Vanishing silver, Britain’s debate and India’s drain (From the Archives)

New Delhi, Sep 28 (IANS) On a cold Friday in March 1806, within the halls of the British House of Commons, a seemingly technical debate unfolded regarding shipping statistics and commercial regulations. To the parliamentarians present, it was a question of national interest, of profits, and of the proper management of their “immense eastern dominion”. To us in India, whose land, labour, and resources were the subject of this distant deliberation, the debate was something else entirely.

It was a stark and revealing glimpse into the minds of our rulers — a squabble among masters over the division of our wealth, an unwitting confession of the immense drain of our resources, and a clear demonstration of the opaque and unaccountable system that governed our lives.

The motion, brought forward by Mr. Alderman Prinsep, was for the production of documents showing the “inordinate proportion of trade carried on by neutral vessels” in our ports. His complaint was not that India was being exploited, but that Britain was not getting its rightful share of the spoils.

He lamented that the British portion of Indian commerce was an “inadequate re-compense for the quantity of population and wealth which Great Britain was annually in the habit of expending for the support of our dominion in India”.

From our perspective, this argument is profoundly revealing. The cost of our own subjugation—the British troops, the civil administration, the naval protection—was framed as an “expense” for which our commerce was expected to provide a “re-compense”.

The debate was not about a partnership; it was about the profitability of an imperial venture. The Alderman presented figures with alarm: dozens of American, Portuguese, and Danish ships crowding the harbour of Calcutta, while the British share dwindled.

For the British parliamentarian, this was a national loss. For us, it was merely a change in the flags of the ships carrying our wealth away.

The Paradox of the Vanishing Silver

Perhaps the most illuminating moment in the debate came from Mr. Francis, a man whose long engagement with Indian affairs gave his words a unique weight.

He established a fundamental truth that our people have always known in their bones: “in any intercourse purely commercial between India and Europe, the relative circumstances of the two parties are such that the balance of trade merely, must be… immensely in favour of the natives of India”.

Our produce and manufactures were in demand; what Europe offered in return was of comparatively little necessity to the masses. Therefore, a natural trade should result in a steady flow of bullion into India.

And indeed, the figures presented in the debate seemed to confirm this. Mr. Prinsep noted that in the previous four years alone, neutral traders had imported over 19 million dollars in bullion into Bengal. This was in addition to the vast sums in specie sent by the East India Company itself.

But Mr. Francis then exposed the devastating paradox at the heart of the colonial economy: despite this immense influx of silver, there was no circulation of specie in Calcutta. The entire economy of the colonial capital ran on paper currency—Company notes and bonds issued at heavy interest.

He asked the crucial question that echoed the plight of our economy: “what becomes of all this specie? Is it buried? is it re-exported? or how is it employed? All we know is, that it vanishes and disappears, as fast as it is imported”.

Here, in the records of the British Parliament, lies an unintentional articulation of the “Drain of Wealth”. The silver arrived not to enrich India, but to pay for the goods that would enrich Britain and other foreign nations.

It was the lubricant for a machine of extraction. The profits from these goods, sold in Europe and America, never returned to our shores.

Instead, the country was saddled with a spiraling debt, which soared from around 11 million pounds when Marquis Wellesley arrived to over 31 million pounds by the time of his departure. The great mystery of the vanishing silver was, from our perspective, no mystery at all. It was the visible symptom of a system designed to transfer the wealth of our land to a distant island, leaving behind a mountain of debt to be paid from our own revenues.

The Politics of Secrecy and the Deflection of Truth

The response of His Majesty’s ministers to this request for information was as telling as the information itself. A motion for what was described as a “mere custom-house document” was met not with compliance, but with evasion. Mr. Secretary Fox, a man reputed for his liberal principles, argued that producing the paper would give an “imperfect impression” and that the matter was one of “delicacy” due to ongoing negotiations with the United States. Lord Henry Petty promptly moved to shelve the discussion by proceeding to the “other orders of the day”.

This refusal to provide basic information was a hallmark of the administration in India. It was a system that thrived in the absence of transparency. We see this pattern repeated throughout the parliamentary records.

Brave individuals like Mr. Paull spent months, sometimes nearly a year, fighting for papers essential to substantiate charges of criminality against Lord Wellesley, only to be met with constant delays and claims that the documents were too “voluminous” or prejudicial to the public service.

This control of information extended to our own shores, where the British administration argued that the principles of press freedom were “not suitable for India”. Any European who dared to publish materials deemed irritating to the natives or critical of the government faced the severe penalty of “immediate embarkation for Europe, without trial, or a hearing, or delay, or preparation”.

The deflection of Mr. Prinsep’s motion was, therefore, not an isolated incident but a reflection of a governing philosophy. Information about the true nature of the Company’s finances, its wars, and its commercial dealings was a tightly guarded secret, to be managed and controlled, never to be freely offered for public scrutiny. The rulers deliberated our fate in secret, and in refusing these papers, they were simply reinforcing the iron curtain that separated the governed from the governors.

Conclusion: India as the Prize

Ultimately, the debate of March 14, 1806, serves as a powerful testament to India’s position in the world at that time. We were not a partner, but a possession. Our commerce was not a source of our own prosperity, but a prize to be fought over by competing foreign powers — British, American, Portuguese, Danish.

The terms of this commerce were dictated by European wars and diplomatic maneuvers in Washington and Paris. Our internal economy was drained of its lifeblood to fuel their industries, and our rulers refused to even provide a public accounting of the transaction.

While ministers in London spoke of “delicacy” and members of the Company spoke of profit margins, the reality in our land was one of growing debt, vanishing resources, and an increasing burden of taxes to pay for it all.

The arguments of men like Prinsep, while aimed at securing a larger piece of the pie for Britain, inadvertently exposed the rotten foundations of the entire imperial project. And in the unanswered questions of men like Francis, we hear the faint, early echoes of the arguments that would one day form the intellectual basis for our long and arduous journey toward self-determination.

(The Author is a researcher specialising in Indian History and contemporary geopolitical affairs)

–IANS

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