The British Conquest of India (1798-1806)
I. Background & Grand Strategy
Hi, and welcome to Strategy Stuff. When it comes to conquest in the late 18th Century, we usually think first of Revolutionary France and its attempts to establish hegemony over Europe. But during the same period, Britain – or more accurately its East India Company – also conquered out a hegemony in South Asia, one that was just as extensive and certainly longer-lasting than the French attempt.
In a series of wars between 1799 and 1806, British Indian forces decisively defeated almost all their indigenous rivals on the subcontinent: most notably the Sultanate of Mysore in the south, and the Maratha Empire in the center and north. In the process, British rule expanded throughout the coasts and up the Ganges River, seizing many old and famous states along the way. By the end of the period, there was no longer any doubt: Britain alone dominated this ‘Jewel in the Crown’.
These events are usually interpreted as an inevitable consequence of European military superiority, but in fact, throughout this period most British strategymakers opposed and even tried to stop expansion. That it happened anyway was arguably due to one man – the chief official of India, Richard Wellesley, the Earl of Mornington – and his desire to conquer the subcontinent for his own political gain.
Ironically, India would give a
bigger boost to the career of Richard’s younger brother, Arthur Wellesley,
later to achieve military fame as the Duke of Wellington. To minimize
confusion, this video series will refer to Richard as ‘Mornington’ and Arthur
anachronistically as ‘Wellington’. Together, they – alongside other generals
and officials – would not only produce a seminal example of European
imperialism, but also forcibly induct South Asia into the European world order
and lay the groundwork for the modern states that exist there today.
This is Part I of a five-part series, where we will go over the situation in India during the 1790s, as well as examine why Britain embarked on conquest.
1. India in the 1790s
By the 1790s, European states had
collectively been in India for nearly 3 centuries, but they still knew
remarkably little about the subcontinent. Part of this was due to their
tendency to characterize Indian society as being filled with ‘Oriental’ traditions
such as Hinduism, caste and village communalism, all allegedly indecipherable
from a Western perspective.
In fact, when it came to political
dynamics, Indian states operated under conditions loosely akin to medieval
European feudalism. Above all, and unlike most of 18th Century
Europe, Indian rulers did not have large central bureaucracies to extract
financial and military resources from their lands themselves. Instead, they
relied on local lords to collect taxes and raise troops, which inevitably meant
that the lords kept a portion of those resources for their own use.
And just like in feudal Europe, this meant that the local lords could resist their rulers, leading to a chronic and cyclical struggle between them. When the state was young and unsettled, rulers could reorganize elite networks to dominate the lords and take their resources. But as the state matured and rigidified, rulers lost the ability to reorganize and dominate, which let the lords keep more resources and put up stronger resistance. This began a self-reinforcing cycle that would eventually reduce the ruler to a powerless figurehead, while the lords became independent states in all but name.
Over the course of the 18th Century, South Asia experienced three such cycles at the empire level: first the Mughal Emperor lost power to the Maratha Emperor, then the Maratha Emperor lost power to his Prime Minister or ‘Peshwa’, and finally the Maratha Peshwa lost power to his subordinates. Similar cycles also occurred at the local level, shattering India into a constellation of independent and practically-independent states, the smallest ones no larger than a fort while the largest ones sprawled over several regions. Formal borders didn’t really exist: instead, there were ‘frontier zones’ where local populations switched support to whichever lord bribed or threatened them at that very moment.
Warfare was endemic within such an environment. To defend themselves, local lords raised the typical feudal units of peasant levies and aristocratic cavalry, but the richest ones also hired from an extensive mercenary economy trading in professional soldiers, nomadic cavalry, and even entire supply trains. In fact, the use of mercenaries was so predominant that Indian wars were less about actual fighting, and more about the constant negotiation to quote-unquote ‘re-hire’ enemy forces on agreeable terms!
One might expect mercenary costs to greatly advantage the wealthy regions of India, particularly the coasts which hosted the legendary spice trade. But as with most things strategy, success is less about spending the most resources, and more about spending them efficiently. And throughout this period, there was no more resource-efficient Indian military unit than light cavalry, which could both conduct, and be paid from, large-scale plundering raids. So by sending swarms of light cavalry into enemy territory, Indian rulers could exert significant military pressure at minimal cost. This practice was so common that the English word ‘loot’ comes from it!
