Battle of Plassey

The Battle of Plassey was fought on 23 June 1757 near the village of Palashi, on the Bhagirathi-Hooghly river north of Calcutta, between the British East India Company under Robert Clive and Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal. Clive's small army won largely because the Nawab's leading commander, Mir Jafar, had secretly agreed to stand aside. The victory gave the Company control over the richest province of India and is usually treated as the starting point of British rule in the subcontinent.

By the mid-eighteenth century Bengal was nominally a province of the Mughal Empire, but its nawabs ruled it in practice as an independent state from their capital at Murshidabad. It was wealthy, a centre of textile production and trade, and the British, French and Dutch all kept fortified trading posts there. The British settlement was at Calcutta, protected by Fort William.

Siraj-ud-Daulah became Nawab in 1756, succeeding his grandfather Alivardi Khan. He objected to the Company strengthening Calcutta's defences without permission and to its abuse of trading privileges. In June 1756 his forces captured Calcutta. Many British prisoners were then held overnight in a small cell that became notorious as the "Black Hole of Calcutta"; how many were confined there and how many died has long been disputed by historians.

The Company's council at Madras sent a relief force under Colonel Robert Clive and Admiral Charles Watson. They retook Calcutta in January 1757 and forced the Nawab into a treaty in February. The Seven Years' War had meanwhile broken out between Britain and France, and in March the British captured the French post at Chandannagar, upriver from Calcutta.

Distrust on both sides remained. A group of powerful figures at the Nawab's court, including the general Mir Jafar and the banking house of the Jagat Seths, were discontented with Siraj's rule. Clive negotiated a secret agreement under which Mir Jafar would be made Nawab in return for large payments and concessions to the Company.

Clive marched north in June with roughly 3,000 men, of whom fewer than a thousand were Europeans and most of the rest Indian sepoys, with a handful of field guns. The Nawab's army was far larger, commonly estimated at around 50,000 troops with dozens of heavy guns and a small detachment of French gunners.

The two sides exchanged artillery fire through the morning. Around midday a heavy rainstorm soaked the Nawab's gunpowder, while the British had covered theirs. When one of Siraj's loyal commanders, Mir Madan, was mortally wounded leading a cavalry charge, the Nawab lost confidence. Mir Jafar's large contingent and those of other conspirators took no real part, and in the afternoon the Nawab's army withdrew in confusion. British losses were very light, about 22 killed and some 50 wounded by the Company's own count; Clive estimated the Nawab's losses at around 500.

Siraj-ud-Daulah fled but was captured and killed in early July 1757. Mir Jafar was installed as Nawab, while the Company received land around Calcutta and huge sums in compensation, and Clive and other officers gained personal fortunes. The new Nawab soon found himself dependent on the Company, which replaced him in 1760 and again intervened in later disputes over the throne.

Plassey ended French influence in Bengal and gave the British a rich base from which to expand. Their victory at Buxar in 1764 over a combined Indian force was followed in 1765 by the Mughal emperor's grant of the diwani, the right to collect revenue in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Over the next century the Company extended its power across most of India, until the Indian Rebellion of 1857 led the Crown to take over directly and create the British Raj.

Our 1700 map shows the Mughal Empire still covering Bengal, and the 1783 map shows Bengal under Company control a generation after the battle.