How the Battle of Buxar and a single treaty turned the East India Company into the ruler of eastern India
Seven years before Buxar, at a place called Plassey, the East India Company had won the province of Bengal with a bribe.
Source: Wikimedia Commons · Christies.com · Public domain
But a bribe only buys you influence, not ownership. After Plassey the Company did not rule Bengal directly. It ruled through puppets, propping up nawabs who did as they were told and swapping them out when they did not. It was powerful, but it was still, in name, only a company doing business under an Indian ruler.
The Battle of Buxar, in 1764, is where that changed for good. It was the fight that turned the Company from a shadow power into an open one.
And the strangest thing about it is this. The moment that truly made the East India Company the ruler of eastern India was not the battle at all. It was a signature, on a piece of paper, the following year.
Source: Wikimedia Commons · unknown (at least not mentioned by the museum) · Public domain
The Nawab who would not kneel
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The road to Buxar ran through a man the British badly underestimated.
After Plassey they had made Mir Jafar the puppet Nawab of Bengal. When he could not satisfy their endless demands for money, they simply replaced him with his son-in-law, Mir Qasim, expecting another obedient figurehead. They were wrong.
Mir Qasim turned out to be a genuine ruler. He moved his capital away from Calcutta, up the river to Munger in Bihar, to get out from under the Company’s eye, and he set about building a modern, well-trained army of his own.
Then came the quarrel that lit the war, and it is worth understanding, because at heart it was a quarrel about fairness. The Company held permits, called dastaks, that let its goods move without paying duty. Company officials had taken to using these permits for their own private trade, so that they paid no tax while Indian merchants paid the full amount. It was ruining local traders. Mir Qasim’s answer was radical and, on its face, entirely just: if the British would not pay duty, then no one would. He abolished all internal trade taxes for everyone, Indian and British alike.
It was fair, and that was precisely the problem. The British were furious at losing a privilege they had come to treat as theirs by right. Within months, there was war.
The grand alliance
Driven out of Bengal, Mir Qasim did not give up. He fled west to Awadh and did something that should have been enough to crush the Company.
He built an alliance of the greatest powers left in northern India. He joined forces with Shuja-ud-Daula, the powerful Nawab of Awadh, and, most striking of all, with Shah Alam II, the Mughal Emperor himself, who was then living in exile. Between them they raised an army of more than forty thousand men.
Against them, Major Hector Munro of the East India Company had perhaps seven thousand. On paper, it should have been the end of the British in the east.
Source: Wikimedia Commons · Benjamin West · Public domain
One morning at Buxar
On 22 October 1764, the two armies met at Buxar, a fortified town on the banks of the Ganges in Bihar.
The alliance had the numbers, but it carried a fatal weakness: it was not really one army at all. The three rulers did not trust one another, and their forces never fought as a single body. Mir Qasim, sensing the day slipping away, fled early, carrying off his treasure. Only some of the allied troops fought with real determination.
The Company’s soldiers, by contrast, were disciplined, unified and well drilled, and their muskets and cannon did the rest. By the middle of the day the great alliance had broken and the battle was won. That discipline had an ugly edge to it. Not long before the fight, Munro had put down a mutiny in his own ranks with terrible severity, in a way designed to make any soldier think twice about wavering.
Plassey had been won with a bribe. Buxar was won with muskets and cannon, in open battle, against the combined armies of Bengal, Awadh and the Mughal Emperor himself.
This was no lucky skirmish decided by treachery. It was a real trial of strength, and the Company had beaten the best that northern India could put into the field.
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The real conquest was on paper
Winning the battle was not the same as ruling the land. That took a document.
In 1765, Robert Clive returned to India and turned the victory into law through the Treaty of Allahabad. Its terms were breathtaking. The Mughal Emperor, Shah Alam II, granted to the East India Company the Diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, which meant the right to collect all the taxes of the richest provinces in India. In exchange, the Emperor was given a yearly pension.
