooring that enabled them to represent distant suffering in familiar terms.

Expansion and contraction in the rhetoric of slavery

Metaphors of slavery had long pervaded British literary culture, appearing in fervent sermons against sinfulness and early feminist tracts.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the late 1820s, journals like the Unitarian Monthly Repository called upon abolitionists to denounce the practice of sati, as Indian widows were ‘the unhappy captives of a barbarous superstition’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Slavery analogies were also attractive to the ‘sailors, servants, colonists, convicts, and religious minorities’ throughout the empire who wished to protest their marginalization.Footnote ⁶⁰ In the India reformers’ polemic, references to slavery signalled a violation of the natural right to self-preservation or an exclusive dependence on a single person or institution. A process of ‘natal alienation’, which genealogically isolated the dishonoured slave and forbade him ‘any independent social existence’, often facilitated this subordination.Footnote ⁶¹

The fluidity of Thompson's network invited participation from reformers differing in locality, class, and gender. Given this ease of admittance, debates over scope naturally arose, namely whether national issues should take precedence over the uplift of the global oppressed. Following an economic downturn in the early 1840s, Chartists and their sympathizers co-opted the rhetoric of political slavery to dramatize the immiseration of the labouring poor.Footnote ⁶² The agents of oppression were certainly legion; Chartist imagery of tyrants crushing ‘the yielding, suppliant slave’ evoked the common villainy of ‘the slaveholding planters, factory overseers, and upper-class government officials’.Footnote ⁶³ Writing in Garrison's Liberator newspaper, Chartist lawyer W. H. Ashurst declared that ‘the workingman in Europe is a slave in fact, though a freeman in name’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The workshop system imposed by the New Poor Law of 1834 had disturbed the familial order and brought about ‘apathy, brutality, and moral degradation’. In a ‘slave state’ of ignorance, the working classes exhibited illicit behaviours that reflected their rescinded humanity. It was this unholy reduction of men to beasts that alarmed the abolitionist Joseph Sturge, who condemned political slavery as a ‘means of degrading men without the use of the lash’.Footnote ⁶⁵ The demoralizing effects of disenfranchisement were only compounded by the proletarian slavery of the wage labour system that—in the words of Friedrich Engels—established the bourgeoisie's ‘monopoly of all means of existence’.Footnote ⁶⁶

Historians differ over whether common invocations of slavery entwined parallel reform campaigns or prompted pressure-group jostling. According to Gregory Vargo, Chartists projected ‘a crystallized image of the worst injustices of English society’ onto colonial rule and opposed militaristic overseas expansion.Footnote ⁶⁷ Press organs like the Scottish Chartist Circular reprinted articles by BIS members; Thompson raged against the Anglo-Afghan War and castigated the political establishment for capitalizing on Russophobia to play up domestic sedition charges.Footnote ⁶⁸ However, the Chartists’ enthusiasm for colonial revolts and their habit of storming anti-slavery meetings to elect their own chairmen incensed the respectable sort.Footnote ⁶⁹ David Turley therefore warns against an oversimplified reading of abolitionist–Chartist amity, as rioting in the summer of 1842 deterred any stable link-up between the middle-class and proletarian organizations.Footnote ⁷⁰ The reports of the Garrisonian GES further testify to the difficulty of fashioning a globally oriented movement. Although most members embraced Thompson's efforts to ‘protect the liberties, and advocate the rights of the Natives of the British dependencies’ through his Satara agitation, the Chartist reverend Patrick Brewster attempted to draw his comrades’ focus to the Corn and Provision Laws, which concerned the suffering of ‘multitudes of men [rather] than individuals’.Footnote ⁷¹

Radical advocates of universal emancipation also engaged in a fraught discursive relationship with the exceptionalism of chattel slavery. ‘For the most part,’ Richard Huzzey posits, ‘transatlantic abolitionist networks often distinguished tactfully between the struggle for global abolition and questions of domestic politics.’Footnote ⁷² Rejecting the metaphor of political slavery, American orator Frederick Douglass famously compared the plights of the working classes and plantation slaves to the difference between ‘light and darkness’ during his British lecture tour.Footnote ⁷³ Chattel slavery alone hindered Christian self-improvement by smothering ‘the intellect burning—the spark of divinity enkindled’ in all men. This was a refrain on a classic abolitionist trope: the singular evil of personal slavery as something akin to ‘soul-murder’.Footnote ⁷⁴ A master effectively committed an atheistic act of brutalization by ‘depriv[ing] God himself of his prerogative, as the sole proprietor … of his immortal and accountable workmanship’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Still, Huzzey notes that Garrison (Douglass's fair-weather colleague) solicited the support of the British working classes and encouraged abolitionist advocacy of the People's Charter. In past orations, Garrison had defined slavery broadly, noting that ‘Every man has a right to his own body—to the products of his own labor—to the protection of law—and to the common advantages of society’.Footnote ⁷⁶ By the 1840s, he was wondering whether ‘England or America demand[ed] the liveliest sympathy’, for both were ‘laden with iniquity’ and ‘full of the elements of self-destruction’.Footnote ⁷⁷ He nonetheless refrained from endorsing the broad concept of white slavery, as the degradation suffered by British labourers was fundamentally distinct from the supposed wage slavery of enfranchised Americans.Footnote ⁷⁸

Reformers within Thompson's network generally concurred that poverty alone did not necessarily testify to one's enslavement. Conditions mattered insofar as they unjustly deprived a person of freedom of action or impaired their natural rights. According to philosopher William Paley (whom Thompson cited), these included ‘a man's right to his life, limbs, and liberty; his right to the produce of his personal labour; to the use, in common with others, of air, light, and water’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Yet the theoretical distinction between personal and political/virtual slavery was sometimes a murky one, as reformers adapted content from a wide range of sources. In one lecture directed against the Free Church of Scotland and the Evangelical Alliance in 1846,Footnote ⁸⁰ Thompson declared that true slavery consisted not of ‘curtailing rights, but annihilating them’, thereby converting a ‘free agent’ into ‘a mere tool for another's benefit’.Footnote ⁸¹ These insights were actually derived from an 1837 article by Reverend George Bourne that probed the ‘teachings of the Old Testament on the subject of human rights’. For Bourne, neither ‘restrictions upon freedom’, ‘apprenticeship’, nor ‘political disabilities’ were indicative of enslavement.Footnote ⁸² Defining slavery narrowly as an act of ‘man-stealing’, he claimed that Jewish law had severely penalized such transgressions and affirmed ‘the entire separation of human beings from brutes and things’.Footnote ⁸³ Thompson opportunely appropriated this biblical exegesis to rebuke the pro-slavery clergy, though he had previously denounced apprenticeship in the West Indies and the Indian coolie trade as forms of slavery by another name.

