India’s Last Stand Against Britain - Tipu Sultan Enters the Fray

0:06 It is said that sometime during the early years of the 19th century,

0:10 the Maharaja Ranjit Singh was shown a map of the entire Indian subcontinent.

0:15 Studying the coloured borders on the parchment, the venerable Maharaja asked,

0:20 “What does the red colour stand for?” The cartographer replied, “Your majesty,

0:25 the red marks the extent of British possessions.” The Maharaja

0:29 scanned the map and saw that nearly the whole of Hindustan,

0:34 except the Punjab, was painted red.

0:37 Growing grim, he turned to his courtiers and remarked:

0:40 “Ek roz sab lal ho jaiga— one day it will all be red.” Thus,

0:44 the Sikh leader’s grim prediction became a prophecy.

0:48 How did it come to that?

0:50 In our last episode,

0:52 we covered John Company’s first major conquest: the annexation of Bengal.

0:56 In this episode, we trace the wars and stratagems

0:59 by which the East India Company extended its grip across

1:02 the rest of the subcontinent- from the formidable Sultanate

1:06 of Mysore to the vast domains of the Maratha Confederacy.

1:12 How the BEIC Reshaped British Society Before we get into the British

1:52 wars against regional powers such

1:57 as the Mysore Sultanate and Maratha Confederacy,

2:00 It is necessary first to discuss the ways in which the territorial conquests

2:04 of the East India Company fundamentally

2:07 changed society and politics back in Britain.

2:10 After the East India Company became the tax

2:14 collectors of the extremely fertile lands of Bengal,

2:17 it began importing Bengali cotton to England on a massive scale.

2:22 The sheer volume of raw cotton being imported from India was unprecedented,

2:26 and it fueled the exponential growth of the British textile industry,

2:31 a growth that was accommodated by the inventions

2:34 of steam-powered machines such as the spinning jenny,

2:37 spinning mule, and water frame.

2:39 These new machines formed a foundational pillar of the Industrial Revolution,

2:43 which paved the way for industrial working conditions.

2:46 As a result of the mass importation of Indian cotton,

2:50 the traditional England of small artisans, village seamstresses,

2:54 and rural subsistence farmers gave way to a modern England of large factories,

2:59 mass production, and heavy machinery.

3:02 As the rural poor amassed into cities like Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham,

3:07 they found themselves working exhausting 16-hour shifts in cramped,

3:11 oppressively loud factories filled with dangerous machinery,

3:15 often alongside their own children as young as six years old.

3:19 Suffice to say, the consequences of the East

3:22 India Company’s conquest of India brought exploitative

3:25 work conditions not only to the Indian masses

3:28 but to the British working class as well.

3:31 After the East India Company conquered Bengal and became the rulers

3:35 of a substantial part of India

3:37 with a population three times larger than Britain's,

3:40 the entire British economy became perilously tied

3:43 to the fortunes of its largest private corporation.

3:46 This was made evident by the Great Bengal Famine of 1770,

3:50 a drought that company executives not only did nothing to mitigate but actively

3:55 exacerbated by continuing to pitilessly squeeze value out of a suffering land.

4:02 As 10 million Bengalis died of starvation and disease,

4:05 land revenues in the region plummeted and the company’s profits cratered.

4:09 When word of this disaster reached London,

4:13 shareholders panicked, the company’s share prices plunged,

4:16 banks collapsed, and a financial crisis rocked Britain to its core.

4:20 Many British politicians and intellectuals were left outraged.

4:24 By 1772, the British East India Company was both bankrupt and deeply in debt.

4:30 The British Government was left with a quandary:

4:33 could it simply let the biggest megacorporation

4:35 in its country’s history cease to exist?

4:38 The answer was no, and the solution

4:42 was history’s first massive corporate bailout,

4:45 made conditional on the British government's right to regulate

4:48 the hitherto unregulated private company’s activities in India.

4:52 These regulations were strengthened by Pitt’s India Act of 1784,

4:56 which went so far as to prohibit the company from engaging in aggressive wars

5:00 of territorial expansion due to the extreme

5:03 financial burden of conquering and holding new lands.

