New Delhi, Jan 25 (IANS) In the summer of 1820, a seemingly minor administrative action unfolded in the British Parliament: the introduction of the East India Company’s Volunteers Bill. This legislation sought to formalise the existence of a modest infantry corps in London, tasked with the prosaic duty of protecting the Company’s massive warehouses.
For the governing elite in Westminster, this was a petty squabble over budgets and security arrangements in a time of domestic unrest. But viewed from the subcontinent of India—the source of the Company’s vast, fragile wealth—this Bill was a final, glaring symbol of imperial hypocrisy. It proved that the EIC, claiming to be a “territorial sovereign” and professing concern for the “welfare and happiness of the inhabitants”, was perfectly willing to mortgage the future of millions of subjects to pay for the security of its tea and silk stocks in distant London, even as it operated under a crushing debt born from colonial conquest.
The debate over the Volunteers Bill was not about security; it was about legitimacy. It exposed the insidious mechanism by which Indian revenues were systematically diverted to subsidise British interests, fund political patronage, and maintain a facade of solvency for a corporation that critics claimed was “15 millions worse than nothing”.
Colossal Mortgage: India pays the interest
To grasp the outrage inherent in funding a London militia from Indian sources, one must first recognise the colossal financial architecture of the British Raj in the early 1800s. The East India Company (EIC) had long since ceased to be primarily a commercial body; it was a “powerful territorial sovereign”.
However, this sovereignty was ruinously expensive.
The costs associated with the “defence and protection of the British possessions in India”—the constant wars and expansion—had exploded the interest-bearing Indian debt from around £7 million in 1793 to approximately £26 million by 1813.
The modest profits the EIC managed to generate through trade were entirely “absorbed by debts and expenses incurred in respect of the territorial acquisitions in India”.
This debt created a permanent, colossal drain on Indian revenue. The EIC was obligated to provide roughly £1.5 million annually in London simply to service the interest on these Indian debts. Every rupee of revenue collected from the sweat of the Indian cultivator was effectively pre-allocated to European creditors and shareholders, guaranteeing the stability of the Company’s credit at home.
The opponents of the Volunteers Bill, therefore, immediately connected the proposed military expense to this pre-existing financial desperation. Creevey demanded a “full inquiry into their actual condition” before the House agreed to such a measure, arguing that the Company’s solvency was in question. He contended that the measure was merely the “last act towards a military despotism” established by ministers, even as the empire struggled to cope with the economic distress following the Napoleonic Wars.
Political Department shell game
The most specific and galling objection, from the perspective of Indian fiscal propriety, was the EIC’s intended accounting manoeuvre. Hume, a diligent critic of the Company’s finances, revealed that the “expense was charged to the political department”.
This charging method was an explicit abuse of Indian revenue. The EIC segregated its accounts into political (territorial administration, military, debt service) and commercial (trade profits). The political department was the vast reservoir funded by the taxes and land rents extracted from India.
By assigning the cost of protecting its “London warehouses”—containing commercial goods like tea and silk—to the political department, the EIC was essentially forcing India’s tax-paying subjects to foot the bill for the Company’s commercial security in Britain.
As Hume lamented, while the political department faced chronic “incumbrances” and relied on “yearly raising loans in India,” the EIC chose to burden it further with this “unnecessary expense”. The argument was clear: if the London corps was needed to guard commercial property, the cost belonged to the commercial budget, which theoretically depended on trade profits, not Indian taxes.
By forcing the charge onto the political account, the EIC formalised the principle that Indian revenue was merely a contingency fund for all corporate needs, regardless of geographical or functional relevance.
Opponents questioned the priority, wondering why the EIC needed a volunteer corps when institutions like the Bank of England, which had “property to protect equally valuable,” had not taken such a step. This highlighted the unique, hybrid nature of the EIC as a private corporation demanding public, state-level military protection, paid for by the distant subjects of its empire.
Military despotism: Fear and the reality
The opposition’s most damning charge was that the Volunteers Bill was a step toward “military despotism”. They argued that raising a 400-to-800-man infantry corps in the “heart of the metropolis” during peacetime was unnecessary and contributed to a generalised “military system ministers were establishing throughout the country”.
Hobhouse pointed out that the standing army was already immense (92,000 men at the time) and criticised the fashion of talking about the “phantom of disaffection” to justify military expansion.
From an Indian perspective, this metropolitan panic over a few hundred volunteers was tragically ironic. While British politicians feared the onset of military despotism in London, India had already been living under its absolute, oppressive reality for decades.
