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Mar 21, 2023 · Government rules favored the planters who owned some 400 plantation sites in Bengal in the early 19 th century (Romesh Dutt, The Economic History of India under early British Rule, 3 rd ed ...
- Overview
- The period of disorder, 1760–72
The revolution in Bengal was the product of a number of unrelated causes. The imminence of the Seven Years’ War prompted the British to send out Clive with a force to Madras in 1755. Succession troubles in Bengal combined with British mercantile incompetence to produce a crisis at a moment when the French in south India were still awaiting reinforcements from France.
ʿAlī Vardī Khan—the nawab and virtual ruler of Bengal—died in April 1756, leaving his power to his young grandson Sirāj al-Dawlah. The latter’s position was insecure because of discontent among his officers, both Hindu and Muslim, and because he himself was at the same time both headstrong and vacillating. On an exaggerated report that the British were fortifying Calcutta, he attacked and took the city after a four-day siege, on June 20, 1756. The flight of the British governor and several councillors added ignominy to defeat. The survivors were held for a night in the local lockup, known as the Black Hole of Calcutta; many were dead the next morning.
News of this disaster caused consternation in Madras. A force preparing to oust Bussy-Castelnau from the Deccan was diverted to Bengal, giving Clive an army of 900 Europeans and 1,500 Indians. He relieved the Calcutta survivors and recovered the city on January 2, 1757. An indecisive engagement led to a treaty with Sirāj al-Dawlah on February 9, which restored the company’s privileges, gave permission to fortify Calcutta, and declared an alliance.
This was a decisive point in British Indian history. According to plan, Clive should have returned to Madras to pursue the campaign against the French; but he did not. He sensed both the hostility and insecurity of Sirāj al-Dawlah’s position and began to receive overtures to support a military coup. The chance of installing a friendly and dependent nawab seemed too good to be missed. Having taken this decision, Clive chose the right candidate in Mīr Jaʿfar, an elderly general with much influence in the army. In so acting, Clive was probably influenced by the example of Bussy-Castelnau at Hyderabad; for six years Bussy-Castelnau had maintained himself with an Indo-French force, sustaining the nizam, Ṣalābat Jang, and maintaining French influence in the largest south Indian state with outstanding success. This system of a “sponsored” Indian state, controlled but not administered, was the one Clive had in mind for Bengal.
The prospects for success seemed good. The event, however, proved otherwise, and there were reasons for this not realized at the time. The chiefs were so lacking in vigour that they made little resistance to British encroachments. External danger could come from only one direction and source—the Mughal authority—and that was at the moment in dissolution. While Bussy-Castelnau had no French merchants to satisfy, the British merchants in Calcutta were ready and eager to exploit the situation. And, because the British company’s government was made up entirely of merchants, it is easy to understand why the sponsored state of 1757 became the virtually annexed state of 1765.
Before breaking with Sirāj al-Dawlah, Clive took the French settlement of Chandernagore, which the nawab left to its fate lest he need British help to repulse an Afghan attack from the north. The actual conflict with Sirāj al-Dawlah, at Plassey (June 23, 1757), was decided by Clive’s resolute refusal to be overawed by superior numbers, by dissensions within the nawab’s camp, by Mīr Jaʿfar’s failure to support his superior, and by Sirāj al-Dawlah’s own loss of nerve. Plassey was, in fact, more of a cannonade than a battle. It was followed by the flight and execution of Sirāj al-Dawlah, by the occupation of Murshidabad, the capital, and by the installation of Mīr Jaʿfar as the new nawab.
The departure of Clive signaled the release of acquisitive urges by the company’s Bengal servants. These urges were so strong that the governor, Henry Vansittart (served 1760–64), found himself unable to control them. Under the company’s constitution, he had only one vote in a council of up to a dozen and could be overruled by any knot of determined men. During these years, a body of British merchants, long separated from British standards and social restraints, suddenly found themselves with real but undefined authority over the whole of a large and rich province. It is not surprising that they thought mainly of getting rich quickly.
The first step was the deposition of the nawab Mīr Jaʿfar on the grounds of old age and incompetence. He was supplanted by his son-in-law, Mīr Qāsim, after the latter had paid a large gratuity to the company and to Vansittart personally. In addition, he ceded to the British the districts of Burdwan, Midnapore, and Chittagong. Both sides wanted power, and both sides were short of money. The nawab had lost substantial land revenue and the lucrative tolls on the British merchants’ private trade; the company was receiving no remittances from Britain, because the directors considered that Bengal should pay for itself. A clash was inevitable.
