The Battle of Buxar, fought in 1764, was a turning point in the English East India Company’s expansion in India: it followed the Company’s earlier victory at Plassey and helped establish its power to take over local wealth and taxation. In the book’s account, the battle belongs to a larger reversal. A region that had been a leading textile producer increasingly became a market for British goods and a source of opium for trade with China.

Background: Trade and contested power

In the eighteenth century, India was divided among competing polities, although many remained nominally under the Mughal emperor in Delhi. The English East India Company, founded in 1600, had spent the seventeenth century seeking a monopoly over valuable Indian exports. Its ambitions were contested by Portuguese and French rivals, while its own monopoly—granted by the Stuart kings—was challenged after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and abolished for more than a decade.

That change in political circumstances also enabled British textile producers to press Parliament to prohibit imports of calicoes, one of the Company’s most profitable goods. With its trading position altered, the Company changed course in the eighteenth century under Robert Clive, turning toward the creation of a continental empire. The book presents this shift as a change in the means of acquiring wealth: commercial competition gave way to territorial expansion and control over taxation.

The Company’s victories in Bengal

The Company first expanded in Bengal, in eastern India. It defeated local powers at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and then at Buxar in 1764. The book identifies Buxar as part of the military sequence that enabled the Company to take over and loot local wealth, although it does not provide details of the battle’s participants, course, or immediate terms.

The account emphasizes what followed the victories rather than reconstructing the battlefield. The Company took over the Mughal rulers’ extractive taxation institutions and may even have intensified them. In this telling, military success was consequential because it gave a trading company access to the machinery through which resources could be collected from the population.

Economic reversal and significance

The Company’s territorial expansion coincided with a major contraction in India’s textile industry. Indian calicoes and muslins had once been widely traded in Europe, Asia, and eastern Africa; as British restrictions closed the British market to these goods, the contraction accompanied de-urbanization and increased poverty. The book describes this sequence as the beginning of a long period of reversed development in India.

The resulting transformation was captured in a stark change in production and trade: instead of exporting textiles, Indians came to buy textiles from Britain and grow opium for the Company to sell in China. Buxar’s significance in the account therefore lies not in a battle narrative, for which the text supplies no tactical detail, but in its place within the Company’s expansion into territorial rule. The victory helped consolidate a system in which control of political power and economic institutions enabled resources to flow to a narrow ruling interest, while the wider economy contracted.