The shifting valences of slavery can also be attributed to the demands of the lecture circuit and the interplay between the languages of constitutionalism and natural rights.Footnote ⁸⁴ In January of 1847, Thompson was airing the Raja of Satara's grievances before literary clubs, taverns, and the Eastern Institution while simultaneously participating in the Free Trade Club and ASL.Footnote ⁸⁵ At one meeting the following month, he lauded the anti-slavery movement as a ‘vindication of the rights of man’ and reminded his audience that he ‘had long ceased to discuss the question of slavery as one of colour or climate, of locality or treatment’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Whether ‘in the rags of an American outcast’ or ‘decked out in robes in the palace of an Oriental despot’, all humans boasted ‘the right to be free’. The following evening, he returned to the local hall to protest the mistrial of Pratap Singh; attendees resolved that it was the ‘inalienable right of every man, whether prince or peasant, to be heard in his defence, when accused of crime’. By featuring summaries of these lectures in the same newspaper column, the Royal Leamington Spa Courier linked the two campaigns as complementary assaults ‘against the various forms of oppression existing in the world’.

Huzzey's hypothesis of a bifurcation between the abolitionists’ global and domestic concerns may hold water in certain cases, but it does not adequately take into account the imperial dimension of reformist agitation. In tracing the artificial origins of the Agra famine and the ‘hungry forties’ in England, reformers observed that institutionalized hardships prevented the starving ryots and cotton operatives from educating themselves, embracing religion, or benefitting from the produce of their labour. Once officials classified Pratap Singh as a puppet king who ruled at the whim of his colonial superiors, they effectively converted him into a disposable tool and endorsed his natal alienation. The Satara debacle also prompted a legalistic debate over whether stringent treaty terms could legitimately reduce a native sovereign to the position of a virtual slave. The reformers’ campaign against monopolism in its political and economic forms was essentially an exercise in rendering the ineffable complexities of Indian governance comprehendible. A moralized version of liberal imperialism predicated on safeguarding individuals from coercion would only thrive under unremitting public scrutiny.

Script 1: the dehumanization of the ryot and British labourer

With a contemporary estimated mortality rate of 500,000,Footnote ⁸⁷ the 1837–38 famine in the North-Western Provinces provided seemingly incontrovertible evidence of societal decline under British rule. The event triggered an interrogation of land-taxation policies and infrastructural neglect amidst a reconceptualization of the ryot as a rights-bearing subject. The question of metropolitan publicity, however, has largely been dwarfed in the historical literature by a focus on state famine policy as the colonial extension of a middle-class ‘reform complex’. Despite the failure of the summer and winter monsoons, a number of colonial officials determined the cause of the famine to be a dearth of work and a surge in prices rather than a scarcity of food. Instead of barring grain hoarding or prohibiting its export, the government set nearly 80,000 ‘able-bodied’ Indian paupers to work principally on road-building projects. This modern system of relief, Sanjay Sharma argues, functioned as a mechanism of control whereby the state extended its purview over the local economic sector.Footnote ⁸⁸ Like the temperance and Sunday-school movements initiated in the metropole, the relief works aimed to instil sufferers with self-discipline and discourage deviancy.Footnote ⁸⁹

Reformers averred that the Company's response failed to address the root causes of the famine. This pushback against the inevitability of ‘natural’ disasters was part and parcel of a long-running critique that Burke had initiated decades earlier in his speech on Fox's East India Bill, when he maligned the Company's failure to have ‘left some monument, either of state or beneficence, behind’.Footnote ⁹⁰ The absence of material improvements was without precedent in the annals of conquest and more befitting ‘the ourangootang or the tiger’ than an enlightened government.Footnote ⁹¹ The following year, Burke blasted the Company for its parsimony during the parliamentary debate on the Nawab of Arcot's private debts. In their depressed state, the lands of the Carnatic could not possibly yield a sufficient tax base to fund the nawab's civil establishment, army, and repayments to his European creditors. Instead of attempting to recuperate fictitious debts, the government ought to have recognized its ‘fundamental duty’ to repair the region's thousands of reservoirs, the monuments of ‘real kings’ of bygone ages.Footnote ⁹² Burke's criticisms were revived in the parliamentary inquiries and debates that preceded the 1833 renewal of the Company's charter. Ardent free-trader James Silk Buckingham linked India's ‘liability to destruction from floods and tigers’ to the EIC's ‘barbarous system of rack-renting’ and its ‘utter disregard’ for the land's future condition.Footnote ⁹³ Even more damningly, this state of affairs contrasted with the relative prosperity of princely states where ‘great useful works are found and maintained’. Buckingham also drew attention to the Company's opprobrious monopoly over salt production in Bengal. Reflecting on the sight of peasants compelled ‘to work in the salt pans under the scorching heat of the meridian sun’, he suggested that the African sugar cultivators in the West Indies enjoyed a slightly more favourable existence.

