In June 1776, a group of Company officials conspired to overthrow the governor of the Madras Presidency, George Pigot. Both sides borrowed rhetoric from the more famous revolution then underway in America to frame the conflict as an issue of liberty and tyranny, but many in Britain saw the coup as little more than a cash grab in a settlement that had become synonymous with greed. This chapter revisits Pigot’s overthrow to show how this story of avarice was shaped by political conflict between two Indian rulers, Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah of Arcot and Tuljaji Bhonsle of Thanjavur. Both rulers had shored up their positions by offering patronage to various Company officials: Pigot had ties to Thanjavur, while his opponents had been courted by Arcot. Their competing interests fueled fierce debates in Madras about how the Company should intervene in Indian affairs – and who should direct that intervention. The Company’s European officers used the crisis to claim new authority over their civilian counterparts and led the coup against Pigot. In Britain, officials condemned the coup, but in Madras, it established a powerful precedent used by politically ambitious officers for decades to come.

Long before the East India Company’s founding, individual Europeans traveled to India as soldiers. Rulers recruited such men to gain access to new technical knowledge and to demonstrate their cosmopolitan reach. Company officials had long sought to make use of these adventurers as informal diplomatic agents, but had little success until the mid-eighteenth century, when the Company’s expanding political power made such connections valuable to European adventurers. As the balance of power between the Company and Indian states shifted, those adventurers demanded more formal positions within the Company, including as political residents through whom the Company asserted indirect influence over nominally independent states. Their success in implanting themselves as Company agents contrasts with the status of Indian officers and sepoys employed by the Company, who were also active in the fluid military labor markets of India. Rather than seeing such figures as potential representatives, Company officials used their growing corps of diplomat-adventurers to compel Indian states into new treaties criminalizing such movement and thus curtailing the fluidity of South India’s military economy.