nadir shah and the afghans, 1732–47conquests in Muslim Central Asia, posed a direct threat to British India. 4
According to Evans, Russia would only need a relatively small army of
30,000 men to invade India, since in his view Persia and the Afghan rulers
would offer little resistance, and might even facilitate a Russian army
marching through their kingdoms.
Evans was an armchair strategist with no personal experience of India,
Persia or Afghanistan, something he shared in common with Ellenborough,
though Ellenborough was subsequently appointed as Governor General of
India. Ellenborough, though, was convinced by Evans’s arguments, noting
in his personal diary that a Russian invasion of India was ‘not only practic-
able but easy’. ‘I feel confident,’ he wrote, ‘we shall have to fight the Russians
on the Indus, and I have long had a presentiment that I should meet them
there, and gain a great battle. All dreams, but I have had them a long time.’ 5
As President of the Board of Control, Ellenborough was now in a pos -
ition to turn his dreams into reality. One of his first actions was to write to
Lord Bentinck, the Governor General, laying out guidelines to counteract
the Russian threat. Britain, he argued, must act pre-emptively to forestall
any Russian influence in the Indus States, in particular Kabul, Kandahar,
Herat and Khiva, urban centres that commanded the two main invasion
routes. To achieve this end, Ellenborough advocated Britain should be
more aggressive in promoting its interests in the region, primarily by
increasing trade with these Indus and Central Asian states.
Ellenborough’s faith in the power of trade as a means to secure political
influence seems somewhat strange today, but in nineteenth-century Britain
commerce was seen by many politicians as a mystical, almost evangelical
force by which imperial objectives could be achieved. Richard Cobden,
writing not long after Ellenborough issued his 1830 Memorandum, wrote
of commerce that it was:
the great panacea, which, like a beneficent medical discovery,
serves to inoculate with the healthy and saving taste for civili-
sation all the nations of the world. Not a bale of merchandise
leaves our shores, but it bears the seeds of intelligence and fruit-
ful thought to the members of some less enlightened community;
not a merchant visits our seats of manufacturing industry, but he
returns to his own country the missionary of freedom, peace and
good government. 6Ellenborough identified with this vision, believing that trade would
transfer the values of ‘civilisation... freedom, peace and good government’