Playing by British East India Company rules

The British, shut out of Molucca and Japan, had plenty of other ports to exploit,

especially in India. From its headquarters in Calcutta, India, the British East India

Company traded in textiles and expanded its influence. It oversaw the administration

of trade, but it also governed British subjects in its trading ports and beyond, becoming

a quasi-government.

In the mid-eighteenth century, the British East India Company expanded its role to

military power, declaring war on the local Mogul ruler, or nawab. The nawab, Siraj-ud-

Daulah, had asked the British to stop fortifying Calcutta. When they refused, he

captured the city in 1756, forcing company officials to flee. The nawab’s forces

captured a garrison of East India Company guards and threw them into a small jail

known ever after as the Black Hole of Calcutta. A British survivor claimed that 146

people were thrown into the 18-x-14-foot jail overnight and that all but 23 died. (Later

scholarship showed that the number of prisoners was probably 64 to start with.) The

story rallied British popular opinion against Siraj-ud-Daulah and firmed up the East

India Company’s resolve to fight back.

The company’s soldiers responded by attacking and defeating a coalition of provincial

Muslim rulers allied with the nawab and the Mogul emperor. At war’s end, a British

trading enterprise had transformed itself into the provincial ruler of the Bengal region

of India.

The company’s power and profits grew alarmingly, and so did mismanagement and

corruption within it. Irresponsible speculation in company stock contributed to a

banking crisis in 1772, and the British government passed a series of laws to reform

the East India Company, requiring more direct government supervision of company

affairs.

In 1857, Hindu and Muslim rebels massacred British soldiers, and the British responded

with overwhelming weaponry and mass executions. The uprising against East India

Company rule forced the government in London to re-examine colonial policies again.

In 1858, Parliament passed an act requiring the East India Company to hand its

powers over to the British crown

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