Between 1837 and 1839, a handful of colonial agents published unofficial accounts testifying to the extent of misgovernment in India and the results of the grinding revenue system. In one influential text, magistrate Frederick John Shore likened the districts outside of Bengal to an ‘apple in a cider press’ being constantly squeezed by avaricious collectors.Footnote ⁹⁴ As the state had anointed itself sole proprietor, or universal landlord, redress from this extortive system was ‘almost unattainable’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Former judge-advocate G. E. Westmacott also observed that the Company had failed to adequately redistribute its resources: ‘charitable institutions, the asylums for the poor, the sick, and the maimed, [and] splendid and useful public works’ were all ‘crumbling to dust’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Dr Henry Spry's Modern India travelogue, a favourite primer for aspiring India reformers, reiterated Buckingham's claim that the only well-maintained works were to be found in princely territories.Footnote ⁹⁷ American visitors concurred that the over-taxed ryots were reduced to a state ‘below that of our Southern slaves’.Footnote ⁹⁸

These revelations provided reformers with key evidence of Indians’ ongoing debasement. Listing a litany of injustices, Howitt questioned why the ‘avowed slavery of some half million of negroes in the West Indies’ continued to excite abolitionist interest, while ‘the virtual slavery of these hundred millions of Hindus in their own land’ went unobserved.Footnote ⁹⁹ Once Thompson took up the cause of India reform, local presses characterized the enterprise as an abolitionist offshoot and applauded his efforts to rescue ‘over a Hundred Million of our fellow-subjects … from a condition of poverty and slavery’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Incidentally, improving the ryots’ standard of living would create a new customer base for British manufactures and thereby promote the ‘happiness of the population at our own doors’. By the time of the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention, reformers had come to consider the East Indies as a ‘place where the worst slavery exists’ for ‘not only the actual bondsman’ but ‘every occupier … under the basest tyranny’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Similar sentiments expressed in the Liberator deplored the ‘degrading slavery’ under which the ryots had ‘no title to their land, no right to their houses, [and] no species of permanent property, because the maladministration of the British Government in India has left them beggars in their native land’.Footnote ¹⁰² This defence of the ryots’ interests dovetailed with the reformers’ campaign to curtail the Mauritius and Guiana coolie trade. It was the oppressive land tax, Pease determined, that led ‘to want and starvation … compelling millions to become slaves for a long series of years’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Aligning himself with Pease and Martin,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Irish MP Daniel O'Connell bombastically claimed that he would prefer ‘the total annihilation of [the Indian] race’ over ‘their being subjected to a new species of slavery’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

To provoke the kind of ‘exact, slow, active, engaging seeing’ that Thomas Laquer associates with the ‘creation of sentiment’,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ reformers adapted forms of narration that foregrounded the pathos of bodily suffering. There were certainly many templates from which they could draw. During the Hastings trial, Burke had recounted the harrowing experiences of the native population under the governor general's reign of terror. Upstarts like tax collector Devi Singh subjected the cultivators to ‘cursed anarchy under the pretence of revenue’, as the non-payer could suffer a loss of limbs or be thrown into a well.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In the 1806 trial of Trinidad governor Thomas Picton for the torture of Louisa Calderon, the prosecution's lurid portrayal of the event was captured in images that were recreated and circulated in the metropole.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Abolitionists, too, noted that members of the giving public were wont to contribute to causes that they could observe first-hand. Lingering on the ‘sensual details of cruelty’, their polemic exposed the condition of slavery as a perversion of the Victorian domestic ideal and recounted tales of desperate slaves driven to inhumane acts.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Accounts emanating from India told of the ‘total debasement of human nature’ amongst the peasantry as ‘every natural affection [was] being absorbed in the universal principle of self-preservation’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Thompson and Martin embellished this narrative of dehumanization by depicting a benighted country in which ryots were ‘dying like dogs’, while mothers threw their starving children into the Jumna River under the cover of darkness.Footnote ¹¹¹ Elsewhere, Thompson lamented that a land of ‘gorgeous scenery’ and ‘unequalled fertility’ was now being ‘ravaged by disease and famine, and infested with mendicants, robbers, and murderers’.Footnote ¹¹² The jungle threatened to reclaim civilization; scavengers pounced upon the dying while corpses impeded ‘the courses of small rivers’.Footnote ¹¹³ Identifying the Company as a habitual offender, Howitt offered excerpts from Abbé Raynal's account of the 1770 Bengal famine that depicted the Ganges ‘choked’ with bodies, infants expiring ‘on the breasts of their mothers’, and peaceable natives ‘trampling under foot all authority, as well as every sentiment of nature and reason’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Utterly demoralized, these ryots had thrown ‘themselves at the feet of the Europeans, entreating them to take them in as their slaves’.

The present crisis offered nothing less than a test of national morality. Inverting Evangelical language so often levied against Hindu practices, reformers rallied against famine deaths as a ‘horrid sacrifice to a selfish and inhuman system’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Though metropolitan philanthropists were familiar with the ‘dreadful cruelty and suffering under the system of black-slavery’, the Agra famine cast light upon the comparable level of human devastation wrought by ‘fiscal oppression’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Outside of Bengal, ryots contended with a hefty land tax that varied by the year and could only be paid in specie rather than in kind. Briggs, the author of an influential tome on the matter, declared that the government's inflated assessment ‘bears down the peasant, and reduces him to a condition little better than that of a slave of the soil’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The employment of costly European collectors, who each maintained a retinue of grasping agents, further contributed to a tax burden that had nearly doubled since the transition from direct Mughal rule.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Reformers therefore demanded the extension of the Permanent Settlement, which would enable the ryots to utilize the surplus produced in bountiful years to temper periods of depression.Footnote ¹¹⁹ But land taxes were not the sole source of India's woes. Prejudicial tariffs compelled natives to receive England's steam-wrought manufactures ‘almost duty free’, while Indian textiles and produce were effectively barred from the home market.Footnote ¹²⁰ The transmission of Company officials’ private fortunes to England, which totalled half a million pounds annually, also justified their reputation as ‘birds of prey and passage’.Footnote ¹²¹ Subtracting these remittances, additional home charges, the interest on the Indian debt, and exhaustive military costs, the colonial government was only left to operate on about one-fifth of the revenue collected. The vampiric nature of this drain was not lost on the Indian intelligentsia, who grew to resent the British as ‘angels in theory but demons in practice’.Footnote ¹²²