The Real Army of Despotism: The EIC did not rely on a few hundred volunteers for its actual power; it relied on an immense military machine in India, numbering “an impressive 250,000 soldiers, predominantly Indian sepoys led by British officers”. This vast force was the true instrument of despotism, constantly engaged in operations stemming from the “irrepressible tendency to expansion”, leading to “conquest or extinction”.
Financing the Despotism: This massive army was funded entirely by the Indian populace, whose resources were “largely consumed by the costs of the British administration and its military activities”. The Indian subject paid for the guns and men that enforced the seizure of territories and the denial of their sovereignty.
The Culture of Violence: The system was one “founded upon blood and supported by injustice”. The conduct of warfare could involve actions “considered questionable by European standards,” such as the execution of the Killedar of Talnier Fort, which Parliament was forced to acknowledge.
The London Volunteers Bill, therefore, represented the externalisation of the political climate of fear and military control that had characterised British rule in India from the start. The British domestic elite, facing social unrest (like the Luddite Riots) and economic dislocation, responded by adopting the very same tools of centralised military control that they had perfected and financed for decades using Indian funds. As Whitbread had stated a decade earlier, the Indian people were not “fellow-subjects… but those whom we and our fellow-subjects are despots over”.
Priority of patronage over justice
The debate over the military corps was intrinsically linked to the larger pattern of colonial finance: the relentless prioritisation of British commercial and political interests over the fundamental needs and legal claims of Indian subjects.
The opposition questioned the EIC’s priorities, noting the general neglect of those who rendered service to the state. General Tarleton had previously argued against increasing the salaries of Board of Control clerks when military pay had “no increase… since the reign of Charles 2”, highlighting the priority given to civil patronage over military service. The Volunteers Bill was another example of prioritising a corporate military indulgence in London over:
Legal Justice in India: Despite the EIC’s claims of providing ameliorated governance and courts of justice, the system was widely condemned in Parliament.
Hume noted the “deplorable state of civil and criminal justice and police in India,” where exorbitant fees and stamped paper requirements meant justice was “virtually denied to suitors,” leading to an “increase of crime, enormous”. The EIC was eager to fund a guard for its docks but failed to create an accessible and equitable judicial system for its millions of subjects.
Honouring Native Creditors: While the Company had funds available to raise a new corps and pay its expenses from the “political department”, the claims of legitimate Indian creditors were routinely ignored. The creditors of the late Rajah of Tanjore, whose revenues were seized by the EIC, had been left unpaid for “over 14 years,” ultimately “despair[ing] of Company justice”. The EIC would mobilise a force and fund its establishment, but it would not pay its lawful debts to its own native subjects.
Maintaining the Illusion of Civilian Rule: The EIC maintained a “fettered” press in India, strictly controlling information under penalty of “immediate embarkation for Europe”. This severe censorship was justified by the fear of publications that might “inform them [natives] of the peculiar tenure by which the British government held their power” or incite “tumultuous proceedings”. The fact that the EIC felt the need to raise a private military corps in London, charged to its political account, only confirmed that the system of governance relied entirely on military enforcement, even in the heart of the capital, thus exposing the fragility of the political “moral influence” it claimed to rely upon in India.
The triumph of corporate interest
Despite the strong opposition raised by critics like Creevey and Hume, who insisted the force was “wholly needless”, the East India Company’s Volunteers Bill was ultimately agreed to. Supporters like Money defended it as “essential for protecting Company warehouses” and necessary to “afford their aid to the civil power”.
The successful passage of the Bill confirmed the final, unchallenged supremacy of the EIC’s financial demands over political accountability, whether in India or Britain. It showed that when the security of the EIC’s valuable commercial assets was at stake—assets that generated the wealth required to pay dividends and service the colossal Indian debt—Parliament would grant extraordinary measures, even those tinged with the flavour of military excess and fiscal impropriety.
The raising of the Volunteer Corps in London, paid for by the distant, impoverished subjects of India, was the symbolic culmination of the EIC’s “privatised imperialism”. India was not merely a conquest; it was a boundless, subservient treasury, whose revenues could be dipped into without restraint to cover the costs of British global projection, domestic repression, and, finally, the security of its own corporate storerooms.
The London Volunteers Bill, funded by India’s political revenue, was like a landlord forcing his tenants in a distant, heavily mortgaged estate to pay the salary of a security guard whose only job was to stand outside the landlord’s personal safe in a foreign city. The security guard served the landlord’s commerce, but his wages were extracted, without consent or question, from the crippling debt of the far-off tenants.
–IANS
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