Clients and Brokers

In ‘Indian’ India, older techniques won political influence and access to resources for the governments of Madras, Bombay and Surat in Awadh, the Carnatic, the Maratha Deccan, and the states of South India. Military alliances secured Mysore, Travancore, Malabar, and the Coromandel. The practice of stationing Company troops in return for tribute spread. Recovery of debts from subordinate princes resembled a gigantic protection racket in the minor principalities, where rulers were guaranteed subordinate status at a price. When the Maratha chiefdoms refused to pay, military campaigns and treaties dismantled their empire in central India and replaced it with a Company paramountcy that left most of the rulers in Maharashtra and the Punjab under control without annexation. Defining the terms of that paramount control over some six hundred major and minor states in a good third of India occupied the central and provincial governments of the Company and the Raj for the rest of the 19th century.

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