The British Conquest of India

The conquest began in Bengal. At Plassey (23 June 1757), Robert Clive defeated Siraj-ud-Daula, the young Nawab of Bengal — less by arms than by conspiracy, having bought the inaction of Mir Jafar, the nawab's commander, through the banker Jagat Seth; of the Company's three thousand men, barely twenty died. Plassey opened Bengal's treasury: the company's servants grew rich on 'presents', and Mir Jafar's installation began the era of puppet nawabs.

At Buxar (1764) the Company defeated the combined forces of Bengal, Awadh and the Mughal emperor; by the Treaty of Allahabad (1765) the emperor granted the diwani — the right to collect the revenue — of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa to a trading company. 'Dual government' followed: the Company took the revenue, the nawab kept the responsibility, and Bengal — the densest commercial economy in the world — began its long fiscal bleeding.

Mysore under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan fought four Anglo-Mysore wars; Tipu, 'the Tiger', died defending Seringapatam in 1799, and his fall removed the last power that combined military modernisation with anti-British resolve. The Marathas were broken in three wars (1775–1818); the Sikhs in two (1845–49), ending with the annexation of the Punjab after Chillianwala and Gujrat.

The doctrine of subsidiary alliance — perfected by Lord Wellesley from 1798 — let Indian rulers 'protect' themselves with Company troops they paid for, surrendering foreign policy; the Nizam of Hyderabad was its first great victim. And Lord Dalhousie's Doctrine of Lapse (1848–56) annexed states whose rulers died without natural heirs — Satara, Jaitpur, Sambalpur, Jhansi, Nagpur — violating the cherised custom of adoption, and sowing dynastic resentments that would bloom in 1857.

By 1856, with Awadh annexed on the charge of misgovernance, the Company held three-fifths of India directly and the rest through the princes. The instruments were the Company's army — overwhelmingly Indian sepoys officered by Britons, who had learned the discipline of European war — its civil service organised from Cornwallis's reforms, and its credit system, by which Indian revenues themselves paid for Indian conquest. India was conquered, in Edmund Burke's famous accusation, not by the British state but by 'a state in the disguise of a merchant'.