The Company settlement
The English East India Company traded in Bengal from the mid-seventeenth century. In 1690 its agent Job Charnock settled at Sutanuti on the east bank of the Hooghly, and in 1698 the Company acquired the rights to three villages, Sutanuti, Gobindapur and Kalikata, from which the city's name derives. A court ruling of 2003 declared that the city had no single founder, rejecting the tradition that made Charnock its father. The Company built Fort William, and the settlement grew as a port for the export of Bengal's textiles.
In 1756 the nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daula, took Calcutta. The British accused him of the "Black Hole", the death of prisoners in a small cell of the fort, though the numbers given by the survivor J. Z. Holwell are not reliable. Robert Clive retook the city in 1757 and defeated the nawab at Plassey, and Calcutta became the base of British power in India.
Capital of British India
Warren Hastings moved the government of Bengal to Calcutta in 1772, and from 1773 the governor-general there had authority over the other presidencies. The city grew into the largest in India and the second city of the British empire, with Government House, the new Fort William, and the mansions that earned it the name City of Palaces, alongside crowded Indian quarters.
William Jones founded the Asiatic Society in 1784, and Calcutta became the centre of European scholarship on India. It was also the centre of the Bengal Renaissance, a movement of social and religious reform and of literature, led by figures such as Rammohun Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and the Tagore family. Hindu College was founded in 1817 and the University of Calcutta in 1857.
Politics and decline as capital
Calcutta was a centre of early nationalism, and Lord Curzon's partition of Bengal in 1905 provoked the Swadeshi movement there. In 1911 the capital of British India moved to Delhi. The city was struck by the famine of 1943, when hundreds of thousands of destitute people came to it from the countryside, and in August 1946 by the Great Calcutta Killings, communal riots in which thousands died. Partition in 1947 made it the capital of West Bengal and brought a great influx of refugees from East Bengal.
Modern Kolkata
After independence the city faced economic decline, political unrest and the Naxalite movement of the late 1960s, and was governed by the Left Front from 1977 to 2011. Its cultural life remained vigorous, in film through Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, in theatre, literature and music. The city was renamed Kolkata, its Bengali name, in 2001. Landmarks include the Howrah Bridge of 1943, the Victoria Memorial and the Indian Museum.
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
See also
- East India Company — The East India Company (EIC) was an English joint-stock trading corporation, chartered in 1600, that expanded from a monopoly on Asian trade into the paramount political and military power on the Indian subcontinent before its dissolution in 1858.
- Battle of Plassey — The Battle of Plassey, fought on 23 June 1757 at the village of Palashi in Bengal, was the decisive engagement in which the British East India Company under Robert Clive defeated Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah, opening the way to British political dominance in India.
- British Raj — The British Raj was the period of direct Crown rule over India from 1858 to 1947, following the East India Company's dissolution after the rebellion of 1857.
- Warren Hastings — Warren Hastings was a British East India Company administrator who served as the first Governor-General of Bengal from 1774 to 1785 and was later tried, and acquitted, on charges of corruption and abuse of power.
- George Curzon, Lord Curzon — Lord Curzon was a British statesman who served as Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, remembered for administrative reforms, the 1905 partition of Bengal, and his resignation over a dispute with Commander-in-Chief Lord Kitchener.
- Partition of Bengal (1905) — The 1905 division of the Bengal Presidency by Viceroy Lord Curzon into two provinces along broadly religious lines, an act that provoked mass protest and the Swadeshi movement.
- Bengal famine of 1943 — A famine in the Bengal province of British India in 1943 that caused large-scale death from starvation and disease amid wartime disruption, administrative failure and export/procurement policy, with death toll estimates commonly ranging from roughly 1.5 to 3 million.
- Partition of India — The Partition of India in 1947 divided British India into the independent dominions of India and Pakistan, ending British colonial rule and triggering mass migration and communal violence on a scale unmatched in modern history.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.