States which Accepted Alliance

The Indian princes who accepted the subsidiary system were: the Nizam of Hyderabad (September 1798 and 1800), the ruler of Mysore (1799), the ruler of Tanjore (October 1799), the Nawab of Awadh (November 1801), the Peshwa (December 1801), the Bhonsle Raja of Berar (December 1803), the Sindhia (February 1804), the Rajput states of Jodhpur, Jaipur, Macheri, Bundi and the ruler of Bharatpur (1818). The Holkars were the last Maratha confederation to accept the Subsidiary Alliance in 1818.

Views

A 1950 Colonial Office paper disarmingly says that Britain ‘as a seafaring and trading nation... had long been a “collector of islands and peninsulas”’. In a much-quoted remark, Sir John Seeley, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, said something similar in 1883: ‘We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind. That didn’t mean quite what it seemed to say: what Seeley meant was that there had not been a coherent policy behind Britain’s imperial expansion. There had been an incoherent set of policies. The 1950 paper explained that the collection of islands and peninsulas was assembled to protect trade and the sea routes. The motive for Empire was selfish… the motivation consisted of desires which interlocked: desires for wealth, for strategic possessions from which to defend the wealth, and for prestige, the inevitable concomitant of wealth. In the process, numberless hundreds of thousands of native populations were slaughtered,

… Almost always, the subject races, even the most sophisticated and educated amongst them, were regarded as and made to feel inferior to the ruling caste.

—Walter Reid, Keeping the Jewel in the Crown

In the hundred years after Plassey, the East India Company, with an army of 260,000 men at the start of the nineteenth century and the backing of the British government and Parliament (many of whose members were shareholders in the enterprise), extended its control over most of India. The Company conquered and absorbed a number of hitherto independent or autonomous states, imposed executive authority through a series of high- born Governors General appointed from London, regulated the country’s trade, collected taxes and imposed its fiat on all aspects of Indian life.

Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness