82. Benefits of Empire in India

We’re back with Britain’s great imperial project in India, going great guns (often literally) despite the war in Europe. It was still in principle being run by England’s old East India company, though increasingly that was little more than a fiction behind which the British state exercised direct rule.

There were more glorious wars against rebellious local leaders, where ‘rebellious’ meant ‘more inclined to exercise power themselves than have it exercised from London’. Governor General Cornwallis, who’d had such a bad time in America at the hands of other rebels, scored some successes in India, as did his successor Lord Mornington, aka Richard Wellesley. The younger brother of Mornington, far better known later by his own alias of Duke of Wellington, got some invaluable military experience out there, and explored some interesting new tactics, such as the use of terror against local villagers.

On a more positive note, we also get to meet a British judge in India, a remarkable linguist, William Jones. He deeply respected local culture, learning Sanskrit and providing the first translations of some Hindu sacred texts into English. Above all, he was struck (as some others before him) by the similarities of languages from South Asia with most European languages, so today he’s generally seen as the father of international linguistics and of the study of the Indo-European language group.

Illustration: Sir William Jones, by James Heath, after Sir Joshua Reynolds
Stipple engraving, published 1799. National Portrait Gallery, D36735.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License