The Company's sword
the East India Company and the politics of militarism, 1644-1858
- ISBN: 9781108987349
- Editorial: Cambridge University Press
- Fecha de la edición: 2025
- Lugar de la edición: Cambridge. Reino Unido
- Colección: Critical Perspectives of Empire
- Encuadernación: Rústica
- Medidas: 24 cm
- Nº Pág.: 302
- Idiomas: Inglés
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
