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Introduction "It is one of the great ironies of the East India Company's history," wrote the historian Ian Barrow, "that its Indian Empire was effectively won by Indian troops." From the siege of Seringapatam in the south to the battle of Assaye on the central plateau and the conquest of the Punjab in the north, it had been an army overwhelmingly composed of indigenous Indian sepoys in red coats that planted the Union Jack in every corner of Hindustan. Yet the loyalty of these native soldiers to their British paymasters was not inviolate, and when their religions and customs were encroached upon,
John Company found itself facing down the gun barrels of the very sepoys it had recruited, armed and trained. In this final instalment in our series on the British East India Company, we will cover the story of the Great Indian Rebellion of 1857, and explore how a private corporation that had begun as a motley band of Elizabethan pirate adventurers entered into the final chapter of its history amidst the biggest, most violent rebellion ever launched against the British Empire. The Discontent of the Sepoys At the crest of the Victorian age, the British East India Company governed over two-thirds of the entire Indian subcontinent,
with the remaining third controlled by autonomous Indian rulers under indirect company control. Comprising three armies headquartered in Bombay, Madras, and Bengal, the private corporate military that had conquered India fielded nearly 300,000 active-duty soldiers, the vast majority of whom were native sepoys. The British Empire in India had been won on the backs of Indians, but by the 19th century, those indigenous soldiers had begun to sour on their paymasters. Initially, the colonial administrators of Hindustan had left the culture and religions of their native soldiers
unmolested, prioritising the extraction of India's wealth over the assimilation of its people. This policy changed with the Charter Act of 1813, which ended the East India Company's trade monopoly and expanded the rights of Christian missionaries operating in India, contributing to both Muslim and Hindu unease. These anxieties were further fuelled by a new law imposed in 1856, which decreed that all sepoys would be required to serve elsewhere in the British Empire if required, even though caste laws forbade Hindu warriors from travelling overseas unless they underwent
costly purification rituals. That same year, the company annexed its client kingdom of Awadh on thin pretences of corruption and maladministration. Over 75,000 active-duty sepoys in the Bengal Army had been recruited from Awadh and saw the deposition of their ruling dynasty as a betrayal. Policy after policy, the alienation between British officers and their native soldiers widened, precipitating great unrest on the horizon. Rifle Cartridges By the year 1857, a storm was brewing in the crown jewel of the British Empire, with the Hindu and Muslim sepoys who formed the backbone of the East India Company's occupation force on the verge of mutiny. The breaking point came with the
introduction of the Pattern 1853 Enfield as the new standard-issue rifle in the British Indian army. Unlike the older Brown Bess, the Enfield's powder and shot were stored in small cardboard cartridges sealed with the fat of pigs and cows, which had to be bitten off to load the weapon. This made the Enfield rifle an abomination to both the Muslims, who considered the pig unclean, and to Hindus, who venerated the cow. Rumours spread among the native soldiery that the new ammunition had been issued to force Muslims and Hindus to sever their ties to their religion and
caste so they could be converted to Christianity. The spark which lit the bonfire was struck in the city of Meerut. On the 24th of April, Lieutenant Colonel George Carmichael-Smyth of the 3rd Bengal Light Infantry assembled his unit in the city barracks for firing drills with the new rifle. Composed primarily of Muslims, the sepoys of the 3rd refused to accept their cartridges. This insubordination was punished severely, with the offending Sepoys clapped in irons and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment with hard labour. This was the final straw. On the 10th of May, the remaining
sepoys in the garrison struck back, opening fire on their European officers and breaking into the barracks jail, freeing their imprisoned comrades. Now in open mutiny, the Sepoys poured out into the streets of Meerut, torching the bungalows of the city's colonial population and gunning down any European they encountered. As word of the uprising in Meerut spread, other sepoy garrisons throughout the region took up arms against their commanders. The Great Indian Rebellion had begun. The Last Mughal Emperor Even as British domination had spread across every corner of India, the Mughal Empire persisted as a shadow of its former self.
