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1 results

  • 1 - The setting for empire

  • P. J. Marshall, King's College London
  • Book:
    Bengal: The British Bridgehead
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    31 March 1988, pp 1-47

  • Summary

    Early in the eighteenth century, the areas which now make up three states of contemporary India, West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, together with present-day Bangladesh, were loosely welded together under a single Governor to form the eastern wing of the Mughal empire. In 1765, authority over the Mughal provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa was formally transferred to the East India Company and by the 1820s these provinces had become the eastern wing of a vast new British empire in India. This chapter is concerned with agriculture and with the people who cultivated the land and made the payments on which the revenue-collecting hierarchy and the empires of the Mughals and the British ultimately depended. By the beginning of the nineteenth century it was thought that 'the great body of the Bengal farmers' had been reduced to the state of being 'servants' of grain dealers. Bengal had become the most important area in Asia for the East India Company's trade.