8:53
It is said that sometime during the early years of the 19th century, the Maharaja Ranjit Singh was shown a map of the entire Indian subcontinent. Studying the coloured borders on the parchment, the venerable Maharaja asked, "What does the red colour stand for?" The cartographer replied, "Your majesty, the red marks the extent of British possessions." The Maharaja scanned the map and saw that nearly the whole of Hindustan, except the Punjab, was painted red. Growing grim, he turned to his courtiers and remarked: "Ek roz sab lal ho jaiga- one day it will all be red." Thus, the Sikh leader's grim prediction became a prophecy. How
did it come to that? In our last episode, we covered John Company's first major conquest: the annexation of Bengal. In this episode, we trace the wars and stratagems by which the East India Company extended its grip across the rest of the subcontinent - from the formidable Sultanate of Mysore to the vast domains of the Maratha Confederacy. How the BEIC Reshaped British Society Before we get into the British wars against regional powers such as the Mysore Sultanate and Maratha Confederacy, It is necessary first to discuss the ways in which the territorial conquests of the East India Company fundamentally changed society and politics back in Britain. After the East India Company became
the tax collectors of the extremely fertile lands of Bengal, it began importing Bengali cotton to England on a massive scale. The sheer volume of raw cotton being imported from India was unprecedented, and it fueled the exponential growth of the British textile industry, a growth that was accommodated by the inventions of steam-powered machines such as the spinning jenny, spinning mule, and water frame. These new machines formed a foundational pillar of the Industrial Revolution, which paved the way for industrial working conditions. As a result of the
mass importation of Indian cotton, the traditional England of small artisans, village seamstresses, and rural subsistence farmers gave way to a modern England of large factories, mass production, and heavy machinery. As the rural poor amassed into cities like Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham, they found themselves working exhausting 16-hour shifts in cramped, oppressively loud factories filled with dangerous machinery, often alongside their own children as young as six years old. Suffice to say, the consequences of the East India Company's conquest of India brought exploitative
work conditions not only to the Indian masses but to the British working class as well. After the East India Company conquered Bengal and became the rulers of a substantial part of India with a population three times larger than Britain's, the entire British economy became perilously tied to the fortunes of its largest private corporation. This was made evident by the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, a drought that company executives not only did nothing to mitigate but actively exacerbated by continuing to pitilessly squeeze value out of a suffering land.
As 10 million Bengalis died of starvation and disease, land revenues in the region plummeted and the company's profits cratered. When word of this disaster reached London, shareholders panicked, the company's share prices plunged, banks collapsed, and a financial crisis rocked Britain to its core. Many British politicians and intellectuals were left outraged. By 1772, the British East India Company was both bankrupt and deeply in debt. The British Government was left with a quandary: could it simply let the biggest megacorporation in its country's history cease
to exist? The answer was no, and the solution was history's first massive corporate bailout, made conditional on the British government's right to regulate the hitherto unregulated private company's activities in India. These regulations were strengthened by Pitt's India Act of 1784, which went so far as to prohibit the company from engaging in aggressive wars of territorial expansion due to the extreme financial burden of conquering and holding new lands. Yet even as parliament clamped down on the East India Company, so too did the East India Company increasingly get
its people into parliament. Indeed, the invention of corporate lobbying is attributed to the British East India Company, a practice which allowed them to continue their economic exploitation and military conquest of the Indian subcontinent, regardless of the cost to the British and Indian common folk, and regardless of what regulatory measures were put in place to stop them. Anglo-Mysore Wars It is on that note that we now return to India. Following the annexation of Bengal, the British East India Company's next major enemy would be the Kingdom of Mysore. Nestled in the sweltering tropics and wetlands of India's southern Karnataka
region, the Kingdom of Mysore was one of the polities which had gained independence after the disintegration of the Mughal Empire. Traditionally ruled by the Hindu Maharajas of the Wadiyar dynasty, the Kingdom was usurped in 1761 by one of their Muslim soldiers, Hyder Ali, who reduced the Wadiyars to figurehead status and declared himself the de facto ruler of Mysore. The Sultan pursued a policy of aggressive territorial expansion, and by 1766, Mysore had risen from obscurity to become the overlords of nearly all of India south of the Krishna river. Hyder Ali's main
