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Resources and Techniques the Second Maratha War*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Marathas and the British confronted each other in India like two finalists after a series of elimination bouts. The East India Company had reduced the native princesBengal and the Carnatic to ciphers, crushed Mysore and emasculated Oudh and Hyberabad. The Marathas, under the leadership of the Sindia dynasty, of Ujjain, had extinguished the last pretensions of the Mughal emperor and reduced the Rajput states to surly submission. The defeat of Sindia and the confederated Maratha princes of Nagpur and Indore in the Anglo-Maratha war of 1803–5 was therefore historic. It confirmed the British as inheritors of the old Mughal supremacy and extinguished all hopes of a native hegemony in the subcontinent for 140 years. This defeat has hitherto been attributed to strategic error. The Marathas should, it has been argued, have adhered to their ancestral cavalry warfare and spread fire and devastation in the traditional Asiatic manner, instead of trying to beat the Europeans at their own game, with infantry and guns. Re-examination of the evidence leads to the conclusion that this argument is unsound. It underestimates the competence of the Marathas in their new style of combat and misplaces the blame for their failure. Traditional methods had paid off in the past; but things had changed by 1803, and had those methods been used in the second Maratha war the margin of defeat would probably have been much wider. As it was, the British victory must be described as hard won.
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