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Policies of expansion and the last annexations (1765–1856)

British expansion in India · Part 3 / 2 · Fact-checked on 26 October 2026 · how we check

Written with AI from the sources listed at the bottom of this page, then fact-checked by a separate AI.

Warren Hastings's ring-fence, Wellesley's subsidiary alliance, Lord Hastings and paramountcy with the Anglo-Nepal War (Sagauli 1816), the Anglo-Burmese wars and the First Anglo-Afghan War, the annexation of Sindh (1843), Ranjit Singh and the two Anglo-Sikh wars (Punjab 1849), Dalhousie's doctrine of lapse, and the takeover of Berar (1853) and Awadh (1856) on the eve of the Revolt of 1857.

After the wars of Parts 1 and 2, this part looks at the methods behind British expansion and at the last annexations before 1857. Four governors-general each gave expansion a tool: Warren Hastings the Ring-fence policy, Wellesley the Subsidiary alliance, Lord Hastings the claim of Paramountcy, and Dalhousie the Doctrine of lapse. Alongside these ran wars against Nepal, Burma and Afghanistan, and against the two strong states left in the north-west, Sindh and the Sikh kingdom of Punjab. By 1856, when Awadh was annexed, the Company ruled, or controlled through treaties, almost the whole subcontinent. Its takeover of states whose rulers had heirs explains much of the anger that burst out in 1857.

The Ring-fence policy belongs to Warren Hastings, Governor of Bengal from 1772 and then Governor-General until 1785. The Company, still weak outside Bengal, faced the Marathas and Mysore at the same time. Rather than seize more land, Hastings protected its territory by guarding the borders of neighbouring states, so that an enemy had to cross a friendly buffer before reaching Bengal. Awadh was the key buffer: Company troops defended it against the Marathas at the Nawab's cost, and in 1774 a Company brigade fought the Rohilla War on his behalf. Here lay the seed of what came later, a ruler paying for Company soldiers he could not command, and Wellesley would turn it into a tool of expansion.

Lord Wellesley, Governor-General from 1798 to 1805, used the Subsidiary alliance to bring Indian states under the Company without the cost of conquest. Lending trained troops to Indian rulers for money or land went back to Dupleix, but Wellesley made it a standard treaty. A state that signed kept a Company force on its soil and paid for it, by a yearly subsidy or by ceding land whose revenue covered the cost. It accepted a British Resident at its court, employed no other Europeans (a clause aimed at the French), and made no war or treaty without the Company's consent. The Company in turn promised protection against outside enemies and no interference in internal affairs. The ruler kept his throne, but his defence and foreign policy now belonged to Calcutta.

The Nizam of Hyderabad signed first, in 1798, and in 1800 he handed over the districts he had gained from Mysore to pay for the force. Mysore and Tanjore followed in 1799, Awadh in 1801, ceding roughly half its kingdom including Rohilkhand, and the Peshwa by the Treaty of Bassein (1802); the Bhonsle and Sindhia were bound by similar treaties after their defeats in 1803. The Company gained an army paid for by others, the French shut out and new land in place of subsidy. The states paid heavily. Rulers whom their subjects could no longer remove had little reason to govern well, the subsidy drained their treasuries, and the soldiers of disbanded state armies lost their livelihood, many joining bands such as the Pindaris. Arrears of subsidy also gave the Company a ready excuse to take more land.

Lord Hastings, Governor-General from 1813 to 1823, made the Company claim Paramountcy over the Indian states as a whole. His campaign against the Pindaris (1817–18) grew into the Third Anglo-Maratha War, and in 1818 the Rajput states and other princes of central India accepted treaties of protection. Under what was later called subordinate isolation, the states kept their internal rule but stood below the Company, could not deal with one another or with foreign powers, and depended on its goodwill. In the north the Anglo-Nepal War (1814–16) checked the expanding Gorkha kingdom. By the Treaty of Sagauli (1816) Nepal gave up Garhwal, Kumaon and most of its claims in the Terai, gave up the lands it had taken from Sikkim and accepted a British Resident at Kathmandu. Nepal kept its independence, and Gorkha soldiers began to serve in the Company's army.

Expansion also pulled the Company into wars beyond India's frontiers. Burmese advances into Assam and Manipur led to the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–26) under Lord Amherst. By the Treaty of Yandabo (1826) Burma gave up its claims to Assam, Cachar and Jaintia, recognised Manipur as independent, ceded Arakan and Tenasserim and paid a war indemnity. The Second War (1852), under Dalhousie, added Lower Burma with Pegu; the Third (1885), under Lord Dufferin, ended the Burmese monarchy and annexed Upper Burma. In the north-west, fear of Russian influence at Kabul led Lord Auckland into the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–42). Under a treaty of 1838 with Ranjit Singh and Shah Shuja, a British army replaced Dost Mohammad with Shah Shuja in 1839, but a rising in Kabul in 1841 forced a disastrous retreat in January 1842, and Dost Mohammad later regained his throne. The war cost much and gained nothing.

