The Conquerors of India

The Conquerors of India by Roger Pocock

The Conquerors of India by Roger Pocock traces the chain of events through which the British came to rule the Indian subcontinent, focusing on the remarkable figures whose rivalries and ambitions made that conquest possible. At the close of the eighteenth century, the Moslem emperors of Hindustan had fallen into ruin. Shah Alam, the last of the Great Mogul's line, was driven from Delhi in 1784 and appealed to Madhoji Scindhia, a Hindu prince from the South. Scindhia restored the emperor to his palace, then had his eyes gouged out, keeping the blind man as a nominal sovereign in whose name Scindhia collected the taxes of Hindustan by force. Scindhia himself owed allegiance to the peshwa of Poona, the head of the Mahratta confederacy, while he fought the nobility of India and watched for British advances from the coast. When a Savoyard adventurer named De Boigne arrived in the country as a tourist, Scindhia suspected him of being a spy and stole his luggage. De Boigne, a veteran of the French and Russian armies who had also served the British, offered his sword to Scindhia's nearest enemy, which prompted Scindhia to recruit him instead. De Boigne proved to be a man of rare honesty and ability, raising and training forty thousand disciplined soldiers along European lines, always victorious in the field. Before retiring to his vineyards in Savoy after twenty years of service, he handed this formidable army and the effective sovereignty of India to Scindhia's heir, Daulat Rao, warning the young prince above all else never to risk a conflict with the English. Meanwhile a runaway Irish sailor named George Thomas had drifted into the interior and fought his way upward through years of adventure until he had raised his own army of five thousand men and conquered the Hariana, a desert region west of Delhi whose fierce and previously unsubdued tribes accepted his rule willingly. As king at his capital of Hansi, Thomas coined money, cast cannon, manufactured muskets and powder, and established a pension fund for the widows and orphans of his soldiers. He starved and marched on foot alongside his men, and his reputation alone was enough to bring cities to surrender and put Sikh cavalry to flight. De Boigne's successor as Scindhia's commander-in-chief was Perron, a French runaway sailor who grew so powerful that he effectively reigned over Hindustan, ignoring Scindhia's orders and stealing the revenues. Perron feared Thomas as a rival and sent an expedition under the incompetent Major Bourguien against him. Bourguien was thrashed, but Thomas squandered his victory in a week of celebration and awoke to find his five thousand men besieged by thirty thousand veterans. His forage was burned, his battalions were bribed to desert, and with only three English officers and two hundred cavalry he cut his way out and fled to Hansi. Bourguien's force stormed the town, and Thomas fell back to the citadel before surrendering to Bourguien's officers, who had themselves warned him of a plot to have him murdered. At the dinner that followed, Bourguien proposed an insulting toast to his prisoner. The officers turned their glasses down, Thomas burst into tears, then drew his sword and declared that one Irish sword was still sufficient for a hundred Frenchmen, sending Bourguien fleeing from the room. Received with honors at the British outposts on the Ganges, the fallen Thomas was advising the governor-general when a map showing British possessions in red was placed before him. He swept his hand across the whole of India and said all of it ought to be red. The events set in motion by Thomas's resistance to Perron led directly to British dominion over all India. Perron, secretly leagued with Napoleon and planning to hand the Indian empire to France, betrayed Scindhia by refusing to send him help when the Mahratta princes rose against him. One of those princes, Holkar, drove the peshwa from his throne at Poona. The peshwa fled to Bombay and returned with a British army under Sir Arthur Wellesley, whose force of four thousand five hundred men defeated a Mahratta army of fifty thousand at the battle of Assaye, capturing a hundred guns and winning Poona. Simultaneously, a British army under General Lake destroyed Perron's forces and captured Delhi. Both capital cities of India thus fell to British arms in the same campaign, both emperors came under British protection, and the empire was established. Perron, his schemes collapsed, sneaked away to France with a large fortune. Arthur Wellesley, the victor of Assaye, went on to become the Duke of Wellington and to liberate Europe at Waterloo.

By Roger Pocock · First published 1897 · Genre: Historical Fiction, Military History, Biography · 1,697 words

First lines

Only the other day, the king of England was proclaimed emperor of India, and all the princes and governors of that empire presented their swords in homage. This homage was rendered at Delhi, the ancient capital of Hindustan; and it is only one hundred and ten years since Delhi fell, and Hindustan surrendered to the British arms. We have to deal with the events that led up to the conquest of India.

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history · india · colonialism · british empire · military history · imperial expansion · conquest · historical narrative · adventure · biography · cultural conflict · political history

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