regional rivals were the Marathas, who routinely threatened his domains from the north, but he was also wary of the rapidly growing influence of the British East India Company. Consequently, he forged a pragmatic alliance with the French, who still retained influence in southern India via their base in Pondicherry. A brilliant general and energetic military innovator, the Sultan invested heavily in developing a technologically advanced standing army capable of defeating modern European troops, even pioneering iron-cased rocket artillery, whose terrifying
shrieking missiles far outperformed even British cannon. For many years, the Kingdom of Mysore was the biggest threat to British domination in the Indian Subcontinent. It would take the East India Company over 20 years, four wars, and the extensive help of allied Indian states to finally bring an end to the Mysore realm. The first Anglo-Mysore war began in 1767. While the East India Company was pacifying the recently annexed region of Bengal, the ambitious Hyder Ali bore down upon the relatively undefended Company Presidency of Madras with a 50,000-strong army
consisting of modern infantry and artillery units, as well as camel cavalry mounted with rockets. The approach of Hyder Ali's massive army upon the unprepared and isolated outpost of Madras sent John Company's stockholders into a panic, contributing to the ongoing financial crisis back in Europe. The East India Company's local allies in the Maratha Confederacy and the Nizam of Hyderabad were neutralized when Hyder Ali bought off the former and convinced the latter to defect to his side, yet the Madras army was able to turn back the combined Mysore-Hyderabad
invasion force at the battles of Chengam and Tiruvannamalai, after which Hyderabad defected back to the British. The war raged on for another two years, during which the British successfully convinced the Marathas to re-enter the fray and raid into Mysore's northern territories, while Hyder Ali's relentless Mysorean armies pillaged perilously close to the suburbs of Madras. In the end, it was the East India Company which sued for peace, signing the 1769 Treaty of Madras which obligated them to help defend Mysore against Maratha aggression,
which was annulled after the British failed to help Mysore repel a Maratha invasion in 1771. The second Anglo-Mysore war was an extension of the American Revolutionary War. When France entered that conflict in 1778, the British East India Company responded by capturing the French port of Pondicherry in Southern India. Hyder Ali leapt to the defence of his traditional French allies, with the Sultan's shrieking rockets annihilating a British force at the 1780 Battle of Pollilur, which was later described as "the severest blow that the English ever suffered in
India." Yet this momentum was checked by a defeat at the Battle of Porto Novo and the death of Hyder Ali in 1782, possibly from cancer. The conflict was continued by his son, the Tipu Sultan, yet the costs of war were beginning to weigh on Mysore. The French withdrew from the conflict after successfully helping the American colonies win their independence; the 1783 Peace of Paris restored Pondicherry to France diplomatically. This compelled the Tipu Sultan to sign the Treaty of Mangalore with the British, which returned their territories to status quo ante bellum.
After the Second Anglo-Mysore War, Tipu Sultan found himself increasingly encircled. From 1786, the Company pursued a policy of diplomatically isolating Mysore by fortifying their alliances with Hyderabad, the Maratha Confederacy, and the Kingdom of Travancore. In 1789, Tipu Sultan attacked Travancore, triggering the third Anglo-Mysore War. The forces of the Marathas, the Nizam of Hyderabad, and the East India Company invaded Tipu Sultan's domains from all sides and besieged his capital, Seringapatam, by 1792. Designed by the finest French military engineers,
the walls of Seringapatam held. Nonetheless, the Tipu Sultan was forced to sign a treaty which partitioned half of Mysore's territory between the British and their allies. In 1799, the Tipu Sultan saw an opportunity to reverse his misfortunes with the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte in France. As he trounced European armies and launched an invasion of Egypt, the ruler of Mysore sought to link up with his Grande Armée against their common British enemy. Understandably, the East India Company had no intention of letting this happen. Calling upon their native allies,
the British amassed a force to end the Tipu Sultan once and for all. This force overcame Mysorean resistance and laid Seringapatam under siege. This time, the walls collapsed, the city fell, and the Tipu Sultan was slain in battle. Mysorean territory was once more partitioned among the victorious allies, and what remained of the Kingdom became a British puppet state. With Mysore neutralized, the so-called "grandest society of merchants in the universe" looked to the vast domains of their Maratha allies as their next theatre of colonial conquest.
