East India Company

The East India Company began in 1600 as a group of London merchants licensed to trade east of the Cape of Good Hope and ended as the ruler of much of South Asia, with its own armies, tax collectors and courts. Its territorial power grew from the Battle of Plassey in 1757 until the British Crown took over its Indian possessions in 1858, laying the foundations of British rule in India. Our maps call it the British East India Company.

Queen Elizabeth I granted the charter on 31 December 1600 to a company of more than two hundred merchants and investors, giving it a fifteen-year monopoly of English trade in the East. Its early voyages sought spices in the Indonesian islands, but the better-funded Dutch East India Company pushed it out, especially after a Dutch attack on its post at Amboyna in 1623. The company turned to India instead, opening a permanent factory, or trading post, at Surat in 1613 under licence from the Mughal emperor Jahangir, then bases at Madras, Bombay and Calcutta.

For most of the seventeenth century the company prospered as a privileged merchant in the Mughal Empire, exporting cotton and silk textiles, indigo, saltpetre and later tea. Charles II gave it the right to acquire territory, mint coin, command troops and make war and peace. Its one open war with the Mughals, between 1686 and 1690, ended in humiliating defeat. After Aurangzeb's death in 1707, however, Mughal authority fragmented, and the company, competing with the French, began to back rival claimants to power.

At the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757, Robert Clive's small force, helped by a conspiracy with the Nawab's commander Mir Jafar, defeated Siraj ud-Daula of Bengal. After a further victory at Buxar in 1764, the emperor Shah Alam II granted the company the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in 1765, the right to collect their revenues. Land tax now paid for its exports. How far the company was to blame for the Bengal famine of 1769 to 1770 is debated. Commonly cited estimates put the dead at seven to ten million, though some scholars consider these exaggerated and suggest at least one million; crop failure began it, but the company's farming out of tax collection may have worsened it, and it offered little relief.

Reports of corruption and the company's near-bankruptcy led Parliament to pass the Regulating Act of 1773, which made Warren Hastings the first Governor-General, and then Pitt's India Act, which created a Board of Control in London. Hastings's impeachment trial, begun in 1788, ended in his acquittal in 1795. In 1793 Lord Cornwallis introduced the Permanent Settlement, fixing the land tax in Bengal through zamindar landholders; in the south the ryotwari system taxed cultivators directly. A large sepoy army, recruited mostly in the Ganges plain, became the company's main instrument of power.

Through the Anglo-Mysore Wars of 1766 to 1799 and the Anglo-Maratha wars of 1772 to 1818, which broke the Maratha Empire, the company became the dominant power south of the Sutlej. It ruled some regions directly and bound many princes to it through subsidiary alliances. Parliament ended its Indian trade monopoly in 1813 and its China monopoly in 1833, after which it was purely an agent of government. Annexations continued, including Punjab after the Anglo-Sikh Wars and Oudh in 1856.

The Indian Rebellion of 1857, which began among the Bengal army's sepoys, led Parliament to pass the Government of India Act of 1858, transferring the company's territories, administration and armies to the Crown and inaugurating the British Raj. The company lingered in a vestigial form and was formally dissolved on 1 June 1874. Judgements of its rule remain sharply divided; among its critics, the historian William Dalrymple has called its extraction of wealth from Mughal India "the single largest transfer of wealth until the Nazis".

Our 1815 map shows the British East India Company's territories across much of the subcontinent. Its neighbours then included the Maratha states, not finally defeated until 1818, the many princely states bound to it by treaty, and Nepal, with which it was at war from 1814 to 1816.