Journey
How the Company took India
A hundred and seven years from a clerk holding a fort in the Carnatic to the annexation of the Punjab. The method never changed: take one side in a succession, lend it drilled infantry it pays for, and collect districts. Each war was financed out of the last one's revenue.
Stops (13)
- Arcot · 1751
Clive took the Nawab of the Carnatic's empty capital with five hundred men and held it for fifty days, breaking the French candidate Chanda Sahib's siege of Tiruchirappalli. It established the principle the Company then applied everywhere: European-drilled infantry could decide an Indian succession, and the winner would pay for it.
- Wandiwash (Vandavāsi) · 14 January 1760
Eyre Coote beat the Comte de Lally on open ground west of Pondicherry, with sepoys making up most of both armies, and Pondicherry surrendered a year later. With no European rival left in the peninsula, every Company war after 1760 was fought against Indian states alone, and the Carnatic's revenues paid for them.
- Plassey (Palāśī) · 23 June 1757
Nine hundred Europeans and two thousand sepoys against fifty thousand, decided because Mir Jafar's division stood still under an arrangement made weeks earlier with William Watts and the Jagat Seth bankers. It was a contract executed in a field rather than a battle, and it left a Company servant choosing the Nawab of Bengal.
- Robert Clive · 1751–1767
Clive held Arcot in 1751, arranged Plassey in 1757, and returned as governor in 1765 to take the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. He removed a personal fortune large enough for Parliament to inquire into it, told the Commons he was astonished at his own moderation, and killed himself in 1774 at forty-nine.
- Buxar · 22 October 1764
Mir Qasim of Bengal, Shuja ud-Daulah of Awadh and the emperor Shah Alam II fought together and lost. Buxar was the real military decision and produced the Treaty of Allahabad: the Company became the emperor's revenue officer for three provinces, with a legal title issued by the power being displaced.
- Kolkata: Fort William & the Maidan · from 1765
Bengal's revenue was collected from Fort William and remitted as the investment that bought the goods, paid the armies and funded the next annexation. The presidency became the capital of British India because it held the money, and the 1770 famine followed the first years of the new revenue demand.
- Pollilur · 10 September 1780
Tipu Sultan's cavalry and rocket batteries destroyed Colonel Baillie's detachment near Kanchipuram — the worst reverse the Company had suffered in India. Tipu had the battle painted as a mural on the walls of his summer palace, showing Company officers in disorder: an Indian victory recorded as monumental art by the winner.
- Srirangapatna / Srirangapattana · 4 May 1799
Tipu fell in the breach with his sword still in his hand, and Mysore was partitioned between the Company, Hyderabad and a restored Wodeyar child bound by a subsidiary treaty. The last south Indian state with its own foreign policy, its own navy and European allies ends here; everything after this is negotiated from weakness.
- Assaye · 23 September 1803
Arthur Wellesley lost a quarter of his force to Scindia's and the Bhonsle's French-trained artillery and called it the hardest fighting he ever saw, Waterloo included. The Second Anglo-Maratha War broke Maratha primacy in the Deccan, and the treaties that followed put Delhi and the blind emperor Shah Alam II under Company protection.
- Shaniwarwada, Pune · 1818
The Peshwa Baji Rao II surrendered in 1818 after Koregaon and Ashti, the confederacy was dissolved, and the palace at the centre of it became a Company office. He was pensioned to Bithoor near Kanpur, where his adopted son Nana Sahib grew up with a pension claim that was refused and surfaced again in 1857.
- Chillianwala · 13 January 1849
A bloody draw against the Sikh khalsa in the Second Anglo-Sikh War, in which four British regiments lost their colours and the losses were heavy enough for questions in Parliament. Gujrat settled the campaign five weeks later, the Punjab was annexed in March, and the Koh-i-Noor was surrendered under the treaty by Ranjit Singh's eleven-year-old son.
- James Broun-Ramsay, Marquess of Dalhousie · 1848–1856
Dalhousie annexed the Punjab, Lower Burma, Nagpur, Jhansi, Satara and Oudh, and built the railway, the telegraph and the post. Both halves were one policy: a single administered market under one paramount power. Every annexation supplied a grievance to the rebellion that broke out the year after he left. Jhansi gave the rebellion Lakshmibai and Oudh gave it most of the Bengal army's recruits.
- Red Fort, Delhi · 1857–1858
Delhi was stormed in September 1857, Bahadur Shah Zafar was tried in his own audience hall and exiled, and the Company was abolished by Act of Parliament the following year. The Crown took over by proclamation in November 1858, and the machinery it inherited was entirely the Company's. The Crown took over by proclamation in November 1858, and the machinery it inherited was entirely the Company's, down to the army, the revenue survey and the civil service.