India
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘India’
In 1756, the Nawab of Bengal allowed his frustration with British merchants in Calcutta to get the better of him.
With the Seven Years’ War brewing in Europe, no one was more pleased than Louis XV of France when in June 1756 the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, grew frustrated with the British in Calcutta and seized Fort William and all its wealth. The horrific sequel has been told in many ways: what mattered then was how it was told the following December to Admiral Watson, the man whose job it was to respond.
Before Siraj ud-Daulah became Nawab of Bengal in 1756, his grandfather begged him to keep the English sweet, and put no trust in Jafar Ali Khan. If he had only listened...
Robert Clive’s victory on June 23rd, 1757, over the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey near Murshidabad was vital to Britain’s successful defence of her colonies in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) against Louis XV of France, and fixed the British East India Company as the Mughal Emperors’ chief European trade partner. For Hari Charan Das, it was also a judgment on the Nawab’s refusal to listen to his grandfather.
In 1327, Mohammad bin Tughluq gave every man, woman and child in Delhi just three days’ notice to quit.
The Delhi Sultanate ruled wide realms in India between 1206 and 1555, but the aspiration of Sultan Mohammad bin Tughluq (r. 1325-1351, a contemporary of England’s Edward III) to be Alexander and Solomon rolled into one brought only bankruptcy and revolt. Especially disastrous was his snap decision in 1327 to walk the entire population of Delhi to a new capital over six hundred miles away.
In 1840, Secretary at War Thomas Macaulay treated the Union Jack like a bully’s visiting card, but backbencher William Gladstone believed it deserved better.
In 1840, the British Government, outraged at Peking’s crackdown on the smuggling of opium by British merchants from Bengal, declared war on the Chinese Empire. On April 8th, William Gladstone rose in the Commons to denounce the Government’s belligerent attitude, deploring the execrable drug traffic and taking exception to the way Secretary-at-War Thomas Macaulay wrapped it in the Union Jack.
In 1840, the British Government declared war on the Chinese Empire over their harsh treatment of drug smugglers from Bengal.
The Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60 were a miserably low point in British history, as Jawaharlal Nehru makes painfully clear in this passage. Opium grown in India was smuggled into China by British merchants to feed the addiction of millions of Chinese, until the problem became so bad that the Chinese imperial government was obliged to step up efforts against the smugglers.
The fort at Budge Budge near Calcutta proved stubborn against the massed artillery of the East India Company, but a tipsy seaman took it all by himself.
In 1756, colonial rivalry between France and Britain sparked the Seven Years’ War. In India, France’s ally Siraj ud-Daulah, Nawab of Bengal, drove the British from Calcutta; they in turn, smarting from the infamous ‘Black Hole’ incident, sailed gunships up to the Nawab’s fort at Budge Budge, which guarded the River Hooghly. The small hours of December 30th found them snatching a little sleep prior to a dawn assault.