- India from the Paleolithic Period to the decline of the Indus civilization
- The development of Indian civilization from c. 1500 bce to c. 1200 ce
- The early Muslim period
- The Mughal Empire, 1526–1761
- The reign of Akbar the Great
- India and European expansion, c. 1500–1858
- British imperial power, 1858–1947
News •
The revolution in Bengal was the product of a number of unrelated causes. The imminence of the Seven Years’ War prompted the British to send out Clive with a force to Madras in 1755. Succession troubles in Bengal combined with British mercantile incompetence to produce a crisis at a moment when the French in south India were still awaiting reinforcements from France.
ʿAlī Vardī Khan—the nawab and virtual ruler of Bengal—died in April 1756, leaving his power to his young grandson Sirāj al-Dawlah. The latter’s position was insecure because of discontent among his officers, both Hindu and Muslim, and because he himself was at the same time both headstrong and vacillating. On an exaggerated report that the British were fortifying Calcutta, he attacked and took the city after a four-day siege, on June 20, 1756. The flight of the British governor and several councillors added ignominy to defeat. The survivors were held for a night in the local lockup, known as the Black Hole of Calcutta; many were dead the next morning.
News of this disaster caused consternation in Madras. A force preparing to oust Bussy-Castelnau from the Deccan was diverted to Bengal, giving Clive an army of 900 Europeans and 1,500 Indians. He relieved the Calcutta survivors and recovered the city on January 2, 1757. An indecisive engagement led to a treaty with Sirāj al-Dawlah on February 9, which restored the company’s privileges, gave permission to fortify Calcutta, and declared an alliance.
This was a decisive point in British Indian history. According to plan, Clive should have returned to Madras to pursue the campaign against the French; but he did not. He sensed both the hostility and insecurity of Sirāj al-Dawlah’s position and began to receive overtures to support a military coup. The chance of installing a friendly and dependent nawab seemed too good to be missed. Having taken this decision, Clive chose the right candidate in Mīr Jaʿfar, an elderly general with much influence in the army. In so acting, Clive was probably influenced by the example of Bussy-Castelnau at Hyderabad; for six years Bussy-Castelnau had maintained himself with an Indo-French force, sustaining the nizam, Ṣalābat Jang, and maintaining French influence in the largest south Indian state with outstanding success. This system of a “sponsored” Indian state, controlled but not administered, was the one Clive had in mind for Bengal.
The prospects for success seemed good. The event, however, proved otherwise, and there were reasons for this not realized at the time. The chiefs were so lacking in vigour that they made little resistance to British encroachments. External danger could come from only one direction and source—the Mughal authority—and that was at the moment in dissolution. While Bussy-Castelnau had no French merchants to satisfy, the British merchants in Calcutta were ready and eager to exploit the situation. And, because the British company’s government was made up entirely of merchants, it is easy to understand why the sponsored state of 1757 became the virtually annexed state of 1765.
Before breaking with Sirāj al-Dawlah, Clive took the French settlement of Chandernagore, which the nawab left to its fate lest he need British help to repulse an Afghan attack from the north. The actual conflict with Sirāj al-Dawlah, at Plassey (June 23, 1757), was decided by Clive’s resolute refusal to be overawed by superior numbers, by dissensions within the nawab’s camp, by Mīr Jaʿfar’s failure to support his superior, and by Sirāj al-Dawlah’s own loss of nerve. Plassey was, in fact, more of a cannonade than a battle. It was followed by the flight and execution of Sirāj al-Dawlah, by the occupation of Murshidabad, the capital, and by the installation of Mīr Jaʿfar as the new nawab.
Clive now controlled a sponsored state, and he played the part with great skill. His position was prejudiced at the outset by the nawab’s failure to find the expected hoarded treasure with which to fulfill his financial promises to the British. The nawab therefore looked for financial support toward his Hindu deputies, with whom saving was second nature. Clive had therefore to intervene repeatedly. In 1759 he defended Patna from attack by the heir to the Mughal throne, ʿAlī Gauhar (later Shah ʿĀlam II), who hoped to strengthen his position in the confused world of Delhi politics by acquiring Bihar. Clive also had to deal with the Dutch, who, hearing of Mīr Jaʿfar’s restiveness and alarmed by the growth of British power in Bengal, sent an armament of six ships to their station at Chinsura on the Hooghly River. Though Britain was at peace with the Netherlands at the time, Clive maneuvered the Dutch into acts of aggression, captured their fleet, defeated them on land, and exacted compensation. They retained Chinsura but could never again challenge the British position in Bengal.
