On 31 December 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted a charter to a group of London merchants. The East India Company was chartered in 1600 with a monopoly on English trade with Asia. It was a business, answerable to shareholders, and it came to India as one supplicant among many at the Mughal court. Within two centuries it collected the taxes of Bengal, kept a private army larger than Britain's, and was on its way to ruling a subcontinent.

Traders and forts

Europeans had arrived earlier. The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in 1498, and Portugal seized Goa in 1510. The Dutch and the French followed. The English Company set up trading posts called factories at Surat, then built forts at Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. For a long time these were small enclaves that depended on the goodwill of Indian rulers. What changed things was the Mughal decline after 1707, which left regional rulers competing for power and money, and the Company's discovery that its disciplined troops, mostly Indian soldiers called sepoys, could decide those contests.

Plassey and the diwani

In Bengal, the young nawab Siraj ud-Daulah clashed with the Company and seized Calcutta in 1756. The next year Robert Clive marched against him. At the battle of Plassey in 1757, Clive won largely because the nawab's commander Mir Jafar, secretly promised the throne, held his troops back. Mir Jafar became nawab and paid the Company and its officers enormous sums. After defeating a coalition of Indian rulers at Buxar in 1764, the Company obtained a far greater prize. In 1765 the Mughal emperor granted the Company the diwani of Bengal: the right to collect its land revenue. A trading company had become a government that profited from taxing the people it ruled. A terrible famine struck Bengal in 1770 while revenue collection continued.

Ruling for profit and reform

Parliament grew uneasy. Acts from 1773 onward placed the Company under growing state supervision, and its first governor general, Warren Hastings, was impeached for corruption and abuse of power in a trial that ran from 1788 to 1795, with Edmund Burke prosecuting. Hastings was acquitted. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 fixed Bengal's land tax forever and made zamindars, the revenue collectors, into owners of the land, leaving many peasants as tenants at their mercy. Through wars against Mysore, the Marathas and the Sikhs, the Company controlled most of India by 1849.

Reform and arrogance arrived together. Indian reformers such as Rammohun Roy campaigned against sati, the burning of widows, which was banned in 1829. In 1835 Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote a minute on education that shaped policy for a century. Macaulay argued for English-language education to create a class of Indians who would serve as interpreters between the British and the people they governed, while dismissing Sanskrit and Arabic learning with contempt. Governor General Dalhousie used the doctrine of lapse, under which the Company annexed a princely state if its ruler died without a natural male heir, and in 1856 he annexed Awadh, claiming misrule.

1857

In 1857 a new rifle reached the sepoys. Its cartridges had to be bitten open, and a rumor spread that the cartridges were greased with cow and pig fat, offending both Hindus and Muslims. On 10 May sepoys at Meerut rose, killed their officers and marched to Delhi, where they proclaimed the aged Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar their leader. The revolt spread across the north. Peasants, landholders and dispossessed rulers joined, among them Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, who died fighting. Both sides committed atrocities: rebels massacred British women and children at Kanpur, and British forces took revenge with mass executions and the destruction of villages. By 1858 the revolt was crushed.

The Government of India Act of 1858 ended Company rule and transferred India to the British Crown. Queen Victoria's proclamation promised not to interfere with Indian religions. The last Mughal emperor was exiled to Rangoon.

The Raj

Under the Crown, a viceroy governed through the elite Indian Civil Service, while about a third of India remained under princely rulers bound to Britain. Railways spread, starting with a line from Bombay to Thane in 1853. Critics noted where the money went. Dadabhai Naoroji's drain theory held that Britain extracted India's wealth through salaries, pensions and charges paid in London. Famines between 1876 and 1878 killed millions while grain was still exported. In 1885 educated Indians founded the Indian National Congress to press for a larger voice. Historians still debate British rule: defenders stress railways, unified law and institutions; critics stress stagnant incomes, famine and deliberate division.

Worked example: naming 1857

British writers called 1857 the Indian Mutiny or Sepoy Mutiny, framing it as a military revolt by disloyal soldiers. In 1909 the nationalist V. D. Savarkar called it the First War of Indian Independence, framing it as a national uprising. Many historians now prefer the Great Rebellion or the Revolt of 1857. Each name makes a claim. "Mutiny" ignores the peasants and princes who joined. "War of Independence" implies a shared national aim that many rebels, who often fought to restore local rulers, did not hold. Choosing a name is already choosing an interpretation, so it helps to know what each one assumes.