The greatly diminished dynasty of Babur had been allowed to continue existing in vestigial form, possessing no political authority outside the ancient capital of Delhi, where it ruled under the supervision of the East India Company. As massive rebellions erupted against British rule in the summer of 1857, the Mughal Empire was set upon its final crossroad of destiny. The reigning Emperor was the 82-year-old Bahadur Shah Zafar, a frail man whose peaceful life of composing Urdu poetry was abruptly interrupted when a large army of rebel Sepoys overwhelmed Delhi's small corps of
British officers and seized control of the city. Appearing beneath the windows of Bahadur Shah's palace apartments, the rebel soldiers implored the old dynast to lead them, knowing his name and pedigree would lend invaluable legitimacy to their struggle. Bahadur Shah hesitated. The following day, a tremendous explosion tore through the city. A company Lieutenant named George Willoughby had led a last stand at the Delhi magazine to prevent the massive store of gunpowder within from falling into rebel hands. Just as he was about to be overwhelmed, Willoughby rigged it all to blow,
setting off a massive detonation that killed hundreds of mutineers in the blast. Elsewhere in the city, a growing anti-British mob took to the streets, plundering through the homes of Delhi's European community and looting the estates of the wealthy. Looking on helplessly from his palace balcony, it was clear to Bahadur Shah that British authority had collapsed. Although dismayed by the destruction done to his beloved city, the enfeebled old poet finally agreed to join the rebellion. On May 12, 1857, Bahadur Shah was proclaimed Emperor of a newly independent
Hindustan, setting him on a path that would extinguish the final flame of the Mughal realm. Rebels and Loyalists The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was the largest uprising ever fought against British rule. At its onset, only around 40,000 British occupiers lived in a subcontinent of over 200 million people. Despite this, the rebellion was put down, and British rule in India continued for nearly another century. Why? The answer lies in regionalism and disunity. Vast swathes of the subcontinent remained on the sidelines or aided the colonisers, including most of the Sepoy regiments in the Company's
Bombay and Madras armies. The Gurkhas of Nepal had staved off British annexation back in 1816, and now fought as reliable mercenaries within their ranks. The Sikhs of the Punjab were alienated by the rebels' choice to elevate the Mughal Emperor as their symbolic figurehead, siding with their new occupiers over their ancestral oppressors. Among the hundreds of local dynasties throughout the Indian subcontinent, those whose hereditary privileges had been kept intact by the British East India Company either remained neutral or aided the colonisers,
while those whose lands and titles had been confiscated by their corporate overlords threw their weight behind the rebellious sepoy armies. The uprising of 1857 was not a national attempt to create a unified Indian nation. Instead, it was an overlap of differing social, religious, and economic interests that converged into one violent conflict, lacking ideological cohesion or universal support among India's diverse population. Although the few European regiments stationed in India were quickly overwhelmed at the start of the uprising, reinforcements were rapidly
redirected from Britain's colonial possessions and ongoing conflicts in Crimea, Persia, South Africa, Australia, and China. While the Indian rebels had few allies and no centralized military leadership, the British had a sophisticated military bureaucracy and near-unlimited resources, which they used with ruthless efficiency to recover the crown jewel of their Empire. The Siege of Delhi In the early stages of the great Indian rebellion, Commander-in-Chief George Anson of the British Indian Army was in an undesirable position.