Clive left Calcutta on February 25, 1760, at the height of his fame and aged only 34, looking forward to an English political career. The nawab was completely dependent on the British, to whose trade it seemed that the rich resources of Bengal were now open. But the prospect was less brilliant than it looked; and for this, and for the troubles that ensued in the next few years, Clive had a direct responsibility. Two measures undermined the plan of a sponsored state, leading to the company’s bankruptcy on the one hand and to the virtual annexation of Bengal on the other. The first of these was an understanding with Mīr Jaʿfar, not mentioned in the actual treaty, that personal domestic trade (i.e., trade within India) of company employees would be exempted from the usual tolls and customs duties. The company’s trade with Europe had since 1717 been exempt from such taxes, but the application of such concessions to individual employees—or to anyone, for that matter, who held an exemption pass (dastak)—was a fiscal disaster, since the pass system was widely abused. Local Indian traders were soon unable to compete against rivals with such an advantage, and the company itself was soon out-positioned by its own employees (who received little compensation from the company and relied on their own entrepreneurial skills to make ends meet.) From free trade many company employees passed to intimidation, employing agents who used the British name to terrorize the countryside and infringe on the company’s monopoly.
The second measure was the acceptance of gifts. This was not forbidden by the company and was, in fact, a recognized custom; but it opened the floodgates of corruption. On the strength of rumours regarding the vast sum of the Murshidabad treasury, large amounts were paid to the armed forces and to the company leaders following the city’s capitulation. In addition, Clive obtained a further Mughal title and then claimed a revenue assignment, or jāgīr, for its upkeep, which was worth a large annual sum. In the context of contemporary values these grants equaled nearly one-fourth of the average annual Bengal revenue and represented some 6 percent of the then annual revenue of Great Britain. With such a vigorous opening of the floodgates, it is not surprising that the other servants of the company asked for more almost as a matter of right and that the company’s directors in London, with relatives and connections on the spot, preferred verbal denunciations to any resolute or sustained action. The effects became speedily apparent when in fact the Murshidabad treasure turned out to be only a fraction of its rumoured value, so that (as Clive later admitted to a parliamentary enquiry), the nawab had to sell jewels, goods, and furniture to meet his obligations. The results of these measures unfolded in the next decade and continued to be felt for a generation.
The extension of British power, 1760–1856
The period of disorder, 1760–72
The departure of Clive signaled the release of acquisitive urges by the company’s Bengal servants. These urges were so strong that the governor, Henry Vansittart (served 1760–64), found himself unable to control them. Under the company’s constitution, he had only one vote in a council of up to a dozen and could be overruled by any knot of determined men. During these years, a body of British merchants, long separated from British standards and social restraints, suddenly found themselves with real but undefined authority over the whole of a large and rich province. It is not surprising that they thought mainly of getting rich quickly.
The first step was the deposition of the nawab Mīr Jaʿfar on the grounds of old age and incompetence. He was supplanted by his son-in-law, Mīr Qāsim, after the latter had paid a large gratuity to the company and to Vansittart personally. In addition, he ceded to the British the districts of Burdwan, Midnapore, and Chittagong. Both sides wanted power, and both sides were short of money. The nawab had lost substantial land revenue and the lucrative tolls on the British merchants’ private trade; the company was receiving no remittances from Britain, because the directors considered that Bengal should pay for itself. A clash was inevitable.
