Remembering the journalist expelled from India for taking on the East India Company

In June 1818, when James Silk Buckingham arrived in Calcutta as captain of the Humayun Shah, he did not anticipate that his seafaring career was about to end. The ship’s owner, the Imam of Muscat, ordered him to transport enslaved people from the East to Zanzibar. Buckingham, a committed opponent of slavery, refused outright.

The refusal left him stranded in Calcutta without employment. Rather than return to England, he decided to remain in India. The city’s European mercantile community, particularly those independent of the East India Company, were frustrated with Company corruption and administrative high-handedness. Buckingham, already politically inclined, found in journalism both a livelihood and a platform.

In September 1818, with financial backing from several merchants led by John Palmer, Buckingham founded the Calcutta Journal and began editing it. Initially an eight-page biweekly, the newspaper soon became a weekly due to its popularity.

The Journal distinguished itself by publishing sharp criticism of the East India Company. Letter writers using pseudonyms would reveal uncomfortable truths. A soldier complained of poor pay and lack of recognition. Another article described chaplains making long visits to the hinterland, leaving Calcutta without clergy for weeks. One report even disclosed troop movements that were ostensibly a government secret.

The Lives of the Illustrious, a periodical devoted to biographical sketches, published in 1853, spoke highly of the Journal:

“The good it effected is admitted by all who were then in that country…It exposed many public abuses, and caused them to be redressed, and prevented many more being committed… It greatly improved the administration of justice in the native courts; and was the first to inveigh openly against the practice of ‘suttee’ and ultimately forced on the suppression of that frightful and murderous rite. It defended the Christian missionaries in their benevolent labours and advocated the education and elevation of the Indian populace, among other things.”

Buckingham believed passionately in the freedom of the press. That belief earned him admirers but also powerful enemies. In the first volume of his largely unfinished autobiography, written barely a year after launching the paper, he listed those opposed to him: “the Law, the Clergy, the Trading (not the Mercantile), the Scotch (except for a few), the Elect and the Select, the Saints and Serviles.” By 1820, he remarked, only “the Mercantiles” remained his allies.

Initially, Buckingham enjoyed the support of the Governor-General, the Marquis of Hastings, who was sympathetic to the Journal’s advocacy for better pay for soldiers. But Hastings was recalled by the Company’s directors in London and his successor, John Adam, took a far less tolerant view of the Journal.

The immediate pretext for action was the Journal’s ridicule of the Reverend James Bryce, who had recently secured the lucrative post of stationery supplier to the East India Company. The dispute was sharpened by personal animosity: Bryce’s own paper, the John Bull, had attacked Buckingham’s character. In 1823, Adam revoked the Calcutta Journal’s licence and ordered Buckingham’s expulsion from India. Despite attempts to continue the paper under new editors, it soon folded.

On the road

Buckingham was born in 1786 in Cornwall, the youngest of eight children in a farming family. As he later recounted in his autobiography, he ran away to sea before the age of 10. During the Napoleonic wars, he was briefly imprisoned in Corunna, a port in northwest Spain, before he travelled through Spain and Portugal.

In the years before his arrival in Calcutta, he had travelled extensively across the Mediterranean and West Asia. He attempted to establish himself as a merchant in Malta, but a plague outbreak thwarted those plans. In Egypt, he met Mohammad Ali, the ambitious Pasha who sought to expand trade with India. Acting as his representative, Buckingham travelled to Bombay in 1815 but had to leave empty-handed because he could not get a licence while the East India Company zealously guarded its trade monopoly.

He spent the next few years journeying through Egypt, Mesopotamia, Palestine and parts of East Africa. Disguised as an Arab merchant, he visited ancient cities such as Jerusalem without arousing suspicion. He explored remote regions, including the headwaters of the Nile, and survived encounters with bandits and suspicious local groups. His observations were often critical of sectarian rivalries and religious intolerance.

These travels would later form the basis of his published works. His accounts of Palestine and surrounding regions appeared in the 1820s, earning him wide readership.

Expelled from India in 1823, Buckingham returned to England and continued his journalistic crusade. He founded several publications, including the Oriental Herald and Colonial Review (1824-’29), the weekly Athenaeum (1828) and The Sphynx (1827-’29). Most of these struggled financially. He also sought compensation from the East India Company for expelling him from India, but lost the appeal, with even the Parliament ruling against him.

After that, he turned increasingly to public lecturing, travelling across Britain to speak about his past journeys, about India and the East India Company’s trade monopoly there. In 1832, he contested the parliamentary seat of Sheffield. His campaign focused on restrictive electoral laws that limited the franchise to propertied, upper-class men. Buckingham won narrowly, though the election was marred by violence that claimed several lives.

As a Member of Parliament, he advocated protections for sailors, called for repealing the Corn Laws that banned grain imports, and supported municipal taxation to fund libraries and museums. Though his parliamentary career was relatively brief, it reflected the same reformist zeal that had animated the Calcutta Journal.

In 1837, three years into his parliamentary term, Buckingham embarked on an extended tour of the United States. Over four years, he travelled across the eastern and southern states, witnessing rapid industrialisation, constitutional governance and regular elections. He admired the country’s institutional checks and balances.

Yet he was deeply disturbed by slavery in the southern states. He described in detail the contrast between the grand homes of plantation owners and the squalid quarters of enslaved Blacks. These observations culminated in The Slave States of America (1842).

Buckingham died in 1855, having completed only two volumes of his autobiography. In his later years, he advocated expanded education in India and representation for Indians in legislative bodies. His life was unified by a consistent belief: that freedom of trade, freedom of the press and political liberty were essential to human progress. As he wrote in The Slave States of America:

“If history and experience can teach us anything, surely these facts must be sufficient to show the superiority of free institutions and unfettered commerce, over despotism in government and monopoly in trade (….) About two hundred years ago, the English East India Company obtained their first settlement in India, which was then a rich, populous, and flourishing country; and after two centuries of misrule and monopoly, Hindoostan is far less populous, and less wealthy, and its people are more impoverished, than they were then. About the same period, the Pilgrim Fathers landed in America, and found it a wilderness, peopled only by savages, without literature, laws, or trade. Under free institutions and unfettered commerce, it has now become one of the first countries in the world, and even in its infancy may rank side by side with the oldest nations of the earth.”