The Rise and fall of East India Company

The Rise and fall of East India Company

• Jagath Seths, the wealthiest bankers, offered Robert Clive £2 million

• The period was of greatest corruption, loot and human rights abuse

Dr. Hari Desai writes weekly column “Heritage History” for “Asian Voice”, the newsweekly of ABPL Group, London. 9-15 November 2019 .You may visit  https://bit.ly/2quPGaa to read the full text and comment.

•          The Company makes its first territorial seizure with the support of the Jagath Seths, the country’s wealthiest bankers. It was they who asked the British to overthrow Siraj-ud-Daulah of Bengal and they offered Robert Clive £2 million to do this. This was the moment the Company realised it could defeat the vast Mughal armies with a very small amount of its newly-trained sepoys. And particularly from the 1780s onwards, the Marwari and Jain bankers of Bengal, and later the Hindu bankers of Benares and Patna, consistently backed the Company against other Indian forces.

1.           The country was not conquered by white British manpower. It was conquered by Indian troops, who were recruited. And these armies were being funded by Marwari bankers. There were never more than 2,000 British traders in India in this period, most of them in Bengal. The extraordinary audacity of the British was to borrow Indian money, train Indian soldiers, and take on other Indian states. But this is exactly what they did.