Mīr Qāsim removed his capital to distant Munger where he could not be so easily overseen, asserted his authority in the districts, and raised a disciplined force under an Armenian officer. He then turned to the company and negotiated a settlement with Vansittart, by which the company’s merchants were to pay an ad valorem duty of 9 percent, against an Indian merchant’s duty of 40 percent. At this the Calcutta council revolted, reducing the company’s duty to 2.5 percent and on salt only. The breach came in 1763, when Mīr Qāsim, after defeat in four pitched battles, murdered his Indian bankers and British prisoners and fled to Avadh. The next year Mīr Qāsim returned with the emperor Shah ʿĀlam II and his minister Shujāʿ al-Dawlah to be finally defeated at the Battle of Buxar (Baksar). That conflict, rather than Plassey, was the decisive battle that gave Bengal to the British.
These events had been viewed with growing alarm in London. The news of the Mīr Qāsim campaign coincided with the victory of Clive’s faction in the company over that of Lawrence Sulivan. Clive used it to appoint himself governor with power to act over the head of the council; he intended an administrative reformation and a political settlement. He arrived in May 1765 to find that the British victory at Buxar had placed Shah ʿĀlam in his hands but had created a situation of deep confusion in other respects. Mīr Jaʿfar had been restored to power but soon died; his second son succeeded him after bestowing lavish gratuities to the company. The British merchants and their agents were the unresisted predators of the Bengal economy, and no one knew the next step to take.
Clive acted with extraordinary vigour. Within four days of arrival he had set up a Select Committee; and, when he left less than two years later, he had effected another revolution. Turning to India’s political situation, Clive had to decide where to stop. No one barred his way to Delhi, and he could at that moment have turned the whole Mughal Empire into a company-sponsored state. But he realized that Delhi was easier to have than to hold. He fixed his frontier at the borders of Bihar and Avadh. Shah ʿĀlam was given the districts of Kora and Allahabad, and he settled in the latter city, with a tribute (or subsidy) from Bengal that was nearly 10 percent of its estimated revenue. Shujāʿal-Dawlah received back Avadh, with a guarantee of its security, in return for paying the troops involved and a cash indemnity. These two were to be buffers between the company and the Marathas and possible marauders from the north.
Clive’s next step was to settle Bengal’s own status. The Mughal emperor still had much influence, though little power; his complete disfavor might therefore have done the company more harm than good. Clive’s solution was to obtain from Shah ʿĀlam the “dewanee,” or revenue-collecting power, in Bengal and Bihar (the company was thus the imperial divan [dīwān] for those two provinces). The nawab was left in charge of the judiciary and magistracy, but he was helpless because he had no army and could get money to raise one only from the company.
This was Clive’s system of “dual government.” The actual administration remained in Indian hands, and for superintendence Clive appointed a deputy divan, Muḥammad Riḍā Khan, who was at the same time appointed the nawab’s deputy. The chain was thus complete. The company, acting in the name of the emperor and using Indian personnel and the traditional apparatus of government, now ruled Bengal. The company’s agent was Riḍā Khan; the success of the experiment turned on his efficiency and the extent of the governor’s support.
Within the company, Clive enforced his authority by accepting some resignations and enforcing others. Gifts amounting to a value of more than 4,000 rupees were forbidden, and those between that figure and 1,000 rupees were only to be received with official consent. The regulation of private trade was more difficult, for the company paid virtually no salaries. Clive formed a Society of Trade, which operated the salt monopoly, to provide salaries on a graduated scale; but the company directors disallowed this on the ground of expense, and two years later they replaced it by commissions on the revenue, which cost the company more. Finally, Clive dealt with overgrown military allowances with equal vigour, overcoming a mutiny headed by a brigade commander. He used a legacy from Mīr Jaʿfar to start the first pension fund for the Indian army.
Clive left Calcutta in February 1767. His work—diplomatic, political, and administrative—was a beginning rather than a complete settlement. But in each direction, instead of looking back to the past, it reached out to the future. This creative period exacted a heavy price. Clive was pursued to England by his enemies, who launched a parliamentary attack, which, though triumphantly repulsed in 1773, led to his suicide the following year.
