What if General Howe had defeated Washington “at the Brunx”?
American independence delayed → Cornwallis learns a new lesson → India is…unlike India
…Washington this way, that, pious invoke meridian night, prayed nocturnal, be dilatory, a stillness unheard those climes before; a higher hand bid ocean slumber, winds be silent, billows mackerel, a misty curtain, drawn omnipotent arm; Aurora rose, amaz’d the English hero, his opponent on the opposite shore…
•Albion: In Twelve Books (1822).
Once upon a time the Founding Fathers kicked the British out of America and founded the United States and everyone was happy forever. The end.
ii. Of course, not everyone was happy. You can pause to address America’s complicated legacy with slavery and Native Americans and etc., but you’ll also notice that among those not happy were the British. J.G. Frazer called it “the heaviest calamity in English history.” Fifty years after the calamity, Lord Macaulay retrospectively gave a very British view of the chaos of ca. 1780: “Britain set against America, a rival legislature sitting beyond the Atlantic, English blood shed by English bayonets, our armies capitulating, our conquests wrested from us, our enemies hastening to take vengeance for past humiliation, our flag scarcely able to maintain itself in our own seas.”
Among the unhappy British was General George Clinton, who blamed the course of the Revolution (i.e. the British loss) on a different general, his superior, William Howe. Clinton griped: “Had Sir William Howe fortified the Hills round Boston, he could not have been disgracefully driven from it: had he pursued his Victory at Long Island, he had ended the Rebellion: Had he landed above the lines at New York, not a Man could have escaped him: Had he fought the Americans at the Brunx, he was sure of Victory: had he cooperated with the N. Army, he had saved it, or had he gone to Philadelphia by land, he had ruined Mr. Washington and his Forces: But as he did none of these things, had he gone to ye D———l before he was sent to America, it had been a saving of infamy to himself and of indelible dishonour to this country.”
That’s pretty strong. One thing you’ll notice, though, is the implicit claim that the course of the Revolution could have run differently with only a little Howe effort. All up to and during the Revolutionary War, British politicians such as William Pitt and Edmund Burke were prophesying that the war was unwinnable regardless of what the British did. Burke’s famous oration advocating “conciliation” with the colonies has several arguments, but here’s one of them. The British, he says, “cannot station garrisons in every part of these deserts. If you drive the people from one place, they will carry on their annual tillage, and remove with their flocks and herds to another.” In other words, Britain can’t conquer the Colonies for the same reason the Romans couldn’t conquer Arabia, China couldn’t conquer Mongolia, and Napoleon couldn’t conquer Russia. America was too big and too wild! Burke goes on to imagine Americans, driven inland by the British, returning as an “ irresistible cavalry” of “hordes of English Tartars,” harrying the coastal Loyalists.
In the strange language of the mad anonymous 1822 prose-poem Albion, “the Americans an infinite superiority knowledge their country; a deep fetched sigh the British, for open plains battle…”
American Tartars: This does sound like a pleasant destiny. Burke’s point is that the Colonists either wanted to be governed by King George or they didn’t; if they did, they’d be Canadians; if they didn’t, they ultimately wouldn’t be. England could cry all it wanted, but these were the facts.
Edmund Burke has a history of being right. In 1790, when the French Revolution still seemed like, you know, a good idea, Burke saw only “Laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigour; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not relieved; civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom; etc.” Famously he accurately predicted not only future violence perpetrated by this “gang of assassins” but even the crowning of Napoleon (not by name, of course). He was also right when he adumbrated the esthetics of Romanticism (see IH p. 234). He certainly was right in predicting the ruin of Britain’s hardline American policy. And if he is right that America could not be conquered, then Clinton must be wrong in asserting that it could have. Howe could have fought at “the Brunx” or he could have not done so, and the result would have been the same.
Well, not the same, of course. Even if Britain was doomed to be driven from the Thirteen Colonies eventually, ala Burke, they could have stayed in the short term. They could have captured or killed, or captured and then killed, that traitor Washington. Independence could have been put off for years, or even a generation.
You can easily spot the thousand small differences such a history—I mean one in which Howe crushed Washington early on—would make. Someone else would be on the US quarter. Washington D.C. would be named Madison D.C. Or Jackson D.C. Or something else. Why not Burr D.C.? The national panoply of heroes, or if you prefer “heroes,” would be different.