Company apologists repudiated the reformist line that famine conditions were preventable. One editorial in the colonial press resented ‘the interference of mistaken philanthropists at home’ and sardonically predicted that Martin would move to recall the governor general and appoint himself as successor.Footnote ¹²³ An incredulous writer for the Edinburgh Review also questioned the necessity of the BIS, noting that ‘Mr. Thompson's picture [was] not like enough to be even a tolerable caricature’ of the present state of India.Footnote ¹²⁴ Still, one ‘young married lady’ in Madras contended that Thompson's ‘accounts of the shameful taxation’ were ‘not in the least exaggerated’.Footnote ¹²⁵ The reformers’ agitation also found favour with members of the incipient Bengal British India Society who concurred that the Company had violated the ryots’ customary landholding rights. No government could justly anoint itself sole proprietor of a country's territory for ‘property, as being the product of labour, [was] natural with man’.Footnote ¹²⁶ Some radical voices even went beyond Thompson and charged zamindars and Brahmins with subjugating the ryots in a manner reminiscent of the American plantation owners.Footnote ¹²⁷

In establishing virtual slavery as an endemic imperial evil, reformers asserted that the same coercive state apparatuses rooted in monopolization were curtailing the liberties of the ryots and metropolitan labourers alike. Much as the Company's tax demands inhibited the peasantry's productive powers, the aristocracy's manipulation of the grain market impoverished the British worker. Due to mill stoppages, 15 per cent of cotton operatives were thrown out of employment by the end of 1841 and quickly degenerated into shades of their former selves amidst Manchester's urban squalor.Footnote ¹²⁸ In response, Chartists and ACLL polemicists employed Gothic imagery, giving credence to rumours that the urban poor were consuming the remains of dead dogs and committing infanticide as an act of mercy.Footnote ¹²⁹ Leading an investigation into the plight of these labourers, philanthropist Joseph Adshead collected statistical data and anecdotal evidence confirming the extent of economic distress. His informants noted the ‘strange anomaly’ of seeing ‘in wealthy, civilised, Christian England, multitudes of men living in the lowest state of physical degradation, and absolutely perishing from neglect’.Footnote ¹³⁰ Searching for a prophylactic against such recessions, Adshead had previously demanded the ‘removal of the shackles upon industry’ that restricted the entry of Indian produce into the home market and reduced the natives’ purchasing power.Footnote ¹³¹ Reformist publications also admitted that it was impossible to ‘look upon a languid, unemployed operative, without being reminded of the errors … which have marked our government of India’.Footnote ¹³²

In the fractured realm of middle-class philanthropy, some leaders of the ACLL considered India reform a distraction and sought to poach its leading lecturer.Footnote ¹³³ Thompson agreed to temporarily enlist with the League, although he reassured supporters that he was not ‘ceasing (even for a time) to labour for India’, as the two campaigns were mutually reinforcing.Footnote ¹³⁴ In depicting the havoc wrought by protectionism throughout the empire, Thompson once more relied on tropes of inversion and atavism. The Corn Laws, he declared, converted ‘plenty into scarcity’ and turned ‘the field into a forest’ by triggering price fluctuations and panics.Footnote ¹³⁵ Such despoliation was contrary to natural law, as it impeded ‘the free gifts of God to the creatures he has made, and for whom he cares with the solicitude of a parent’. Unable to satiate their ‘animal wants’, the working classes suffered a ‘concomitant deterioration of public and private morals’ and lacked any incentive for self-improvement.Footnote ¹³⁶ Artificial poverty also impaired the labourer's liberties by making him solely dependent on the state's reformatory institutions. In most cases, the pauper could not claim any protection unless he was ‘in a union house, the outcast in a prison, or the exile … far from the place of his nativity’.Footnote ¹³⁷ The most needy Britons were effectively banished from their homeland and compelled ‘to find asylum in some foreign land from penury and helplessness’.Footnote ¹³⁸

One of Thompson's initiatives for the ACLL, which had begun to rebrand repeal of the Corn Laws as a Christian duty, was to organize a ‘sanctified parliament’ of clergymen modelled on the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention.Footnote ¹³⁹ Ditching the usual Evangelical interpretation of economic calamity as a sign of divine retribution, attendees concurred that Britain's plight was ‘self-inflicted’, the ‘result of a departure, by human legislation, from the spirit and mandates of the divine law’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ But ministers would win few converts to the cause of free trade so long as Britain's agriculturists remained in a state of ‘abject dependence upon those whose will can any time dispossess them of their means of subsistence’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Facing high food prices and rack rents, the farmhand was bound in ‘slavery to his landlord’ and condemned to ‘ignorance [and] tame submission to feudal tyranny’.Footnote ¹⁴² These observations echoed the classic anti-monopoly line that arbitrary rent hikes ‘virtually include[d] the essence of personal slavery’ by obliging ‘one man to labour for the benefit of another without an equivalent’.Footnote ¹⁴³ Nursing great expectations, Thompson anticipated that repeal would finally liberate the English tenant farmers ‘from their bondage to the aristocratic proprietors of the soil’ and lead them to embrace finance and franchise reform.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ As MP, he continued to rail against the electoral system of ‘mock representation’ that was ‘directly calculated to make men crouching slaves’.

Thompson's fellow lecturers on the free-trade circuit invoked the motif of virtual slavery in a complementary fashion. According to one pamphleteer, the Corn Laws constituted a ‘Jacobin’ assault against customary labour rights; forcing a worker to toil ‘twelve hours for the bread that might be got in eight’ was nothing less than an act of ‘man-stealing’—an unjust tax of men's ‘nerves and sinews’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Locking horns with the protectionist BFASS, which prioritized the economic interests of recently liberated cultivators in the West Indies, Howitt denounced the tariffs that prevented the influx of cheap sugar into England. Slavery, he reminded his abolitionist listeners, did not simply consist of being ‘bought and sold’, but rather was a general ‘condition of privation of free will, and being put under the arbitrary will of another’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Idle, starving metropolitan workers were effectively ‘the slaves of political enactments’ and the victims of market manipulations. Their emancipation could only come about through investment in the low-cost, free-labour production of Indian sugar and cotton.

