Background
Hyder Ali rose from military command to effective ruler of Mysore in the 1760s, displacing the nominal authority of the Wodeyar royal line while retaining it as a figurehead, and built a well-drilled army that incorporated elements of European-style training and artillery. He recruited French officers to drill his infantry and artillery on continental lines and established state arsenals and workshops at Seringapatam and Dindigul, giving Mysore's forces a technical edge over most other Indian armies of the period. His kingdom's growing power, and its wars with the Marathas and the Nizam of Hyderabad, drew it into recurring conflict with the expanding English East India Company in southern India, particularly as the Company's Madras Presidency bordered Mysore's territory directly and competed with it for control of the Malabar coast and its pepper and spice trade.
First War (1767-1769)
Hyder Ali, briefly allied with the Nizam against the Company before switching sides, campaigned successfully against Company and Nizam forces and advanced to the outskirts of Madras, forcing the Company to negotiate from a position of weakness. The resulting Treaty of Madras (1769) restored conquered territories on both sides and included a mutual defence clause, which the Company subsequently failed to honour when Hyder Ali was attacked by the Marathas, a grievance that shaped his conduct in the next war.
Second War (1780-1784)
Amid the wider context of the American War of Independence, which strained British resources globally and drew France into conflict with Britain, Hyder Ali allied with the Marathas and the Nizam against the Company and inflicted a serious defeat on a Company force under Colonel William Baillie at Pollilur, near Kanchipuram, in 1780, one of the heaviest British defeats in India before the twentieth century. The Company, under Governor-General Warren Hastings, worked to detach the Marathas and the Nizam from the alliance while sending reinforcements south. Hyder Ali died of illness in 1782 and was succeeded by his son Tipu Sultan, who continued the war with French naval support intermittently available in the Indian Ocean. Neither side achieved a decisive victory, and the conflict ended with the Treaty of Mangalore (1784), which restored the pre-war territorial position, the last occasion on which an Indian power negotiated with the Company on essentially equal terms.
Tipu Sultan's state
Between the second and third wars, Tipu Sultan pursued an ambitious programme of state-building, restructuring Mysore's administration into centralized revenue and military departments, establishing state trading monopolies in commodities such as sandalwood, pepper and cardamom to fund his army, and issuing a new calendar and coinage. He continued his father's investment in artillery and pioneered the large-scale battlefield use of iron-cased rockets, launched from massed rocket corps, which inflicted notable casualties on Company troops in several engagements and later influenced British experiments with rocket artillery. Seeking allies against the Company, Tipu sent missions to Revolutionary France, the Ottoman Sultan, and Afghanistan, and briefly allied Mysore with a French Jacobin club at Seringapatam, though none of these overtures produced substantial military support.
Third War (1790-1792)
War resumed after Tipu Sultan attacked the Company's ally Travancore. Governor-General Lord Cornwallis assembled a coalition with the Marathas and the Nizam and personally led the campaign against Mysore, besieging Tipu's capital, Seringapatam. The Treaty of Seringapatam (1792) forced Tipu to cede roughly half his territory, divided among the Company and its allies, pay a large war indemnity, and hand over two of his sons as hostages pending payment.
Fourth War and the fall of Seringapatam (1799)
Governor-General Lord Wellesley, alarmed by Tipu's diplomatic contacts with Revolutionary France and viewing Mysore as the last major power capable of resisting Company expansion in the south, launched a final campaign in 1799. Company forces, supported by the Nizam, stormed Seringapatam on 4 May 1799; Tipu Sultan was killed defending the breach. Mysore's territory was partitioned between the Company, the Nizam and a restored Wodeyar ruler, installed as a minor under a subsidiary alliance that placed Mysore's foreign relations and military affairs under Company control while leaving nominal internal sovereignty intact.
Significance
The fall of Mysore removed the last indigenous power in southern India able to contest Company military supremacy directly and confirmed the subsidiary alliance system, later extended widely across the subcontinent by Wellesley and his successors, as the Company's principal instrument for absorbing Indian states without full territorial annexation. Tipu Sultan's reputation has remained a subject of historiographical dispute: British colonial-era accounts and some later Indian critics portrayed him as a religious persecutor of Hindus and Christians in his territories, while other historians emphasise his administrative modernisation, patronage of industry and technology, including rocket artillery that influenced later European weapons development, and his sustained military resistance to Company expansion, and caution against reading later communal politics back into an eighteenth-century dynastic and territorial conflict.
Further reading
- Dalrymple, William. The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. Bloomsbury, 2019
- Bayly, C. A. Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1988
- Metcalf, Barbara D. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press, 2012
- Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. Oxford University Press, 2009
See also
This entry was last revised on 31 August 2026.