It is worth noting how the company’s servants so enriched themselves at that time that they undermined the economy of Bengal, and those who returned to Britain became a byword for ostentation. Apart from the great political prizes already mentioned, it must be remembered that all the company’s servants were engaged in private trade on their own account. Their new authority and the company’s power enabled them to exploit their trade with little hindrance. They had the means of using intimidation (through their agents) against Indian rivals such as the indigo growers and Indian police, customs, revenue, and judicial officials. Presents and bribes were the price Indians had to pay for freedom from harassment. They were able, through their connection with the administration, to arrange virtual monopolies for particular articles in particular districts, fixing a low purchase price as well as a high selling price. They could arrange commissions on revenue collection, mercantile transactions, and any form of commercial activity. What was not done through agents could be arranged through intermediaries, who also, of course, had their own compensation. Thus, a man could make a fortune, lose it in Britain, return for another, lose it again, and return for a third. It is significant that from the time of Clive’s second governorship lamentations increased that the opportunities for quick fortunes were slipping away.
The Company Bahadur
The year 1765, when Clive arrived in India, can be said to mark the real beginning of the British Empire in India as a territorial dominion. However, the regime he established was really a private dominion of the East India Company. It was not a British colony, and it fitted into the highly flexible structure of the dying Mughal Empire. The structure of the administration was Mughal, not British, and its operators were Indian, personified by the deputy nawab Muḥammad Riḍā Khan. It was a continuation of the traditional state under British control, and it can be aptly described by the company’s popular title, the Company Bahadur—the Valiant, or Honourable, Company. This Company Bahadur state continued through the governorship of Warren Hastings and in essence until the early 19th century, although Lord Cornwallis (governor-general, 1786–93 and 1805) substituted largely British for Indian personnel. The revenue was collected by the officers of the deputy nawab; the law administered was the current Mughal (Islamic) criminal code, with the traditional personal codes of the Hindu and Muslim communities; the language of administration was Persian. Only the army broke with the past, with its British officers, its discipline, and its Western organization and tactics.
It was this state that Warren Hastings inherited when he became governor of Bengal in 1772. Noteworthy in his 13-year rule were his internal administration, his dealings with his council, and his foreign policy. Hastings inherited a state that in the five years since Clive’s departure had stepped back toward the corruption from which Clive had rescued it. But Hastings was armed with authority by the directors, so that the first two years of his government were a period of real reform. He first dealt with the dastaks, or free passes, the use of which had crept in again since Clive’s departure; they were abolished, and a uniform tariff of 2.5 percent was enforced on all internal trade. Private trade by the company’s servants continued but within enforceable limits. The Bengalis began to experience some security and a settled order, if not yet an equitable society. Next, the company took over the responsibility for the revenue collection from Riḍā Khan, who was arraigned for corruption; the charges could not be proved, however, even with the approving support of the British authorities. Hastings substituted British for Indian collectors working under a Board of Revenue. In a way this was a retrograde step, for the new collectors were often as corrupt as their predecessors and more powerful; but the change gave legal power to those who already wielded it in fact, and in the future their irregularities could more easily be dealt with than could the surreptitious dealings through the old Indian collectors. Finally, Hastings instituted a network of civil and criminal courts in place of the deputy nawab’s. The same law was administered by British judges, who were often incompetent, but a model was provided into which Western ideas and practices could later be fed.
These changes held good through the period of Hastings’ rule and may be said to have provided a viable, though not yet very competent or equitable, state. Criminal and personal law cases were virtually in the hands of Indian assessors to British judges who did not know Persian; revenue administration was distorted by the collectors’ desire for both personal gain and increased returns for the company. Hastings was least successful in his revenue administration, in which he never advanced beyond a condition of trial and error; a five-year settlement made in ignorance proved unsuccessful, and he was finally reduced to annual settlements, which meant hit-and-miss arrangements with the traditional zamindars.
