Richard Wellesley

Subsidiary alliances and expansion

Wellesley arrived in India in 1798 as Governor-General with an explicit mandate to counter French influence among Indian rulers during the Napoleonic Wars, at a time when the British government was alarmed by Napoleon's Egyptian campaign and by contacts between Tipu Sultan of Mysore and French agents. He used this mandate as the basis for a far more aggressive policy of extending Company control than his instructions from the Company's directors in London had envisaged. His principal instrument was the subsidiary alliance system, under which Indian rulers were required to accept a Company military force stationed permanently in their territory at their own expense, to cede control of their external relations with other states entirely to the Company, and, in many cases, to surrender territory or assign revenue to meet the cost of the stationed troops. Rulers who accepted these terms retained nominal sovereignty over day-to-day internal administration while becoming financially and militarily dependent on, and effectively subordinate to, Company power; the arrangement was imposed on or accepted by Hyderabad, Awadh, Tanjore, the Carnatic and numerous smaller states during his tenure, dramatically extending the area under indirect Company control without the expense of direct annexation.

Mysore and the Marathas

Wellesley moved decisively against Tipu Sultan of Mysore, whom the Company had fought twice before and regarded as its most capable and persistent adversary in southern India as well as a potential ally of the French, in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War of 1799. A Company-led force under General George Harris, which included Arthur Wellesley, stormed Tipu's fortified capital at Seringapatam in May 1799; Tipu was killed defending the breach, and Mysore's territory was partitioned, with a substantially reduced Mysore state restored under the Wadiyar dynasty as a Company subsidiary and other portions annexed directly or ceded to allies. Wellesley subsequently went to war with the Maratha confederacy, whose constituent chiefs, including Scindia and the Peshwa, he brought into conflict over succession disputes and rival alliances; the Second Anglo-Maratha War of 1803 to 1805 secured further substantial territorial gains for the Company in northern and central India, including effective control over Delhi and custody of the nominal Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II, though the Maratha states were not fully subdued in this round and fought the Company again in the Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817 to 1818.

Recall

Wellesley's wars and the administrative expenditure that accompanied them, including his founding in 1800 of Fort William College in Calcutta to train Company civil servants in Indian languages and administration, drew mounting alarm and criticism in London from the East India Company's Court of Directors, who objected both to the cost and scale of his campaigns and to his repeated disregard of their explicit instructions to avoid further territorial expansion beyond what was strictly necessary for defence. Relations between Wellesley and the directors deteriorated further over disputes about expenditure and over his autocratic style of governance in Calcutta. He was recalled in 1805, having in seven years substantially enlarged the territory under direct or indirect Company control across southern and central India and established the pattern of subsidiary alliances and paramountcy that his successors, including his brother Arthur, later drew on and extended across much of the subcontinent.