The British Conquest of India (1798-1806)
II. The 4th Anglo-Mysore War
Hi, and welcome to Strategy Stuff. This is Part II of a five-part series on how Britain and its East India Company, between 1798 and 1807, established hegemony over India through conquest.
In the last Part, the chief official of British India, Richard Wellesley the Earl of Mornington, had just arrived on the subcontinent, determined to achieve something to advance his political ambitions. Unexpectedly, he had scored an early success when a major indigenous power, Hyderabad, submitted to Company rule. Now, Mornington would return to his intended target: the south Indian power of Mysore.
4. The 4th Anglo-Mysore War (1799-1803)
In many ways, Mysore was the perfect target for Mornington, who still wasn’t sure how much aggression his superiors in Parliament and the EIC would really tolerate. Mysore had fought the British three times, kept links with Revolutionary France, and had a reputation for torturing Europeans. Its threat had diminished significantly after Britain imposed a punitive peace on it in their last war, but Mornington banked that London would not find a new conflict with it too objectionable.
Mysore at this time was ruled by the Muslim Tipu Sultan, whose father had usurped the original Hindu dynasty in the 1760s. Taking advantage of unsettled circumstances, and identifying British India as their main rival, both father and son initiated extensive centralization reforms that aimed to turn Mysore into an economic powerhouse with a Europeanized military to match. Tipu, in particular, was not satisfied with merely sidelining feudal lords nor with creating a new tax bureaucracy; instead, he also sought to establish factories, merchant convoys, and even overseas colonies!
All these changes were bound to trigger discontent amongst Tipu’s traditionalist subjects, and so to suppress opposition, he increasingly relied on forced labor, state terror and Islamic zealotry. The extra resources gained by these reforms were poured back into the Mysorean military: expanding the number of sepoy infantry, repairing forts, founding a navy, and even conducting innovative experiments with rocket artillery.
Aware that he needed time for these changes to mature, Tipu sought out defensive alliances against the British with whoever he could find: fellow Indians, fellow Muslims, and Revolutionary France. But here, he was to be sorely disappointed. Tipu’s neighbors – Hyderabad and the Maratha Empire – were traditional enemies and were happy to see him fall, while the Ottomans and Persians were more interested in keeping Britain’s friendship than in defending distant Mysore. And as we’ve seen, French ‘help’ was ineffective and positively accelerated the onset of British aggression.
On the other side, Mornington was also running into problems as he prepared British India for war. The most serious one was with the Afghans, who were invading India again, raising fears that their cavalry might sweep all the way down the Ganges to Bengal. It would have been quite impossible for British India to start a war with Mysore under such circumstances, but the British found a typically colonial solution for this: bribe the Persians to attack the Afghans and force the latter’s recall! Unlike Mysore, British diplomacy worked, and Mornington was soon able to turn his attention back to Tipu.
There was also the question of funding, which Mornington solved by raising loans from indigenous merchants and, to the fury of the EIC Directors in London, re-appropriating the Bengal silver tax that was meant to buy Chinese tea. And finally, Mornington also had to deal with the EIC civil and military bureaucracy, whose officials had been promoted by Mercantilists and therefore also shared their opposition to war. In fact, the main reason why Mysore wasn’t attacked as soon as Mornington arrived was due to stalling from this quote-unquote ‘deep state’, and by now, the Governor-General had finally had enough. In late 1798, he moved to Madras – the Presidency primarily responsible for fighting the upcoming war – to oversee things personally and browbeat any civil official who still defied him.
As for the military officials, Mornington sent the next-best thing: his younger brother Arthur, i.e. the future Duke of Wellington, who at the time led a regiment of European soldiers in India. In a move typical of the political patronage of the time, Mornington inserted Wellington into the staff of the Madras Army, both to help with the planning of the Mysore campaign and, more importantly, ensure that its commander, George Harris, actually carried it out.
Wellington soon discovered that not all of Harris’ excuses were fake. The geography of the upcoming war was well-known thanks to previous conflicts: Mysore lies on a plateau that rises steeply in the west, and gently in the east. An invasion from the east – i.e. Madras – was therefore the logical strategy, but that meant an inland journey of 500 kilometers, much of it through the frontier zone separating the two powers, which the Mysore light cavalry was sure to devastate as part of their scorched-earth campaign. What’s more, the whole campaign had to take place between October and March, because after that the famous Indian monsoon would start flooding rivers and cutting communications.