As such, the strongest indigenous states of the period were those best able to deploy light cavalry, namely the ones situated on the drier, poorer yet cavalry-friendlier plateaus of inland India. There was the Sultanate of Mysore in the south, the Nizamate of Hyderabad in the center, and the great lords of the Maratha Empire in the center and north. There were also the Afghans to the far northwest, whose periodic eruptions into the subcontinent were a source of constant anxiety to all, including the British.
By the 1790s, this military picture was slowly changing, as indigenous rulers gradually adopted European military methods based around drilled musket infantry. Still, the geopolitical picture remained largely intact: after all, only the established powers could offer protection to the trading companies who sold the guns and the instructors. So the list of states that trained European-style ‘sepoy’ infantry remained the same as before – Mysore, Hyderabad, the great Maratha lords – and they used these units to great effect against unreformed neighbors, further consolidating their joint dominance over India.
In the process, however, the indigenous powers also had to confront the problems associated with so-called ‘Westernization’, as the costs of adopting European military methods clashed with the feudal basis of Indian government. In particular, unlike light cavalry, sepoys couldn’t pay for themselves through raiding: the state had to pay them regularly, and that would require a larger and stabler resource stream than what the traditional reliance on local lords could provide.
So in response, almost every indigenous ruler initiated centralization reforms to try and extract more revenue from their lands. Some repurposed their sepoys as armed tax collectors; others adopted the much-maligned practice of ‘tax farming’, where taxation rights were sold to urban elites. Topping them all were the efforts of the Mysore Sultans, who suppressed the feudal system and replaced it with a central tax bureaucracy built from scratch!
Despite it all, these efforts yielded only partial success, and every indigenous ruler continued to struggle with paying sepoys. Furthermore, the feudal lords did not appreciate being sidelined by centralization, and their opposition opened up political divides that an enemy could exploit. Still, the mere existence of reforms worried European observers, with some warning that the British had only 30 years before the Indians caught up and ejected them from the subcontinent.
This was a Eurocentric assessment. In reality, indigenous states – except maybe Mysore – reformed mainly to better fight each other, not Westerners. To them, the British were not only a source of technology and trade, but also a safe counterbalance against any indigenous rival seeking hegemony. After all, nothing indicated that the British wanted to carve out their own hegemony over India… at least, not until now.
2. Britain’s India Policy: Mercantilists vs. Reformists
The late 18th Century was as much a period of reform for the British Empire as it was for India, so much so that historians have used it as a dividing line separating the ‘First’ British Empire, focused on the Atlantic, and the ‘Second’ British Empire, focused on Asia. British India itself reflects this change quite nicely: at the start of this period in 1798, its leaders were mostly veterans of the American Revolutionary War; by the end of it in 1807, its rising stars would go on to enjoy careers in South and Southeast Asia.
This generational change affected not just personnel, but also British thinking about Empire. In the 1790s, most of the British imperial leadership – including both Parliament and the Directors of the East India Company, or EIC – had what this video series will call a ‘Mercantilist’ view of British grand strategy. To them, the point of Empire was to bring as much gold as possible into British coffers.
Mercantilists therefore assessed imperial strategy through the lens of short-term profit, a focus sharpened by the EIC’s debt crisis throughout the previous decades. To them, British India was there to supply the EIC with goods needed for a profitable trade: not just spices and textiles, but also silver to buy Chinese tea.
By this metric, British India was already a complete success. The EIC controlled the relevant crop areas in southern India, and in the east, its takeover of Bengal in the 1760s had given it a large population that could be taxed for silver. No European rival could challenge this position, nor stop the British from accessing the subcontinent. Mercantilists therefore argued that there was nothing more that Britain wanted – or should want – from India, and any further expansion would only lead to needless expenses and the acquisition of unnecessary territory.
Mercantilism had long guided British strategy, but by the late 18th Century, a new viewpoint was rising up to challenge it, which this video series will call ‘Reformist’. Influenced by the political theories of the Enlightenment, Reformists believed that the state, rather than being a mere tool for profit, should also be used to establish a quote-unquote ‘rational’ order over society. This thinking is usually associated with the wholesale reorganization of Revolutionary France, but – crucially for this video series – British Reformists wanted to reorganize society too. They just wanted to achieve it through reform, not revolution, and by promoting the rule of the landed gentry, rather than a central bureaucracy.
Reformists therefore assessed British Indian policy from a different perspective. Firstly, they demanded internal reform of the EIC in order to make it less ‘corrupt’ and more ‘rational’. This eventually resulted in a whole host of changes aimed at raising the quality of colonial governance, ranging from language requirements for officials, to army medical units, to systematic tax and geographic surveys.
