how was the subsidiary alliance beneficial to the British
Answers
Trying to answer this question is rather futile because there wasn’t just one subsidiary alliance. A subsidiary alliance was any alliance between anative Asian state and the British East India Company after the 1757 Battle of Plassey. The purpose of subsidiary alliances were set forth in the followeing dispatch:
His Excellency the Governor-General's policy in establishing subsidiary alliances with the principal states of India is to place those states in such a degree of dependence on the British power as may deprive them of the means of prosecuting any measures or of forming any confederacy hazardous to the security of the British empire, and may enable us to reserve the tranquility of India by exercising a general control over those states, calculated to prevent the operation of that restless spirit of ambition and violence which is the characteristic of every Asiatic government, and which from the earliest period of Eastern history has rendered the peninsula of India the scene of perpetual warfare, turbulence and disorder...