Battle of Plassey and the rise of British power in Bengal
- Date
- 23 June 1757
- Category
- Military & conflict
- Region
- Bengal, eastern India
- Era
- Early Modern
- Significance
On 23 June 1757 a British East India Company force of about 3,000 under Robert Clive defeated the roughly 50,000-strong army of Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, on the field of Plassey near Murshidabad.
The outcome turned less on fighting than on conspiracy: Clive had secretly bribed the Nawab's commander Mir Jafar, who held his troops back and was installed as a puppet nawab in Siraj's place. The victory gave the Company effective control of Bengal, the richest province of the former Mughal Empire, and access to its enormous revenues. Combined with the grant of the diwani (revenue-collection rights) in 1765, Plassey transformed a trading company into a territorial and military power, funding further conquest from Indian taxation. Often treated as the beginning of British colonial rule in India, the battle inaugurated a process that would bring most of the subcontinent under Company and then Crown control over the next century.
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Empires active in 23 June 1757
- Qing Dynasty1636 CE – 1912 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
- Russian Empire1721 CE – 1917 CE
- Mughal Empire1526 CE – 1857 CE
Related military & conflict events
- Fall of Beijing and the Ming–Qing transition1644
- Qing conquest of the Dzungars and the creation of Xinjiang1755–1759
- Third Battle of Panipat checks Maratha expansion14 January 1761
- Nadir Shah sacks Delhi and shatters Mughal powerMarch 1739
- Defenestration of Prague and the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War23 May 1618
- The Treaty of Paris ends the American Revolutionary War3 September 1783
Further reading
The wider story
The Mughal Empire
The standard scholarly survey (New Cambridge History of India).
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