By representing concomitant reform initiatives as a grand rebuff of monopolization, polemicists within Thompson's circle were able to orient the ryots and working classes as victims of a common plight. The recession and Agra famine had not been triggered by pestilence or internal wars, but rather were the result of governmental malfeasance. When Britain suffered yet another downturn in 1847, reformers once more declared that the Company ought put India's ‘millions in motion, and bury American Slavery for ever beneath the limitless mass of free-labour produce that she will pour in upon us’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Evidence presented to John Bright's select committee on the growth of Indian cotton spoke to the adequacy of soils and the capitalistic disposition of the native population. If the ‘land were not incumbered by taxes’ and ‘the natives were not in a state of almost inextricable slavery’, the subcontinent's supply of cotton would surely increase.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ As reformers continued to charge the Company with obstructing economic development, they simultaneously contested its coercive approach to interstate politics by popularizing the figure of the fallen prince as a virtual slave. The following section will plumb the depths of the prolonged Satara agitation—a historically neglected but contemporarily provocative affair that tested the limits of public-sphere agitation.

Script 2: the native prince as disposable tool

On the night of 4 September 1839, Raja Pratap Singh was roused from his slumber and ousted from his palace, the victim of a cabal between his brother Appa Sahib and political agent Colonel Charles Ovans. Thrown ‘half-naked’ into a palanquin, the newly minted political prisoner was marched into exile with his courtly retinue. The raja's adviser, Balla Sahib Senaputtee, pleaded for a halt when his wife gave birth shortly after the journey commenced; denied this request, he suffered a fit of duress, contracted an illness, and died. Pratap Singh's vakeels (legal agents) denounced these events as ‘repugnant to justice and humanity’ and demanded ‘as their birthright … a fair and impartial inquiry into the charges against his Highness’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ As acting chairman of the BIS, Charles Forbes petitioned the House of Commons in September 1841 to account for the cruelties endured by the raja. Ovans refuted his accusations, claiming that the march was a lavish and leisurely affair that had been planned three months in advance.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ This rebuttal was hardly the end of the matter. As late as 1847, John Cam Hobhouse, the president of the BoC, was still denouncing Forbes's petition as a libellous assassination of Ovans's character. Regarding the dethronement, he concluded that ‘the forfeiture of the dominion of a dependent chief’ could not ‘be placed on the footing of a criminal trial in a court of judicature’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The raja's right to a fair trial, in other words, was denied.

Full of ‘the marvelous, the romantic, and the affecting’,Footnote ¹⁵² what Garrison termed ‘the atrocious case of the afflicted Rajah of Sattara’ could be transposed into a constitutionalist morality play in a way that fiscal debates could not.Footnote ¹⁵³ From the arrival of Pratap Singh's representatives to London in 1838 to the Company's contested annexation of the territory in 1849, the matter galvanized reform networks that persisted long after the BIS had fallen into abeyance. Throughout this period, Thompson and his associates enumerated the injustices suffered by Pratap Singh as a semi-autonomous ruler. The victim of a conspiracy orchestrated by Company officials and local Brahmins alike, he had been tried by an illegal secret commission and deprived of the universal right to contest the charges. Forced to admit his guilt or suffer exile, the raja confronted the startling reality that British paramountcy over the princely states knew no legal bounds.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

The fact that Thompson received a retainer as a paid agent of the raja (which he later used to fund his parliamentary campaign) has led to an undue emphasis on his pecuniary motivations.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Historian S. R. Mehrotra disparaged Thompson for having ‘wasted time and energy in taking up the cause of the deposed Raja’ rather than ‘working for the people of India’ more generally.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ A contributor to the Calcutta Review levied this same criticism in 1848, remarking that the very mention of Satara functioned as a ‘potent talisman … to clear the benches’ of the House of Commons and discourage readership of India-reform propaganda.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ But other commentators denounced the dethronement as a reckless scheme of territorial aggrandizement reminiscent of ‘the days of Lord Clive and Warren Hastings’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The Company's meddling in Satara also gained notoriety in the aftermath of the uprising of 1857, when critics denounced the annexation as a formative experiment with the doctrine of lapseFootnote ¹⁵⁹ and a blatant disavowal of the law of nations.

Even before the Satara quagmire, reformers were echoing Burke's conclusion that there was not ‘a single prince, state, or potentate, with whom the rulers of India had come in contact that they had not sold’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Prefacing a transcript of one of Thompson's lectures, the editor of the Glasgow Argus bewailed the fact that the ‘princes of India [were] now but slaves of the Government of India … crouching and often disaffected vassals of British power’.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Elsewhere, Thompson audaciously claimed that the ‘misery engendered’ by colonial governance in India could exceed that of ‘the West India system, with all its horrors’.Footnote ¹⁶² The ruling classes, in particular, were ‘compelled to bow humbly’ before juvenile British tax-gatherers and suffered a striking loss of status. Thompson offered the example of the Raja of Nagpur, who was obligated to construct and maintain a road exclusively used by Company officials for their evening drives; soldiers stationed along its course prevented the raja's own subjects from even setting foot on the thoroughfare. Other reformers confirmed that the Company had pulled every one of the princes ‘from their thrones, or has left them there the contemptible puppets of a power that works its arbitrary will through them’.Footnote ¹⁶³

Pratap Singh's dynasty was initially ‘resurrected’ in 1818 during the Third Anglo-Mahratta War to diminish popular support for the insurgent Peshwa. Mountstuart Elphinstone, the governor of Bombay, imagined that a native administration would guarantee the allotment of pensions to leading Brahmins and preserve tax-free inams.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ According to a series of British ‘residents’ stationed at the raja's court, Pratap Singh internalized the principles of enlightened governance; he established schools, collected taxes efficiently, sponsored public works, and oversaw an efficient judicial system.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ If these agents identified one fault with the raja, it was his tendency to guard his prerogatives as a semi-independent ruler. Although an 1819 treaty declared that he would govern in ‘subordinate cooperation’ with British authorities, the details of this arrangement were never fully clarified. In one instance, Briggs (the resident at the time) had clashed with Pratap Singh over a property inheritance involving two young widows and a selection of possible heirs. Resenting Briggs's interference, the raja bypassed him altogether and sought confirmation from Bombay that he alone could settle the matter.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Pratap Singh also maintained a watchful eye over local notables who were in possession of certain jagirs.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Elphinstone seemingly confirmed that these territories were personal land grants that the raja could redeem upon the death of their present holders.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ When Pratap Singh pressed the issue in the early 1830s, the CoD decreed ‘the Raja's claims to the reversion of the feudal chiefs, of whom by treaty he was a sovereign … should be admitted’.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The Bombay government dissented and withheld the court's reply for nearly three years. In the interim, its officials gave credence to rumours that the raja was entertaining hostile designs toward the Company and had violated the treaty article that forbade association with foreign powers.

