The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

by William Dalrymple

This was every day becoming more likely. The absence of taxes and customs duty all added to the financial pressure on the Nawab and led to growing violence in the streets of Murshidabad where the Nawab’s hungry sepoys were now taking matters into their own hands. But it also did much to alienate powerful individuals who might otherwise have been tempted to throw in their lot with the Company-backed regime. One of the first victims of the new power equation in Bengal was an influential Kashmiri trader named Mir Ashraf. Mir Ashraf was part of a dynasty of cultured Patna-based merchant princes who had grown rich on the manufacture and trade of saltpetre, derived from the mineral nitrates which appeared naturally in the soils of Bihar. As well as being an important ingredient of gunpowder, it was also used by the Mughals to cool their drinks. Mir Ashraf’s dynasty had good political connections at the Murshidabad court, and until the Battle of Plassey they had found it easy to dominate the saltpetre trade with the support of the Nawab. This irritated their British counterparts, who were unable to compete with the Mir’s efficient procurement organisation, and who had for some years been complaining unsuccessfully that he was monopolising all saltpetre stocks and so shutting them out of the market. Before Plassey, these complaints about Mir Ashraf were simply ignored by Nawab Aliverdi Khan, who dismissed the petitions against his friend by English interlopers as absurdly presumpt...