Economic and Political Expansion: The Case of Oudh

Historians of the early phases of British conquest in India have until recent years given comparatively little attention to the economic elements in British expansion. Historians of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century generally portrayed conquest as a largely defensive reaction to French rivalry or to the instability created by the collapse of the Mughal empire. The commercial functions of the East India Company were largely ignored; if they were mentioned at all it was only to point out that the Directors of the Company believed that costly wars and conquests were incompatible with successful trade and therefore took a jaundiced view of the supposed ambitions of Warren Hastings and Wellesley. Wellesley. In 1948, however, in his John Company at Work , Professor Holden Furber both revealed a much more complex pattern of British economic interests in India, including an extremely vigorous private sector operating in the interstices of the Company's monopoly, and suggested a number of links between ‘economic contact between India and the west’ and the rise of British ‘imperialism’. More recently, historians have begun to examine such links in detail in studies of specific parts of India. The extent to which the British had entrenched themselves in the economic life of Bengal long before Plassey, was noted by Dr Bhattacharya in his The East India Company and the Economy of Bengal , a book which prompts questions about the extent to which Siraj-ud-daula or Mir Kasim were victims of British economic success.