The East India Company and the Maratha Empire

The Maratha Empire was the last major Indian power to resist the British East India Company. Founded by Shivaji in the seventeenth century, the empire had been the most formidable Indian state of the eighteenth century, controlling much of central India and the Deccan and projecting power into the Gangetic plain. By the early nineteenth century the empire had fragmented into a confederacy of five major chiefs, the Peshwa at Poona, the Bhonsle of Nagpur, the Holkar of Indore, the Scindia of Gwalior, and the Gaekwad of Baroda, and it was in this fragmented state that the British confronted it. The three Anglo-Maratha wars of 1775–1782, 1803–1805, and 1817–1818 were the final wars of the East India Company’s expansion in India, and the victory in 1818 marked the end of Indian military resistance to British rule.

The Maratha Empire at its Height

The Maratha Empire reached its peak in the early eighteenth century under the Peshwa Baji Rao I (r. 1720–1740), whose military campaigns extended Maratha power across the Deccan and into the Gangetic plain. The Battle of Panipat in January 1761, in which the Afghan king Ahmad Shah Durrani decisively defeated the Maratha armies, was the great disaster of Maratha history. The defeat shattered the illusion of Maratha invincibility and produced a succession crisis that broke the central authority of the Peshwa. The confederacy that emerged was held together by a common Maratha identity and a common interest in resisting the British, but it was a confederacy in name only. The five major chiefs — the Peshwa at Poona, the Bhonsle of Nagpur, the Holkar of Indore, the Scindia of Gwalior, and the Gaekwad of Baroda — pursued their own interests, often at the expense of one another.

The British East India Company, in the meantime, was consolidating its position in Bengal and expanding its power in the Carnatic and on the Malabar coast. The First Anglo-Maratha War (1775–1782) was provoked by the British seizure of the family treasure of the Peshwa Raghunath Rao and by the British intervention in the internal politics of the Maratha confederacy. The war was indecisive. The Treaty of Salbai of 1782 restored the status quo ante bellum, and the British withdrew from Maratha politics for the next twenty years.

The Second Anglo-Maratha War (1803–1805)

The Second Anglo-Maratha War was provoked by the British intervention in the Maratha affairs in the wake of the Treaty of Bassein (1802), by which the Peshwa Baji Rao II accepted British protection. The war was fought on three fronts: against the Scindia of Gwalior in the north, against the Bhonsle of Nagpur in the east, and against the Peshwa himself in the west. The British victories were decisive. The Battle of Assaye on 23 September 1803, in which Arthur Wellesley defeated the Maratha army of the Scindia, was one of Wellesley’s most famous victories and the foundation of his military reputation. The battles of Laswari and Argaon, in November 1803, completed the British conquest of the Maratha heartland.

The Treaty of Deogaon (December 1803) with the Bhonsle, the Treaty of Surji-Anjangaon (December 1803) with the Scindia, and the Treaty of Bassein (December 1802) with the Peshwa transformed the British position in India. The Maratha chiefs accepted British suzerainty, ceded large territories, and recognised the British right to maintain resident ministers at their courts. The British had won, in effect, the position of paramount power in India. The Maratha chiefs retained their titles and their territories, but they had lost the right to make war and peace without British consent.

The Third Anglo-Maratha War (1817–1818)

The Third Anglo-Maratha War was the final war of the East India Company’s expansion. The war was provoked by the Maratha attempts to reassert their independence — the Peshwa’s march on Poona in November 1817, the simultaneous rising of the Bhonsle in Nagpur, the Holkar in Indore, and the raja of Nagpur. The British response was overwhelming. The Peshwa was defeated at the Battle of Khadki and the Battle of Koregaon in November 1817; the Bhonsle was defeated at the Battle of Sitabuldi in November 1817; the Holkar was defeated at the Battle of Mahidpur in December 1817. By the spring of 1818 the Maratha resistance was over.

The consequences of the war were substantial. The Peshwa, Baji Rao II, was exiled to Bithoor, near Kanpur, on a British pension; the Maratha territories were annexed to British India. The Holkar and Scindia retained their states, but as subordinate princes under British suzerainty. The Maratha confederacy was dissolved, and the great Maratha chiefs became subordinate rulers in the British Indian system. The Third Anglo-Maratha War marked the end of Indian military resistance to British rule, and the beginning of the long period of British paramountcy that lasted until 1947.

The Maratha System and British Rule

The British inherited from the Marathas a system of political administration that was, in many respects, more elaborate than the British were initially prepared to recognise. The Peshwa’s government, the Maratha revenue system, the Maratha intelligence networks — all of these were, in their different ways, sophisticated instruments of governance. The British, as the historian Stewart Gordon has argued, often found the Maratha systems more capable than the British were prepared to admit, and they preserved many Maratha administrative practices even as they displaced Maratha political authority.

The most striking example of this was the role of the Peshwa’s court at Poona in the development of the Maratha-Mughal political culture. The Peshwa, in the late eighteenth century, was the principal Indian rival to the British, and the British decision to annex the Peshwa’s territories in 1818 reflected a recognition that the Peshwa’s court was the principal obstacle to British paramountcy. The decision also had profound cultural consequences: Poona had been the centre of Maratha learning, and the British annexation of the city was, in a real sense, the end of an Indian political tradition that had survived from the seventeenth century.

The Aftermath

The defeat of the Marathas did not end Indian military resistance to British rule. The Anglo-Sikh Wars of 1845–1846 and 1848–1849 would follow, and the Indian Rebellion of 1857 would be the most serious Indian challenge to British rule. The Marathas, however, were the last Indian power that could be considered a serious military rival to the British, and their defeat in 1818 marked the end of the period of Indian political independence. The British had emerged, by 1818, as the unquestioned paramount power in India. The last Indian state to maintain a serious degree of political autonomy was Awadh, whose annexation in 1856 would be one of the immediate causes of the 1857 rebellion.

The Peshwa’s pensioner house at Bithoor, with Baji Rao II and his adopted son, the infamous Nana Sahib, would be the centre of the 1857 rebellion in the Ganges plain. The Maratha defeat of 1818, in this respect, did not end the Maratha political tradition. It displaced it. The tradition survived in the courts of the surviving Maratha princes, in the family houses of the Maratha nobility, and in the cultural memory of the Maratha people. The legend of the Maratha empire would be, throughout the nineteenth century, a touchstone of Indian resistance to British rule.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the Maratha Empire and the British conquest of it has been substantially revised since the 1960s. The older British tradition, of which the work of G. S. Sardesai and the early volumes of the Cambridge History of India are representative, treated the Maratha Empire as a predatory state whose defeat was, on balance, a service to the Indian people. The more recent scholarship, of which the work of Stewart Gordon, André Wink, and the contributors to the New Cambridge History of India is the most distinguished representative, has produced a more nuanced picture. The Maratha Empire was, on this more recent view, a sophisticated and effective state whose administration was comparable to that of the Mughals. The British conquest of the Marathas was not the inevitable result of British superiority; it was the contingent result of a series of military and political decisions taken in the context of the decline of the Mughal Empire and the rise of the British. The defeat of the Marathas in 1818 was not the end of an Indian political tradition; it was the displacement of one Indian state by another.

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