5:06 Yet even as parliament clamped down on the East India Company,

5:10 so too did the East India Company increasingly get its people into parliament.

5:15 Indeed, the invention of corporate lobbying is

5:18 attributed to the British East India Company,

5:21 a practice which allowed them to continue their economic

5:25 exploitation and military conquest of the Indian subcontinent,

5:27 regardless of the cost to the British and Indian common folk,

5:31 and regardless of what regulatory measures were put in place to stop them.

5:36 Anglo-Mysore Wars It is on that note that we now return to India.

5:40 Following the annexation of Bengal, the British East India Company’s next major

5:44 enemy would be the Kingdom of Mysore.

5:46 Nestled in the sweltering tropics

5:48 and wetlands of India's southern Karnataka region,

5:51 the Kingdom of Mysore was one of the polities which

5:54 had gained independence after the disintegration of the Mughal Empire.

5:58 Traditionally ruled by the Hindu Maharajas of the Wadiyar dynasty,

6:02 the Kingdom was usurped in 1761 by one of their Muslim soldiers,

6:07 Hyder Ali, who reduced the Wadiyars to figurehead status

6:10 and declared himself the de facto ruler of Mysore.

6:14 The Sultan pursued a policy of aggressive territorial expansion, and by 1766,

6:20 Mysore had risen from obscurity to become the overlords

6:23 of nearly all of India south of the Krishna river.

6:27 Hyder Ali’s main regional rivals were the Marathas,

6:30 who routinely threatened his domains from the north,

6:33 but he was also wary of the rapidly

6:36 growing influence of the British East India Company.

6:39 Consequently, he forged a pragmatic alliance with the French,

6:42 who still retained influence in southern India via their base in Pondicherry.

6:47 A brilliant general and energetic military innovator,

6:50 the Sultan invested heavily in developing a technologically

6:54 advanced standing army capable of defeating modern European troops,

6:58 even pioneering iron-cased rocket artillery,

7:01 whose terrifying shrieking missiles far outperformed even British cannon.

7:05 For many years, the Kingdom of Mysore was

7:09 the biggest threat to British domination in the Indian Subcontinent.

7:12 It would take the East India Company over 20 years, four wars,

7:16 and the extensive help of allied Indian states

7:19 to finally bring an end to the Mysore realm.

7:24 The first Anglo-Mysore war began in 1767.

7:28 While the East India Company was

7:30 pacifying the recently annexed region of Bengal,

7:33 the ambitious Hyder Ali bore down

7:35 upon the relatively undefended Company Presidency

7:38 of Madras with a 50,000-strong army

7:41 consisting of modern infantry and artillery units,

7:44 as well as camel cavalry mounted with rockets.

7:48 The approach of Hyder Ali’s massive army upon the unprepared

7:52 and isolated outpost of Madras sent John Company’s stockholders into a panic,

7:57 contributing to the ongoing financial crisis back in Europe.

8:01 The East India Company’s local allies in the Maratha

8:04 Confederacy and the Nizam of Hyderabad were

8:07 neutralized when Hyder Ali bought off the former

8:10 and convinced the latter to defect to his side,

8:13 yet the Madras army was able to turn back the combined

8:18 Mysore-Hyderabad invasion force at the battles of Chengam and Tiruvannamalai,

8:23 after which Hyderabad defected back to the British.

8:26 The war raged on for another two years,

8:29 during which the British successfully convinced the Marathas

8:32 to re-enter the fray and raid into Mysore’s northern territories,

8:36 while Hyder Ali’s relentless Mysorean armies pillaged

8:39 perilously close to the suburbs of Madras.

8:42 In the end, it was the East India Company which sued for peace,

8:46 signing the 1769 Treaty of Madras which obligated

8:50 them to help defend Mysore against Maratha aggression,

8:53 which was annulled after the British failed

8:56 to help Mysore repel a Maratha invasion in 1771.

9:01 The second Anglo-Mysore war was an extension of the American Revolutionary War.