So to defeat Mysore, British forces would need to rapidly generate and maintain offensive momentum, and for that, they needed a comprehensive logistics plan. Three forces needed to be supplied: the main body of the Madras Army, numbering 30 thousand; a supporting force of 15 thousand from Hyderabad; and a 7-thousand strong detachment from the Bombay Army that would invade from the west. These numbers were roughly equivalent to contemporary European forces, but because Indian armies had looser regulations on baggage and accompanying non-combatants, the true size of the combined British armies was probably more like a hundred thousand!
Feeding these moving cities from supplies was no easy feat, and it was in planning for this that Wellington, as part of the Madras staff, first gained a reputation as a logistician and disciplinarian, though in this case he cheated a bit and got his brother to authorize the hiring of mercenary supply trains. Equally importantly, here Wellington also learnt the value of intelligence, as he took advantage of the reports pouring in from the feudal lords of Mysore, who sought revenge for Tipu’s repression.
Ultimately, Harris settled for a safe campaign strategy: the British would use the same route they had used in previous wars to enter Mysore, where they would then aim straight for Tipu’s capital, the fortress of Seringapatam. No serious military challenge was anticipated: while the Madras and Mysore sepoys largely came from the same local population, the EIC sepoys were better drilled and were also bolstered by 8 thousand European troops, used for the toughest jobs like fortress-storming. Mysore’s artillery, despite the rockets, was seen as inferior and its fortresses especially outdated; the only real worry came from its light cavalry, but they were plunderers, not battlers, and British logistics had hopefully neutralized the impact of their scorched-earth strategy.
So on November 1798, Mornington formally denounced Mysore for collaborating with France, forcing Tipu to face the prospect of fighting a war before his reforms were complete. By now, Mysore had 30 thousand sepoys and 15 thousand light cavalry, but the former couldn’t yet match the British in battle, and there wasn’t enough of the latter to stall out the British advance. His diplomacy had failed, and within Mysore, many preferred British colonialism to his continued repression. Seemingly resigned to his downfall, Tipu decided on what was essentially a final stand. His army would conduct token resistance as the British invaded, but afterwards they would withdraw into Seringapatam, where Tipu could only pray for an early monsoon to save him.
In the end, the 4th Anglo-Mysore War was a fairly straightforward affair for the British. Bowing to Mornington’s pressure, Harris amazingly set out on February 1799, right before the start of the monsoon. Wellington joined him as commander of the Hyderabad force, a position gained – yet again – due to patronage. A month later, both the Madras and Bombay armies entered Mysore from east and west, brushing aside the Mysorean sepoys and ignoring the harassment of the Mysorean light cavalry. By April, Harris was at Seringapatam; in early May, the walls were breached and the British promptly rushed in, killing Tipu and sacking the fortress. They did so just in time: a few days later, the long-delayed monsoon finally arrived, flooding the area and forcing a halt to any further operations.
The rapid demise of Mysore illustrates some of the problems indigenous rulers faced when resisting European imperialism. In their reviews of the campaign, both Harris and Wellington assessed that Mysore’s attempt to adopt European methods had been a fundamental strategic error. By 1799 it had been reforming for 3 decades, yet its military still folded before British Indian forces; furthermore, Tipu’s political centralization had destroyed Mysore’s feudal cohesion and encouraged local lords to either defect or not resist. As the British saw it, Tipu should have just fought in the traditional Indian light-cavalry manner which, besides not having the aforementioned problems, also had the advantage of being less familiar to Europeans, and so might have stood a better chance of stalling the British until the monsoon arrived.
This analysis has its merits, but it is also Anglocentric. It ignores that most indigenous powers – Mysore admittedly not being one of them – reformed primarily to fight each other, and in these wars sepoy units often proved very effective against traditional Indian militaries. The British also had a tendency to exaggerate the effects of Indian light cavalry plundering, while overlooking their inability to attack prepared forces or positions; in any case, the British were already developing counter-measures in the form of horse artillery.
And finally, Mysore’s fall can also be blamed on specific mistakes that Tipu made, rather than being an indictment of the entire project of indigenous reform. At the very least, had Tipu Sultan preemptively submitted to the British, he or his dynasty might have bought the time needed to complete Mysore’s transition out of feudalism. After all, that was what Hyderabad did, and as a result both state and dynasty survived the entire period of British rule.