But regardless of the short-term victory, Burke can persuade us that from a distance the actions of Howe would look insignificant. He won a war that was later to be inevitably lost. You could chalk this up as another Bell moment. Pretty much everything important stays the same, right?
Well, sure, perhaps in America. But the history of India would be different.
American independence delayed → Cornwallis learns a new lesson → India is…unlike India
If you put your naked foot upon the ground, death is upon you; if you sit upon marble without taking care, death is upon you; if you drink unmixed water, or merely smell dirty water with your nostrils, death is upon you; if you uncover your head to feel the breeze the better, it may affect you either by its heat or coldness—but in any case, death is upon you.
•Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia Hibernica (1188).
Generals tend to learn from their mistakes. Not Luigi Cadorna (see here), perhaps, but usually. Ulysses S. Grant, after the slaughter Union troops suffered at the Battle of Cold Harbor, forebore to try frontal assaults again, deciding they were too costly. William Howe may have learned a similar caution after taking high casualties at the Battle of Bunker Hill—if Clinton were to ask him why he did not complete “his Victory at Long Island,” Howe could argue (as he in fact did) that he “could not risk the loss that might have been sustained in the assault.” And then there was Charles Cornwallis.
ii. Imagine this scenario: You’re in charge of a British colony in the eighteenth century. Some of the indigenous locals—Indians—may view their colonial overlords as convenient allies in ancient feuds, but all of them would prefer autonomy to British rule. They are a people with a proud martial tradition, and the specter of bloody colonial war looms.
Now, quick: Of whom are you, a British general, most afraid?
Cornwallis will give the answer. He will say in this situation the greatest danger comes from the British.
iii. The trick in the preceding paragraphs is that Cornwallis’s next job was in fact in India. India had been in the British sphere since the 1750s, when Robert Clive, an office clerk, had more-or-less single-handedly conquered it in the name of a spice company. Don’t look at me, history is weird.
Clive didn’t conquer India from native Indians, of course. Conquering is just what people used to do, so if you conquered a place you were probably conquering it from other conquerers. Britain took Hong Kong not from the Chinese, but from China’s Manchu overlords, just as they took the Levant from the Ottomans, South Africa from the Dutch, and India from the Mughals. The Mughals were Turks who pretended to be Mongols (that’s probably an oversimplification); they swept down from Central Asia in 1526 under the leadership of Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur—a descendent of both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane and therefore possessed of the greatest conquering genes imaginable. Babur was the first Muslim to write an autobiography; no other Muslim would try again for centuries, which sounds like a strange gap but in fact has precedent: The first Christian to write an autobiography was Augustine, in 397; the second was Guibert of Nogent in 1115.
[Is that last sentence true? Babur is usually cited as the first Muslim autobiography, but there existed a medieval Arabic tradition of something called a tarjama nafsah—a brief autobiographical narrative, any example of which would have priority if we counted it. I can’t find where I read that Guibert’s book is the second Christian autobiography—it’s only partially autobiographical—but at the very least it preceded Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum by seventeen years.]
As you might imagine, Babur was a great subject for an autobiography. He was born heir apparent to the city of Fergana, and inherited the throne when he was twelve; but the city his sights were set on was nearby Samarkand. Great Samarkand had been ancient by the time Alexander the Great conquered it and rebuilt it along Greek lines; Babur considered himself, some 1800 years later, the rightful heir, and he conquered it in turn. But he was not the only descendant of Tamerlane to consider himself the rightful heir of Samarkand, and he soon lost Samarkand to family infighting; then conquered it again; then lost it again. He spent decades in exile trying to build up enough support to reclaim the throne of the city he loved; he did manage to take it again, briefly, but then lost it again as well, at which point he said to heck with Samarkand and turned south to go conquer India. He hated India, and the climate killed him; but his descendants ruled the country for nearly three hundred years, until the British came. First the British East India Company muscled into India, keeping the Mughals as puppet rulers, and then, after an abortive revolution, Britain proper officially took the reins. Queen Victoria became Empress of India in 1876, replacing the last Mughal, Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II. Because a minor British officer had guaranteed the old emperor his life, the British could not execute him—the word of a gentleman was binding in the nineteenth century!—and so they simply exiled this last Mughal.
The Mughals had no more “right” to be in India than the British did; but that fact, all of these facts—none of this lets the British off the hook for their empire! Empires are bad! When the US seized the Philippines after the Spanish-American War (seized them, obviously, from Spain and not from native Filipinos), William James wrote how “sickening” it was that “the country puked up its ancient principles” in order to start an overseas empire; which is nicely put. Everyone knows empires are bad. Lenin carefully redefined the term imperialism such that only capitalist states can have empires; the Soviet Union could then annex what territory it would and still not be an empire, by definition. Well, by Lenin’s definition, at least.