Anglo-Maratha Wars Rising to prominence in 1674 under the leadership of the invincible Hindu warlord Shivaji, the Marathas were arguably the most powerful foe the British ever faced in India, emerging as the undeniable winners of the power vacuum left by the collapse of the Mughal Empire, going so far as to sack Delhi itself in 1737. The Marathas had risen to supremacy at the spear tip of lethally mobile light cavalry. Yet, they also responded to the rise of British power in India with the rapid adoption of European-style warfare. In 1784, the Maratha ruler of Gwailor invited the worldly Savoyard mercenary,
Benoît de Boigne, to sculpt several battalions of state-of-the-art Maratha artillerymen and musketmen who became famed for their 'wall of fire and iron.' Powerful as they were, the Marathas had their vulnerabilities. Their vast domains were not a centralized Empire, but instead a loose coalition of rulers consisting of the Maharajas of Indore, Nagpur, Baroda, the aforementioned Gwalior, and Poona. The ruler of Poona, who held the title of Peshwa, was the nominal overlord of the other four Maharajas, but in practice they were all functionally autonomous. The different
Maratha states often competed with one another, and the divisions between them would be exploited by the British to eventually subdue the entire Maratha Empire. Nevertheless, it would still take the British three wars fought across over 30 years to bring down the masters of central India. The Maratha Confederacy and the British East India Company were initially allies against the Kingdom of Mysore, but conflict soon arose between them after the British began meddling in the Maratha Confederacy's internal affairs. In 1772, the Maratha Peshwa Madhavrao I passed away, and his
position came under contest by two claimants, Raghunathrao and Madhavrao II. Raghunathrao made overtures to the British East India Company, promising to cede territories and grant extensive commercial rights in exchange for military assistance. Governor-General Warren Hastings seized upon this deal, while the vast majority of Maratha factions united under Madhavrao II to preserve their sovereignty, kickstarting the first Anglo-Maratha war. This conflict went very poorly for John Company, whose expeditionary army out of Bombay was cut off, surrounded,
then defeated by a Maratha force at the 1779 battle of Wadgoan. The two belligerents continued to exchange glancing blows in the Deccan plateau, but the British were ultimately unable to achieve their war objective of installing Raghunathrao to the Maratha throne. The 1782 Treaty of Salbai concluded a peace between the Maratha and the East India Company, after which the two powers returned to fighting as allies against their mutual enemy of Mysore, with the Marathas proving instrumental in helping the British subjugate the most powerful Kingdom in southern India.
The lead-up to the second Anglo-Maratha war began in the autumn of 1802 with a power struggle between the Maratha Maharajas of Gwalior and Indore. Their nominal overlord, Peshwa Baji Rao II, sided with Gwalior, only for their combined armies to be crushed by Indore forces at the battle of Poona. Defeated by his own vassal, Baji Rao made the ill-advised decision to flee to the East India Company for protection. The British compelled the Peshwa to sign the Treaty of Bassein, in which he renounced the right to declare war or make alliances without British
approval and allowed the British to station troops in his capital, effectively signing away the independence of the Maratha Confederacy. Horrified, Maharaja Scindia of Gwalior turned on his overlord and, in alliance with the Maratha ruler of Nagpur, rose up against both him and his new British masters. Unwilling to aid his Gwalior rival, Maharaja Holkar of Indore sat on the fence, hoping Scindia and the British would weaken one another to his benefit. The second Anglo-Maratha war was defined by the brilliance of Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington. Under
General Wellesley's leadership, British Company forces achieved a miraculous victory at Scindia's unassailable fortress of Assaye. The bill for this battle totalled up to the lives of a third of the entire British army, with British officers agreeing that the Maratha artillery had been as well organized and deadly as the most disciplined European army. Even after defeating Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, the Duke of Wellington still maintained that the Battle of Assaye was the greatest military challenge he had ever faced. Meanwhile, a second Company force
under General Gerard Lake advanced on Delhi, successfully capturing the city and seizing the puppet strings of the politically powerless but still symbolically important Mughal Emperor, Shah Alam II. Had the Marathas put up a united front, they would likely have been able to destroy the British, but the highest ruler of the Maratha realm had already consigned himself to becoming a British puppet, while simmering internal rivalries meant that Gwalior and Nagpur fought largely without the support of the other constituent Maratha states, sealing their ultimate defeat.