In his final report on Satara, Briggs informed Elphinstone of whispers that Pratap Singh was engaged in unapproved communications with the Raja of Kolhapur and other petty chiefs. But he insisted that these rumours need ‘create no suspicion in the mind of the Honorable Governor in Council as to the fidelity and attachment of the present Raja’.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Elphinstone concurred that these liaisons were likely an attempt at self-inflation. A decade later, accusations of conspiracy emerged once more and ultimately cost the raja his throne. In July 1836, Resident Peter Lodwick informed his superiors in Bombay of an unsubstantiated allegation: Pratap Singh had attempted to involve two subedhars (native officers) in an anti-British plot. Despite the absence of hard evidence backing these claims, Governor Robert Grant notified the Secret Committee in September and dispatched Ovans and government secretary J. P. Willoughby to convene a secret commission of inquiry.Footnote ¹⁷¹ This investigation functioned as a kind of summary court martial. Barred from conducting a cross-examination, the raja was neither permitted legal representation nor provided with copies of the officers’ depositions in Marathi, his native language. A regretful Lodwick later alleged that his colleagues were eager to convict the raja from the outset as a ‘damned scoundrel … treacherous to that power which had raised him from a prison to a throne’.Footnote ¹⁷² Though the commission officially disbanded in November after a key informer admitted to perjury, Ovans continued to linger at Satara as a ‘grand inquisitor’ and was appointed as Lodwick's successor the following June.

From that point on, Ovans proceeded to dredge up new conspiracies at every turn. Pratap Singh had reportedly connived with the Raja of Jodhpur to foment a Maratha restoration and encouraged Mudhoji Bonsle, the indigent Raja of Nagpur, to facilitate a Russian invasion of India with Turkish support.Footnote ¹⁷³ The Bombay authorities noted that Pratap Singh had sent Bhonsle a pair of shoes and a sword as a collusive overture, though this claim itself was uncorroborated. More shockingly, Ovans reported that the raja had approached Don Manoel, the Viceroy of Goa, to secure 30,000 troops for his revolt.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Even after Pratap Singh was deposed and exiled to Benares, the Bombay government continued to situate him at the nexus of multiple transregional plots.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Thompson and Briggs contended that any treasonable correspondence was a forgery, the work of a long-running Brahminical conspiracy to unseat the raja and his supporters belonging to the Kayastha Prabhu caste.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Ovans, the reformers declared, was party to these machinations from the outset and could soundly be counted amongst ‘the greatest living criminals’ for his role in the regime change.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

Since the late eighteenth century, the Company had utilized its residency system to monitor the native sovereigns and curb their communication with other Indian rulers or foreign powers. The opening of steamship routes in the 1830s put this programme of ‘official and enforced isolation’ under severe stress.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ In April 1837, Governor Grant tentatively allowed Pratap Singh to hire an agent who could bring the jagir debacle to the attention of the metropolitan authorities. The central government acknowledged the raja's right to dispatch his personal physician, Dr Milne, to London. Having relinquished its economic monopoly, the Company could no longer circumscribe the movements of British subjects with ease, let alone bar ‘respectable individuals … from undertaking the defence of natives of rank’.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ But the Bombay administration soon altered its position and declared that the home government was effectively a foreign power; if the raja directly interacted with the BoC or CoD, he would be in violation of the treaty of 1819.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Acting-Governor James Farish sabotaged one deputation's attempted venture to England in the winter of 1838 by instructing the Collector of Sea Customs at Bombay to bar a French-owned ship from departing with the agents on board. Treating the raja's representative as contraband irked leading agent Rungo Bapojee, who bemoaned his countrymen's apparent lack of legal rights.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Whereas the ‘slave-born native of Africa’ became free upon touching British soil, ‘the free-born, but wronged, Native of India’ was ‘hunted, tracked, imprisoned, heavily fined, and the law twisted and tortured to chain him to the earth’.Footnote ¹⁸² In practice, the directors were under no obligation to recognize the delegations that did arrive. Vakeels were frequently forced to linger in London until they had exhausted their allowances, at which point the Company purchased their passage home.Footnote ¹⁸³

Reformers vowed that the government could not prohibit the influx of agents into London unless ‘a law be passed that should make it a felony for a native to come to England at all’.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Upon their delayed arrival in London, the raja's emissaries were incorporated within an incipient India-reform network. Forbes subsidized the first deputed vakeel, Syed Mir Afzul Ali; Satara agents were also in attendance at the inaugural meeting of the BIS. After corresponding with Bapojee in early 1842, Thompson became ‘more than ever convinced of the perfect innocence of the Raja of all the acts laid to his charge’.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ From that point forward, Bapojee occupied a prominent position in the reform community, accompanying Thompson to lectures on Indian governance, abolitionist meetings, and even a party for the Lord Mayor of London.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ One meeting at the Hall of Commerce, which prominently featured a reading of Bapojee's statement on the Satara case, drew between 400 and 500 attendees and lasted over three hours.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ His ubiquity about town led some sceptical proprietors to assert that he was simply ‘brought here for stage effect’.Footnote ¹⁸⁸

