Emma Rothschild

The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History By Emma Rothschild, Princeton, $35

A prevailing discourse quite justifiably links the British Empire to brutal oppression and limitless exploitation. The story of the British Empire is also a story of connections, many of them unexpected and unusual. Emma Rothschild’s magnificently researched and lucidly written book reveals the many connections and layers of empire without in any way undermining the less edifying aspects of empire.

For any student of history, the research that went into the making of this book is staggering. This research, in archives and in libraries, enables Rothschild to bring together many strands of history without losing focus on her micro (his)story — the saga of the Johnstone family, which, to use Rothschild’s telling phrase (though she uses it in a different context), is “the red thread, Ariadne’s thread in the labyrinth of the archive’’ and the enormous material she has collected. She links the family story to that of the British Empire in the Americas, and the emerging one in Bengal. She brings together the world of the Scottish enlightenment and the saga of slavery and its abolition. She reveals how the making of empire touched upon family relationships.

Rothschild, in this book, has a penchant for the word, “vista”, and she does open up many new vistas for the writing of history. She does this with effortless ease to suggest as if the many themes and explorations of this book emerge almost inevitably from the archival material concerning the Johnstone family. Her manner of crafting and her jargon-free prose camouflage the braiding of her immense erudition on the Scottish enlightenment with the history of a family and its participation in the making of the empire.

The Johnstone family came from Dumfriesshire in Scotland. They were 11 children (seven sons and four daughters) of an impoverished owner of a small estate who couldn’t quite be called a laird. Their lives spanned the 18th century — Barbara, the eldest, was born in 1723 and Betty, the last surviving child, died in 1823. The brothers pursued many careers — in north America, in the politics of Britain (four of them were elected to parliament), in the army and in the service of the English East India Company. One of the daughters fought for Bonnie Prince Charles and after her capture, escaped to live in exile in France. The brothers knew Adam Smith, David Hume and the poet, James “Ossian’’ Macpherson, and one of them employed Adam Ferguson as a secretary on a political mission. Rothschild’s narrative is flooded with details about the many activities and interests of the Johnstone family.

It is the career of John Johnstone (born 1734), the ninth of the siblings, that best illustrates the family’s involvement in the making of the British Empire and is, therefore, of greater interest to Indian readers. At the age of 16, he joined the service of the English East India Company and was an artillery officer in the battle of Plassey. He served in various parts of Bengal and was known to be fluent in both Persian and Bengali. He was for a time in charge of the Company’s Persian correspondence. He was responsible (to add one more detail to the many in this book) for the introduction of the “public outcry’’ system for the collection of land revenue in Burdwan in the uncertain times of the 1760s. His position allowed him to amass a huge fortune — he was what in the 18th century was called a Nabob. In Britain, he became an MP (it isn’t known if his was a “rotten borough’’). He became an enemy of Robert Clive who accused him of “illegally’’ accepting “presents”— the source of much of his wealth that allowed him to offer financial support to at least five of his siblings. In 1771, he applied to be the governor of Bengal and was passed over for Warren Hastings.

John Johnstone was clearly a participant in and a beneficiary of the post-Plassey plunder of Bengal by the officials of the English East India Company — the shaking of the pagoda tree, as it was known at that time. Rothschild does not make this point emphatically enough even though this plunder was a key component in the foundation of the British Empire in India. One avenue of such wealth-making was “presents’’. The inverted commas are necessary since in the words of a friend of John Johnstone, “presents’’, “when taken without consent, they were plunder; when taken with consent they were gifts, and when taken by connivance, they became inland trade’’.

The slave trade, another avenue of wealth-making for Britons in the 18th century, was part of the lives of the Johnstones in more ways than one. Most of the brothers were owners of slaves but two of them campaigned for the abolition of slavery and another was “the last and most effective of all the supporters of the slave trade in the house of commons’’. What was even more significant is that the family was involved in one of the most celebrated cases involving a slave in Great Britain. This concerned Belinda or Bell, a girl from Bengal, whom John had brought to Britain. She was the last person who was deemed to be a slave by a court in Britain. Her life — native of Bengal, from where she came to Scotland as a slave; she had a son in Scotland who died and whom she laid to rest in a river (threw into a river, according to her accusers); she was imprisoned in Scotland; sentenced to be sold as a slave, she arrived in Virginia on a ship in the early years of the American Revolution and then dropped out of history, despite Rothschild’s best efforts to track her down in the records — was “a transnational life... of global connections’’ in the 18th century, the world that made the Johnstones.

It is remarkable that in the voluminous correspondence of the Johnstones — they wrote about everything to one another — there is no mention of Belinda or, indeed, of slaves. This deliberate silence, as Rothschild notes, “impose[s], most insidiously, the inequality of individuality: of who is, and who is not, the subject of her or his own history’’.

Belinda’s life, or rather the fragment of it that Rothschild has retrieved from the condescension of her contemporaries (to slightly alter E.P. Thompson’s celebrated phrase), is where 18th-century enlightenment and the discipline of history hit their limits. Historical research, Ranajit Guha noted, and Rothschild quotes him, is driven by the “urge for plenitude’’, but the urge is perpetually insatiated and insatiable. A life story like Belinda’s — so central to the Johnstone story and even perhaps to the history of the 18th century — is tantalizingly fragmentary. It imposes on the historian, in Rothschild’s remarkable phrase, “a tolerance for incompleteness’’. It is a reminder of “the restrictiveness of the historian’s investigations’’.

The language of the enlightenment that the Johnstones frequently used — “discourses on rights, in the midst of conquest, and on freedom in the midst of terror’’ — is, in Rothschild’s words, “extraordinarily difficult to make sense of’’. In our ears, she says with emphasis, it “is cant: words without ideas’’. The “deepest presumption’’ of the late 18th-century enlightenment is the “presumption of inner equality: that all individuals without exception are discursive and inquisitive, with moral sentiments and ideas about the world’’. Yet Hume could write in an infamous footnote (Rothschild’s unerring eye doesn’t miss this), “I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites.’’ Enlightenment was gripped by amnesia when it entered the colonies and the worlds of the dominated.