9:06 When France entered that conflict in 1778,

9:08 the British East India Company responded by capturing

9:11 the French port of Pondicherry in Southern India.

9:14 Hyder Ali leapt to the defence of his traditional French allies,

9:18 with the Sultan's shrieking rockets annihilating a British

9:22 force at the 1780 Battle of Pollilur,

9:24 which was later described as “the severest blow

9:28 that the English ever suffered in India.” Yet this momentum

9:31 was checked by a defeat at the Battle of Porto

9:35 Novo and the death of Hyder Ali in 1782, possibly from cancer.

9:39 The conflict was continued by his son, the Tipu Sultan,

9:44 yet the costs of war were beginning to weigh on Mysore.

9:47 The French withdrew from the conflict after

9:49 successfully helping the American colonies win their independence;

9:53 the 1783 Peace of Paris restored Pondicherry to France diplomatically.

9:57 This compelled the Tipu Sultan to sign the Treaty of Mangalore with the British,

10:03 which returned their territories to status quo ante bellum.

10:07 After the Second Anglo-Mysore War,

10:10 Tipu Sultan found himself increasingly encircled.

10:13 From 1786, the Company pursued a policy of diplomatically

10:17 isolating Mysore by fortifying their alliances with Hyderabad,

10:21 the Maratha Confederacy, and the Kingdom of Travancore.

10:25 In 1789, Tipu Sultan attacked Travancore, triggering the third Anglo-Mysore War.

10:30 The forces of the Marathas, the Nizam of Hyderabad,

10:34 and the East India Company invaded Tipu Sultan's

10:37 domains from all sides and besieged his capital, Seringapatam, by 1792.

10:42 Designed by the finest French military engineers,

10:46 the walls of Seringapatam held.

10:48 Nonetheless, the Tipu Sultan was forced to sign a treaty which

10:52 partitioned half of Mysore’s territory between the British and their allies.

10:57 In 1799, the Tipu Sultan saw an opportunity to reverse

11:01 his misfortunes with the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte in France.

11:05 As he trounced European armies and launched an invasion of Egypt,

11:09 the ruler of Mysore sought to link up

11:12 with his Grande Armée against their common British enemy.

11:16 Understandably, the East India Company had no intention of letting this happen.

11:20 Calling upon their native allies,

11:22 the British amassed a force to end the Tipu Sultan once and for all.

11:27 This force overcame Mysorean resistance and laid Seringapatam under siege.

11:31 This time, the walls collapsed, the city fell,

11:35 and the Tipu Sultan was slain in battle.

11:38 Mysorean territory was once more partitioned among the victorious allies,

11:41 and what remained of the Kingdom became a British puppet state.

11:45 With Mysore neutralized,

11:47 the so-called “grandest society of merchants in the universe” looked to the vast

11:53 domains of their Maratha allies as their next theatre of colonial conquest.

11:59 Anglo-Maratha Wars Rising to prominence in 1674 under

12:02 the leadership of the invincible Hindu warlord Shivaji,

12:06 the Marathas were arguably the most powerful

12:09 foe the British ever faced in India,

12:11 emerging as the undeniable winners of the power

12:14 vacuum left by the collapse of the Mughal Empire,

12:17 going so far as to sack Delhi itself in 1737.

12:21 The Marathas had risen to supremacy

12:24 at the spear tip of lethally mobile light cavalry.

12:28 Yet, they also responded to the rise of British

12:31 power in India with the rapid adoption of European-style warfare.

12:35 In 1784, the Maratha ruler of Gwailor

12:38 invited the worldly Savoyard mercenary, Benoît de Boigne,

12:43 to sculpt several battalions of state-of-the-art

12:46 Maratha artillerymen and musketmen who became

12:48 famed for their ‘wall of fire and iron.’ Powerful as they were,

12:53 the Marathas had their vulnerabilities.

12:55 Their vast domains were not a centralized Empire,

12:59 but instead a loose coalition of rulers consisting of the Maharajas of Indore,

13:05 Nagpur, Baroda, the aforementioned Gwalior, and Poona.

