Nawabs of the Carnatic

The Carnatic Wars

The nawabs governed the Coromandel country as Mughal deputies under the Nizam of Hyderabad. When both the Hyderabad and Arcot successions were disputed in the 1740s, the French under Dupleix and the British East India Company each backed a candidate — and discovered in the process that small European-trained forces could decide Indian dynastic contests, and that the victor's patron could then draw on the revenue of a province.

This was the real innovation of the Carnatic Wars, more consequential than any battle in them. Robert Clive's defence of Arcot in 1751 with a few hundred men made his reputation; the French defeat at Wandiwash in 1760 ended their political ambitions in India.

Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah, the British candidate, held the nawabship for half a century and financed his position by borrowing from private British creditors at ruinous rates. The Arcot debts became a scandal in Britain — Edmund Burke devoted one of his major speeches to them — because the creditors formed a lobby in Parliament with an interest in the Company's Indian policy.

The end

The nawabs' territory was taken under Company administration in 1801 and the family retained titles and a pension. The line was ended under the doctrine of lapse in 1855, though a separate princely title, the Prince of Arcot, was created afterwards and survives.

The Chepauk Palace at Madras, built for the nawab in the 1760s, is among the earliest Indo-Saracenic buildings, and the family's patronage shaped the early growth of the city.