GCSE AQA History: 1757, the Battle of Plassey
Migration, empires and people
Greg Jenner's "You're Dead to Me" - The Mughal Empire - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p088...
To fully understand the Battle of Plassey it is important to understand the relationship between Britain and India by 1757. If you’ve already watched the previous video on the East India Company then you will know that those first British men who travelled to India after 1600 were tradesmen, eager to take advantage of the massive profits that could be obtained from India. To achieve this they needed to negotiate and trade with India’s rulers and from the sixteenth century that had been the Mughuls. They were Muslims who invaded India and established their own empire. The greatest of their emperors was arguably Akbar, who managed to unite many of the Indian states and ruled over all of the Hindu princes.
Its important to emphasise here that before the British seized control there was already evidence of a united India. Shashi Tharoor, the Indian historian, argues that it was not the British who delivered India as the united country seen today but that this had been evident in both the sixteenth century under the Mughals and even around 300BC under Chandragupta Maurya.
So, back to the Mughal empire: under Akbar there was peace, growth and prosperity. However, his great-grandson, Aurangzeb, was a brutal leader and under his reign, 1658-1707, wars started to break out across India.
So, for the British coincidence and luck came together at a time when they were looking to expand their economic control and their empire; as the Mughal empire started to fall apart at the seams the British were ready and able to take advantage. They recognised that the secret to gaining control of India lay in winning the cooperation of the Hindu princes who had been conquered and controlled by the Mughals for the previous 150 years. The British supplied those princes with the weapons and soldiers the princes needed to defeat the Mughals. Once a prince had been successful the British could then demand their reward – usually land or goods. And should the prince himself prove to be a problem in the future he could be overthrown and replaced by complete British control.
This brings us to 1757 and the Battle of Plassey. It was fought between the East India Company, lead by Robert Clive, and the Mughal leader of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daula. Even though Siraj-ud-Daula was supported by the French and had and army of 40,000 soldiers he was defeated by Clive’s army of just 3000 troops – 2000 of which were Sepoys – Indian soldiers who fought for the British.
This was a key turning point for British control. Victory at Plassey meant the East India Company could take complete control of Bengal – you might remember that in the previous video we called Bengal the ‘workshop of the world’ as it was such thriving centre of the Indian textiles industry. The company would push further across India, occupying other states and using its army to maintain control.
Despite this acceleration in British control, the East India Company ran into financial problems some twenty years later – caused partly by the war in the Americas – and so in 1773 the Government of India Act was passed stating that the territory in India was now controlled jointly by the East india Company and the British government, with Warren Hastings appointed as Governor General to control the territory.
So what do you need to know? Well, the Battle of Plassey is important at it marks the moment where any pretence of British involvement in India being just for trade ended. From this point onwards Britain’s main objective was to control every aspect of life in India. The British government would now officially take much more of an active lead in affairs there and would seemingly remain largely unchallenged until a major rebellion took place exactly 100 years after the Battle of Plassey.