Leadership: Court of Directors, Leadenhall Street, London; Governor-General in Council at Calcutta (Lord Moira, 1814); overseen by the Crown's Board of Control

Territory: The three Presidencies — Bengal, Madras, Bombay

Overview

A trading company that became a state. In 1814 the Company governs perhaps forty million people from Calcutta, collects the revenues of Bengal, keeps an army larger than the King’s, runs its own courts, coins its own money, and answers, reluctantly and at six months’ distance, to a Court of Directors in Leadenhall Street and the Crown’s Board of Control in Westminster. Last year’s Charter Act of 1813 renewed its charter for twenty years and clipped it hard: the India trade monopoly is gone, private merchants may now be licensed east, missionaries are admitted, a bishop is on the sea, and Parliament asserted the Crown’s sovereignty over the territories in plain words. The Company kept the China trade, the tea, and the opium. Every dinner table in Calcutta is still arguing about the rest.

Everyone British in Bengal stands in some relation to the Company: in its covenanted service, in its army, licensed by it, married to it, or watched by it.

The Covenanted Civil Service — Ranks

The civil servants proper, appointed by a Director’s patronage, bound by covenant, and graded by seniority. A boy is nominated at about sixteen, passes through the East India College at Haileybury, and comes out to India as a Writer at seventeen or eighteen. Haileybury is the Company’s own training college in Hertfordshire (opened 1806 at Hertford Castle, moved to Haileybury in 1809): two years of Persian, Hindustani, law and political economy that every young civilian since its founding has shared, the service’s school tie. Many finish at Fort William College in Calcutta itself. The old mercantile titles survive as pure seniority grades: by 1814 a “Factor” may in fact be a judge, a collector, or a magistrate, and his title tells you only how long he has served.

Rank	Years of service (approx.)	What it means in 1814
Writer	1st to 5th year	The apprentice grade. Copying, ciphering, learning the languages at Fort William College, surviving the climate. Most of Calcutta’s junior civilians, including Alastair Glennie 🏛️ in the shipping office
Factor	6th to 8th year	The old “trader at a factory” title, now a seniority step. A factor holds real charges: assistant collectorships, commercial residencies, godown responsibility. Hugh Cavendish 🏛️ is a senior factor of the opium division
Junior Merchant	9th to 11th year	Middle seniority; deputy collectorships, judgeships of the smaller courts, secretariat posts
Senior Merchant	12th year onward	The senior grade, from which the great offices are filled: collectors, magistrates, judges of the Sudder courts, Members of Council. Charles Ashworth 🏛️ and Edmund Courtney 🏛️ rank here; Roderick Pelham 🏛️ sits on the Sudder Dewani Adalat

The grades were pay steps as much as posts: promotion came by the calendar, employment by ability and interest. The whole ladder ran on patronage at the London end and seniority at the Indian end, and every man on it could tell you to the month where he and his rivals stood.

The Other Services

• The Bengal Army. The Company’s own military establishment, with its own commissions: European officers (Valentine Frome 🏛️, Marcus Hale 🏛️, George Drury 🏛️), its own engineers (Edward Renwick 🏛️, James Hatcherly 🏛️), and the sepoy regiments with their native ranks, of which havildar is the sergeant’s (Havildar Pratap Singh 🏛️). King’s regiments also serve in India (Thomas Wyndham, Colonel Arthur Blackwood) and are emphatically not Company men; the two services maintain a courteous, permanent rivalry.
• The Medical Establishment. Company surgeons (Samuel Wright 🏛️) with the army and the civil stations.
• The Chaplains. Appointed and paid by the Company, licensed by the Church (Reverend Arthur Jessop 🏛️). The 1813 Act’s new bishopric is about to reorganise their world.

Around the Company, Not of It

• Free merchants, licensed to trade but holding no covenant: Hawthorne Surlish and his junior partner Percy Cartwright. The 1813 Act is their victory.
• Banians, the Indian brokers and men of business on whom every European house runs: Baijnath Mullick, Ramkanta Sett.
• The Board of Control, Westminster’s ministry for India, which oversees the Company from London and holds no Calcutta establishment at all. Freddy Cavendish’s junior correspondence appointment belongs here, which is why no Company man can place him on the ladder above, and why several of them privately wonder what he reports.

History

Chartered by Elizabeth I on the last day of 1600. Traded pepper, calico and tea for a century and a half; took Bengal at Plassey in 1757; became a revenue-collecting territorial power under Clive and Hastings; was disciplined by Parliament in 1773 and 1784 (which created the Board of Control); reformed by Cornwallis, who barred its servants from private trade and paid them properly instead; and clipped by the Charter Act of 1813. The men at any Calcutta dinner table in 1814 have lived the last act of that story personally, and the ones with twenty years’ service consider the Company they joined already half gone.

Relationships

• Headquartered at Writers Building — The Bengal civil establishment's offices and records fill the north side of Tank Square
• Controls Fort William — Headquarters of the Bengal Army, the Company's own military establishment