The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

by William Dalrymple

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.

The Company had been authorised by its founding charter to ‘wage war’ and had been using violence to gain its ends since it boarded and captured a Portuguese vessel on its maiden voyage in 1602.

Nevertheless, 1765 was really the moment that the East India Company ceased to be anything even distantly resembling a conventional trading corporation, dealing in silks and spices, and became something altogether much more unusual. Within a few months, 250 company clerks, backed by the military force of 20,000 locally recruited Indian soldiers, had become the effective rulers of the richest Mughal provinces.

In many ways the East India Company was a model of commercial efficiency: one hundred years into its history, it had only thirty-five permanent employees in its head office. Nevertheless, that skeleton staff executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history: the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia. It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history.

Indeed, the East India Company probably invented corporate lobbying. In 1693, less than a century after its foundation, the EIC was discovered for the first time to be using its own shares for buying parliamentarians, annually shelling out £1,200 a year to prominent MPs and ministers.

Although its total trading capital was permanently lent to the British state, when it suited, the East India Company made much of its legal separation from the government. It argued forcefully, and successfully, that the document signed by Shah Alam in 1765 – known as the Diwani – was the legal property of the Company, not the Crown, even though the government had spent an enormous sum on naval and military operations protecting the EIC’s Indian acquisitions. But the MPs who voted to uphold this legal distinction were not exactly neutral: nearly a quarter of them held Company stock, which would have plummeted in value had the Crown taken over.

Bengal’s wealth rapidly drained into Britain, while its prosperous weavers and artisans were coerced ‘like so many slaves’ by their new masters. A good proportion of the loot of Bengal went directly into Clive’s pocket. He returned to Britain with a personal fortune, then valued at £234,000, that made him the richest self-made man in Europe. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757 – a victory that owed as much to treachery, forged contracts, bankers and bribes as it did to military prowess – he transferred to the EIC treasury no less than £2.5 million* seized from the defeated rulers of Bengal – unprecedented sums at the time.

Before long the EIC was straddling the globe. Almost single-handedly it reversed the balance of trade, which from Roman times on had led to a continual drain of Western bullion eastwards. The EIC ferried opium east to China, and in due course fought the Opium Wars in order to seize an offshore base at Hong Kong and safeguard its profitable monopoly in narcotics. To the West it shipped Chinese tea to Massachusetts, where its dumping in Boston harbour triggered the American War of Independence.

Yet, like more recent mega-corporations, the EIC proved at once hugely powerful and oddly vulnerable to economic uncertainty. Only seven years after the granting of the Diwani, when the Company’s share price had doubled overnight after it acquired the wealth of the treasury of Bengal, the East India bubble burst after plunder and famine in Bengal led to massive shortfalls in expected land revenues. The EIC was left with debts of £1.5 million and a bill of £1 million* in unpaid tax owed to the Crown. When knowledge of this became public, thirty banks collapsed like dominoes across Europe, bringing trade to a standstill.

These English-language Company records I have used alongside the excellent Persian-language histories produced by highly educated Mughal historians, noblemen, munishis and scribes throughout the eighteenth century. The best of these, the Seir Mutaqherin, or Review of Modern Times by the brilliant young Mughal historian Ghulam Hussain Khan, is by far the most perceptive Indian source for the period, and has been available in English since the 1790s. But many other equally revealing Persian-language histories of the time remain both untranslated and unpublished.

the EIC was from the very first conceived as a joint stock corporation, open to all investors.

The idea of a joint stock company was one of Tudor England’s most brilliant and revolutionary innovations.

On 31 December 1600, the last day of the first year of the new century, the ‘Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading to the East Indies’, a group of 218 men, received their royal charter.27 This turned out to offer far wider powers than the petitioners had perhaps expected or even hoped for. As well as freedom from all customs duties for their first six voyages, it gave them a British monopoly for fifteen years over ‘trade to the East Indies’, a vaguely defined area that was soon taken to encompass all trade and traffic between the Cape of Good Hope and the Strait of Magellan, as well as granting semi-sovereign privileges to rule territories and raise armies. The wording was sufficiently ambiguous to allow future generations of EIC officials to use it to claim jurisdiction over all English subjects in Asia, mint money, raise fortifications, make laws, wage war, conduct an independent foreign policy, hold courts, issue punishment, imprison English subjects and plant English settlements.