India reformers contended with numerous institutional blockages while advocating on behalf of the raja. In February 1840, sympathizers in the CoP moved for an inquiry into the dethronement and were swiftly rebuked for their audacity, as it was ‘inexpedient’ for the court ‘to interfere with the responsible Executive’.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ The Company, however, could not dismiss the House of Commons’ call for papers that came down the following year. This development triggered a new barrage of requests from proprietors for a fulsome investigation; by July 1848, reformers had reportedly brought the Satara scandal to the CoP's attention on 31 occasions.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ In most cases, detractors rebuffed the agitation as the work of a ‘small knot of persons’ who had deluded the raja into squandering his resources.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Obstructionist proprietors challenged the reformers on matters of protocol, moved to strike their accusations against deceased personnel, and prematurely adjourned special general courts before their motions had received a vote. As early as August 1842, Thompson was privately admitting that the likelihood of the raja receiving an appeal was slight, but nonetheless vowed to persevere by circulating petitions amongst sympathetic MPs.Footnote ¹⁹² Briggs applauded Thompson's efforts to force the ‘defence of the Rajah of Sattara down the throats of [his] unwilling auditors’, though he also doubted that Pratap Singh would ever ‘be replaced on the throne of his ancestors’.Footnote ¹⁹³

While reformers like Bapojee broadly ‘framed [their] arguments on moral and legal grounds recognized as sacred by the British establishment’,Footnote ¹⁹⁴ we may further discern two distinct polemical modes that established Pratap Singh as a conscientious victim of coercion. The first characterized Ovans as a conniving scoundrel and exposed the Company's reluctance to censure its own employees.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ The second cast the raja as a rights-bearing subject who had been ill-used as a virtual slave and denied a fair hearing. In contrast to trials of wayward colonial agents like Hastings and Picton, which operated as acts of purgation and served to ‘re-sanction legitimating norms’,Footnote ¹⁹⁶ the Ovans debacle demonstrated that a governmental esprit de corps could effectively safeguard officers from public scandal. Among Thompson's 12 charges was the damning allegation that Ovans had trafficked in forged correspondence implicating the raja's imprisoned minister, Govind Rao, in the subedhar affair. Ovans had allegedly come into possession of a letter signed by the minister's mother, who confessed her son's guilt in the hope of saving his life. Upon learning that this document was inauthentic, he paid the forger a small amount of hush money rather than informing his superiors of any subterfuge.Footnote ¹⁹⁷

After Thompson related this saga to the CoP in 1842, the Bombay government demanded his prosecution. He continued to encounter opposition from the majority of directors thereafter. James Hogg, a chief adversary of the reformers, inveighed that an ‘inquiry into charges so false and malicious’ would not only place a stigma on Ovans, but also bring about ‘an end to the civil and military services … if a servant of the East India Company … were to be so treated’.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ In the CoP, a Mr Fielder denigrated Thompson for behaving in a thoroughly un-English manner and called upon the chair to ‘stop this abuse—this venom, venom, venom’.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Hobhouse rebuked the Company itself for having ‘suffered one of their own honest servants to be calumniated and reviled by one of the most unscrupulous scoundrels who ever lived’.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Nevertheless, Thompson's Burkean invective damaged his target's reputation and raised suspicions that Ovans's high-ranking brother-in-law, Company secretary James Cosmo Melvill, had safeguarded his relation from further fallout. One published poem even charged Melvill with reimbursing ‘his countless kindred from the public purse … wrung with hot haste, by peculating knaves / From [India's] oppress'd and too submissive slaves’.Footnote ²⁰¹

While Thompson's excoriation of Ovans met with a backlash, his defence of the raja's natural and constitutional rights garnered wider support. Pratap Singh had been ‘hurled to the dust; stripped of his state, and even personal possessions’ amounting to 300,000 pounds in land and private property accumulated for the support of his retinue.Footnote ²⁰² The case was hardly isolated, for it could very well set the stage for a more grasping style of colonial diplomacy unconcerned with maintaining the social standing of native sovereigns.Footnote ²⁰³ Authorities like former Bombay governor John Malcolm had previously noted the danger of rendering princes ‘the mock and degraded instruments of our power’ while allotting them an ambiguous amount of residual sovereignty.Footnote ²⁰⁴ Yet political agents at the native courts continued to assume ‘that these princes [were] mere tools or puppets’ in their hands. Hobhouse, too, looked upon ‘a throne in India [as] a mere bauble’ that could ‘be taken away from these unfortunate princes just as though they were children or infants’.Footnote ²⁰⁵

If the raja was, in fact, a dependent ruler, he boasted the ‘undoubted privilege of all Englishmen’ to contest the charges levied against him.Footnote ²⁰⁶ Few parties disputed the fact that his extralegal trial was grossly mishandled. Director John Forbes had condemned the proceedings in 1840 as a farce, noting that ‘no Grand Jury in England would have sent a case to trial’ based on such scanty evidence.Footnote ²⁰⁷ Former Madras official John Sullivan concurred that a charge alone ‘does not criminate’, for there was not a British ‘peasant who tills the ground, who [could] be deprived of his land except by a regular sentence of a judicial tribunal’.Footnote ²⁰⁸ Dragging Pratap Singh before the secret commission, moreover, was a ‘wanton insult’ that only served to ‘degrade him in the eyes of his own subjects’.Footnote ²⁰⁹ Writing directly to the governor general in 1844, Pratap Singh had asked for the most basic rights ‘which the Law, the Constitution, and the Religion of England, grants to the traitor and the assassin’.Footnote ²¹⁰ Reformers concurred that the raja's right to be heard was confirmed ‘by the laws of nature, of society, and of God’; the Company could ‘no more destroy that right than they [could] disturb the pillars of the universe’.Footnote ²¹¹ By 1847, Thompson had recast the Satara case as a moral parable in which ‘the right of universal humanity’ had come under fire. Not even the North American Indians, who were well ‘accustomed to the use of the tomahawk and scalping knife’, deprived a prisoner of an oral defence.Footnote ²¹² Recalcitrant officials attempted to discount such rights-talk by arguing that the commission's investigation was a political act and not a trial at all, legally speaking. By extension, the ‘technicalities of the British constitution’ could not be applied to the case, as the raja's overthrow ‘concerned the interpretation of a treaty and not of a law’.Footnote ²¹³ This manoeuvre irked reformers, for it threatened to set a precedent whereby wronged princes would be deprived of a parliamentary appeal.Footnote ²¹⁴

