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November 17 - December 30, 2024
On 24 October 1746, on the estuary of the Adyar River, Mahfuz Khan tried to block the passage of 700 French sepoy reinforcements under Paradis. The French beat off an attack by the 10,000 Mughal troopers with the help of sustained musketry, their infantry drawn up in ranks, file-firing and using grapeshot at close quarters in a way that had never before been seen in India.
Whatever the truth, the Battle of Adyar River proved a turning point in Indian history. Only two French sepoys were killed, while Mughal casualties were over 300. For the first time, techniques of eighteenth-century European warfare, developed in Prussia and tested on the battlefields of France and Flanders, had been tried out in India. It was immediately clear that nothing in the Mughal armoury could match their force.
The Battle of Adyar River, the first time these tactics were tried out in India, had shown that a small body of infantry armed with the new flintlock muskets and bayonets, and supported by quick-firing mobile artillery, could now scatter a whole army just as easily as they could in Europe.
In 1749 news came from Europe that the War of the Austrian Succession had ended, and that at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle it had been agreed that Madras should be restored to the EIC.
Rather than disbanding his new sepoy regiments, Dupleix decided to hire them out to his Indian allies, and to use them to gain both land and political influence.
Soon both the British and the French were intriguing with the different states in the south, covertly offering to sell their military assistance in return for influence, payments or land grants.
Dupleix sold his services as a mercenary first to one of the claimants to the throne of the Carnatic, and then, in a much more ambitious move, despatched the Marquis de Bussy to Hyderabad to take sides in the succession crisis that had followed the death of the region’s most powerful Mughal overlord, Nizam ul-Mulk, as his sons fought for control of the Nizam’s semi-detached fragment of the Mughal Empire.
Selling the services of his trained and disciplined troops, he soon realised, was an infinitely more profitable business than dealing in cotton textiles.
Dupleix’s generalissimo, the Marquis de Bussy, who also made a fortune, could hardly believe the dramatic results his tiny mercenary force achieved as he marched through the Deccan:
The Carnatic Wars that rumbled on over the next decade might have had few conclusive or permanent strategic results, but they witnessed the transformation of the character of the two Companies from trading concerns to increasingly belligerent and militarised entities, part-textile exporters, part-pepper traders, part-revenue-collecting land-holding businesses, and now, most profitably of all, state-of-the-art mercenary outfits.
two Companies from trading concerns to increasingly belligerent and militarised entities, part-textile exporters, part-pepper traders, part-revenue-collecting land-holding businesses, and now, most profitably of all, state-of-the-art mercenary outfits.
the Carnatic Wars were grinding to an inconclusive end in the mid-1750s.
So began the first act in what Americans still call the French and Indian Wars, and which is known in the rest of the world as the Seven Years War.162
Calcutta. On receipt, Governor Drake immediately ordered work to begin on rebuilding and strengthening the city walls, an action explicitly forbidden by the Nawab of Bengal – which in turn quickly set off a chain of events fatal both for the people of Bengal and for the French in India.
Sales of tea alone cleared half a million sterling, which represented the import of some 3 million pounds of tea leaves. The rest of the EIC’s accounts were made up of sales of saltpetre, silk, gorgeously painted palampores (bed covers) and luxurious Indian cotton cloth, around 30 million square yards of which was now imported annually.
on 25 March 1755, signed up the thirty-year-old Robert Clive, for the second time.
still only in his mid-twenties, the curt, withdrawn and socially awkward young accountant had been the surprise star of the Carnatic Wars,
the directors were keen to send Clive back to India at the head of the private army of sepoys that Clive himself had helped recruit, drill and lead into battle.
He was lonely, homesick and miserable. Before long he had developed a profound hatred for India that never left him. ‘I
None of his letters from Madras contain a word about the wonders of India, and he gives no hint of the sights he saw; nor does he seem to have made any attempt to learn the languages. He had no interest in the country, no eye for its beauty, no inquisitiveness about its history, religions and ancient civilisations, and not the slightest curiosity about its people whom he dismissed as universally ‘indolent, luxurious, ignorant and cowardly’.
What he did have, from the beginning, was a streetfighter’s eye for sizing up an opponent, a talent at seizing the opportunities presented by happenchance, a willingness to take great risks and a breathtaking audacity.
It was only during the French attack and conquest of Madras in 1746 that Clive’s talents became apparent.
managed to dodge French patrols and made it on foot to the other, smaller British stronghold on the Coromandel coast, Fort St David. Here he was trained to fight by Stringer Lawrence, a bluff, portly John Bull, known as ‘the Old Cock’, who had seen action against the French at Fontenoy and Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Jacobites on Culloden Moor.
By the time Dupleix began leasing out his sepoy regiments to his client Nawabs in the late 1740s, Clive was showing promise in what he called ‘the military sphere’, steadily rising in the ranks to become the lieutenant of a Company of Foot, and demonstrating the aggressive chutzpah and a willingness to take risks that would distinguish him throughout his life.