On 28 August 1608, Captain William Hawkins, a bluff sea captain with the Third Voyage, anchored his ship, the Hector, off Surat, and so became the first commander of an EIC vessel to set foot on Indian soil.43 India then had a population of 150 million – about a fifth of the world’s total – and was producing about a quarter of global manufacturing; indeed, in many ways it was the world’s industrial powerhouse and the world’s leader in manufactured textiles. Not for nothing are so many English words connected with weaving – chintz, calico, shawl, pyjamas, khaki, dungarees, cummerbund, taffetas – of Indian origin.

Roe found that Jahangir ‘expects great presents and jewels and regards no trade but what feeds his insatiable appetite after stones, riches and rare pieces of art’.

The status of the English at the Mughal court in this period is perhaps most graphically illustrated by one of the most famous images of the period, a miniature by Jahangir’s master artist, Bichitr. The conceit of the painting is how the pious Jahangir preferred the company of Sufis and saints to that of powerful princes. This was actually not as far-fetched as it might sound: one of Roe’s most telling anecdotes relates how Jahangir amazed the English envoy by spending an hour chatting to a passing holy man he encountered on his travels:

Losses were still heavy: between 1601 and 1640, the Company sent a total of 168 ships eastwards; only 104 arrived back again.68 But the Company’s balance sheets grew increasingly profitable, so much so that investors from around Europe began for the first time queuing up to buy EIC stock. In 1613 the subscription for the First Joint Stock raised £418,000. Four years later, in 1617, the subscription to Second Joint Stock pulled in a massive £1.6 million,* turning the EIC for the first time into a financial colossus, at least by English standards.

It was not until 1626 that the EIC founded its first fortified Indian base, at Armagon, north of Pulicat, on the central Coromandel coast. It was soon crenellated and armed with twelve guns. But it was quickly and shoddily constructed, in addition to which it was found to be militarily indefensible, so was abandoned six years later in 1632 with little regret; as one factor put it, ‘better lost than found’.

This time the settlement – soon known simply as Madras – flourished. The Naik (governor) who leased the land said he was anxious for the area to ‘flourish and grow rich’, and had given Day the right to build ‘a fort and castle’, to trade customs free and to ‘perpetually Injoy the priviledges of minatag[e];’. These were major concessions that the more powerful Mughals to the north would take nearly another century to yield.

Before long Madras had grown to be the first English colonial town in India with its own small civil administration, the status of a municipality and a population of 40,000. By the 1670s the town was even minting its own gold ‘pagoda’ coins, so named after the image of a temple that filled one side, with the monkey deity Hanuman on the reverse, both borrowed from the old Vijayanagara coinage.

The second big English settlement in India came into the hands of the Company via the Crown, which in turn received it as a wedding present from the Portuguese monarchy. In 1661, when Charles II married the Portuguese Infanta, Catherine of Braganza, part of her dowry, along with the port of Tangier, was the ‘island of Bumbye’.

Only once during the seventeenth century did the Company try to use its strength against the Mughals, and then with catastrophic consequences. In 1681 the directorship was taken over by the recklessly aggressive Sir Josiah Child, who had started his career supplying beer to the navy in Portsmouth, and who was described by the diarist John Evelyn as ‘an overgrown and suddenly monied man … most sordidly avaricious’.81 In Bengal the factors had begun complaining, as Streynsham Master wrote to London, that ‘here every petty Officer makes a pray of us, abuscing us at pleasure to Screw what they can out of us’. We are, he wrote, ‘despised and trampled upon’ by Mughal officials. This was indeed the case: the Nawab of Bengal, Shaista Khan, made no secret of his dislike of the Company and wrote to his friend and maternal nephew, the Emperor Aurangzeb, that ‘the English were a company of base, quarrelling people and foul dealers’.

