Nawabs of Bengal

The richest province

Murshid Quli Khan, the Mughal revenue officer for Bengal, made his position hereditary in 1717 as imperial authority receded. Bengal under the nawabs was the wealthiest region in the empire and one of the wealthiest in the world: its raw silk, cotton textiles and saltpetre drew silver from Europe, and its revenue subsidised the Mughal centre.

The Company traded there from Fort William at Calcutta under imperial concessions, and the recurring friction concerned the abuse of those concessions — private trade by Company servants under a duty exemption meant for the Company itself, which cost the nawab's treasury heavily.

Plassey

Siraj ud-Daulah succeeded in 1756 at twenty-three, took Calcutta in response to the Company's fortification of it without permission, and was met the following June at Plassey by Robert Clive with about three thousand men against perhaps fifty thousand.

The battle was decided before it was fought. Clive had arranged with Mir Jafar, the nawab's commander, and with the Jagat Seth bankers and Hindu and Armenian merchants of Murshidabad, that the bulk of the army would not engage. It did not; a rainstorm wetted the nawab's powder and not the Company's; the action lasted a few hours; Siraj fled and was killed.

Mir Jafar was installed and the Company took an enormous payment. The precedent — that the Company could make and unmake the ruler of a province — was established, and it was repeated at once when Mir Jafar was replaced by Mir Qasim, who then fought and lost at Buxar in 1764.

The diwani and the famine

Buxar was the more decisive battle, defeating the combined forces of the nawab, the nawab of Awadh and the Mughal emperor. In 1765 the emperor granted the Company the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Odisha — the right to collect the revenue — while the nawab retained the nominal administration. The arrangement gave the Company income without responsibility, which Clive described approvingly and which contemporaries called a double government.

In 1770 the Bengal famine killed an estimated ten million people, perhaps a third of the population. Its immediate cause was the failure of the rains; its severity is generally attributed in substantial part to revenue policy that was not relaxed, and to the Company's grain dealings. The Company's own directors were forced to acknowledge the catastrophe, and it began the process of parliamentary regulation of the Company in Britain.

The nawabs continued as pensioners at Murshidabad. Their palace, the Hazarduari, was built in the 1830s for a nawab who no longer governed anything.