Indian conquest

>>1174304
Mughal and Maratha India had become a bunch of small princely states after all the fighting, which made it easy for Britain to divide and conquer.

Someone feel free to correct me but I'm pretty sure it goes something along the lines of the British set up small factories and communities then worked with the rich Indian landowners to extend their will in a process that involved make the caste system much more rigid and closer to the modern interpretation in order to have a wider labor force kept down by culture. Something like that in a vague sense

>>1174390
Oh right and all the playing off and dealing with smaller scale large land owners was due to >>1174385

File: 396px-The_Duke_of_Wellington_on_Copenhagen_(1818)_by_Thomas_Lawrence.jpg (37KB, 396x599px) Image search: [Google]

37KB, 396x599px

Before kicking Napoleons arse,General Wellsley kicked lots of indian arse, which left him with a smelly boot

They had a city in Bengal, then were granted the rest of Bengal to rule in the name of the Mughal Emperor. Then they just sort of stumbled onto a whole bunch of new lands and vassals by helping out local kings and lords with their rebellions and wars, and taking Indian lands that belonged to other European powers, until it got to such a point that they looked at all this land they had and said: "Hey, we might as well just take the rest of it." And so they did.

Why didnt Indians have guns? Next to China which was gunpowder central after all

>>1174517
Who said they didn't?

>>1174517
indians had guns.

i read something the other day that said the reason they lost so many battles is they used to spam cannons then use them to screen the infantry. but the British would just march as fast as possible through the cannon fire (scottish and native bullet sponges lol) then the indian infantry would panic and run because the cannons were overrun, then the cavalry would mop up.

Interesting thread learnt a lot

>>1174820
What battle was this?

>>1174304

Creative use of flags.

>>1174304
Britain didn't conquer India in the way you probably imagine.

A lot of it was fighting, often against other European powers moreso than with the local Indian states. But a massive amount of it was simply making deals with the local rulers.