The most important such support came from the subsidiary alliances with Indian princes during the first 75 years of Company rule. Since the Company operated under financial constraints, it had to set up political underpinnings for its rule. The second form of asserting power involved treaties in which Indian rulers acknowledged the Company's hegemony in return for limited internal autonomy. In 1854 Berar was annexed, and the state of Oudh two years later. Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir, were annexed after the Anglo-Sikh Wars in 1849–56 (Period of tenure of Marquess of Dalhousie Governor General) however, Kashmir was immediately sold under the Treaty of Amritsar (1850) to the Dogra Dynasty of Jammu, and thereby became a princely state. The annexed regions included the North-Western Provinces (comprising Rohilkhand, Gorakhpur, and the Doab) (1801), Delhi (1803), Assam ( 1828), and Sindh (1839 to 1843).
The first of these was the outright annexation of Indian states and subsequent direct governance of the underlying regions, which collectively came to comprise British India. The expansion of the Company's power chiefly took two forms. With the defeat of the Marathas, no native power represented a threat for the Company any longer. The Anglo-Mysore Wars (1766–99) and the Anglo-Maratha Wars (1772–1818) left it in control of large areas of India south of the Sutlej River.
It also proceeded by degrees to expand its dominions around Bombay and Madras. It took complete control of Bengal-Bihar region and the Nawabs stood as mere pensioners of the Company. In 1793, the nizamat (local rule) was abolished by the Company. The Company thus became the de facto ruler of large areas of the lower Gangetic plain by 1773. The Company's victory under Robert Clive in the 1757 Battle of Plassey and another victory in the 1764 Battle of Buxar (in Bihar), consolidated the Company's power, and forced emperor Shah Alam II to appoint it the diwan, or revenue collector, of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. Since, during this time other companies-established by the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and Danish-were similarly expanding in the region, the English Company's unremarkable beginnings on coastal India offered no clues to what would become a lengthy presence on the Indian subcontinent. Two decades later, the Company established a presence on the eastern coast as well far up that coast, in the Ganges river delta, a factory was set up in Calcutta. The First Anglo-Mughal War ended in 1690. Bombay island, not far from Surat, a former Portuguese outpost given to England as dowry in the marriage of Catherine of Braganza to Charles II, was leased by the Company in 1668. In 1640, after receiving similar permission from the Vijayanagara ruler farther south, a second factory was established in Madras on the southeastern coast. It gained a foothold in India with the establishment of a factory in Masulipatnam on the Eastern coast of India in 1611 and the grant of the rights to establish a factory in Surat in 1612 by the Mughal emperor Jahangir. The English East India Company ("the Company") was founded in 1600, as The Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies.
0 kommentar(er)
