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The Governor of Bengal accused the East India Company of turning a crisis into a humanitarian catastrophe.
The terrible famine which struck Bengal from 1769 was partly a freak of nature, but Warren Hastings, Governor of Bengal, blamed a culture of corruption and negligence in the East India Company for making the effects far worse than they needed to be, and was not prepared to turn a blind eye.
The dazzling throne of the Mughal Emperors has vanished from history, but not before Abdul Hamid Lahori had seen it.
The Peacock Throne in the Hall of Private Audiences in the Red Fort of Delhi was the high throne of Mughal Emperors, built for Shah Jahan, who ascended it for the first time on March 22nd, 1635. The throne was looted and taken to Persia in May 1739 by Nader Shah, but we do have this eyewitness description from Abdul Hamid Lahori, Shah Jahan’s court historian.
Sir Thomas Roe had some difficulty making an impression on Emperor Jehangir.
In 1615, English courtier Sir Thomas Roe was despatched to the court of the Great Mogul, Jehangir, to win his support for the East India Company in the face of Portuguese rivals. Roe presented the Emperor with various presents designed to impress him with the superior cultural advancement of the English, but he might have been better off keeping it simple.
Britain’s fear of Russia led her to attempt regime change in Afghanistan, but it cost many lives and damaged the army’s reputation.
Jawaharlal Nehru has been telling his daughter about the rise of the Punjab State under Ranjit Singh, who died in 1839. From there he passes on to the stirring events unfolding to the north-west. The British East India Company, then ruling most of India, had been struck by a sudden fear that Nicholas I’s Russia might invade Afghanistan and threaten their Indian monopoly.
The Indian Mutiny began with a revolt among disgruntled soldiers, and ended with the making of the British Raj.
By 1857, the East India Company, a British government agency, had been running India for a hundred years. The Company’s ruthless acquisition of territory, and its high-handed treatment of respected figures and institutions, alienated Indians of all classes; and that May, soldiers in the Company’s militia rose up against their officers. Jawaharlal Nehru explains what happened next.
Incompetence, arrogance and some mischievous propaganda all conspired to throw India into chaos.
In 1757, the British East India Company took control of most of India on behalf of the British Government. The Company employed a large number of Indian-born soldiers in their private army, including Muslims and Sikhs, and in 1857 some of these ‘sepoys’ rose up in rebellion. The reasons were complex, but clearly explained here by two Indian schoolmasters, writing in 1944.
The British Empire may be said to have started when Elizabethan importers got into a fight with the Dutch over the price of pepper.
The English were more interested in war than trade in the days of Henry VIII, but in the reigns of Henry’s daughters Mary I (1553-1558) and Elizabeth I (1558-1603) English mariners began to imitate their Continental neighbours and reach out to the Far East. This did not greatly please their neighbours, who resented the competition.