Read that slowly. The Emperor of India signed away the revenues of his wealthiest lands, and in return the man who had once been the master of the subcontinent became, in effect, a pensioner of a trading company.
With one signature, the Mughal Emperor handed a company the right to tax around twenty million people. The conquest of eastern India, when it finally came, was a piece of paper.
Power without responsibility
What the Company did with that paper was, in its cold way, the most revealing part of the whole story.
Clive set up what became known as the Dual System. The Company took the Diwani, the right to collect the wealth of Bengal. But it left the messy business of actually governing, of keeping order and dispensing justice, in the hands of the Indian Nawab. In plain terms, the British took the money, and the Nawab took the blame.
It was rule with the accountability carefully removed. The Company held the power and dodged the responsibility, and the people of Bengal were caught in the gap between them.
The results were exactly as grim as that arrangement sounds. The Company squeezed the province for revenue, something like four million pounds a year, money that would help pay for the conquest of the rest of India. And within a few years this pitiless machine helped produce one of the great horrors of the age, the Bengal famine of 1770, in which a huge part of the population starved.
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What Buxar really decided
If Plassey was the foothold, Buxar was the empire.
Plassey had given the Company influence in Bengal by trickery. Buxar gave it something far larger and far harder to undo: a battlefield victory over the united might of the north, and then, on paper, legal sovereignty over India’s richest provinces. After Buxar there was no serious power left in northern India to stand in the Company’s way. The road ran more or less straight from here to the full colonial rule that would follow.
There is one last figure worth remembering. Mir Qasim, the one Nawab in this whole story who tried to rule justly and to make trade fair for his own people, never recovered. He wandered for years and died in Delhi in 1777 in such complete poverty that, by the account handed down, his family could not afford a shroud to bury him in. The company he had defied went on to rule a fifth of humanity.
That is the quiet lesson buried in the Battle of Buxar. The conquest of India was not only a matter of muskets and cavalry. It was also a matter of treaties, permits and account books, and of learning that once you have won the battle, the surest way to keep a country is to get it to sign the papers.
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If you think you have remembered everything about this topic take this QUIZ
Results
#1. The Battle of Buxar was fought on which date?
#2. Who was the British commander who led the East India Company forces to victory at Buxar?
#3. Which three Indian rulers formed the alliance against the British at Buxar?
#4. What crucial right was granted to the East India Company by the Treaty of Allahabad (1765)?
#5. Mir Qasim moved his capital from Murshidabad to which city to distance himself from British interference?
#6. What was the immediate economic trigger for the conflict between Mir Qasim and the British?
#7. Which system of government did Robert Clive introduce in Bengal after the victory at Buxar?
#8. What happened to Shah Alam II, the Mughal Emperor, after the defeat at Buxar?
Who fought in the Battle of Buxar?
The battle was fought between the British East India Company (led by Hector Munro) and the alliance of Mir Qasim (Bengal), Shuja-ud-Daula (Awadh), and Shah Alam II (Mughal Emperor).
When was the Battle of Buxar fought?
It was fought on October 22, 1764.
What were the Diwani Rights?
Diwani Rights gave the East India Company the legal authority to collect revenues from the provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa.
Who signed the Treaty of Allahabad?
Robert Clive signed the treaty on behalf of the British with Shah Alam II and Shuja-ud-Daula in 1765.
Why is Buxar considered more important than Plassey?
While Plassey gave the British a foothold, Buxar demonstrated their military superiority over the combined might of North Indian rulers and gave them legal control over India’s richest provinces.
Sources & References
- Encyclopaedia Britannica (“Battle of Buxar” and “Treaty of Allahabad”) — the battle of 22 October 1764, the alliance, and the 1765 treaty that granted the Diwani.
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Hector Munro) — the British commander at Buxar.
- The British Library (Shah Alam II and the Mughal court) — the emperor’s role, the grant of the Diwani, and his position as a Company pensioner.
- UK Parliament (living heritage: the East India Company) — the Diwani, the Company’s shift into a revenue-collecting territorial power, and its later regulation.