On 26 August 1751, Clive first made his name when he volunteered to march through torrential monsoon rains to relieve the siege of Arcot, the capital of the Nawabs of the Carnatic, with only a small force of 200 Europeans and 300 sepoys. Clive surprised the French and their allies by attacking in the middle of a thunderstorm, and soon raised the Nawab’s Mughal colours from the gates.
Clive’s greatest success came in 1752 when he beat off a threatened attack on Madras. He and Stringer Lawrence then went on the offensive and managed to win a series of small engagements around the Carnatic, securing Arcot and Trichinopoly for the British and their tame Nawab, Muhammad Ali.
On 18 February 1753 Clive impulsively married the formidable Margaret Maskelyne, sister of Nevil, the Astronomer Royal, in St Mary’s, Fort St George.*
But despite successfully buying a Cornish rotten borough, his political career was quickly wrecked on the shoals of inter-party intrigue, and after only eighteen months he found that he needed to return and make a second fortune in India.
Clive rejoined in the senior position of Deputy Governor of Madras, and was also given a military rank in the army: a local commission as a royal lieutenant colonel, effective only in India.
The decision was soon made to send out a squadron of Royal Navy warships under Admiral Watson to support the EIC’s own private army, along with some regular British army troops in order to match the regiment believed to have been sent by the French.
one of the oddest events in world history: a trading company based in one small building in the City of London defeating, usurping and seizing power from the once-mighty Mughal Empire.
Calcutta had quickly grown to become the jewel among the Company’s overseas trading stations: it was by far the EIC’s most important trading post in India and the major source of British textile imports.
twice as many ships now visited it every year as docked at its Mughal rival, Hughli, a little upstream.
Throughout the 1740s, while the Carnatic Wars were raging in the south, the Marathas had attacked Bengal with horrifying violence, killing what the Dutch VOC chief in Bengal estimated to be as many as 400,000 civilians.
The Bargis [Marathas] began to plunder the villages and all the people fled in terror. Brahmin
What was a nightmare for Bengal turned out to be a major opportunity for the Company. Against artillery and cities defended by the trained musketeers of the European powers, the Maratha cavalry was ineffective.
the Marathas made a point of not attacking any of the different European strongholds along the Hooghly:
Amid all these frantic attempts at money-making, Drake’s Calcutta Council had forgotten one major consideration: the importance of maintaining the city’s defences. The fort walls were visibly crumbling, the guns rusting and new buildings had encroached on all sides of the battlements, in several cases looking down over the fortifications.
Drake’s Calcutta Council had forgotten one major consideration: the importance of maintaining the city’s defences. The fort walls were visibly crumbling, the guns rusting and new buildings had encroached on all sides of the battlements, in several cases looking down over the fortifications.
Jean Law, the brother of Jacques who was defeated by Clive in the Carnatic Wars, was the director of the French factory at Kasimbazar, the commercial centre on the southern edge of the Bengali capital, Murshidabad.
In 1756 they wrote to ask Drake whether any work had been completed in upgrading the defences, urging that he quickly make whatever repairs were necessary, ideally with the approval of the Nawab, Aliverdi Khan,
in 1756 that the repairs and rebuilding actually began, and Drake ignored his instructions to seek the Nawab’s permission, having been advised by William Watts, who ran the English factory of Kasimbazar, that ‘it is far from being certain that he [Aliverdi] will take any notice of our making Calcutta defensible
the old Nawab, Aliverdi Khan, had received a full account of Drake’s repair programme and summoned his grandson and heir apparent to discuss the proper response to this attempt to subvert Mughal authority by these impudent merchants. The grandson’s name was Siraj ud-Daula.
Murshidabad, the capital of late Mughal Bengal, lay three days’ sailing from Calcutta up the Bhagirathi, one of the two headstreams of the Ganges.
From it, Nawab Aliverdi Khan ran what was by far the richest province of the Mughal Empire, though how far that empire still existed in more than name in 1756 was now a matter of debate.
Aliverdi Khan, who was of mixed Arab and Afshar Turkman stock, had come to power in 1740 in a military coup financed and masterminded by the immensely powerful Jagat Seth bankers, who controlled the finances of Bengal.
Aliverdi proved to be a popular and cultured ruler; he was also an extremely capable one. It was his bravery, persistence and military genius which had succeeded in keeping the Maratha invasions at bay, something few other Mughal generals had ever succeeded in doing.
In Murshidabad, Aliverdi Khan created a strong and dazzling Shia court culture, and a stable political, economic and political centre which was a rare island of calm and prosperity amid the anarchy of Mughal decline.
there was only one cloud on the horizon: Aliverdi Khan’s grandson and heir apparent, Siraj ud-Daula.
Siraj’s most serious error was to alienate the great bankers of Bengal, the Jagat Seths.
