carry with him habits of business and financial ability hitherto but too rarely exhibited on the banks of the Hooghly, and if he succeeds in making India solvent, and in proving that she can pay her own way, he will have rendered a public service which cannot be too highly appreciated.’143 Wilson went on a farewell tour. He appeared with Bowring at a banquet given by the mayor of Liverpool. The Cotton Supply Association met with him in Manchester. Bradford’s Chamber of Commerce asked him to induce the Indians to clip their sheep only once in nine months for finer fabrics. And after thirty-five years he returned to Hawick. Around ‘70 Scotch gentlemen’ were there to toast him, and amidst their cheers he summed up his work since leaving home. ‘We have at last solved that great problem in politics – that the real interests of society, well understood, were common to all alike.’ In India – whose interests were also ‘to an extent, identical’ with those of Britain – he promised to raise revenues and cut the cost of the army, which had more than doubled from £11,000,000 in 1855. ‘I say if you cannot govern the country and keep the internal peace for less than £21,000,000 you must abandon it altogether.’144
During his valedictions Wilson gave effusive thanks to Palmerston, who had interceded on his behalf many times since 1848. Confessing that he had initially declined the offer of a position as secretary at the Board of Control, a parliamentary body that supervised the East India Company, he reported that ‘the noble Lord begged that I reconsider’ telling him that ‘a man who enters public life must not confine himself to those few questions of which he considers himself master’. In 1856, Queen Victoria had blocked Wilson from a governorship in Australia, considering it bad form for a commoner to run a place bearing her name. But in 1859 Palmerston, now prime minister, made him vice-president of the Board of Trade, before offering him such an exalted post in India – sweetened with promises of a title and cabinet place within five years.145 Yet it was his time on the India Board, Wilson reflected, without which ‘I could not have assumed the duty which has now devolved upon me’.
In that earlier stint in the Commons Wilson had indeed pushed for the kind of economic development the East India Company had been slow or unwilling to pursue. Railway construction was his main concern, sharing the view of Bright and other Manchester men that this would open the vast interior to British industrial goods and ease extraction of raw materials like flax, wool, indigo, sugar and above all cotton, where Britain was too reliant on the American South. His daughter Emilie remembered her father ‘planning these Indian lines of railway on the dining-room table – lines over which eleven years later he himself was destined to travel’.146 He pressed administrators to open the port of Karachi, hoping to tempt ‘native dealers from Kabul’, and personally carried wool and cotton samples to factories in Leeds. But to these goals Wilson added another, a direct extension of his concerns as editor and proprietor of the Economist, and now Chancellor of India: security of investment.147
‘Wilson believed that he originally suggested’, Bagehot – his successor at the Economist – would record, ‘the peculiar form of state guarantee upon the faith of which so many millions of English capital have been sent to develop the industry of India.’148 Peculiar because, as Wilson realized even before his arrival there, and with no less an authority than Mill to back him up, for liberal outcomes a compromise with liberal principles might be needed – at least when it came to what were commonly considered backward races.149 Bagehot, who was even more alive to this problem, praised Wilson for his pragmatism: ‘the necessity on the one hand, in an Asiatic country where the state is the sole motive power, of the Government’s doing something – and the danger on the other of interfering with private enterprise, by its doing, or attempting to do, too much’.150 Wilson took leave of Britain telling his audiences, ‘I am one of those who believe that what is right in one part of the world cannot be wrong in another’, for ‘human nature is human nature the world over’.151 In practice, however, he behaved as though India required very different measures to springboard capitalist development.
Wilson arrived in Calcutta in November 1859 with his wife and three eldest daughters, before setting out to meet the new viceroy of India, Lord Canning, on a tour of the Upper Provinces. He soon got to work, seeking to apply in under one year policies that had taken decades to enact in England. His first budget – with its dual task of raising revenue and keeping order – included policies Wilson had once opposed. He proposed a paper currency, for example, modelled on Peel’s Act of 1844. Income tax would also be assessed, starting at 200 rupees, even as millions of pounds in spending were slashed. ‘I am putting the screw on very strongly’, he admitted.152 He sought to do so with tact. Recycling his strategy from Influences of the Corn Laws, he tried to show Hindus that being taxed was as one with their own ancient laws, codified in the Manu-Samhita.153 In the army he aimed to reduce the ratio of native Indians by shifting some to ‘a great police system of semi-military organization’, which, he claimed, would be ‘cheaper by half a million’, and safer for Europeans.154 Finally, he set up an English system of public accounts, with estimates, annual budgets, and a national audit.
It is no coincidence that these moves all tended to increase the confidence of overseas investors. Wilson was such an investor, and that was his intention. As if to underscore the byways between empire and finance, Wilson arrived in India even as his Chartered Bank was opening branches in Calcutta, Bombay, Shanghai and Hong Kong, buoyed by the opium pouring into China, as well as those more benign-sounding commodities, which in contrast it actually named in its prospectus, circulating between China, Java, Ceylon, India, Manila, Australia and the rest of the region.155
His reforms did more than incorporate India into the formal structure of empire: they made it into that structure’s financial cornerstone. Without the Indian Army, and the Indian revenues that paid for it, Britain could not have projected its power in Africa and the Middle East, let alone Central, South and East Asia. Nor could the international system of multilateral settlements and payments that emerged after 1858 have looked nearly as favourable to the City.156 A stabilized British Raj pulled in capital from London: £286 million, or 18 per cent of the total invested in the empire from 1865 to 1914. The presence of so much foreign capital, in turn, made it crucial to maintain stability, and therewith investor confidence. India was expected above all to ‘keep faith’ with its creditors. Between 1858 and 1898 remittances averaged nearly half of exports, with 20 per cent alone going to debt service and Home Charges, an ingenious system by which Britain debited India for the cost of exploiting it. Meanwhile, the trade surplus India ran with much of the rest of the world allowed it to settle its trade deficit with Britain; and for Britain, in turn, to settle around two-fifths of its own trade deficit, mainly with Europe and North America.157
If his special mission concerned finance, Wilson was far from indifferent to the trappings of empire this brought with it. He was excited by the challenge of India, and his own power to act there, in contrast to London. He described the ‘increased capacity of the mind when removed to a new scene of action … I cannot tell you with what ease one determines the largest and gravest question here compared with in England’, exulting that ‘the Indian Exchequer is a huge machine. The English Treasury is nothing to it for complexity, diversity and remoteness of the points of action.’158 Taking to his new imperial role with gusto, he relished the subtleties of frontier diplomacy as much as he enjoyed the dusty chaos of the financial files before him:
It is a most unwieldy Empire to be governed on the principle of forcing civilisation at every point of it. One day it is the frontier of Scinde and a quarrel with our native chiefs which our Resident must check: another, it is an intrigue between Heraut and Cabul, with a report of Russian forces in the background: the next, there is a raid upon our Punjab frontiers to be chastised: then come some accounts of coolness, or misunderstanding, or unreasonable demands from our ally in Nepaul: then follow some inroads from the savage tribes which inhabit the mountains to the rear of Assam and up the Burrampootra: then we have reported brawls in Burmah and Pegu, and disputes among the hill tribes whose relations to the British and the Burmah Governments are ill defined: then we have Central India, with our loyal chiefs Cindiah and Holkar, independent princes with most turbulent populations, which could not be kept in order a day without the presence of British troops and of the Governor-General’s