The native sepoys who had formed the bulk of his forces were now the backbone of a massive anti-British rebellion, leaving him marooned in hostile territory. Rather than wait for reinforcements, Anson collected the few all-European and trustworthy sepoy regiments available to him and launched an assault on the city of Delhi, where most of the mutineers had congregated. Assembling a force about 3,000 strong, Anson set out on a march from Ambala, dying anticlimactically of cholera days later. Command subsequently passed to Sir Henry Barnard,
who outflanked and scattered a rebel army three times his size at the Battle of Badli-ki-Serai. As former servicemen in the British Indian Army, the rebel sepoys were well-trained, highly disciplined foot soldiers. However, they lacked experience in the senior leadership positions which had been reserved for White British officers. Moreover, the sepoys' use of the obsolete Brown Bess rifle over the more accurate Enfield put them at a disadvantage in arms. Overall, the rebels' inferior weaponry and lack of a unified command structure allowed smaller British forces
to routinely defeat larger rebel armies throughout the course of the rebellion. By June 9th, Barnard's force had pitched camp on a defensible rocky ridge three miles north of Delhi and put the city to siege. It was an absurd position, for in no scenario could 3,000 attackers take a fortified city defended by over 40,000 rebels. The besiegers soon became pinned down on their mount, withstanding countless assaults from rebel outriders. Much-needed relief came in August, when reinforcements arrived from the Punjab, swelling the attacking force to 9,000 men,
of which 3,000 were European and 6,000 were loyal Sikhs, Gurkhas, and other native Indians. Newly furnished with heavy artillery, the besiegers methodically reduced Delhi's centuries-old walls to rubble under a relentless bombardment before storming the city. Brutal street-by-street fighting ensued, with the British committing an indiscriminate slaughter upon the city's civilian population. As the dust settled on a two-week orgy of violence, the rebels in the city had fled, while the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah, symbolic leader of the rebellion, had been found and taken
into British custody. The fall of Delhi did not end the Indian Rebellion, but it tore out the gravitational center of the movement. With the remaining rebel strongholds in northern India left decentralised and isolated from one another, the British set out to mop them up one by one. The Siege of Kanpur Today, Kanpur is one of northern India's major financial hubs. In the 19th century, it was the site of one of the most barbaric conflicts in the British Empire. On the 4th of June, 1857, Major-General Sir Hugh Wheeler of the Cawnpore garrison had sheltered down in a barracks block outside the city with just 300 European soldiers
and their families, where he was encircled by thousands of hostile sepoys under the leadership of Nana Sahib, a Prince of the Maratha Confederacy who had been deprived of his birthright by the East India Company. Nana Sahib's insurgents harassed General Wheeler's entrapped forces with artillery bombardments and sniper fire, picking off many redcoats as yet more died of sunstroke and dehydration. On 27 June, a bone-weary Wheeler capitulated, agreeing to surrender Kanpur to the rebels in exchange for safe passage to Allahabad. The beleaguered British garrison filtered out of
their fortifications towards a ferry landing on the Ganges where, as they waded towards the boats, they were ambushed by Nana Sahib's soldiers. Wheeler and all his men were cut down, alongside many of their wives, sons and daughters. The surviving 206 women and children were taken hostage and herded back to Cawnpore, where they were imprisoned in a small single-family bungalow in deplorably claustrophobic conditions. Rescue, however, was on the way. Newly infused with Sikh allies and reinforcements diverted from ongoing wars on Persia and China, General Henry Havelock
began a march from Allahabad to Kanpur, smashing his way through multiple larger but less organized rebel forces sent by Nana Sahib to turn him back. Unable to block Havelock's advance, Nana Sahib prepared to retreat, but not before ordering the mass execution of the hostages in his captivity in a final act of spite. When Havelock's column reoccupied Kanpur on July 17th, they discovered no women and children to rescue; only their gruesome corpses. The British reprisal was savage. Despite having taken no part in the conflict, the civilian population of Kanpur was indiscriminately
slaughtered. Hindus were made to swallow beef at gunpoint. Muslims were force-fed pork, sewn into pigskins and hanged. Indian men and women alike were tortured and mutilated, and corpses were desecrated. For the rest of the Rebellion, British forces rallied around the war cry, "Remember Cawnpore!", as they initiated increasingly brutal reprisals against the native population. The Siege of Lucknow In the summer of 1857, the city of Lucknow joined Delhi and Kanpur as one of the major battlegrounds upon which the fate of the great rebellion against British rule was to be decided. Upon receiving news that the East India
Company's native troopers were revolting across northern India, Brigadier-General Henry Lawrence of the Lucknow Garrison acted quickly, driving out the sepoy units he suspected of mutiny before they could turn on him. Left with 855 British redcoats and 712 loyalist sepoys under his command as well as hundreds of women and children in his care, Lawrence retreated into the British Residency, a fortified colonial compound in the heart of Lucknow. By the end of July, an army of over 30,000 rebels had occupied Lucknow and surrounded the British residency.