Sindh, on the lower Indus, was ruled by the Talpur Amirs. At first the Company dealt with them by treaty: in 1809 they agreed to keep the French out, and in 1832 they opened the Indus to the Company's traders. The Afghan war changed this. The Indus route was needed to supply the army in Afghanistan, and in 1839 the Amirs were pressed to let British troops pass, to accept a subsidiary force and to pay towards it. After the Afghan disaster Lord Ellenborough sent Sir Charles Napier, whose demands drove the Amirs to war. Napier defeated them at Miani in February 1843 and near Hyderabad in Sindh a month later, and Sindh was annexed in 1843. The annexation was criticised even in Britain, because the Amirs had kept their treaties: one frontier war had created reasons for another conquest.

In Punjab, Ranjit Singh united the Sikh chiefdoms (misls), took Lahore in 1799 and built the strongest Indian state of his time, with an army partly trained by European officers. By the Treaty of Amritsar (1809) he accepted the Sutlej as the eastern limit of his expansion, leaving the cis-Sutlej Sikh states under British protection, and he kept the treaty all his life. After his death in 1839 came murders and short reigns, until the boy Duleep Singh took the throne with his mother, Rani Jindan, as regent, while the army became a power of its own. The First Anglo-Sikh War (1845–46), under Lord Hardinge, saw hard battles at Mudki, Ferozeshah, Aliwal and Sobraon. By the Treaty of Lahore (March 1846) the Sikhs ceded the Jullundur Doab, cut their army and paid part of a war indemnity; for the rest they gave up Kashmir, which the Company passed to Gulab Singh of Jammu for a payment by a separate Treaty of Amritsar (1846).

The settlement of 1846 did not last. Under the Treaty of Bhairowal (December 1846) a British Resident at Lahore ran the government through a council of Sikh nobles during Duleep Singh's minority, and resentment grew. In 1848 a revolt by Mulraj, the governor of Multan, spread across Punjab, and Dalhousie, newly arrived as Governor-General, chose to treat it as war. The Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848–49) saw a costly, indecisive battle at Chillianwala in January 1849 and a decisive British victory at Gujrat in February. Punjab was annexed in March 1849, Duleep Singh was pensioned off and the Koh-i-noor diamond passed to the British Crown. A board that included the Lawrence brothers governed the new province, whose frontier now reached the Afghan hills. In 1857 Punjab largely stayed on the British side.

Dalhousie, Governor-General from 1848 to 1856, is remembered above all for the Doctrine of lapse. Hindu law let a ruler without a son adopt one, who would then succeed him. Dalhousie held that in dependent states, which owed their existence to the Company or stood under its protection, an adopted son could inherit the ruler's private property but not the state itself unless the Company approved; without approval, the state lapsed to the Company. The idea was not new, but Dalhousie applied it systematically and almost always refused approval. Satara was annexed in 1848, Jaitpur and Sambalpur in 1849, Baghat in 1850, Udaipur (a small state in central India, not Mewar) in 1852, Jhansi in 1853 and Nagpur in 1854. Jhansi, where Rani Lakshmibai's adopted son was refused, became one of the centres of 1857. Dalhousie also ended the titles of the Nawab of the Carnatic and the Raja of Tanjore, and refused Nana Sahib, adopted son of the last Peshwa, Baji Rao II, his father's pension.

Other annexations rested on other grounds. In 1853 the Nizam had to hand over Berar to Company administration to meet the cost of the Hyderabad Contingent, a force he was bound to maintain. Awadh could not be taken by lapse: its rulers had heirs and had been loyal allies since the subsidiary treaty of 1801. Dalhousie used the charge of misgovernment instead, a ground Bentinck had used to annex Coorg (1834). The Residents reported disorder in Awadh, itself partly a product of the subsidiary system, since the Company shielded the Nawab from his own subjects. In February 1856 Awadh was annexed, and Nawab Wajid Ali Shah was deposed and sent to Calcutta. The court and its dependants lost their living, many taluqdars (large landholders) lost estates in the revenue settlement that followed, and the sepoys of the Bengal army, many of them from Awadh, saw their homeland taken. Little more than a year later Awadh was at the heart of the Revolt of 1857.

