The Prelude to Empire (Plassey Revolution of 1757)

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The book puts forward a completely new explanation for the Plassey revo-lution of 1757. It dispels the received wisdom that the Plassey conspiracy was an 'Indian-born' conspiracy, that the British had no 'calculated plotting' behind it that it was the 'internal crisis in Bengal which inevitably brought in the British' and that the British conquest was almost 'accidental'. By making an in-depth analysis of the genesis of and the circumstances leading to the Plassey conspiracy and revolution, the volume discounts the 'collaboration thesis' as well and shows conclusively that it was the British who not only engineered and encouraged the conspiracy but tried their best till the last moment before the battle to persuade the Indian conspirators to stick to the British 'project' of a revolution.

It has been shown that the conspiracy took the final shape only under the aegis of the British and that without their active involvement it would not have matured enough to bring about the downfall of the nawab. It has been argued on the basis of both qualitative and quantitative evidence that the British conquest of Bengal became an imperative for them for the retrieval of the battered private trade fortune of the Company servants which was facing a severe crisis in the late 1740s and early 1750s.

Based mainly on the manuscript records preserved in various European and Indian archives, the volume will be of great interest not only to students and teachers of history and allied subjects but the lay reader as well. It will certainly lead to a fair amount of debate and discussion on the subject and help in the proper understanding of the growth and development of colonialism in India and elsewhere.

Sushil Chaudhury, who passed away in December 2018, was a former University Chair Professor of Islamic History and Culture, Calcutta University, and a National Research Fellow, Indian Council of Historical Research, New Delhi (January 2014-December 2015). He did his Ph.D. from the University of London as a Commonwealth Scholar. Since 2002 he was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, U.K.

I HAVE BEEN articulating the main thesis of this volume in different journals and seminars during the last several years. I have attempted to put all this in a connected and comprehensive manner in this volume. Though my last publication, From Prosperity to Decline-Eighteenth Century Bengal (New Delhi, 1995), indicated the main contours of this thesis, I have tried to present a coherent and detailed argument with necessary elaboration in the present volume. The conventional wisdom, even in the latest studies, has it that the British conquest of Bengal was almost 'accidental', that the British had no 'calculated plottings' behind the conquest and that it was the internal 'crisis', both political and economic, which 'inevitably brought in' the British. I have tried to argue in this volume, with both qualitative and quantitative evidence collected mainly from the European archives, that the said explanation of the Plassey revolution and the British conquest of Bengal is hardly tenable. I have tried to show that it was the British who not only engineered and encouraged the Plassey conspiracy, but tried their utmost till the battle of Plassey to persuade the nawab's disgruntled courtiers to stick to the British 'project' of a revolution. At the same time I have also tried to explain why the conquest became an imperative for the British in the mid-eighteenth century.

The Plassey revolution, resulting in the British conquest of Bengal in June 1757, was of momentous significance not only for the history of India but for the history of the world as well. Plassey indeed laid the foundation of the British empire in India. Bengal became the springboard from which the British extended their territorial acquisitions in different parts of India and gradually built up the Indian empire. And the enormous resources of Bengal which was one the most prosperous subas of the erstwhile Mughal empire came in handy for financing the British expansion. Thus the British conquest of Bengal can be reckoned as the beginning of the British imperialism and hence it becomes imperative to explain how and why the British had conquered Bengal. The present work tries to make an in-depth analysis of the prelude to empire and puts forward a completely new explanation of the Plassey revolution of 1757.