13:08 The ruler of Poona, who held the title of Peshwa,

13:12 was the nominal overlord of the other four Maharajas,

13:15 but in practice they were all functionally autonomous.

13:19 The different Maratha states often competed with one another,

13:22 and the divisions between them would be exploited

13:25 by the British to eventually subdue the entire Maratha Empire.

13:29 Nevertheless, it would still take the British three wars fought across

13:33 over 30 years to bring down the masters of central India.

13:38 The Maratha Confederacy and the British East India

13:41 Company were initially allies against the Kingdom of Mysore,

13:44 but conflict soon arose between them after the British

13:47 began meddling in the Maratha Confederacy's internal affairs.

13:51 In 1772, the Maratha Peshwa Madhavrao I passed away,

13:56 and his position came under contest by two claimants,

14:01 Raghunathrao and Madhavrao II.

14:03 Raghunathrao made overtures to the British East India Company,

14:07 promising to cede territories and grant extensive

14:10 commercial rights in exchange for military assistance.

14:14 Governor-General Warren Hastings seized upon this deal,

14:17 while the vast majority of Maratha factions

14:20 united under Madhavrao II to preserve their sovereignty,

14:23 kickstarting the first Anglo-Maratha war.

14:25 This conflict went very poorly for John Company,

14:29 whose expeditionary army out of Bombay was cut off,

14:33 surrounded, then defeated by a Maratha force at the 1779 battle of Wadgoan.

14:38 The two belligerents continued to exchange glancing blows in the Deccan plateau,

14:43 but the British were ultimately unable to achieve

14:46 their war objective of installing Raghunathrao to the Maratha throne.

14:50 The 1782 Treaty of Salbai concluded a peace

14:54 between the Maratha and the East India Company,

14:57 after which the two powers returned to fighting

14:59 as allies against their mutual enemy of Mysore,

15:02 with the Marathas proving instrumental in helping the British

15:06 subjugate the most powerful Kingdom in southern India.

15:10 The lead-up to the second Anglo-Maratha war began in the autumn of 1802

15:15 with a power struggle between the Maratha Maharajas of Gwalior and Indore.

15:21 Their nominal overlord, Peshwa Baji Rao II, sided with Gwalior,

15:25 only for their combined armies to be crushed

15:27 by Indore forces at the battle of Poona.

15:31 Defeated by his own vassal, Baji Rao made the ill-advised decision to flee

15:36 to the East India Company for protection.

15:39 The British compelled the Peshwa to sign the Treaty of Bassein,

15:43 in which he renounced the right to declare war or make alliances

15:47 without British approval and allowed the British

15:49 to station troops in his capital,

15:52 effectively signing away the independence of the Maratha Confederacy.

15:56 Horrified, Maharaja Scindia of Gwalior turned on his overlord

16:00 and, in alliance with the Maratha ruler of Nagpur,

16:03 rose up against both him and his new British masters.

16:07 Unwilling to aid his Gwalior rival, Maharaja Holkar of Indore sat on the fence,

16:13 hoping Scindia and the British would weaken one another to his benefit.

16:18 The second Anglo-Maratha war was defined

16:20 by the brilliance of Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington.

16:25 Under General Wellesley's leadership,

16:27 British Company forces achieved a miraculous

16:30 victory at Scindia’s unassailable fortress of Assaye.

16:32 The bill for this battle totalled up to the lives

16:35 of a third of the entire British army,

16:38 with British officers agreeing that the Maratha artillery had been

16:42 as well organized and deadly as the most disciplined European army.

16:46 Even after defeating Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815,

16:49 the Duke of Wellington still maintained that the Battle

16:52 of Assaye was the greatest military challenge he had ever faced.

16:57 Meanwhile, a second Company force under General Gerard Lake advanced on Delhi,

17:01 successfully capturing the city and seizing

17:04 the puppet strings of the politically

17:07 powerless but still symbolically important Mughal Emperor, Shah Alam II.