5. Suppression (1799-1803)
With the capture of Seringapatam and the death of Tipu, the British were now in charge of Mysore. In what was fast becoming an unwelcome pattern of patronage, Wellington was again appointed as Governor of the newly-conquered territory, prompting angry protests from the more senior military commanders. But in all fairness, Wellington had proven his competence in campaign logistics, and it was expected that he would perform similarly well when it came to colonial administration.
Wellington’s first task was not anything civilian, however, but instead the suppression of residual resistance within Mysore. Here, the heirs of Tipu Sultan had already done the British a huge service when they agreed to accept the war’s outcome, but Mysore was still fundamentally a feudal state, and so, despite the central government’s surrender, local lords – including former British allies – now tried to take advantage of events to reassert their former authority. In this, they were joined by many of Tipu’s ex-sepoys, many of whom had now become mercenaries needing a new source of employment.
By far the most significant movement in this regard was the so-called ‘rebellion’ of one Dhondia Wagh, who led a coalition of border lords in the ‘frontier zone’ between northern Mysore, Hyderabad and the Maratha Empire. In a sense, what Wagh was doing was fairly standard under Indian feudalism, which was for a lord to take advantage of unsettled conditions to expand his own authority, and then use the power gained to extract various benefits and privileges from the ruler.
Unfortunately for Wagh, he was not dealing with a feudal Indian state, but with the post-feudal British who did not tolerate rival authorities in their own realm. Denouncing Wagh’s effort as an attempt to restore Tipu Sultan’s regime, Wellington set out to destroy him in one of the earliest examples of a colonial counter-insurgency campaign.
In doing so, Wellington was confronted by some of the challenges typical to counter-insurgency. First, with only a limited number of troops to secure a vast territory, the British had to rely on local support and therefore had to compete with Wagh for quote-unquote ‘hearts and minds’. Second, British Indian forces would also be operating within a ‘frontier zone’, where the lack of any central authority meant that borders were far less meaningful than they seemed to be on a map. In this case, Wellington was strictly ordered not to violate the territory of the neighboring Maratha Empire, even as Wagh’s forces criss-crossed the border with virtual impunity.
In response to these challenges, Wellington developed what he called his ‘Light and Quick’ strategy, which in reality was really just a systematized formulation of what British Indian forces were already doing. The ultimate goal of ‘Light and Quick’, or L & Q, was to suppress open resistance in as short a time as possible, and avoid a drawn-out campaign that would drain both finances and political will.
Tactically, L & Q employed fast units like cavalry and horse artillery which, in conjunction with local intelligence, could quickly rush to and attack enemy forces. Operationally, these units would be grouped into several columns, each operating on a separate line of communication, which would fragment enemy concentrations and allow them to be defeated in detail. And finally on a strategic level, through repeated success in L & Q, British forces would build up a reputation for being inescapable and invincible, thereby winning – or more accurately, psychologically dominating – local ‘hearts and minds’ and cowing them into stopping further resistance. To this, Wellington added the need to practice quote-unquote ‘fair dealing’, which meant both reliably punishing anti-British activity – savagely, if needed – and also rewarding pro-British ones.
The campaign against Wagh was Wellington’s first as an independent commander, and it was one where the L & Q strategy served him well. Most of the work was done by 5 thousand cavalry split into two columns, but Wellington was also smart enough to support them by re-employing the old spy network that Tipu had built up. An initial thrust in mid-1799 failed, as Wagh simply relocated to Maratha territory, only to return once the British withdrew at the height of the monsoon. In mid-1800 Wellington attacked again, but this time he exploited his relationship with his brother, who authorized him to offer the local Maratha lords some land if they made an effort to seal their border. The Marathas agreed, and together the two forces boxed Wagh back into Mysore territory. Shorn of his mobility, Wagh’s days were numbered and within a few months, both he and his army were destroyed by Wellington’s forces.
The campaign against Dhondia Wagh was only the largest of the many minor wars waged by British India between 1799 and 1803, as Mornington extended EIC control over various other ‘frontier zones’ that had never submitted to any central authority before. From the hill forts of southern India to the walled villages of the middle Ganges, British Indian sepoys marched, fought and died to secure minor tracts of territory, oftentimes only to do it again next campaign season as the sites were re-occupied over the monsoon. But the end result was the full acknowledgement of British authority over all of its directly- or indirectly-held possessions, marking an important step in the construction of a ‘Europeanized’ state on the subcontinent.
And at the same time, a few Reformists also wanted to use this authority to change Indian society…
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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 II of a five-part series: Part III will be about the British attempt to reform away Indian feudalism on both a societal and interstate level.
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