GOLCONDA^163portant changes in the constitution of the East India Company. The
new arrangements, which entailed closer state oversight of the gover
nance of Bengal, did make it harder to get "filthy rich" fast; but one
could still make more in India in a few years than in a British lifetime.
In the long run, the British assumption of empire in India posed
grave problems of political strategy and ethics. The EIC saw its acqui
sitions as permanent—"as permanent as human wisdom can make
them" (1766). Therefore it had to "protect and cherish the inhabitants
... whose interest and welfare are now become our primary care"—
for the company's sake. India was compared to a landed estate where
the interests of tenant and landlord were the same.^24
Very wise, and very British; but not simple. Even after reform, the
task of development remained, complicated by a prudent reluctance to
tamper with Indian social and cultural institutions. The Indian econ
omy changed and grew as new technologies, the railway in particular,
came in from abroad. But it was slow to respond to the Industrial
Revolution, except as supplier of raw cotton; and the Indian cotton
manufacture, once the world's greatest, shrank almost to vanishing. In
dian historians blame this on their colonial oppressor, who not only ve
toed protective tariffs (long live free trade!) but taxed the Indian
product to equalize access for British yarn and cloth. But that was not
the problem. Both Indian and British entrepreneurs were free to un
dertake modern forms of manufacture in India, as they did beginning
in the 1850s. If they refrained earlier, they presumably had good rea
son.
How Do We Know?
The Nature of the EvidenceSome of the most important work on Indian history has been done
by Indian scholars, yet these, ironically, have had to rely almost
exclusively on European records and accounts. Almost no written
documentation comes down to us from the Indian side. What we
know, for example, of Indian Ocean trade in the sixteenth to
eighteenth centuries, and of the textile manufacture in particular, is
drawn almost exclusively from the archives of the chartered trading
companies and their home governments; also from travel accounts