As a consequence, in 1686 a considerable fleet sailed from London to Bengal with 19 warships, 200 cannons and 600 soldiers. ‘It will,’ Child wrote, ‘become us to Seize what we cann & draw the English sword.’84 But Child could not have chosen a worse moment to pick a fight with the Emperor of the richest kingdom on earth. The Mughals had just completed their conquest of the two great Deccani Sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda and seemed also to have driven the Marathas back into the hills whence they had come. The Mughal Empire had thus emerged as the unrivalled regional power, and its army was now able to focus exclusively on this new threat. The Mughal war machine swept away the English landing parties as easily as if it were swatting flies; soon the EIC factories at Hughli, Patna, Kasimbazar, Masulipatnam and Vizagapatam had all been seized and plundered, and the English had been expelled completely from Bengal. The Surat factory was closed and Bombay was blockaded. The

It was the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 that changed everything for the Company. The Emperor, unloved by his father, grew up into a bitter and bigoted Islamic puritan, as intolerant as he was grimly dogmatic.

On his deathbed, Aurangzeb acknowledged his failures in a sad and defeated letter to his son, Azam: I came alone and I go as a stranger. The instant which has passed in power has left only sorrow behind it. I have not been the guardian and protector of the Empire. Life, so valuable, has been squandered in vain. God was in my heart but I could not see him. Life is transient. The past is gone and there is no hope for the future. The whole imperial army is like me: bewildered, perturbed, separated from God, quaking like quicksilver. I fear my punishment. Though I have a firm hope in God’s grace, yet for my deeds anxiety ever remains with me.102 Aurangzeb finally died on 20 February 1707. He was buried in a simple grave, open to the skies, not in Agra or in Delhi but at Khuldabad in the middle of the Deccan plateau he spent most of his adult life trying,103 and failing, to bring to heel.

In the worst year of all, 1719, four different Emperors occupied the Peacock Throne in rapid succession.

the ground, this meant devastating Maratha raids, leaving those villages under Mughal authority little more than piles of smoking cinders. The ruthlessness and cruelty of these guerrilla raids were legendary. A European traveller passing out of Aurangabad came across the aftermath of one of these Maratha attacks: When we reached the frontier, we found all put to fire and sword. We camped out next to villages reduced to ashes, an indescribably horrid and distressing scene of humans and domestic animals burned and lying scattered about. Women clutching their children in their arms, men contorted, as they had been overtaken by death, some with hands and feet charred, others with only the trunk of the body recognisable: hideous corpses, some char-grilled, others utterly calcined black: a sight of horror such as I had never seen before. In the three villages we passed through, there must have been some 600 such disfigured human bodies.105 Yet if the Marathas were violent in war, they could in times of peace be mild rulers.106 Another French traveller noted, ‘The Marathas willingly ruin the land of their enemies with a truly detestable barbarity, but they faithfully maintain the peace with their allies, and in their own domains make agriculture and commerce flourish. When seen from the outside, this style of government is terrible, as the nation is naturally prone to brigandage; but seen from the inside, it is gentle and benevolent. The areas of India which have submitted to the...

As the country grew increasingly anarchic, Murshid Quli Khan found innovative ways to get the annual tribute to Delhi. No longer did he send caravans of bullion guarded by battalions of armed men: the roads were now too disordered for that. Instead he used the credit networks of a family of Marwari Oswal Jain financiers, originally from Nagaur in Jodhpur state, to whom in 1722 the Emperor had awarded the title the Jagat Seths, the Bankers of the World, as a hereditary distinction. Controlling the minting, collection and transfer of the revenues of the empire’s richest province, from their magnificent Murshidabad palace the Jagat Seths exercised influence and power that were second only to the Governor himself, and they soon came to achieve a reputation akin to that of the Rothschilds in nineteenth-century Europe.

Delhi in 1737 had around 2 million inhabitants. Larger than London and Paris combined, it was still the most prosperous and magnificent city between Ottoman Istanbul and imperial Edo (Tokyo).

Maratha armies swept ever further north, even the capital ceased to be secure. On 8 April 1737, a swift-moving warband under the young star commander of the Maratha Confederacy, Baji Rao, raided the outskirts of Agra and two days later appeared at the gates of Delhi, looting and burning the suburban villages of Malcha, Tal Katora, Palam and Mehrauli, where the Marathas made their camp in the shadow of the Qu’tb Minar, the victory tower which marked the arrival of the first Islamic conquerors of India 600 years earlier. The raiders dispersed when news came that Nawab Sa’adat Khan was approaching with his army from Avadh to head them off; but it was nevertheless an unprecedented insult to the Mughals and a blow to both their credibility and self-confidence.