Hastings was personally incorrupt, but he had to tolerate a good deal in others and to resort to extensive jobbing to placate his supporters both in Bengal and in London. He left a personal legend behind him, but his administration was disorderly as well as strong. A reason for this can be found in his relations with his council. Under the Regulating Act of 1773, Hastings became governor-general of Fort William in Bengal, with powers of superintendence over Madras and Bombay. He was also given a supreme court, administering English law to the British and those connected with them, and a council of four, appointed in the Regulating Act. The leading council member, Sir Philip Francis, hoped to succeed him, and, because Hastings had no power of veto, Francis was able with two supporters to overrule him. For two years Hastings was outvoted, until the death of one member enabled him to use his casting vote. But the struggle continued until Francis—wounded by Hastings in a duel—returned to London in 1780, to continue his vendetta there. The conflict culminated with charges against Hastings of corruption by an Indian official, Nand Kumar (Nandakumar), and with the latter’s conviction before the supreme court of perjury and his execution under English law. The episode exposed the moral weakness of the council majority, which failed to reprieve Nand Kumar, and convinced the Indians of Hastings’ overriding power.
This struggle, lasting for years, left Hastings triumphant but also embittered; he had to deal not only with the opposition in Calcutta, which never ceased, but also with the constant threat of supersession in the involved politics of London at that time. This strain probably accounts for the acts that formed important items in Hastings’s subsequent impeachment—these were the dunning (demands for money) of Raja Chait Singh of Varanasi and his deposition in 1781 and the pressuring of the Begums of Avadh (the mother and grandmother of the nawab Āṣaf al-Dawlah) for the same reason. Hastings’s financial difficulties at the time were great, but such actions were harsh and high-handed.
The impeachment of Hastings at the behest of Edmund Burke and the Whigs, which followed his return from India and ended in his acquittal but retirement in 1795, was a kind of very rough justice. Hastings had saved for the company its Indian dominions, and he was relatively incorrupt. But the charges served notice that the company’s servants were responsible for their actions toward those they governed, and for these actions they were answerable to Parliament. Hastings was so identified with the company’s rule that he was the inevitable target for any such assertion of principle.
The company and the state
During the first half of the 18th century, the East India Company was a trading corporation with a steady annual dividend of 8–10 percent, offering its employees prospects of a modest fortune through private trade, along with great hazards to health and life. It was directed in London by 24 directors—elected annually by the shareholding body, the Court of Proprietors—who worked through a series of committees.
The Bengal adventure from 1757 turned the two courts—of directors and proprietors—into political bodies, because they now controlled a great eastern state. Shares became political counters, the purchase of which might secure votes needed to change the company’s policy. A second result was the return to Britain of the company’s servants with fortunes; their ostentation and lack of restraint earned them the title nabob (the English version of nawab). These events soon produced reactions. The shareholders wanted to share in this new wealth, in the guise of increased dividends, and the directors wanted the company as well as its servants to benefit from this wealth. Two processes were thus set in motion—one a rising pressure for increased dividends and the other an attempt by the company to discipline its servants and to secure some profit for itself. Broadly speaking, it was the success of the first and the failure of the second that provoked state intervention in the company’s affairs.
The close personal connection between the “direction” and the company’s servants themselves weighed heavily and eventually stultified the directors’ efforts. It produced an infirmity of purpose, which led to the return to Bengal by one faction of servants dismissed for irregularities by another—a factionalism epitomized by the struggle between Clive and Sulivan for control of the company. These developments occupied the 1760s, drastically reducing the prestige of the company. On the side of discipline, alarm at the overruling of Vansittart and the wars against Mīr Qāsim and Shah ʿĀlam led to the dispatch of Clive as governor in 1765. As the effect of Clive’s measures diminished after his return to England in 1767, three “supervisors” were dispatched to Bengal in 1769 with plenary powers, but they were lost at sea. Then Hastings was appointed in 1772 with a reform mandate. But it was too late, for bankruptcy was now knocking at the door.
The company had hoped for large profits from Clive’s first control of Bengal. The hopes then shortly dashed were revived by his second governorship. Clive believed that he had secured an ample revenue surplus for the company. On the strength of these expectations, the company’s dividend was raised to 12.5 percent in 1767; in the same year the first signs of parliamentary opposition were bought off by the offer of a large annual cash incentive to the state in return for undisturbed possession of Bengal. As the expectations withered, this became a financial millstone that compelled the company in 1772 to ask for a loan to avert bankruptcy. This opened the floodgates of parliamentary criticism, leading to committees of inquiry and revelations of malpractices, to Clive’s suicide (1774), and to the beginning of state intervention.