In laying the Satara case before the CoP, the CoD, and the House of Commons, India reformers were searching for an impartial forum that could hear the grievances of the Company's exploited victims. Although Thompson's condemnation of the deposition as an illegal act contrary to statute law failed to move the directors,Footnote ²¹⁵ the plight of the native rulers began to acquire a higher profile within a number of reformist organizations. Dr Burns of Paisley, a member of the GES, interpreted the destruction of the colonial army in Afghanistan as a divine protest against the Company's ‘cupidity and cruelty’ in India.Footnote ²¹⁶ According to the Hibernian British India Society, the native population had perceived the ‘grievous injustice’ of the Satara case as evidence that their country was under occupation by a ‘government of force’.Footnote ²¹⁷ Thompson himself went so far as to suggest that the despoliation of Satara had provoked the recent aggressions in the Punjab; a people who had often ‘had to choose between slavery and death’, the Sikhs believed themselves to be the next target of the Company's wrath.Footnote ²¹⁸ Speaking before an audience of several hundred in 1846, MP John Bowring hoped that a sympathetic spirit of resistance might soon be conjured in the metropole.Footnote ²¹⁹ If English public opinion could be brought to bear on the recent Polish uprisings, why should it not condemn the Company's despotic overthrow of Pratap Singh?

The reformers’ ongoing efforts to make Indian policy a public issue only incensed the BoC, thereby perpetuating the raja's captivity. Distraught by the re-emergence of the ‘absurd Sattarah question’ in the summer of 1847, Hobhouse mused that he could ‘put an end to it in five minutes by striking off the final 0 of the ex-Raja's retired allowance’.Footnote ²²⁰ Pratap Singh died in exile that autumn, followed by his brother the following spring. In the absence of a blood heir, Appa Sahib's widows continued to engage Bapojee's services to oppose the looming annexation of their state. This development led Hobhouse to privately defame Bapojee as a ‘good-for-nothing personage’ who continually ‘threatens us with parliamentary squabbling … and holds up Lord Dalhousie and the Court to the vengeance of the public’.Footnote ²²¹ By 1849, he was pressuring the governor of Bombay to restrict the widows’ stipend so that they could not ‘keep alive a party in India’ or ‘pay for agitation in England’.Footnote ²²² With his purse strings cut, Bapojee announced that his employer ‘had been starved into a written renunciation of all [her] infant's rights’ to the throne.Footnote ²²³ He nonetheless continued his crusade until 1853, when accumulated debt forced him to accept 2,500 pounds from the Company in exchange for abandoning ‘all supposed claims against the Government of India’.Footnote ²²⁴

The widows’ anxieties were well founded, for expansionists in the late 1840s doubled down on their characterization of Pratap Singh as a ‘mere instrument, set up to answer certain political ends’.Footnote ²²⁵ As the raja's advocates tirelessly denounced the violation of his constitutional and natural rights, the character of the 1819 treaty also became a matter of debate. Critics in the colonial press condemned the treaty early on as an iniquitous document that would never have been presented to a potential European ally.Footnote ²²⁶ Yet they maintained that Pratap Singh, while baited, had never violated its articles. Although the raja had been reduced to a ‘mere slave without the power of proposing or acting in anything’ without his resident's leave, ‘the laws of nations and of nature’ justified his legal claim to the jagirs as an aggrieved party. Edward Thornton, a Company undersecretary commissioned by the CoD to pen a voluminous history of British India, offered an inverted reading of the 1819 treaty: Pratap Singh had in fact ‘exchanged the condition of a titled slave’ under the Peshwa's thrall for ‘the exercise of actual sovereignty’ after his liberation.Footnote ²²⁷ Following the raja's alleged indiscretions, Governor Carnac had avoided a formal trial lest it place him in ‘the situation of a subject’ when ‘he had always been treated as a sovereign’. While Thornton at least recognized the anomalous nature of British paramountcy over princely states like Satara, Company director Ross Mangles saw the issue in starker terms. The 1819 treaty, quite simply, had deprived the raja of ‘the freedom of action enjoyed by the humblest individual in a private sphere of life’.Footnote ²²⁸ By accepting British protection, the raja had knowingly condemned himself to virtual enslavement and forfeited all opportunity of redress. Twenty-five years after the annexation, Bapojee's former patron, the Ranee Suguna Bai Saheb, resurrected the case in an exhaustive formal appeal to Queen Victoria. Among her many points of contention was a refutation of Mangles’ treaty interpretation couched in the language of unequal alliances and semi-sovereignty. Her conclusion was clear: a stronger contracting power like the ‘late East India Company’ could not have legally condemned the ‘Rajas of Sattara to be [its] slaves’ in perpetuity.Footnote ²²⁹

As the annexation of Satara garnered public attention, the BoC took additional measures to guard against external interference in the Company's affairs. Hobhouse urged the Indian government to plug the leak of sensitive information from within its own ranks and stymie all communication with the Anglo-Indian press.Footnote ²³⁰ After one official allegedly published documents held by the Secret Committee, Hobhouse demanded Dalhousie make an example of him, lest reformers like Thompson get their hands on such material.Footnote ²³¹ He further chastised Bartle Frere, the last resident at Satara, for drafting a minute that weighed the adopted heirs’ vying claims to the throne, as he had given an Indian newspaper the mistaken impression that the annexation had been called off.Footnote ²³² Aside from browbeating his underlings, Hobhouse attempted to discredit Thompson as a paid agitator. He even admitted to Dalhousie that he might have permitted an adopted heir to inherit sovereign powers if such a suggestion had originated with the Indian government. It was instead a proposal ‘made by the enemy’; its acceptance would only have ‘encourage[d] further attempts to interfere with the decisions of Government’ and given ‘a decided triumph to the party who have kept us in hot water for so many years’.Footnote ²³³ Regardless of any treaty obligations, the fate of Satara had become a matter of principle.