Forging the Conqueror's Sword: How Two Indias Created One Empire Open Access
Welsch, Christina Caroline (2010)
Abstract
Abstract
Forging the Conqueror's Sword
How Two Indias Created One Empire
By Christina C. Welsch
Historians have long argued that the English East India
Company's empire was
made by employees working in South Asia. For early historians
seeking to distance
London from the act of conquest and for modern scholars following
Gallagher and
Robinson's peripheral theory of empire, the active agents of
expansion were those "on the
spot". But few investigations examine why these servants
adopted imperial ambitions in
the first place. Traditional explanations focus on "great"
individuals or on hostilities
exported to South Asia from Europe. Neither analysis, though, can
explain the location
and timing of the Company's first conquests in Bengal in 1756.
Scholars should shift
away from the Eurocentric lens of Anglo-French warfare to examine
the Company more
explicitly in the South Asian political fabric. The subcontinent's
early-eighteenth-century
regionalism gave the Company's localized administrative
presidencies new autonomy as
each interacted with a unique local reality. This divergent milieu
allowed imperial
ambitions to develop in some of these settlements. Myriad small
wars in the south
provided militaristic servants in the Madras Presidency experience
in limited warfare,
while trade profits in the north funded this militarization. In
1756, the Nawab of Bengal's
attack on Company servants stationed in Calcutta gave the Madras
Presidency the excuse
to extricate its military from those indecisive conflicts and to
conquer a region previously
isolated from the Company's gradual military development. I argue
that the Company's
initial conquests were not just a function of the periphery, but
rather through interactions
among peripheries-an empire made in two distinct Indias.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
A NOTE ABOUT SPELLING
............................................................................................................................
1
INTRODUCTION
..........................................................................................................................................
2
CHAPTER ONE: THE EMERGENCE OF
MULTIPLE
INDIAS...................................................................................
15
Introduction
...............................................................................................................................
15
Pictures of Delhi at Dusk
...............................................................................................................
20
Rise of the Regions
......................................................................................................................
27
The Company in the Mix
................................................................................................................
33
Interperipheral Imperialism
.............................................................................................................
40
CHAPTER TWO: THE FIRST INDIA:
CONFLICT IN THE KARNATIK
........................................................................
46
Introduction
...............................................................................................................................
46
Europe's Eastern War
...................................................................................................................
53
The First Steps towards Militarism
...................................................................................................
59
The Carnatic Wars Become Karnatik
................................................................................................
64
The Madras Military Revolution
.......................................................................................................
77
CHAPTER THREE: THE SECOND INDIA:
BUSINESS IN BENGAL
............................................................................
89
Introduction
...............................................................................................................................
89
A "Failure" to Militarize
..................................................................................................................
94
"The Paradise of Provinces"
..........................................................................................................
101
The Bengal Presidency as Bengali
..................................................................................................
107
The Balance Breaks
....................................................................................................................
114
CHAPTER FOUR: WAR BETWEEN THE
INDIAS
.................................................................................................
122
Introduction
...............................................................................................................................
122
The Military Revolution and the
Deccan
...........................................................................................
125
The Winners of the Revolution
.......................................................................................................
135
1756: A Year of Opportunity
.........................................................................................................
142
A Step into
Empire........................................................................................................................
146
Victory in Bengal
.........................................................................................................................
155
An Empire between Peripheries
.......................................................................................................
159
CONCLUSION
.............................................................................................................................................
163
APPENDIX: POLITICAL MAPS OF
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SOUTH ASIA
...............................................................
174
WORKS CITED
.............................................................................................................................................
179
List of Figures
Table 1: Comparison of Military and Mercantile Expenses in the
Madras and Bengal Presidencies (1755)......................43
Fig 1: Regional Map of South Asia in the Mid-Eighteenth Century........................................................................175
Fig 2: The Presidencies of the English East India Company.................................................................................176
Fig 3: Map of the Karnatik...........................................................................................................................177
Fig 4: Map of Bengal...................................................................................................................................178
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