The East India Company takes Bengal
At Plassey a private British trading company defeats the Nawab of Bengal and soon controls the revenues of India's richest province.
- The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company — William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury (2019)
- Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire — C. A. Bayly, Cambridge University Press (1988)
- A Concise History of Modern India — Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, Cambridge University Press (2012)
The English East India Company was chartered in London in 1600 to trade in Asian spices and Indian textiles. For a century and a half it was one of many European traders, along with the Portuguese, Dutch and French, working by permission of the Mughals and regional rulers.
- The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company — William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury (2019)
- A Concise History of Modern India — Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, Cambridge University Press (2012)
As Mughal power collapsed, the Company built up its own army of Indian soldiers (sepoys). On 23 June 1757, at Plassey (Palashi) in Bengal, Robert Clive defeated the young Nawab Siraj ud-Daula, largely because the Nawab’s commander Mir Jafar, who had been promised the throne, held his troops back. Clive and his colleagues then extracted vast sums from the new Nawab.
- The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company — William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury (2019)
- Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire — C. A. Bayly, Cambridge University Press (1988)
After another victory at Buxar in 1764, the Mughal emperor granted the Company the diwani, the right to collect the revenues of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, in 1765. A trading company had become a state. A few years later, in 1769–70, a famine killed, by contemporary estimates, perhaps a third of Bengal’s people while revenue collection continued. Over the next ninety years the Company conquered or subordinated most of the subcontinent, defeating Tipu Sultan of Mysore, the Marathas and the Sikh kingdom of Punjab.
- The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company — William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury (2019)
- A Concise History of Modern India — Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, Cambridge University Press (2012)
Why it matters today
Indians remember that their country was first conquered not by a state but by a corporation, through bribery, alliances and private armies. It is a reference point in debates about colonial plunder and about foreign companies and Indian sovereignty.