Seen together, these policies form a sequence. The Ring-fence policy guarded the Company's lands with buffer states; the Subsidiary alliance turned such states into dependants who paid for its army; Paramountcy declared the Company supreme over them all; and the Doctrine of lapse and the charge of misgovernment absorbed dependants into British territory. Where states stayed independent, war did the rest: Nepal was checked, Sindh and Punjab were conquered, Burma was partly annexed, and Afghanistan showed the limits of force. When Dalhousie left in 1856, the Company ruled most of the subcontinent directly and controlled the rest through treaties with the princely states. The method mattered as much as the result: rulers denied their heirs, nobles stripped of pensions and soldiers whose homelands had been annexed all carried grievances, and the chapter on the Revolt of 1857 picks up the story there.

Exam traps

• Two Hastings: Warren Hastings (1772–85) is linked with the ring-fence; Lord Hastings (1813–23) with paramountcy, the Pindari campaign and the Anglo-Nepal War. Do not swap them.
• Hyderabad (1798) was the first state to accept Wellesley's subsidiary alliance, before Mysore (1799), Awadh (1801) and the Peshwa (1802).
• Awadh was annexed in 1856 on the ground of misgovernment, not under the doctrine of lapse: its rulers had heirs.
• The Udaipur annexed by lapse in 1852 was a small state in central India, not the Rajput state of Udaipur (Mewar).
• There are two Treaties of Amritsar: 1809 (Ranjit Singh accepts the Sutlej as his limit) and 1846 (Kashmir passed to Gulab Singh after the First Anglo-Sikh War).
• Chillianwala (January 1849) was costly and indecisive; Gujrat (February 1849), in Punjab, was the decisive battle of the Second Anglo-Sikh War. Sobraon (1846) belongs to the First War.
• Sindh was annexed in 1843 under Ellenborough after the Battle of Miani, before Dalhousie's time; Punjab was annexed in 1849 under Dalhousie.
• The Treaty of Sagauli (1816) ended the Anglo-Nepal War; Nepal remained independent and was never annexed.

Recap

• Ring-fence (Warren Hastings): guard the frontiers of neighbours, chiefly Awadh, so that enemies meet a buffer before Company territory.
• Subsidiary alliance (Wellesley, 1798–1805): Company force paid by subsidy or ceded land, British Resident, no other Europeans, no war or treaty without consent; Hyderabad first (1798), then Mysore and Tanjore (1799), Awadh (1801), the Peshwa (1802).
• Lord Hastings (1813–23): paramountcy and subordinate isolation; Pindari campaign; Rajput states under protection (1818); Anglo-Nepal War and the Treaty of Sagauli (1816).
• Burma: Treaty of Yandabo (1826) after the First War; Lower Burma 1852; Upper Burma 1885. First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–42) under Auckland: Shah Shuja installed, retreat from Kabul in January 1842.
• Sindh: treaties of 1809 and 1832; pressure from 1839; Napier wins at Miani (February 1843); annexed 1843 under Ellenborough.
• Punjab: Ranjit Singh and the Treaty of Amritsar (1809); First Anglo-Sikh War 1845–46 (Mudki, Ferozeshah, Aliwal, Sobraon; Treaties of Lahore and Amritsar 1846); Second War 1848–49 (Chillianwala, Gujrat); annexed March 1849.
• Doctrine of lapse (Dalhousie): Satara 1848, Jaitpur and Sambalpur 1849, Baghat 1850, Udaipur 1852, Jhansi 1853, Nagpur 1854; Carnatic and Tanjore titles ended; Nana Sahib's pension refused.
• Berar handed over (1853); Awadh annexed for misgovernment (February 1856), Wajid Ali Shah sent to Calcutta; the grievances fed the Revolt of 1857.

Practice questions

Sources

• C. U. Aitchison (comp.), A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads relating to India and Neighbouring Countries, Government of India, Calcutta: the subsidiary treaties with Hyderabad (1798, 1800), Mysore (1799), Awadh (1801), the Peshwa (1802) and the Maratha chiefs (1803); the Treaty of Sagauli (1816); the Treaty of Yandabo (1826); the treaties with the Amirs of Sindh (1809, 1832, 1839); the Treaty of Amritsar (1809); the Treaties of Lahore and Amritsar (1846) and of Bhairowal (1846) — https://www.abhilekh-patal.in
• National Archives of India: Foreign and Political Department records, including the Governor-General's minutes on adoption and lapse (1848–54), the papers on the annexation of Punjab (1849) and the proclamation annexing Awadh (February 1856), Abhilekh Patal — https://www.abhilekh-patal.in
• The Imperial Gazetteer of India, Vol. II (The Indian Empire: Historical), Government of India, 1909; and the provincial volumes on Oudh, the Punjab, Sind, Burma and the Central Provinces — https://dsal.uchicago.edu/reference/gazetteer/