Empires are bad, and even in the eighteenth century there were mixed feelings about them. The British weren’t sure they wanted the subcontinent Clive had handed them. They put Clive on trial, and generally harassed him until he killed himself. But in the end, once they had India the British weren’t about to give it back. British India was in 1786 a weird quasi-cyberpunk corporate state, or perhaps more accurately a weird patchwork of kingdoms, pocket boroughs, and allied hangers-on, any one of which might also be a quasi-cyberpunk corporate state. 1786 was when Cornwallis arrived.
Cornwallis’s fighting days weren’t over, and for all I know he learned valuable tactical lessons from his experiences in America. Perhaps he learned not to fight a fellow Freemason (see IH p. 82). Perhaps he learned never again to be “bottled up by Washington and the French fleet” (get earwormed here). But the main lesson was surely just never to get into such a situation in the first place. Cornwallis’s plan in India was to prevent an American-style Revolution by keeping India as different as possible from the American Colonies.
Many American colonists had been in the New World for generations. They had American families. George Washington was born in Virginia; Benjamin Franklin in Massachusetts; Nathan Hale (I’m just picking guys at random now) in Connecticut. No wonder they didn’t identify as British.
And perhaps in India things were heading in a similar direction. Upon Cornwallis’s arrival he found that one-third of the British were either married to or shacked up with Indian women, and 11,000 of their “half-caste” children were already running around the place. Cornwallis put a stop to this, most notoriously by banning all non-Europeans from participating in company activities. Interracial marriage became discouraged; even fraternizing with the natives was taboo. Soon there were rules forbidding Company employees from serving long tours of duty in India; a high turnover could rotate employees back to England before they could “go native.”
On the other hand, David Gilmour (no, not that one) writes that Cornwallis also rooted out corruption in the East India Company’s civil service, setting the stage for a century-plus tradition of integrity, so never an ill wind, you know.
But if there had been no successful American Revolution, if Cornwallis hadn’t been so afraid of Englishmen ceasing to be English and rising up against their mother country, the man could have reformed the civil service without all the other tricks. Englishmen and Indians could have continued to mingle, each learning from the other. Generations of mixed-race children may or may not decide to break their ties with England, but they would, regardless, live in a pluralistic tolerant society.
And everyone would be happy forever. The end.
iv. Ha ha! Probably not, right?
Charles Cornwallis may have quite literally institutionalized racism, writing it into the EIC bylaws, but that hardly makes him unique in the annals of European imperialism. I mean, it’s not like the British needed any extra motivation to implement racist policies; you’ll notice that Cornwallis’s plan to keep Europeans and Indians separate is “apartness”—the literal definition of the Afrikaans word apartheid. And as for India: By 1786 it had been a pluralistic society for several millennia, apparently without (I’m speaking as an outsider here) flowering into a utopia.
I don’t know enough about the last 250 years of Indian history to speak with the authority I usually fake. But in Impossible Histories (p. 225) I cite a “1950s field survey, seeking to discover how many rural Indians knew that the British had left India the decade before, [that] found instead that most didn’t know the British had ever ruled India in the first place.” Maybe if the British had not been sequestered in the corridors of power, maybe if they or their children had been running all over India, maybe someone would have noticed them.
Also, the 1857 Indian rebellion would have succeeded. That’s one up, one down for wars of independence.
(This piece is inspired by William Dalyrmple’s The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire (Bloomsbury, 2019), a book I read four years ago and did not take adequate notes on; Frazer, The Golden Bough Part I: The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings vol. I (Macmillan, 1917) p. 216; Thomas Babington Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to the Edinburgh Review (Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1852) p. 305; Clinton: Thomas Fleming, “The Enigma of General Howe”; Burke, Speech on Conciliation with America; Albion; Burke, Reflection on the Revolution in France (Penguin, 1984) pp. 126 & 160; Howe: David McCullough, 1776 (Simon & Schuster, 2005) p. 195; William James: Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890–1914 (Macmillan, 1966) p. 161; Lenin: Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (International, 1939) pp. 88–89 (to be fair to Lenin, he first came up with this definition in 1916, before he had the opportunity to start his own empire); Gilmour, The British in India (FSG, 2018) p. 40.)