the Nizam and the Company together as allies, and which isolated the Company’s great enemy Tipu Sultan, who remained outside the alliance.

Hyderabad did not collapse, thanks largely to the diplomacy and the carefully-constructed system of alliances created by Nizam Ali Khan. Militarily, Hyderabad was the weakest of the competing states of the Deccan when he took control, but only it and the East India Company would remain important powers by the time of his death. It was his

But the bulk of the Nizam’s army had succeeded in reaching their designated campsite on the banks of a rivulet three miles on from the slopes of Moori Ghat. There they dug in for the night, well positioned for the expected battle the following morning. No one was quite sure at the time what went wrong, but just after eleven o’clock that night, a

At a time when the British showed no particular enthusiasm for cleanliness, Indian women for example introduced British men to the delights of regular bathing. The fact that the word shampoo is derived from the Hindi word for massage, and that it entered the English language at this time, shows the novelty to the eighteenth-century British of the

battle. For this reason he and Aristu Jah were very anxious to forge an alliance with the English through William, and to enlist the armies of the Company on their side. Aristu Jah was the most Anglophile of the Nizam’s advisers, and alone in the durbar realised the real and growing military strength of the Company. His ideas, however, were not

Afterwards [they] have permission to approach but seldom sit down. There is more state and pomp here than I ever saw at [the Mughal Emperor] Shah Alam’s durbar. Agreeably to the custom of the Nizam’s family he [Nizam Ali Khan] never smokes but swallows large balls of paun which as he has no teeth he cannot chew; he drinks a great deal of coffee, &

Library. It is as if the Victorians succeeded in colonising not only India but also, more permanently, our imaginations, to the exclusion of all other images of the Indo – British encounter.

Dundas had instructed Wellesley to ‘cleanse’ those pockets of Indian power that had been ‘contaminated’ by French influence: namely the courts of Tipu Sultan of Mysore, Nizam Ali Khan of Hyderabad, and those of that network of rival Hindu chiefs who ruled the great Maratha Confederacy – all of whom had raised sepoy armies trained by Francophone

This new Imperial approach was one that Lord Wellesley was determined not only to make his own, but to embody. His Imperial policies would effectively bring into being the main superstructure of the Raj as it survived up to 1947; he also brought with him the arrogant and disdainful British racial attitudes that buttressed and sustained it.