The victory of the British East India Company in the Second Anglo-Maratha War effectively ended the Maratha Confederacy's tenure as the predominant land power in the Indian subcontinent. The status of the ruling Peshwa Baji Rao II as a de facto British puppet was affirmed, and the Marathas ceased to function as a unified coalition, with Company officials negotiating separate treaties with individual Maratha Maharajas rather than with the Confederacy as a whole. The Maharaja of Gwalior and Nagpur both ceded land to the British, while the Maharaja of Indore conducted his own war
against the redcoats for a time. However, his ultimate failure to cooperate with his Gwalior rivals led to his defeat, and he too sued for peace, ceding land to the East India Company. With the fiercest anti-British Maratha factions pacified, a twelve-year period of peace ensued, during which time the East India Company tightened its grip on Maratha politics. A third and final Anglo-Maratha war erupted in 1817, when Baji Rao II repudiated the Treaty of Bassein and rose in rebellion against the East India Company. Alas, his bid to throw off colonial
corporate overlordship was a doomed one. Once more, the Marathas failed to form a unified front against the British. Prince Scindia of Gwalior, who had fought so fiercely against the redcoats in the Second Anglo-Maratha war, was convinced by the British to sit on the sidelines, while many other smaller Maratha factions defected outright, lured into the Company's army by the prospect of higher wages. The conflict was swift and decisive, resulting in the formal dissolution of the Maratha Confederacy and the direct annexation or indirect vassalization of the majority of its territories.
The historian Percival Spear described the end of the Third Anglo-Maratha War in 1818 as the year when "the British dominion in India became the British dominion of India." Sikh Empire & Conclusion Following the dissolution of the Maratha Confederacy, the last remaining significant native Indian state was the Sikh Empire in the Punjab. We have already covered the entire history of the Sikhs in another video, which we encourage you to check out, so we will not explore the Anglo-Sikh wars in detail here. However, in broad strokes, the story of the British East India Company's conquest of the
Punjab was a very familiar one. Like the Mysore Sultanate and Maratha Confederacy, the Sikh Empire invested heavily in a modern, European-style military capable of defeating the British. Yet like Mysore and the Marathas, the East India Company exploited an ongoing succession crisis within the Sikh's domain to divide the region. Like he had done in Bengal, John Company cultivated treachery within the Punjabi court which paralyzed the Sikhs' ability to resist, culminating in two wars which resulted in the total annexation of the Punjab by 1849,
completing the final major conquest of the British East India Company within the Indian Subcontinent. With that, nearly the entirety of India had been painted red. The Union Jack now flew in every corner of Hindustan, not on the direct initiative of the British Government itself, but through the scheming ambitions of a private company who owed its colonial success not only to its massive corporate army in India, but its legion of corporate lobbyists back in London. In our next video on the British East India Company, we will take a brief interlude from India
and roll back the timeline a few decades to set up an important subplot in John Company's history: the story of the East India Company in China. To ensure you don't miss that, 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 patrons and YouTube members can watch more than 200+ exclusive videos - join their ranks via the link in the description or by pressing the join button under the video to watch these weekly videos,
learn about our schedule, get early access to our videos, access our private Discord, and much more. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one.
