Josiah the Great: The True Story of The Man Who Would Be King. Ben Macintyre

In this sense, Harlan’s imperialism resembled the original imperium, the authority exercised by the rulers of Rome over the city state and its dominions. In his mind, no figure in history represented this combination of civilised expansionism and kingly dignity more spectacularly than Alexander the Great. ‘His power was extended by the sword and maintained by the arts of civilization. A blessing to succeeding generations by the introduction of the refinements of life, the arts and sciences, in the midst of communities exhausted by luxury or still rude in the practices of barbarism … Vast designs for the benefit of mankind were conceived in the divine mind of their immortal founder, the universal philanthropist no less than universal conqueror.’ Conquest, benevolence, philanthropy and immortality: Harlan saw Alexander’s empire, like the expanding American imperium, as a moral force bringing enlightenment to the savages, and he would come to regard his own foray into the wilderness in the same way: not simply as a bid for power, but the gift of a new world order to a benighted corner of the earth.

      Harlan’s ideas of empire were still in their infancy when he left the roasting Indian plains and made his way to Simla, in the foothills of the Himalayas, where British officialdom was on retreat from the summer heat. Technically, as a civilian, he was now persona non grata, since neither British subjects nor foreigners were allowed to live in the interior of India without a licence, but following an interview with the Governor General Lord Amherst himself, the permit was granted. Harlan chose not to linger in the hill station. Instead, armed with his copy of Elphinstone, he headed towards Ludhiana, the Company’s last garrison town in north-west India.

      Ludhiana marked the westernmost edge of British control, a dusty border post where civilisation, as the British saw it, ended, and the wilderness began. Beyond was the mysterious Punjab, and even further west, across the mighty Indus, lay mythical Afghanistan: a ‘terra incognita’, in Harlan’s words. In Simla Harlan he had learned that Maharajah Ranjit Singh, the mighty independent ruler of the Punjab, had already employed a handful of European officers to train his army in modern military techniques, and might be looking for more such recruits. The Sikh king was also famously obsessed with his health, and after barely a year as an army medical officer Harlan considered himself amply qualified to work for the maharajah as either doctor or soldier, or both.

      On a late summer’s evening in 1826, accompanied by Dash and a handful of servants, Harlan rode into Ludhiana, caked in dust but still resplendent in his full service uniform complete with cocked hat. Presiding over this outpost of empire was one Captain Claude Martine Wade, the East India Company’s political agent and leader of its tiny colony of Europeans. Wade’s tasks were to police the border, maintain relations with the local Indian princes, and report back to Calcutta with whatever intelligence he could glean on the chaotic political situation beyond the frontier. He was the shrewdest of Company men, as dry and penetrating as the wind that blew off the western desert, and he observed the arrival of this unlikely young American with a mixture of interest and deep suspicion. Harlan made his way directly to Wade’s residence, and handed the British agent a document, signed by the Governor General himself, giving him permission to cross the Sutlej, the river separating the Company’s domain from that of Ranjit Singh.

      Cordial but reserved, Wade invited Harlan to lodge at the residence while he made preparations for his journey. The offer was readily accepted, and having despatched a letter to Ranjit Singh by native courier requesting permission to enter the Punjab, Harlan settled down to await a reply in comfort. ‘I enjoyed the amenities of Captain W.’s hospitality,’ he wrote, noting that the Englishman ‘with the characteristic liberality of his country, extended the freedom of his mansion to all’. Over dinner, Wade explained that he maintained ‘respectful and obedient subservience from the numerous princely chieftains subject to his surveillance’ by playing one off against another. The English agent handled his delegated authority with ruthless skill, caring little what the local rulers did, to their subjects or to each other, as long as British prestige was maintained. As Kipling wrote in ‘The Man who Would be King’: ‘Nobody cares a straw for the internal administration of Native States … They are the dark places of the earth, full of unimaginable cruelty.’

      Harlan was impressed by Wade’s cynical attitude to power, declaring him an ‘expert diplomatist’ and ‘a master of finesse who wielded an expedient and peculiar policy with success’. Wade in turn was intrigued by his energetic and enigmatic guest, who seemed to have plenty of money and who spoke in the most educated fashion about the local flora and classical history. Many strange types blew through Ludhiana, including the occasional European adventurer, but a mercenary-botanist-classicist was a new species altogether. Puzzled, Wade reported to Calcutta: ‘Dr Harlan’s principal object in wishing to visit the Punjab was in the first place to enter Ranjit Singh’s service and ultimately to pursue some investigation regarding the natural history of that country.’ He warned Harlan that the Company could not approve of the first part of his plan, since ‘the resort of foreigners to native courts is viewed with marked disapprobation or admitted only under a rigid surveillance’. Yet he did not try to dissuade him from heading west. In the unlikely event he survived, a man like Harlan might prove very useful in Lahore, Ranjit’s capital.

      Harlan’s future was clear, at least in his own mind: he would join the maharajah’s entourage and rise to fame and fortune, while compiling a full inventory of the plants and flowers of the exotic Punjab. Like Lewis and Clark, with American bravado and learning he would open up a new world. The only hitch was that Ranjit Singh would not let him in. Although he had signed a treaty with the British back in 1809, as the greatest independent ruler left in India the maharajah was pathologically (and understandably) suspicious of feringhees, as white foreigners were called. The British were happy to let the Sikh potentate get on with building his own empire beyond the Sutlej. ‘Very little communication had heretofore existed betwixt the two governments,’ wrote Harlan. ‘The interior of the Punjab was only seen through a mysterious veil, and a dark gloom hung over and shrouded the court of Lahore.’ Which was exactly the way Ranjit Singh wanted it.

      As he kicked his heels waiting for a passport that never arrived, Harlan began to form an altogether more extravagant plan that would take him far beyond the Punjab in the service of a different king, who also happened to be his neighbour in Ludhiana.

       2 THE QUAKER KING-MAKER

      Fifteen years earlier Shah Shujah al-Moolk had welcomed Mountstuart Elphinstone to Peshawar, seated on his gilded throne. Now the Afghan king was an exile, and Ludhiana’s resident celebrity. ‘His Majesty might be seen almost daily in the vicinity of Loodianah in regal state,’ wrote Harlan. ‘The throng of a long procession proclaimed the approach of the King, shouting to the listless winds and unpeopled highways, as though he was in the midst of obedient subjects, with the deep and sonorous intonation of self-important command, where there was none to obey!’

      The spectacle of this displaced potentate, parading the streets and demanding subservience from invisible subjects, struck the American as both touching and admirable, the display of a monarch who ‘never compromised his royal dignity’, and never disguised his belief that his protectors and hosts were infidels and inferiors. As Harlan observed with sly pleasure, even Captain Wade, the senior British official in Ludhiana, was treated as a minion. ‘The forms and etiquette of his court were no less strictly preserved by the banished king than they were in the brightest days of his greatness! Under no circumstances, however urgent, would His Majesty deviate from the etiquette of the Kabul court [and] his high and mighty hauteur could not be reconciled to an interview on equal terms with another human being.’

      Ousted by his own brother, Shujah had fled to the Punjab in 1809, taking with him his harem and most of the Afghan royal jewellery, including the Koh-i-Noor diamond, the priceless gem originally taken from the Moguls by the conquering Nadir Shah of Persia and today a centrepiece of Britain’s Crown Jewels. Throwing himself on the mercy and hospitality of Ranjit Singh, Shujah found himself a prisoner