Over the next five weeks, the defenders held out against relentless assault as the rebels pinned them down under an artillery barrage and picked them off with sniper fire. General Lawrence himself was assassinated by an Indian sharpshooter on July 2nd, with command thereafter passing to Lieutenant-Colonel John Inglis. As seasoned veterans of the British Indian army, the rebel sepoys investing Lucknow were professional musketeers and artillery men, but their lack of a unified command structure prevented them from launching the coordinated
assaults necessary to overwhelm their enemies' defences. Nevertheless, the situation for the British garrison grew increasingly dire when their filthy, overcrowded conditions resulted in an outbreak of smallpox and cholera. Help, however, was on the way. Having reconquered Kanpur in an orgy of blood, Major-General Henry Havelock was marching on to Lucknow with a relief force. Struggling through blisteringly hot weather and fierce rebel resistance, Havelock's brigade of sturdy Sikhs and rugged Scottish Highlanders stabbed their way through
numerically superior forces. Fighting their way into Lucknow by the 25th of September, the relief force rendezvoused with the defenders inside the British Residency, only to find that even their combined numbers were too few to drive off the rebel force occupying the city. By November, however, another relief column of 5,000 men was en route, led by the new Commander-in-Chief, Colin Campbell. With the names of the British women and children slaughtered in Kanpur on their lips, Campbell's kilted highlanders lunged through the streets of Lucknow, dislodging the decentralised
mutineers from key positions across the city. Rebel cohesion broke, the civilians within the residency were finally evacuated, and by March of 1858, Lucknow was back in British hands. The End In the closing months of 1857, the massive rebellion which had threatened to sweep the British off the Indian Subcontinent was running out of steam. Rebel pockets continued to fight on in central India, led by determined leaders such as Tantia Topi and the warrior-queen Rani of Jhansi, but these isolated insurgencies were eventually brought into submission. When the dust settled on the biggest rebellion ever fought
against British rule, over 6,000 British citizens in India lay dead. Inversely, over 150,000 native Indian corpses were strewn across the length of the Gangetic Plain and the breadth of the Deccan Plateau, of which 100,000 were civilians; some shot, some hanged; some tortured to death, and others strapped to cannons and blasted apart. Both Indian and Briton had committed myriad atrocities, but in the end, British savagery arose triumphant and that ensured colonial rule in India would continue for another 90 years. However, the company that had begun the conquest of India
would not. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 not only brought a final end to the Mughal Empire, whose final Emperor was sent into exile for his part in the rebellion, but also the private corporation that had been governing India on Britain's behalf. Stripped of its monopoly over Indian trade in 1813 and Chinese trade in 1833, John Company had already lost its identity as an independent corporation before the rebellion, reduced to a managing agency that administered occupied India on behalf of the British crown. After the upheaval of 1857, it was clear in the halls of
Westminster that it was no longer advisable to allow an outside contractor to govern by far the most valuable colony in the British Empire. The East India Company had conquered Hindustan, but the British Government would take it from here. So it was that the company rule in India was ended, with Indian territories, administration, and armies nationalised in a new era of direct rule known as the British Raj. But how much truly changed? Even after the end of the company, the British government continued to govern India as a commercial enterprise, pursuing administrative
policies that prioritised the exploitation of natural resources and the generation of wealth for shareholders and investors over the welfare of the native peoples it ruled over. The British East India Company had been consigned to the pages of history, but the era of profit-driven Imperialism it had pioneered continued on, and in many ways still does to this day. More videos are on the way, so make sure you are subscribed and have pressed the bell button to see it. Please consider liking, subscribing, commenting, and sharing, it helps immensely. Our
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