what were superior weapons of the british east india company
Answers
Answer:
1)Madras in 1746 the British East India Company gave Captain Stringer ... But the British military posture was still defensive. 2)He smiled in a scornful way. 3)He also mastered in-depth knowledge of Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and Buddhism.
Step-by-step explanation:
In the east, the speed with which the East India Company exploited trade with Asia surprised investors and government alike. By 1690 about 13 per cent of Britain’s imports came from Asia. British merchants were also quickly opening access to China as a market. By 1720 about 10 per cent of the East India Company’s trade was with China. It is easy to forget how flimsy the foundations of the East India Company in India were. In 1713 the Company owned only a score of ‘factories’. In Calcutta – as in most other cities – there were only a few hundred Britons in each factory. In such circumstances, the Company was obliged to work with the local populations; any other strategy would not work. An attempt to be more dominant in Bengal in 1688 had led to opposition from the local population and a sharp reversal in policy.
In 1698 an attempt by other English merchants to break the East India Company’s monopoly on Asian trade by chartering a new company failed. The old East India Company simply bought the majority shareholding in the new company and restored its hugely valuable monopoly. Thereafter, any threats to its dominance of Asian trade were fought in the courts, which imposed heavy fines on incursions into the East India Company’s chartered area.
Although India is often thought of as the quintessential British imperial possession, at the end of the seventeenth century it was still an open field. The Dutch Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (from 1601) and the French Compagnie des Indes Orientales (from 1664) traded alongside the East India Company for cotton, indigo and silk. What permitted the European merchants to gain such a foothold in India were long-range trading ships with navigational and maritime skills; commerce at such a distance would have been impossible without these. The Europeans also possessed firearms, which could be used to enforce their interests. India was receptive to colonial and commercial advances because there were local merchants and producers who could supply European traders. Moreover, local rulers in India were prepared to grant concessions to the traders in exchange for customs duties or support in dynastic feuds.
The East India Company found that India possessed some of the key economic structures that facilitated trade. The subcontinent had a mobile labour force, some of which was organized in merchant guilds, and much of which could be directed to work by rulers and bureaucratic systems. India also had a well-developed financial system, including credit notes and banks. Indian merchants lent funds to rulers, and Europeans were also willing to do so. Additionally, although the Mughal Empire was in rapid decline, the British were able to adopt the systems and bureaucracy that the Mughals had establish to reinforce and sustain their control over the territories into which they expanded.
In south India, the British base in Madras was less significant than the French fort at Pondicherry. The French strength in south India was based, in part, on their intervention in Indian domestic affairs. This enabled France to capture Madras in 1746 during the War of Austrian Succession, although it was handed back to the British in 1749. In Hyderabad, in central India, similarly, France allied itself with the local ruler, the Nizam, and this led to reduced influence for the British, who were allied to the ruler of Peshwa, the Nizam’s enemy. This pattern was reversed in Carnatic, in south India, where the British support for Muhammad Ali, the successful claimant to be the Nawab of Carnatic, produced a ruler sympathetic to the East India Company in 1751.
The Seven Years War in India witnessed the rise of Robert Clive, who had come to Madras in 1744 as a ‘writer’ – a combination of clerk and accountant – for the East India Company. He had distinguished himself during the 1746 attack by the French on Madras, but depression forced him to leave India in 1748. He returned in 1755, as deputy governor of Fort St David, south of Madras. From here, he evicted the French from Hyderabad, eventually being commissioned as a colonel. During the war, the ruler of Bengal, in eastern India, had chosen to oppose the British. With impressive diplomatic and military action, he was defeated by Clive at Plassey in 1757. It was a stunning victory, in which Clive’s army, numbering just 1,100 Europeans and 2,100 sepoy troops with nine field-pieces, faced 18,000 cavalry, 50,000 infantry and fifty-three heavy guns operated by French fusiliers. Clive was victorious, largely due to the scattering of the Bengali troops. He then captured the Bengali treasury and distributed enormous sums in spoils. Clive himself gained £160,000, while £500,000 was distributed among the East India Company troops, and £24,000 was given to each member of the Company’s committee – worth several million pounds in today’s values. By the end of his career, Clive was the first self-made millionaire.