In 1732, Nader had seized the Persian throne in a military coup. Shortly afterwards he deposed the last infant Safavid prince, ending 200 years of Safavid rule. Seven years later, in the spring of 1739, he invaded Afghanistan. Even before he had left Isfahan, there were rumours that his real plan was to mount a raid on the treasures of Mughal Delhi, ‘to pluck some golden feathers’ from the Mughal peacock.

On 29 March, a week after Nader Shah’s forces had entered the Mughal capital, a newswriter for the Dutch VOC sent a report in which he described Nader Shah’s bloody massacre of the people of Delhi: ‘the Iranians have behaved like animals,’ he wrote. ‘At least 100,000 people were killed. Nader Shah gave orders to kill anyone who defended himself. As a result it seemed as if it were raining blood, for the drains were streaming with it.’135 Ghulam Hussain Khan recorded how, ‘In an instant the soldiers getting on the tops of the houses commenced killing, slaughtering and plundering people’s property, and carrying away their wives and daughters. Numbers of houses were set on fire and ruined.’136

and more vulnerable successor states. The days of huge imperial armies, financed by an overflowing treasury, had ended for ever. Instead, as authority disintegrated, everyone took measures for their own protection and India became a decentralised and disjointed but profoundly militarised society. Almost everybody now carried weapons. Almost everybody was potentially a soldier. A military labour market sprang up across Hindustan – one of the most thriving free markets of fighting men anywhere in the world – all up for sale to the highest bidder. Indeed, warfare came to be regarded as a sort of business enterprise.143 By the end of the eighteenth century, substantial sections of the peasantry were armed and spent part of their year as mercenaries serving in distant locations. Sometimes they moved their family and agricultural bases to take advantage of opportunities for military earnings. Meanwhile, the regional rulers they fought for had to find ways of paying for them and the expensive new armies they needed in order to compete with their rivals. To do this they developed new state instruments of bureaucracy and fiscal reputation, attempting to exercise a much deeper control over commerce and production than the Mughal regime they had replaced.

However, the two powers which would make most use of the opportunities presented by the descent of the Mughal heartlands into Anarchy were not Indian at all. In Pondicherry and Madras, two rival European trading companies, alerted to Mughal weakness and the now deeply divided and fragmented nature of authority in India, began to recruit their own private security forces and to train and give generous wages to locally recruited infantry troops. As the EIC writer William Bolts later noted, seeing a handful of Persians take Delhi with such ease spurred the Europeans’ dreams of conquests and Empire in India. Nader Shah had shown the way.

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.

Europeans had long suspected they were superior to the Mughals in tactical prowess, but they had not appreciated how great this advantage had become due to military developments in the previous half-century since 1687 when the pike-wielding Jacobean troops of Sir Josiah Child were quickly overwhelmed by Aurangzeb’s Mughal troopers. But the wars of late seventeenth-century Europe had seen rapid development in military tactics, particularly the widespread introduction of flintlock muskets and socket bayonets to replace pikes. The organisation of the infantry into battalions, regiments and brigades made continuous firing and complex battlefield manoeuvres by infantry a possibility.

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. In 1749, in return for a small trading port, the EIC became involved in its first attempt at what today would be called regime change, taking sides in a succession dispute in the Maratha kingdom of Tanjore. The attempted coup was a miserable failure.

Dupleix, however, had much more success as a military entrepreneur. His clients had to pay for their European weapons and troops in land grants and land revenue collection rights that would enable the French Compagnie to maintain its sepoys and finance its trade from Indian revenues rather than importing bullion from Europe. 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. Dupleix was handsomely rewarded for his assistance with a present of £77,500, the high Mughal rank of Mansab of 7,000 horse – the equivalent of a Dukedom in Europe – the rich port of Masulipatnam and a jagir (a landed estate) worth £20,000.* Selling the services of his trained and disciplined troops, he soon realised, was an infinitely more profitable business than dealing in cotton textiles.

reality, however, these were all two-way transactions: weak Indian rulers of fragmented post-Mughal states offered large blocks of territory, or land revenue, to the different European Companies in return for military support. The warfare that followed, which usually involved very small Company armies, was often incoherent and inconclusive, but it confirmed that the Europeans now had a clear and consistent military edge over Indian cavalry, and that small numbers of them were capable of altering the balance of power in the newly fractured political landscape that had followed the fall of the Mughal Empire.

