1 - The setting for empire

Summary

Early in the eighteenth century the very diverse areas which now make up three states of contemporary India, West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, together with present-day Bangladesh, were loosely welded together under a single Governor to form the eastern wing of the Mughal empire. In 1765 authority over the Mughal provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa was formally transferred to the East India Company and by the 1820s these provinces had become the eastern wing of a vast new British empire in India. The chronological span of this volume of the New Cambridge History of India has thus been chosen to cover the replacement of Mughal rule by the first British regime in India.

Until fairly recently, such a choice of dates would require little explanation or defence. Contemporary Englishmen sometimes described the changes that took place in the middle of the eighteenth century in Bengal as a ‘revolution’, and later generations of historians tended to agree with them. The change from Mughal to British rule has commonly been seen as the beginning of a ‘modern’ era, not only for the peoples of eastern India but for the whole sub-continent. For very good reasons, what happened in Bengal during the early years of British rule has become one of the classic case studies for those concerned with assessing the impact of foreign rule on conquered societies.

In recent years, however, the revolutionary consequences of the establishment of colonial rule have been called into question for many different parts of the world.