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“Our Execrable Banditti”: Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Philip Lawson  and
Jim Phillips
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Extract

In March 1761 the diarist Horace Walpole complained that “West Indians, conquerors, nabobs, and admirals” were attacking every parliamentary borough in the general election. Although it lacked statistical proof, this sour observation became an accepted tenet in political histories of Britain written during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even the one full-length study of nabobs published in 1926 echoes Walpole's refrain; Holzman depicted them as a group of nouveaux riches “determined to raise their power and position to the level of their credit. This precipitated a fierce class strife, which was signalised [sic.] by changes in the ownership of landed estates and pocket boroughs.” The investigations of the Namierite school have long since demolished the myth of an East Indian onslaught on English politics and society in the mid-eighteenth century. Only a handful of novice MPs were returned to parliament in the general elections of 1761 and 1768, and those elected did not constitute a concentrated and coherent East Indian lobby at Westminster.

Yet should Walpole's observation be dismissed so readily? This was an age of ignorance of the nature of the British presence in India, of considerable misgivings over the many effects that an empire of conquest in the east would have on Britain, and of a resultant lack of enthusiasm for an Asian empire. The leading historian of the British connection with India in the eighteenth century has recently pointed out that this reluctance derived in part from fears that it would upset not only the social and political, but also the moral underpinnings of established society.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , Fall 1984 , pp. 225 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1984

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References

1 Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford, ed. Mrs.Toynbee, P., 16 vols. (Oxford, 1905), 5:29Google Scholar. Nabob is a corruption of the Persian nawab, a regional govenor under the Mughal empire. By the mid eighteenth century the Indian nawabs had secured independence from the central authority in Delhi and founded dynastic states. Contemporaries used the term nabob to refer either to nawabs or to the Company's servants.

2 Holzman, J.M., The Nabobs in England 1760-1785: A Study of the Returned Anglo-Indian, (New York, 1926), p. 15.Google Scholar

3 The standard account of the Company in politics, although one that devotes little attention to parliament, is Sutherland, L.S., The East India Company in Eighteenth Century Politics (Oxford, 1952)Google Scholar. For the elections of 1761 and 1768 see Namier, L.B. and Brooke, J., eds., The House of Commons 1754-1790, 3 vols. (London, 1964), 1:149–46Google Scholar; Namier, L.B., The Structure of Politics and the Accession of George III (2nd ed.; London, 1961), pp. 158–72Google Scholar: Namier, L.B., England in the Age of the American Revolution (2nd ed.; London, 1961), pp. 125–70Google Scholar: Phillips, C.H., “Clive in the English Political World, 1761-64,” Bulletin of the School or Oriental and African Studies, 12 (1947–1948): 695–702.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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12 For a discussion of nabob ambitions, which demonstrates that most were content with the life of a petty country gentleman, see Marshall, , East Indian Fortunes, pp. 214–19.Google Scholar

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18 Lawson and Lenman, “Robert Clive.” Clive's jagir was a pension of £30,000 per annum from the Bengal land revenues.

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26 Quoted in Love, H.D., Vestiges of Old Madras, 3 vols. (London, 1913), 3: 149 nGoogle Scholar. Mackreth was once a waiter at White's who married the proprietor's daughter and became owner of the club and MP for Castle Rising. Rumbold remitted part of his Indian fortune to him.

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40 Ibid., 22 July 1782.

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42 In 1779 Smith became High Sheriff of Berkshire. He apparently convened a county meeting to arrange for a road to be built through the property of those present, “for his sole convenience, so that he might arrive at Chiltern Lodge, without the necessity of passing through the little stinking town of Hungerford.” Quoted in Holzman, , The Nabobs in England, p. 25.Google Scholar

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44 Charles Lloyd to George Grenville, 1 June 1769, B.L. Add. MS. 57818, f. 170.

45 George Johnstone to James Oswald, 3 March 1764, Oswald MS., Chest 4, C. Hockworthy House, Devon. We are indebted to Mrs. D.C. Bruton for permission to quote from this collection.

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58 London Chronicle, 31 Dec. 1774 - 3 Jan. 1775.

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60 Public Advertiser, 30 Aug. 1781.

61 Ibid., 27 Dec. 1776.

62 Thomas Mercer to Lord Macartney, 20 June 1783, Macartney MS., Deccan College, Poona, d. 906.

63 Public Advertiser, 20 Dec. 1776 (authors' emphasis).