In 1773 the British government gave a substantial loan to the company, but its price was the Regulating Act, passed the same year. The act sought to “regulate” the affairs of the company, in both London and India. In London the qualifications fee for a vote was doubled, and the directors’ terms were extended from one to four years, with a year’s gap before reelection. This ended the soliciting of votes for the control of policy by private interests and gave continuity of policy to the direction. In India a governor-generalship of Fort William in Bengal was established, with supervisory control over the other Indian settlements and Warren Hastings as its first incumbent. Hastings was given four named councillors, but future appointments were to be made by the company. Finally, a supreme court with a chief justice and three judges was set up. The Regulating Act was a first step toward taking the political direction of British India out of the hands of the company and of securing a unified overall control. But it had serious defects, which bedeviled administration in Bengal and made India (despite British preoccupation with the American Revolution) a leading subject of controversy over the next 20 years.
The governor-general possessed no veto in his council. With three political councillors from Britain, each ready to take Warren Hastings’s place, this led to his virtual supersession by the majority for two years and to a paralysis of the executive. Hastings used the energy in fighting his council that should have gone to reforming Bengal. The superintending power added responsibility with little power to enforce it. The supreme court decided to administer English law (the only law it knew) and to apply it not only to all the British in Bengal but also to all Indians connected with them; in practice this meant those Indians in Calcutta, and it led to such grave abuses as the hanging of Nand Kumar for an offense not recognized as being capital in any Indian code.
In 1780 the company’s privileges ran out, but this was during the crisis of the American Revolution, so a decision was delayed until 1784. Charles James Fox’s radical measure to transfer the control of British India to seven commissioners was defeated by the influence of King George III in the House of Lords, but the next year the matter was settled for more than 70 years by Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger’s India Act of 1784. Its essence was the institution of a dual control. The directors were left in charge of commerce and as political executants, but they were politically superintended by a new Board of Control, the president of which, in the person of Henry Dundas, soon became the virtual minister for India. The directors dealt with the board through a secret committee of three, but their dispatches to India could be altered, vetoed, and dictated by the board. The governor-general could be recalled by the crown. In India the governor’s council was reduced to three, including the commander in chief, and by an amending act he acquired the veto, which Warren Hastings had missed so much. Finally, there was to be a parliamentary inquiry before each 20-year renewal of the company’s charter.
Pitt’s India Act proved to be a landmark because it gave the British government control of policy without patronage. The cumbrous dual system developed into a seesaw arrangement of give and take, becoming ever stronger on the government side as greater ability, influence, and power had their effect. The inquiry provision produced a national inquest on Indian affairs every 20 years, marking successive stages in the diminution of the company’s political power. On the first such inquiry, in 1793, the company repelled an attempt to compel it to support Christian missionary work; this incident led to the foundation of the Church Missionary Society in 1799. In 1813 the company was obliged by Parliament to admit missionaries and was deprived of its monopoly on trade. By the Act of 1833 it lost its trade altogether and was thenceforth a governing corporation under increasing state surveillance. In 1853, with the introduction of competitive examinations, the company lost most of its patronage and also had to admit nominated directors. Policies were increasingly dictated to a sulky or apathetic board. The last case of the recall of a governor-general by the company was that of Lord Ellenborough in 1844; this was the real swan song of the company, because it was recognized that such a thing could never happen again. The company had become a managing agency of the British government.
Relations with the Marathas and Mysore
After Clive’s settlement in 1765, the East India Company had no desire for any further acquisitions. Its object was still trade; it regarded the acquisition of Bengal as a political framework for the safe conduct of trade, justified by the danger of near anarchy in its most profitable scene of operations. But such a resolution was easier to make than to keep. Indian states were ever ready to seek European help in achieving their own projects; many of the company’s servants looked longingly at territorial revenues that might assist their own enrichment, and the exigencies of Indian politics at times made nonalignment difficult to observe.