Mīr Qāsim removed his capital to distant Munger where he could not be so easily overseen, asserted his authority in the districts, and raised a disciplined force under an Armenian officer. He then turned to the company and negotiated a settlement with Vansittart, by which the company’s merchants were to pay an ad valorem duty of 9 percent, against an Indian merchant’s duty of 40 percent. At this the Calcutta council revolted, reducing the company’s duty to 2.5 percent and on salt only. The breach came in 1763, when Mīr Qāsim, after defeat in four pitched battles, murdered his Indian bankers and British prisoners and fled to Avadh. The next year Mīr Qāsim returned with the emperor Shah ʿĀlam II and his minister Shujāʿ al-Dawlah to be finally defeated at the Battle of Buxar (Baksar). That conflict, rather than Plassey, was the decisive battle that gave Bengal to the British.
These events had been viewed with growing alarm in London. The news of the Mīr Qāsim campaign coincided with the victory of Clive’s faction in the company over that of Lawrence Sulivan. Clive used it to appoint himself governor with power to act over the head of the council; he intended an administrative reformation and a political settlement. He arrived in May 1765 to find that the British victory at Buxar had placed Shah ʿĀlam in his hands but had created a situation of deep confusion in other respects. Mīr Jaʿfar had been restored to power but soon died; his second son succeeded him after bestowing lavish gratuities to the company. The British merchants and their agents were the unresisted predators of the Bengal economy, and no one knew the next step to take.
Clive acted with extraordinary vigour. Within four days of arrival he had set up a Select Committee; and, when he left less than two years later, he had effected another revolution. Turning to India’s political situation, Clive had to decide where to stop. No one barred his way to Delhi, and he could at that moment have turned the whole Mughal Empire into a company-sponsored state. But he realized that Delhi was easier to have than to hold. He fixed his frontier at the borders of Bihar and Avadh. Shah ʿĀlam was given the districts of Kora and Allahabad, and he settled in the latter city, with a tribute (or subsidy) from Bengal that was nearly 10 percent of its estimated revenue. Shujāʿal-Dawlah received back Avadh, with a guarantee of its security, in return for paying the troops involved and a cash indemnity. These two were to be buffers between the company and the Marathas and possible marauders from the north.
Clive’s next step was to settle Bengal’s own status. The Mughal emperor still had much influence, though little power; his complete disfavour might therefore have done the company more harm than good. Clive’s solution was to obtain from Shah ʿĀlam the “dewanee,” or revenue-collecting power, in Bengal and Bihar (the company was thus the imperial divan [dīwān] for those two provinces). The nawab was left in charge of the judiciary and magistracy, but he was helpless because he had no army and could get money to raise one only from the company.
Jul 23, 2023 · The introduction of Western education and ideas during British Colonial Rule in Bengal nurtured a budding sense of nationalism among the educated elite. Early political movements, such as the Indian National Association, laid the groundwork for India’s struggle for independence.
The Indian Independence Act of 1947: The End of British Rule and the Birth of Two Nations; Key Reforms in British India: Indian Councils Acts of 1861, 1892, and 1909; Evolution of British Governance: A Study of the Charter Acts (1793-1853) Early British Legislative Reforms: Regulating Act, Pitt’s India Act
A very severe famine struck Bengal in 1769-1770. A third of the population perished due to starvation and the accompanying pestilence. It took Bengal another forty year to recover from the catastrophe. 3. Describe how the administration was reformed and reorganized in Bengal during the rule of East India Company.
- Anindita Tasneem
Marshall argues that colonial rule was only part of a complex pattern of developments in eighteenth-century Bengal. 'British rule stimulated, modified or aborted existing patterns of change; it did not break long continuities and force India into wholly new directions.' The first two chapters examine in some detail 'the setting for the empire ...
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Apr 12, 2021 · Result: This decisive battle confirmed British power over Bengal and marked the end of the attempt to rule Bengal through a puppet nawab. The battle resulted in the Treaty of Allahabad, 1765 in which the Mughal Emperor surrendered sovereignty of Bengal to the British. Lord Robert Clive, the victor at the Plassey, became the first governor of ...
