Place · battle · India
Buxar
The 22-23 October 1764 battle at Buxar on the Ganga in Bihar, where Hector Munro's 7,000-strong East India Company force defeated the combined 40,000-strong army of Mughal emperor Shah Alam II, Nawab Shuja-ud-Daulah of Awadh, and Mir Kasim of Bengal — the Mughal empire's own paramount coalition against the Company. Militarily far more decisive than Plassey, Buxar established beyond question that the Company could defeat the main Mughal field army. The 1765 Treaty of Allahabad produced the Diwani Grant: Shah Alam II formally gave the Company the right to collect the revenues of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa — a legal basis for Company rule that converted de facto possession into de jure sovereignty.
- Date
- 1764 CE
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.560, 83.980
Connections (4)
- Succession in timePlassey (Palāśī)
Plassey in 1757 took Bengal by arranging a defection; Buxar in 1764 secured it by beating a real coalition — the Nawab of Awadh, the Mughal emperor and the deposed Nawab of Bengal together — and produced the Diwani grant of 1765, which gave the Company the legal right to collect the province's revenue in the emperor's name. The first was a coup; the second made it a government.
- Power passed toKolkata: Fort William & the Maidan
Buxar in 1764 produced the Diwani grant the following year, giving the Company the right to collect the revenues of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa — and Calcutta, a trading settlement of seventy years' standing, became the capital of that administration and then of British India for a century and a half. The city's whole nineteenth-century character, including the reform movements that argued there, follows from being the seat of that government.
- Power passed toPātaliputra
Pataliputra became Patna, and in 1764 the Company's victory at Buxar a hundred kilometres upriver produced the Diwani grant of 1765 — the right to collect Bengal, Bihar and Orissa's revenue — which gave Company rule its legal basis. Buxar was militarily far more decisive than Plassey, fought against a real coalition, and it is the point at which a trading company became the government of the middle Ganges.
- Power passed toRed Fort, Delhi
Buxar defeated the emperor Shah Alam II in person, and the Treaty of Allahabad the next year granted the Company the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in return for a tribute and the promise of restoring him to Delhi. He got back to the Red Fort in 1772 under Maratha escort, not British, and the emperor became a Company pensioner there in 1803.
On these journeys
Sources
List of wars in the Indian subcontinent; standard reference accounts
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