In 1765 the three centers of the company’s power were independent of each other, but the post-Mughal Indian pattern was becoming clear. In the north there were the Mughal fragments of Allahabad, Avadh, and Delhi, with the Sikhs resurgent in the Punjab. In the Deccan the nizam of Hyderabad maintained his Mughal regime uneasily, sometimes overwhelmed by two vigorous and expansive powers—the Marathas and Mysore.
The Marathas had made their bid for the Mughal succession in the previous decade, and they were now recovering from a disastrous defeat at Panipat (1761). The unified leadership of the peshwa had given way to a confederacy of the peshwa and four military dictatorships developing into monarchies. The Marathas were restless, energetic, and acquisitive; their greatest enemy was their own divisions.
In the south the old Hindu state of Mysore had passed into the hands of Hyder Ali in 1762. When Warren Hastings took overall control of the company’s possessions in 1774, Madras had already stumbled into war with Hyder Ali and had submitted to a virtually dictated peace under the walls of Madras in 1769. The nawab of the Carnatic had become by degrees dependent on the company because he needed its support against the threat of Hyder and the nizam. Ingenious and feckless, the nawab involved Madras in south Indian politics and the company in his affairs by borrowing from company employees.
Hastings had a natural gift for realpolitik, but he was tied to a policy of nonaggression. Much of his diplomatic skill was spent repairing the blunders of others. His major work for British India was preserving the company’s dominion against a coalition of country (Indian) powers, virtually unaided from home, at a time when Britain was itself hard pressed both in America and by a European coalition. His first work was to safeguard Bengal from the reviving power of the Marathas, who had conducted Shah ʿĀlām II to Delhi in 1771. Hastings intervened and handed Allahabad and Kora to Shujāʿ al-Dawlah of Avadh in return for a subsidy and a treaty. The following year he found himself assisting the nawab of Avadh to crush the Afghan Rohillas in the Ganges–Yamuna Doab (this stroke was the first item in the indictment at his impeachment, but its effect was to stabilize the north Indian situation for the next 10 years).
In western India, Hastings was the victim of Bombay brashness and of directorial blunders. A succession struggle in Pune for the peshwa-ship led Bombay to support Raghunatha Rao in the hope of securing the island of Salsette and town of Bassein. (See Treaty of Purandhar.) When this was countermanded by Calcutta, London intervened to renew the venture. In 1779 a British army was surrounded on its way to Pune, one month before a force sent by Hastings completed a brilliant march across India at Surat. This precipitated the Convention of Wadgaon, the terms of which were likewise repudiated by British officials. In 1782 the British made peace with the peshwa, abandoning Raghunatha and having only Salsette to show for seven years of war. This first round of what came to be called the Maratha Wars was a draw.
While this war was in progress, Hastings was confronted with a far greater menace. In 1780 the ineptitude of Madras provoked a coalition of the nizam, Hyder Ali, and the Marathas, which defeated the company’s armies and swept over the Carnatic. Though without hope of succour from Britain, itself hard-pressed, Hastings set about sustaining the Madras forces and dividing his foes. In 1781 the military balance was restored, and the next year the Marathas made peace (the Treaty of Salbai). Hyder Ali died (1782), French help arrived too late to affect the issue, and in 1784 the Treaty of Mangalore with Hyder Ali’s son Tippu Sultan restored the status quo. Hastings thus had little to show in the way of empire building. His feat of defense without external aid was nevertheless remarkable. He preserved the British dominion in India, and by so doing he made it possible for others to extend it. The company had become one of the recognized great powers of India.
Pitt’s Act of 1784 reiterated the company’s own intentions by forbidding aggressive wars and annexations. Lord Cornwallis and his successor Sir John Shore (governor-general 1793–98) were eager to comply, but Cornwallis nevertheless found himself involved in the third Mysore war (1790–92) with Tippu Sultan, who possessed his father’s ability without his judgment. The cause was a combination of Tippu Sultan’s intransigence with conflicting obligations undertaken by the Madras government. It took three campaigns before Cornwallis could bring Tippu Sultan to bay. Half his dominions were annexed, more as a precaution than as an exercise in imperialism. But Tippu Sultan remained formidable and, not unnaturally, more hostile than ever.