On 21 June 1752, a party of French Indians led by the French adventurer Charles Langlade, who had a Huron wife and was also influential among the Seneca, Iroquois and Micmac, led a war party of 240 warriors down Lake Huron, across Lake Erie and into the newly settled farmlands of British Ohio. Tomahawks at the ready, they fell on the British settlement of Pickawillany, achieving complete surprise. Only twenty British settlers managed to muster at the stockade. Of those, one was later scalped and another ceremonially boiled and the most delicious parts of his body eaten.161

As late as 1621, two decades after its founding, the Company was still operating from the home of Sir Thomas Smythe, its Governor, with a permanent staff of only half a dozen.4 It was not until 1648 that the Company finally moved to Leadenhall Street, operating from a humble, narrow-fronted house whose first-storey façade was decorated with images of galleons in full sail at sea. In 1698, when a casual passer-by asked who lay within, he was told ‘men with deep purses and great designs’.5 Soon after East India House was given a Palladian facelift, a Portuguese traveller noted in 1731 that it was ‘lately magnificently built, with a stone front to the street; but the front being very narrow, does not make an appearance in any way answerable to the grandeur of the house within, which stands upon a great deal of ground, the offices and storehouses admirably well contrived, and the public hall and committee room scarce inferior to anything of the like nature in the city’.6 Like so much about the power of the East India Company, the modest appearance of East India House was deeply deceptive.

The two terse and plain-spoken men worked well together, and Lawrence was the first to spot Clive’s potential. 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. It was at this point, under the tutelage of Stringer Lawrence, that the Madras authorities began to imitate the French initiative and for the first time started training up their own sepoys – at first mainly Telugu-speakers – and drilling them to fight in infantry formations, supported by mobile European field artillery. For many years, the sepoys numbered only a few hundred and did not even have proper uniforms; what fighting they did was initially tentative and amateurish: ‘How very ignorant we were of the art of war in those days,’ wrote Clive in the mid-1750s, looking back at his performance in the early years of the Carnatic Wars. 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.

The profits from Calcutta’s trade were huge and still growing, but what really attracted Indians to this foreign-owned Company town was the sense that it was safe and secure. 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.26 In 1750, Bhaskar Pandit, a general of the Maratha leader Bhonsle, invaded Bengal again, this time with 20,000 cavalry. They carried out night raids, pillaging the Nawab’s camp, and destroyed the convoys which brought provisions for his army. The Marathas followed a scorched-earth policy, burning the neighbouring villages to prevent grain from reaching the enemy. The Nawab’s soldiers were thus denied food, conveyance and their own baggage, and so rendered ineffective, something the Company factors graphically described in their letters home.27 Vaneshwar Vidyalankar, the Pandit of the Maharaja of Bardwan, wrote that the Marathas ‘are niggard of pity, slayers of pregnant women and infants, of Brahmans and the poor, fierce of spirit, expert in robbing the property of everyone and committing every sinful act. They created a local cataclysm and caused the extirpation of the people of Bengal villages like an [ominous] comet.’

The Bargis [Marathas] began to plunder the villages and all the people fled in terror. Brahmin pandits fled, taking with them loads of manuscripts; goldsmiths fled with the scales and weights; and fishermen with their nets and lines – all fled. The people fled in all directions; who could count their numbers? All who lived in villages fled when they heard the name of the Bargis. Ladies of good family, who had never before set a foot on a road fled from the Bargis with baskets on their heads. And land owning Rajputs, who had gained their wealth with the sword, threw down their swords and fled. And sadhus and monks fled, riding on litters, their bearers carrying their baggage on their shoulders; and many farmers fled, their seed for next year’s crops on the backs of their bullocks, and ploughs on their shoulders. And pregnant women, all but unable to walk, began their labour on the road and were delivered there. There were some people who stood in the road and asked of all who passed where the Bargis were. Everyone replied – I have not seen them with my own eyes. But seeing everyone flees, I flee also. Then suddenly the Bargis swept down with a great shout and surrounded the people in their fields. They snatched away gold and silver, rejecting everything else. Of some people they cut off the hand, of some the nose and ears; some they killed outright. They dragged away the most beautiful women, who tried to flee, and tied ropes to their fingers and necks. When one had finishe...

