Introduction
The year is 1686. The Mughal Empire, under the firm rule of Emperor Aurungzeb, is the undisputed ruler of India and perhaps the finest military force in the world. The fearsome rebels, the Marathas, have dispersed to the hills to continue their campaign of guerrilla warfare after the Mughal Army took back almost all the forts the Marathas once ruled. But there is a thorn in the Mughal side. An upstart group of merchants controlling an army of Indian mercenaries – the British East India Company (BEIC) – wanted better terms of trade with the Mughals. The BEIC’s stockholders – all the way in London, with no understanding of the realities in India – saw that constant raids on the Mughal Empire would pressure Emperor Aurungzeb into submission. By 1690, the British East India Company had been utterly destroyed. This is the story of how, in two short years, the East India Company was almost wiped out.
Build Up – the 1680s
The war began in 1686, with each side constantly fighting small skirmishes – though it would not kick into high gear until 1688. Much of this early “war” was characterised by the BEIC harassing the Mughals, then the two sitting down to negotiate and one party breaking off the negotiation to continue to fight until better terms were received. The BEIC’s mercenary army raided Mughal trade routes within the Empire, and the East India Company Marine (the BEIC’s Navy) attempting to blockade Mughal port cities in Konkan, Gujarat and Bengal in an effort to take control of the sea route of the spice trade and the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. Early on, Emperor Aurungzeb was restrained in his response, hoping to reach a trade agreement that favoured the Mughals more than it favoured the EIC.
But for the BEIC, this war was about much more than trade. Back home in England, the “new” King William III and his wife Queen Mary II were leading a political and media campaign to get the BEIC disbanded. The East India Trade Debate, as it became known, lasted from 1688-1698 and it saw the BEIC go to great political and legal lengths to defend its monopoly over the trade from India against a group of Parliamentarians – supported by the King and Queen – who wanted to cut the BEIC out of the trade and hog all the profits for themselves. In the end, for the BEIC this war – which would turn out to be misguided in every sense of the word – became a war for survival. Surviving against the Mughal military onslaught in India and the political onslaught back home in England.
And so, the BEIC spent considerable resources to achieve their victory.
The King sent over 12 of his very heavily armed ships, with professional sailors. The BEIC troops in Bengal had been reinforced with a fresh battalion and over 400 cannons. And BEIC merchantmen, along with Royal Navy warships and privateers (pirates paid by the English King) began to raid and seize Mughal civilian and merchant ships. Initially, the Mughals paid little attention to this as they were fighting the Maratha “insurgency” in the Deccan. But then, on January 18th, 1689 the Governor of Bombay made a fatal mistake.
Heavily armed BEIC merchantmen, on the instruction of Governor Josiah Child, attacked and seized an unarmed Mughal grain convoy. This grain convoy was in the service of the Mughal Army and was carrying food and non-lethal supplies from Surat to the Deccan to resupply the massive Mughal field army that was fighting the Marathas. And Emperor Aurungzeb would not take that lying down.
The Siege of Bombay and the Crumbling of the BEIC
Before we proceed, there is some context necessary regarding the sheer numbers at play. The Mughal Army – at its height during the Deccan Wars – had over 500,000 professional soldiers and over 400,000 bandukchi (untrained militia infantry) in service. The British, at this time in India, had over 2,300 soldiers in the Deccan Plateau, 2,000 of which were Maratha mercenaries that had signed up to fight the Mughals on the side of the British. Of the remaining 300, roughly half were Portuguese mercenaries who also had a bone to pick with the Mughals and only about 150 of them were actually British. In Madras, the other British “stronghold” the British had about 1,000 men, of which 4-600 were Bengali mercenaries. In total, the Mughals had at their disposal 900,000 soldiers, 50,000 heavy cavalry and 30,000 war elephants. In total, the BEIC had at their disposal about 3,300 soldiers.
With the seizure of the grain ships in January of 1689, Emperor Aurungzeb ordered that all Company holdings in India were to be seized. This was ridiculously easy and within weeks, the British only had control over the fortified towns of Bombay and Madras. By February, barely a month after the British seized the grain fleet, Mansabadar (modern equivalent would be Major General) Yakut Khan – a brilliant naval commander, often referred to by the British as the “Admiral of the Mughal Navy” – landed a force of 14,000 men north of Bombay. Within hours, they overran and captured the British occupied town of Sewri and within 2 days, they had reached Dongri Hill, overlooking Bombay city and Bombay Fort. The men now began to place hundreds of artillery guns in fortified emplacements and dug a series of trenches and fortifications on the hill. From these positions, and by way of the naval blockade enforced by the Mughal Navy, they turned Bombay into rubble.
Within a matter of weeks, the only structure that still stood was Bombay Fort, with the city having been completely flattened. Governor Josiah Child – described by historian Margaret Hunt as unlucky and unlikeable and a bureaucrat with no military experience who was universally reviled by his men – sued for peace and surrender almost immediately after the commencement of the siege. Emperor Aurungzeb would not give his ascent to this peace for well over a year. It is not known why Emperor Aurungzeb, when he had defeated the British in every conceivable way on every conceivable front, chose to prolong the siege. It could very well have been out of cruelty or perhaps he had different reasons. At any rate, Mansabadar Yakut Khan made no attempt to storm Bombay and it seemed the Mughals had no wish to capture the city.
By the time the siege was ended in April of 1690, 90% of all the pre-war population of Bombay had been killed. Of its 2,300 defenders, only 60 survived with 115 (all of them, European) deserting to the Mughal side. The Marathas, being staunchly opposed to the Mughals, chose to fight to the death instead of desert. Captain Alexander Hamilton, a merchant captain with no affiliation to the BEIC, recalls that to end the siege, the British had to beg the Mughals on their knees and ringing hands.
Finally, peace did come – but at humiliating terms for the BEIC. Emperor Aurungzeb, seeing no threat in the BEIC whatsoever, allowed them to continue trading instead of expelling them. The terms of the peace, how the East India Company brought itself back from the brink and how they hid their devastating defeat for centuries will all make for a very, very interesting story. Especially given the political pressure they were feeling back in England. But it is a story for another time.
Conclusion
It was this war and the First Anglo-Maratha War that confirmed to the British that military victory over the powers of India would be nearly impossible. Apart from the Battle of Plassey, a purely Company or British Army would never defeat an Indian Army. Events such as these are almost certainly the reason the British turned to the far more nefarious policies of the Doctrine of Lapse and “Divide and Rule” (though both of these would become codified doctrine much later, their genesis was in these conflicts). However, had Emperor Aurungzeb expelled the British East India Company, Indian history would likely have looked very, very different today.
Sources
Hasan, Farhat, “Conflict and Cooperation in Anglo-Mughal Trade Relations during the Reign of Aurungzeb”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 34:4 (1991), pp. 351-360
Hunt, Margaret, “The 1689 Mughal Siege of East India Company Bombay: Crisis and Historical Erasure”, History Workshop Journal of the Oxford University, 84:14 (2017), pp. 151-169
Hunt, Margaret (ed.), Stern, Phillip (ed.), The English East India Company at the Height of Mughal Expansion: A Soldier’s Diary of the 1689 Siege of Bombay (Bedford; 2015)
Lal Vinay, “Aurungzeb: A Political History”, UCLA, accessed at: http://bit.ly/3ZLeq92 Malik, Zaheeruddin, “MUGHAL OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS CONCERNING THE ENGLISH TRADE IN BENGAL—1633-1712”, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 31 (1969), pp. 246-254
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