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Smuggling India: Deconstructing Western India's Illicit Export Trade, 1818–1870

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2015

KATE BOEHME
KATE BOEHME*
Affiliation:
University of [email protected]
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Abstract

In the 1800s it was not only merchants from British India who participated in the expanding trade with China, but also those from the princely states who sought to profit from the increased demand for cash crops. Smuggling—just as most commercial activities unsanctioned by the Bombay Government were labelled—was a source of great anxiety for the colonial authorities in India, especially in the western territories. This article looks at smuggling activity in and around the Bombay Presidency during the first half of the nineteenth century. It will assert that local ‘smuggling’ was, in many cases, the continuation of pre-colonial trade relations, labelled as illegal as a result of ill-defined boundaries and ambiguous legal restrictions. In fact, the success of these activities was less a reflection of widespread criminality than structural weaknesses in the colonial administration. Evidence suggests that British anxieties over smuggling had a greater effect on the political economy of western India than the actual financial damage caused by the illicit trade. The coordinated subversive smuggling network, ultimately, did not exist, and held power largely as a figment of the imperial imagination.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 685 - 704
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2015 

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References

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32 “Illegal Manufacture of Salt in Gaekwar's Territory” (1874), Crown Representative Records, India Office Records, BL.

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37 Lieutenant M. Battye to H.E. Goldsmid, “Question of permission to His Highness the Gaekwar to convey opium from Pitlad to Baroda” (7 June 1853), Revenue Department, MSA.

38 Demonstrating the contradictory nature of opium policies in Gujarat, A. K. Forbes to B. H. Ellis. “Cultivation of Opium” (20 September 1859), Revenue Department, MSA, notes that “the prohibition of the cultivation of opium in Kathiawar appears to have been merely incidental”, going on to explain that a law passed to such effect had been largely forgotten, with regulations even approved in the interim to restrict the drug's production in other ways. Forbes expressed confusion the following year as to whether it had been “definitely settled whether or not Government considered itself entitled to prohibit the cultivation of opium”, see A.K. Forbes to H. L. Anderson, “Opium. Kathiawar. Cultivation of –” (Kathiawar: 10 April 1860), Revenue Department, MSA.

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46 For example, see The Secretary to Government to the Resident at Baroda, “Letter No. 299-785” (19 October 1874), Political Department, BL, on the subject of illegal salt manufactures in Baroda, “the illegal action of the [Baroda] Durbar causes a loss of Rs. 18,000 annually to the British Government”; Major G. LeGrand Jacob to H.E. Goldsmid, “Measures for the protection of the opium revenue at Bombay” (Mandavi: 6 June 1853), Revenue Department, MSA, states, “The longer the present undefined state of things, and circuitous channel of legitimate supply continue, the greater the loss to Government, and the danger of smuggling becoming the rooted practice of the country”.

47 Major Hamerton to A. Malet, (Zanzibar, 30 June 1853), Customs Department, NAI; J.T.W. to the Government of India, “Salt Smuggling on the Pondicherry Boundary” (Pondicherry, December 1869), Foreign Department, NAI; Dr. R. Brown to J.W. Edgar, “Alleged Munnipore Smuggling” (Munnipore, 18 September 1868), Foreign Department, MSA.

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53 Ibid.