The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple

Author:William Dalrymple [Dalrymple, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: History, Asia, India & South Asia, Europe, Great Britain, General, Modern, 18th Century, Political Science, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, Military, Wars & Conflicts (Other)
ISBN: 9781635573954
Google: 42aYvgEACAAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2019-09-09T19:00:00+00:00

Two days after Pollilur, a special vessel was sent off from Madras to Calcutta to tell Fort William of the disaster. The news arrived on 20 September. When Warren Hastings heard of the catastrophe, he realised immediately what the defeat meant: ‘Our armies,’ he wrote to London, ‘which have been so long formed to habits of conquest, will not easily recover from the impression of the dreadful reverse, nor be brought to act with their former confidence under unsuccessful commanders.’127 Lord Macartney wrote home in a similar vein from Madras: ‘The Indians have less Terror of our Arms; we less Contempt for their opposition. Our future Advantages therefore are not to be calculated by past exploits.’128

The Company – now more than £10 million* in debt and unable to pay its own salaries – was now faced by a combination of all the strongest powers in India, supported by the French.129 Privately Hastings imagined himself ‘on board a great leaky vessel, driving towards a Lee Shore with Shipwreck not to be avoided, except by a miracle’.130

Few would disagree. Never had the Company’s position in India seemed so shaky. One early analysis of the defeat expressed surprise that the different Indian rivals of the Company did not take more advantage of the crucial opportunity Pollilur presented: ‘Had the French sent timely assistance to the enemy,’ he wrote, ‘as there was every reason to expect, and had the Mahratta states, instead of remaining quiet spectators … joined their confederate forces and acted with unanimity, there could not have been a doubt but the British must have been dispossessed of almost every settlement on the Peninsula. Had Haidar pursued his success after the defeat of Baillie considering the shattered and dispirited state of the rest of the army, there could scarcely have been a hope of it not falling, together with Fort St George, almost a defenceless prey into the hands of the enemy.’131 Fortunately for the Company, Haidar was determined to preserve his forces. He avoided any further decisive engagements and focused on harassing Company supply lines by launching hit-and-run raids with his cavalry. The Company kept its toehold in the south only by the lack of confidence and initiative shown by its adversaries, and the quick supply of reinforcements from Calcutta. Over the months to come, with a mixture of imaginatively wide-ranging military action and deft diplomacy, Hastings managed to break both the Triple Alliance and the unity of the Maratha Confederacy when, on 17 May 1782, he signed the Treaty of Salbai, a separate peace with the Maratha commandor Mahadji Scindia, who then became a British ally. For the Company’s enemies it was a major missed opportunity. In 1780, one last small push could have expelled the Company for good. Never again would such an opportunity present itself, and the failure to take further immediate offensive action was something that the durbars of both Pune and Mysore would later both bitterly come to regret.

Elsewhere in the world, 1780 saw the British

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