The British conquest of India was conquest by corporation – a corporation financed by Indians and fought for by Indians, employing scores of Indians. The British conquest of India was in some ways an Indian conquest of India – on behalf of the British.
When the English East India Company began building its power India was governed by a range of rulers. Many Indian fighters, administrators, writers, and governors were happy to work for or do business with the Company, which operated to make money.
Small post-Mughal states offered territory or land revenue to the Company (and its French rival) in exchange for military support. During the Carnatic Wars (1746-1763) both companies established themselves as militaristic corporations with private armies that had, William Dalrymple writes, a ‘military edge over Indian cavalry’. A Kashmiri soldier named Abdul Karim, observing conflict in Bengal, noted that the usually fearless Maratha armies pointedly avoided attacking European strongholds, since the “Europeans excel in the use of cannons and muskets”.
As the Company’s power grew, so too did the awareness among some Indians that British rule meant they would be subject to a foreign entity not acting in their interests. In the 1760s the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam, who had immense support from regional rulers and notables, was determined to revive his Empire’s waning fortunes. On 22 October 1764 his army, combined with the armies of the Nawabs of Bengal and Awadh, met Company forces in battle at Buxar in Bengal.
This was a significant display of Indian agency against a rising foreign-owned power. But the Company vanquished its opponents with its unrivalled military technology; Shah Alam, humiliated, was forced to sign the Treaty of Allahabad dismissing his revenue officials and replacing them with English traders of the Company. That was the end of any real Mughal power.
The only plausible threat to the British afterwards came from Tipu Sultan, legendary ruler of Mysore in the South. From 1783 until his defeat and killing in 1799, the ‘Tiger of Mysore’ plagued the English imagination. Tipu Sultan launched relentless assaults on the Company, his armies crushing its forces with French military technology more developed than its own; he brazenly declared his independence from the Mughals, referring to Shah Alam as “enslaved and a mere cypher”; he even courted Napoleon Bonaparte’s assistance, styling himself as Citizen Tipu, and his French troops sung republican hymns and swore “hatred of all Kings, except Tipoo Sultan, the Victorious…”. When he was finally killed, having fought four wars against the Company, his defeat was due only to the enemy’s resources.
The Company’s success came largely down to its wealth. By 1792 elite Indian financiers saw the Company as the most reliable investment. The Mughal Empire had crumbled, Tipu Sultan had lost half his kingdom and the Maratha Confederacy was in decline. Significant Indian investment in the Company stretched back decades: Lakshmi Subramanian uses English records to explain relations in the late eighteenth century between Gujarati businessmen and the Company. Even then, the Company was seen by Indian bankers and traders as a secure investment; it controlled the revenues of Bengal and profited from the China trade. Indian businessmen negotiated with the Company, securing good deals for themselves.
But racism increased during the late eighteenth century: Indians were systematically removed from senior government positions, and Indian dignitaries were received, Major William Palmer observed, “in the most cold and disgusting style”. Indians were quietly losing agency even as many were willing to help the Company.
In 1803 the Company achieved a momentous victory, crushing the Marathas at the Battle of Delhi. The Marathas had until then controlled Delhi and its Mughal ruling elite; the British now swept in. There was no longer any Indian agency to rival the Company, which had “reduced all the powers in India to the state of mere cyphers”, Lord Wellesley wrote.
“We are now complete masters of India,” declared Thomas Munro. Yet the blind Mughal Emperor Shah Alam was allowed by the British, who had officially been given their legitimacy by the Mughals, to remain on his throne in the Red Fort.
William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy is a recently published, forensically researched and magnificently well-written account of the East India Company’s rise.
William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (2019)
Richard Eaton, India in the Persianate Age: 1000-1765 (2019)
Lakshmi Subramanian, Indigenous Capital and Imperial Expansion (1996)
Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India (2007)
