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March 24 - April 27, 2020
After Ghulam Qadir had taken a formal oath swearing he came to his sovereign in peace
The only problem was that, thanks to the machinations of the ever-vindictive Philip Francis, Parliament had impeached the wrong man.
But Hastings was nevertheless by far the most responsible and sympathetic of all the officials the Company had yet sent to India.
with a countenance placid and thoughtful, but when animated, full of intelligence.
the Impeachment demonstrated above all the sheer ignorance of the British about the subcontinent they had been looting so comprehensively, and profitably, for thirty years.
it helped publicise the corruption, violence and venality of the EIC, so setting the stage for further governmental oversight, regulation and control.
1773 Regulating Act
Pitt’s India Act of 1784, which made the Company’s political and military transactions subjec...
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Cornwallis’s mission was now to make sure that the same never happened in India.
Imagine everything that is glorious in nature combined with everything that is beautiful in architecture,’ wrote the newly arrived William Hunter,
by the end of the decade, Cornwallis was able to report back to London that revenues exceeded expenditure by £2 million.
Part of these profits came from the successful introduction of new cash crops like sugar, opium and indigo,
the Company state was able to keep building its army and apportion over £3 million annually to military expenditure, a sum no other South Asian power could possibly match.
Bengal army sepoys classed as ‘gentlemen troopers’ earned around Rs300 a year,
Burton Stein nicely put it: ‘The colonial conquest of India was as much bought as fought.’
‘The greatest obstacle you have to conquer is the jealousy of the Europeans,’ he wrote. ‘The English are today all-powerful in India. It is necessary to weaken them by war.’
In America, Britain had lost its colonies not to Native Americans, but to the descendants of European settlers.
Cornwallis brought in a whole raft of unembarrassedly racist legislation aimed at excluding the children of British men who had Indian wives, or bibis, from employment by the Company.
In 1791 the door was slammed shut when an order was issued that no one with an Indian parent could be employed by the Civil, Military or Marine branches of the Company.
The Company’s ever-growing Indian empire could not have been achieved without the political and economic support of regional power groups and local communities.
By the end of the century, Bengal was annually yielding a steady revenue surplus of Rs25 million at a time when Scindia struggled to net Rs1.2 million
He was determined to secure India for British rule and was equally determined to oust the French from their last footholds on the subcontinent.
‘I would rather live a day as a lion than a lifetime as a sheep … Better to die like a soldier, than to live a miserable dependant on the infidels, in their list of pensioned rajas and nabobs.’
something that has yet to happen with the real loot of Srirangapatnam.
In due course it made its way back to the Clive seat of Powis, where it was put on display beside the loot collected, forty years earlier, from the Murshidabad palace of Siraj ud-Daula. There it remains.
The rump was returned to the Hindu Wadyar dynasty whose throne Haidar and Tipu had usurped.
Tiger of Mysore, the single Indian ruler who did more than any other to resist the onslaught of the Company.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Lord Wellesley, raising a glass, when the news of Tipu’s death was brought to him, ‘I drink to the corpse of India.’
Mughal Vakil-i-Mutlaq, or Vizier.
Shah Alam’s one remaining pleasure was his literary work. He spent much of his free time in his seventies editing his lifetime’s poetic composition, from which he produced a single volume of his favourite verses, and the Nadirat-i-Shahi, Diwan-i-Aftab.
Once war broke out, he would soon need all these reserves of trust and popularity to persuade his troops to face down the magnificent Maratha artillery.
After the rural upheavals of Cornwallis’s land reforms had settled down, the Company in Bengal found it had a considerable annual revenue surplus of Rs25 million.
Indeed, bankers from across India began to compete among themselves to supply the Company army with finance.
Ultimately the East India Company succeeded in war precisely because it had found a way to provide a secure financial base for its powerful mercenary army,
Wellesley also worked hard to keep the warring Maratha armies from patching up their differences.
In particular, adopting the old Roman maxim divide et impera, divide and rule, Wellesley did all he could to keep Scindia and Holkar from reconciling.
Wellesley was developing an aggressive new conception of British Empire in India, not as a corporate but as a state enterprise;
Sir George Barlow first articulated it in an official memorandum: ‘It is absolutely necessary,’ he wrote, ‘that no Native State should be left to exist in India which is not upheld by the British power, or the political conduct of which is not under its absolute control.’
Lord Valentia arrived in Calcutta he applauded Wellesley’s imperial style, writing that it was better that ‘India be ruled from a palace than a counting house’;
Because of Arthur Wellesley’s later celebrity after Waterloo, Assaye has long come to be regarded as the crucial victory of the Maratha War;
Before long, the Company would conclude treaties with all the Rajput states that had been fiefs of Scindia: Jodhpur, Jaipur, Macheri, Bundi and the Jat Raja of Bharatpur.
‘We are now complete masters of India,’ wrote Thomas Munro, ‘and nothing can shake our power if we take proper measures to confirm it.’
Memories of earlier Maratha sieges and lootings were not easily forgotten and Scindia’s troops had always been unpopular in Delhi; no one, it seems, was sad to see them go.
the Line of Timour is extinct as a Dynasty; beginning with the lame, and ending with the blind.
It had hardly been a glorious reign, but his was, nonetheless, a life marked by kindness, decency, integrity and learning at a time when all such qualities were in short supply.
he had guided his dynasty through its lowest moments and managed to keep the Mughal flame alive through the worst of the Great Anarchy.
The Company understood the importance of infiltrating the Mughal system rather than simply blowing it apart or abolishing it.
