Anglo-Mysore Wars

The Anglo-Mysore wars were four conflicts fought in southern India between 1767 and 1799. On one side stood Mysore, ruled in practice first by Hyder Ali and then by his son Tipu Sultan; on the other, the British East India Company, usually acting through its Madras government, together at various times with the Marathas, the Nizam of Hyderabad and the kingdom of Travancore. The wars ended with Tipu's death and the break-up of his state, removing one of the strongest obstacles to British power in India.

Mysore was formally ruled by the Wodeyar dynasty, but Hyder Ali, a soldier who had risen through its army, had become its real master by 1761. He hired French experts to build up his artillery and expanded the kingdom through constant warfare. His growing strength worried his neighbours, the Nizam and the Maratha Peshwa, while the Company, extending its hold on the east coast, repeatedly turned down his offers of an alliance.

The First Anglo-Mysore War grew partly out of the Nizam's manoeuvres. Hyder and the Nizam together attacked a Company outpost at Changama; British accounts put the allied army at about 70,000 against some 7,000 Company troops. The Nizam changed sides in February 1768, but Hyder kept fighting and advanced so close to Madras that its alarmed government asked for terms. The Treaty of Madras, signed on 29 March 1769, bound each side to help the other if attacked.

Hyder came to feel that the British had failed to honour that promise. After they captured the French-held port of Mahé, which supplied his army, he went to war again. This round was bloodier. Tipu defeated a Company force under William Baillie at Pollilur in September 1780 and another under John Braithwaite in February 1782, while the veteran British commander Eyre Coote beat Hyder at Porto Novo. Hyder died in December 1782, and Tipu carried on the war, which ended with the Treaty of Mangalore on 11 March 1784 restoring the pre-war position.

In 1789 Tipu Sultan, now allied with France, attacked Travancore, a Company ally. The Governor-General, Lord Cornwallis, commanded the British forces, supported by the Marathas and Hyderabad. After a three-year war the allies besieged Tipu's capital, Srirangapatna, in 1792. Under the peace terms Tipu gave up about half of his territory to the allies and handed over two of his young sons as hostages to guarantee the settlement.

Tipu's continued contacts with France, at the time of Napoleon's 1798 invasion of Egypt, alarmed the Company, and Mysore was invaded from several directions in 1799. According to one estimate, about 35,000 Mysorean soldiers faced some 60,000 British-led troops, while the Marathas and the Nizam attacked from the north. On 4 May 1799 the fortress of Srirangapatna, known to the British as Seringapatam, was stormed, and Tipu was killed defending it. Among the British officers was the young Arthur Wellesley.

Mysore's armies made effective use of rockets with iron casings, which could fly as far as about two kilometres. Captured examples influenced British rocket development and inspired the Congreve rocket, later used in the Napoleonic Wars.

After 1799 the Company, the Nizam and the Marathas annexed much of Mysore. The remaining core was given back to the Wodeyars under the young Krishnaraja Wadiyar III, as a princely state bound to the Company by a subsidiary alliance; the dynasty ruled it until 1947. Together with the earlier Battle of Plassey and the later wars against the Maratha Empire and the Sikhs, the conflicts helped make Britain the dominant power in India, leading eventually to the British Raj.

Our 1783 map shows southern India during the second war, and the 1800 map shows the region after Tipu's fall, when the Company and the British Empire had become the leading power in the south.