Place · battle · India
Plassey (Palāśī)
The 23 June 1757 battle at Palashi on the Hooghly in Nadia district, Bengal, where Robert Clive's 3,000-strong East India Company force defeated Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah's 50,000-strong Bengal army — decided by the defection of the Nawab's own commander Mir Jafar, who had been bribed with the succession in a prior conspiracy with the Jagat Seth bankers and the Company. The battle itself was brief; the Company's acquisition of Bengal's revenues followed in rapid succession — Mir Jafar on the Nawab throne, Mir Kasim replacing him in 1760, and Buxar in 1764 providing the formal Diwani grant. Plassey is the transit point at which trading-company commerce became colonial territorial sovereignty.
- Date
- 1757 CE
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 23.800, 88.250
Connections (9)
- Succession in timePanipat
The third Panipat in January 1761 destroyed the Maratha army as an instrument of north Indian policy; Plassey had already happened in 1757 and Buxar followed in 1764. The Company moved into a vacuum that the Marathas, the Mughals and the Afghans had emptied between them — and none of the three was in any position to contest Bengal while it did. The decade from 1757 to 1765 settles who would rule India.
- Succession in timeBuxar
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.
- CampaignHooghly–Chinsurah
Plassey was fought a day's march north of the Hooghly settlements in June 1757 and decided by Mir Jafar's defection rather than by fighting — a few hundred casualties, and the revenues of Bengal. The European river towns downstream had been trading posts under Mughal licence for a century and a half; within eight years one of them was collecting the province's land revenue, which is the transition from trading to ruling in a single document.
- PrecursorJoseph François Dupleix
Dupleix demonstrated between 1746 and 1754 that a few hundred European-trained troops could decide an Indian succession war and that the winner would pay in revenue rights. Clive watched it at Arcot, learned it, and applied it in Bengal with the Company's credit behind him — Plassey in 1757 is Dupleix's method executed by his opponents with better funding. France recalled Dupleix for the expense; Britain let Clive keep going, which is most of the difference between the two empires.
- Power passed toMurshidabad
Murshidabad was the richest city the Company had ever traded in and Plassey was fought thirty kilometres from it, in June 1757, and decided by Mir Jafar's defection rather than by fighting. The Jagat Seth bankers of the city financed the conspiracy; the Nawab's treasury was carried down to Calcutta in boats. The transfer of Bengal from a nawabi capital to a Company settlement took about eight years and began with a banking decision.
- CampaignChandernagore
Clive and Watson took Chandernagore in March 1757, three months before Plassey, to remove the one European force that could have reinforced Siraj ud-Daulah. The Nawab had permitted the attack on a neutral settlement in his own territory; stripping him of the French alliance was the precondition for the defection that decided the battle at the mango grove in June.
- Imperial administration ofKolkata: Fort William & the Maidan
Siraj ud-Daulah took Calcutta in June 1756 and the prisoners died in the fort's lock-up; Clive retook it in January 1757 and fought Plassey in June. Fort William was rebuilt on a far larger plan afterwards, with the Maidan cleared as its field of fire. The battle and the fortress are one sequence: the Company stops being a tenant in Bengal and becomes its garrison.
- CampaignRobert Clive
Clive's conduct of Plassey was financial before it was military: Mir Jafar's defection, William Watts's negotiation and the Jagat Seth bankers' money were arranged weeks before the armies met, and the fighting lasted an afternoon. Clive took over two hundred thousand pounds personally from the settlement, and the precedent that a Company servant could sell a throne was set here.
- Contemporary capital withWandiwash (Vandavāsi)
Plassey and Wandiwash were fought thirty months apart at opposite ends of the subcontinent and settled two different questions: which European company would be paramount, and whether a company could collect an Indian province's revenue. The second was the consequential one, but the first had to come first, and both were won largely by Indian troops.
On these journeys
Sources
List of wars in the Indian subcontinent; standard reference accounts
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