Among the refugees were those who would go on to found some of the city’s most illustrious dynasties such as Nabakrishna Deb and Ramdulal Dey.33 But it was not just the protection of a fortification that was the attraction. Already Calcutta had become a haven of private enterprise, drawing in not just Bengali textile merchants and moneylenders, but also Parsis, Gujaratis and Marwari entrepreneurs and business houses who found it a safe and sheltered environment in which to make their fortunes.34 This large Indian population also included many wealthy merchants who simply wanted to live out of the reach of the Nawab’s taxation net. Others took advantage of the protection of the British fleet to make trading expeditions to Persia, the Gulf and eastwards through the Strait of Malacca to China.

Whatever their many vices, wrote Shushtari, the English welcomed and rewarded talent: ‘the English have no arbitrary dismissal,’ he noted, ‘and every competent person keeps his job until he writes his own request for retirement or resignation. More remarkable still is that they take part in most of the festivals and ceremonies of Muslims and Hindus, mixing with the people. They pay great respect to accomplished scholars of whatever sect.’

On one occasion Aliverdi Khan told his elderly general, Mir Jafar Khan, that the Europeans were like a hive of bees, ‘of whose honey you might reap benefit, but if you disturbed their hive they would sting you to death’.53 He advised his generals not to antagonise them: ‘What wrong have the English done me that I should wish them ill?’ He told one headstrong Afghan officer: ‘Look at yonder plain covered with grass; should you set fire to it, there would be no stopping its progress; and who is the man then that shall put out the fire that shall break forth at sea, and from thence come upon land? Beware of lending an ear to such proposals again, for they will produce nothing but evil.’

Not one of the many sources for the period – Persian, Bengali, Mughal, French, Dutch or English – has a good word to say about Siraj: according to Jean Law, who was his political ally, ‘His reputation was the worst imaginable.’ This young man of average height, aged about 24 or 25 years old … was noted for indulgence in all kinds of debauchery and for his revolting cruelty. The women of the Gentiles [Hindus] are in the habit of bathing in the Ganges. Siraj was informed by his henchmen of those who were of some beauty. He would send his henchmen in small boats to carry them off while they were still in the water. He had been seen many times, when the river was in flood, to intentionally ram the ferry boats to jolt them, or make them spring a leak, in order to experience the cruel pleasure of frightening a hundred or more people – men, women and children – many of whom would not know how to swim and would be certain to perish by drowning. If it was necessary to get rid of some minister or noble, Siraj would volunteer his services. Aliverdi Khan, who could not bear to hear the cries of those being executed, would in the meantime retire to some garden or house outside the city. People trembled at the mere mention of his name. Such was the dread he inspired … This thoughtless young man had no real talent for government. He ruled only by inspiring fear, but at the same time he was known to be the most cowardly of men.

Siraj’s most serious error was to alienate the great bankers of Bengal, the Jagat Seths. The Seths’ machinations had brought Aliverdi to power, and anyone who wanted to operate in the region did well to cultivate their favour; but Siraj did the opposite to the two men of the family who were now in charge of the banking house, Mahtab Rai, the current holder of the title Jagat Seth, and Swaroop Chand, his first cousin, who had been accorded the title ‘Maharaja’ by Aliverdi Khan.

Aliverdi Khan died on 9 April 1756, at 5 a.m. He was buried that day, next to his mother in the Khushbagh. That same evening Siraj ud-Daula attacked the palace of his aunt Ghasiti Begum, killed or disarmed her household troops and seized all her money and jewellery. The following month, on 22 May, Siraj was marching towards Purnea with thousands of men and 500 elephants to attack a cousin he saw as another potential rival, when he met his grandfather’s agent, Narayan Singh, who was returning from his mission to Calcutta angry and humiliated. He told the new Nawab that Drake had had him seized and expelled from the city without so much as an audience. ‘“What honour is left to us,” he asked, “when a few traders, who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms, reply to a ruler’s order by expelling the envoy?” Siraj ud-Daula, on hearing such words, with a vast force, turned back and in one night’s march came and alighted at the back of the English factory at Kasimbazar.’