The Company's Sword
The East India Company and the Politics of Militarism, 1644–1858

Examines the role of the East India Company's independent armies in the colonial government of South Asia.

Christina Welsch (Author)

9781108987349, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 8 August 2024

302 pages
23.1 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.45 kg

'This is an excellent and highly readable book that offers a significant new interpretation of the travails of the East India Company and its armies in the century or so leading up to the end of Company rule in South Asia.' Margaret R. Hunt, Journal of British Studies

In the late eighteenth century, it was a cliché that the East India Company ruled India 'by the sword.' Christina Welsch shows how Indian and European soldiers shaped and challenged the Company's political expansion and how elite officers turned those dynamics into a bid for 'stratocracy' – a state dominated by its army. Combining colonial records with Mughal Persian sources from Indian states, The Company's Sword offers new insight into India's eighteenth-century military landscape, showing how elite officers positioned themselves as the sole actors who could navigate, understand, and control those networks. Focusing on south India, rather than the Company's better-studied territories in Bengal, the analysis provides a new approach, chronology, and geography through which to understand the Company Raj. It offers a fresh perspective of the Company's collapse after the rebellions of 1857, tracing the deep roots of that conflict to the Company's eighteenth-century development.

List of maps
List of figures
maps
Acknowledgements
A note on spelling and place names
Introduction
1. Forging the sword
2. The sepoy's oath
3. Mercenaries, diplomats, and deserters
4. The other revolution of 1776
5. The empire preserved
6. Stratocracy
7. Breaking the officers' sword
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Military history [HBW], Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], Asian history [HBJF]