Secondly, Reformist ambitions were not limited to British society: many also believed that Indian society needed to be ‘rationalized’. Inevitably, ‘rational’ was defined from the British perspective as a post-feudal European state, so little within Indian feudalism was ever seen as ‘rational’. Instead, Indian village life was quote-unquote ‘lazy’, Indian mercenary negotiation was ‘deceitful’, and Indian centralization initiatives were ‘corrupt’. As Reformists saw it, these traditions prevented Indian society from ‘rationally’ making good use of its resources, and so it was Britain’s burden to develop the subcontinent.
Lastly, Reformists also sought to align government policy with a grand strategy based on a ‘rational’ analysis of Britain’s geographic position and comparative advantages. Most concluded that such a grand strategy involved being the conduit and guarantor for global trade, which in turn meant that British power was best used to both open up new markets for British trade, and to stop indigenous powers from closing off existing ones. Accordingly, the indigenous states of India, with their vast untapped populations and worryingly strengthening governments, became priority targets whose control would secure Britain’s ‘Place in the Sun’, especially after the loss of the Thirteen Colonies.
In short, the debate over British Indian strategy boiled down to two policy positions: either keep to the status quo, and risk what Reformists feared would be strategic and civilizational stagnation, or expand, and risk what Mercantilists feared would be a financial drain: but that said, practical politics muddied these distinctions significantly. Britain’s Prime Minister during the 1780s and 90s was Pitt the Younger, and he supported the Reformist position on India and the EIC; however, in order to get the Mercantilists to support Company reform, Pitt had to give them an India Act that was strategically Mercantilist, even going so far as to ban British aggression against the indigenous powers.
But cunningly, Pitt left an opening that he hoped to eventually use for Indian expansion. The Act gave the Prime Minister great influence over who was to be the Governor-General of Bengal, who actually oversaw all EIC holdings in India; and while the Governor-General was, on paper, primarily responsible to the Mercantilist Directors of the EIC, a politically-strong Prime Minister could shield his appointee from the latter’s fury and in so doing, get British India to pursue state rather than Company interests.
In 1796, Pitt felt that he was politically strong enough to give British India to his preferred candidate: Richard Wellesley, the Earl of Mornington. This was partly rewarding a political supporter, but equally importantly, Pitt knew that Mornington desired ‘great achievements’ to advance his political career. And just to be absolutely sure, Pitt and his colleagues privately encouraged Mornington to expand British India, even as his official instructions continued to parrot the Mercantilist strategy of non-aggression.
And so in late 1797, Mornington departed for British India to become its Governor-General, determined to make his mark on the subcontinent.
3. Mornington’s Grand Strategy
Mornington arrived in India on April 1798, finding a land where the British were a major, but by no means hegemonic, player. The formal holdings of the EIC were split into three Presidencies, each isolated on land from the others: in the east was Bengal on the lower Ganges River, whose capital Calcutta was also the capital of British India; in the south was Madras, whose coastal enclaves hosted the Company’s spice trade; and in the west was Bombay, the oldest possession but for now, just an unprofitable group of islands that the EIC had nearly considered abandoning!
Attached to each Presidency were the informal holdings of the EIC, consisting of indigenous states bound to the British through so-called ‘subsidiary alliances’. These were essentially vassal treaties where the ruler had to accept EIC direction over his foreign affairs, and also pay for an EIC garrison within his own capital! Subsidiary alliances were a clever way for the EIC to offload some of its military expenses, while gaining ‘buffer zones’ further up the Ganges and along the coasts to shield its formal holdings from hostile invasion. Beyond that, the British also had a regular alliance with Hyderabad in central inland India, the latter having suffered a near-death experience against the Maratha lords in 1795.
None of these links were particularly exotic from a European perspective. But one of the most important relationships the British had in India was, in fact, not with a major landed power: it was with the Mughal Emperor in Delhi, on the Upper Ganges. Once, his Empire encompassed almost all of the subcontinent; now, he barely ruled even the city of Delhi itself. But that historical legacy meant that most of the subcontinent’s rulers still saw him as a source of legitimacy whose endorsement would justify their own rule. The British were no exception: after all, they technically only governed Bengal on behalf of the Mughals.
So far, the British had acted as a loyal – though nominal – subordinate of the Emperor. But this meant that it was the Emperor, not the British, who determined what was legitimate when it came to subcontinental governance. As a result, previous Governor-Generals had to put up with certain behaviors that would have been absolutely unacceptable within Europe, in particular the tendency of allies, vassals and even officials to share political, diplomatic or military information with other states!
This was the situation that greeted Mornington on his arrival, and with his need for achievement in mind, the new Governor-General soon decided on two policies that would align India with Reformist goals. Firstly, British India would expand: it would take all the remaining coast, occupy whatever valuable territory was inland, and place as much of the subcontinent as possible under its influence.
Secondly, Mornington would also begin the work of ‘rationalizing’ or more accurately ‘Europeanizing’ India. At the domestic level, this meant remaking Indian feudal society to better resemble the British experience; at the international level, British India would ditch its subordination to the Mughals and establish a new regional state order with European standards of behavior and Britain, naturally, as its head. Such changes would of course render India more accessible to British exploitation, but Reformists also believed that they would also be removing many of the barriers that hindered India’s development. In a sense, such a project was not so different from Revolutionary France’s famous reorganization of Central Europe a decade later.
Both expansion and reorganization put British India on a collision course with everybody else on the subcontinent. But even before that, Mornington first had to neutralize the inevitable opposition from the Mercantilist Directors of the EIC, who – albeit with a communications lag of 6 months – would doubtlessly try to impeach him for violating the India Act’s ban on aggression.
To a limited extent, Mornington tried to persuade the EIC, speculating that acquiring new territories and vassals would bring in additional profits. But for the most part, he preferred to appeal to state interest, and in so doing get Parliament to override the EIC. To achieve this, Mornington spun a new narrative for India, claiming that a hostile coalition was forming against the British, and the only way to survive was to embrace aggression and defeat each enemy pre-emptively.
But who was to be the British bogeyman? Given that this was 1798, the answer was, of course, Revolutionary France. In reality, Mornington did not believe that France, even in league with its Spanish and Dutch allies, posed any threat to British India. Nevertheless, playing up the ‘French threat’ was a surefire way to get Parliament to endorse expansion, and what’s more, the French played their part perfectly. In early 1798, the French governor of Mauritius made a rather ineffective call for volunteers to help the indigenous British rival of Mysore; more dramatically, in mid-1798 Napoleon set out to conquer Egypt, with India rumored to be his ultimate target. But if that was indeed the intention, a British naval squadron in the Red Sea quickly stopped any further progress.
All these seemingly validated Mornington’s conspiracy of a ‘French threat’ to British India. According to this narrative, Paris was an omnipresent manipulator of Indian states, and all French mercenaries – Royalist or Revolutionary – were fifth columnists itching to raise the Tricolore. Their machinations had already made Mysore into a French puppet, and every indigenous power with French officers or French-trained sepoys – i.e. all of them – was only one coup away from suffering the same fate. The French could supposedly even get Persia to get the Afghans to invade India!
Mornington’s ploy worked. His master, Prime Minister Pitt, remained politically strong and easily suppressed Mercantilist calls for a less hysterical assessment, and so Parliament retroactively agreed that the removal of French influence in India, no matter how vague, was a valid reason to take offensive action, no matter how drastic. Mornington now had a free hand to seek his ‘achievements’.
Even before he received London’s response, Mornington was already ordering EIC forces to prepare for war. But he was also fine with winning non-violently, and as luck would have it, an opportunity for that cropped up almost immediately. The target was the British regular ally of Hyderabad, and the catalyst, as with so many subsequent expansion opportunities, was a succession crisis.
Here, the favored heir found his status challenged by a rival who was supported by Hyderabad’s sepoys, trained and led by French mercenaries. In desperation, the heir sought out Mornington, who offered the following deal: the EIC would support the heir’s claim and even send their own sepoys to disarm the French ones, but afterwards the British troops would stay in the capital and Hyderabad would pay for them. In other words, it was a subsidiary alliance.
Recognizing not only the personal, but also the military consequences for friendless Hyderabad if he refused, the heir agreed and so, in late 1798, one of the top indigenous powers in India smoothly turned into a British vassal. It wasn’t even that hard for Mornington to expel the French: contrary to his own narrative, the French mercenaries were only interested in money, not politics, and so were easily bribed away by, amusingly, granting them EIC shares that they could sell once they returned to Europe!
In a single month, Mornington had gained territory that previous rulers had taken years to conquer. But this only served to whet his appetite, as he speculated that other indigenous powers might be just as quote-unquote ‘corrupt’ as Hyderabad. In any case, the EIC’s armies had already been mobilized with another target in mind…
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Thanks for watching the video, and please like, subscribe and hit the bell button! If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them in the comments section. This is Part I of a five-part series: Part II will be about the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War and its aftermath.