17:11 Had the Marathas put up a united front,

17:13 they would likely have been able to destroy the British,

17:16 but the highest ruler of the Maratha realm

17:19 had already consigned himself to becoming a British puppet,

17:22 while simmering internal rivalries meant that Gwalior and Nagpur fought

17:27 largely without the support of the other constituent Maratha states,

17:33 sealing their ultimate defeat.

17:35 The victory of the British East India

17:38 Company in the Second Anglo-Maratha War effectively

17:41 ended the Maratha Confederacy's tenure as the predominant

17:44 land power in the Indian subcontinent.

17:47 The status of the ruling Peshwa Baji Rao

17:50 II as a de facto British puppet was affirmed,

17:53 and the Marathas ceased to function as a unified coalition,

17:57 with Company officials negotiating separate treaties with individual Maratha

18:01 Maharajas rather than with the Confederacy as a whole.

18:05 The Maharaja of Gwalior and Nagpur both ceded land to the British,

18:10 while the Maharaja of Indore conducted his own

18:12 war against the redcoats for a time.

18:15 However, his ultimate failure to cooperate

18:17 with his Gwalior rivals led to his defeat,

18:20 and he too sued for peace, ceding land to the East India Company.

18:25 With the fiercest anti-British Maratha factions pacified,

18:29 a twelve-year period of peace ensued,

18:32 during which time the East India Company tightened its grip on Maratha politics.

18:37 A third and final Anglo-Maratha war erupted in 1817,

18:41 when Baji Rao II repudiated the Treaty of Bassein

18:44 and rose in rebellion against the East India Company.

18:48 Alas, his bid to throw off colonial corporate overlordship was a doomed one.

18:53 Once more, the Marathas failed to form a unified front against the British.

18:58 Prince Scindia of Gwalior,

18:59 who had fought so fiercely against the redcoats in the Second Anglo-Maratha war,

19:04 was convinced by the British to sit on the sidelines,

19:07 while many other smaller Maratha factions defected outright,

19:10 lured into the Company’s army by the prospect of higher wages.

19:15 The conflict was swift and decisive,

19:17 resulting in the formal dissolution of the Maratha Confederacy and the direct

19:22 annexation or indirect vassalization of the majority of its territories.

19:27 The historian Percival Spear described the end of the Third

19:31 Anglo-Maratha War in 1818 as the year when “the British

19:36 dominion in India became the British dominion of India.”

19:41 Sikh Empire& Conclusion Following the dissolution of the Maratha Confederacy,

19:44 the last remaining significant native Indian state

19:47 was the Sikh Empire in the Punjab.

19:50 We have already covered the entire history of the Sikhs in another video,

19:55 which we encourage you to check out,

19:57 so we will not explore the Anglo-Sikh wars in detail here.

20:00 However, in broad strokes, the story of the British East India Company’s

20:04 conquest of the Punjab was a very familiar one.

20:07 Like the Mysore Sultanate and Maratha Confederacy,

20:10 the Sikh Empire invested heavily in a modern,

20:14 European-style military capable of defeating the British.

20:17 Yet like Mysore and the Marathas,

20:19 the East India Company exploited an ongoing succession

20:22 crisis within the Sikh’s domain to divide the region.

20:26 Like he had done in Bengal, John Company cultivated treachery within the Punjabi

20:31 court which paralyzed the Sikhs’ ability to resist,

20:34 culminating in two wars which resulted

20:37 in the total annexation of the Punjab by 1849,

20:40 completing the final major conquest of the British

20:44 East India Company within the Indian Subcontinent.

20:47 With that, nearly the entirety of India had been painted red.

20:51 The Union Jack now flew in every corner of Hindustan,

20:54 not on the direct initiative of the British Government itself,

20:58 but through the scheming ambitions of a private company who owed

21:02 its colonial success not only to its massive corporate army in India,

21:07 but its legion of corporate lobbyists back in London.

21:12 In our next video on the British East India Company,

21:14 we will take a brief interlude from India and roll back the timeline

21:19 a few decades to set up an important subplot in John Company’s history:

21:23 the story of the East India Company in China.

21:26 To ensure you don’t miss that, make sure you are

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