Carnatic Wars

The Carnatic Wars were three conflicts between 1746 and 1763 in which the English and French East India Companies fought around Madras and Pondicherry, on India's southeast coast. They began as an extension of the War of the Austrian Succession, when a French force took Madras in 1746. They continued as a proxy contest over who would rule the Carnatic, the coastal region ruled by the Nawab of Arcot, and over succession at Hyderabad.¹

The wars grew out of the Mughal collapse after 1707, which left powers such as the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Nawab of Arcot to be disputed by rival claimants. The French governor Joseph-Francois Dupleix found that small units of European-drilled infantry, backed by sepoys (Indian soldiers trained in European style), could defeat much larger Indian armies. The English Company copied the method. Robert Clive seized and held Arcot in 1751 with a few hundred men, and his side's candidate won. In the third war, fought alongside the Seven Years' War, Eyre Coote defeated the French at Wandiwash in January 1760 and Pondicherry fell in 1761. By the Treaty of Paris in 1763 France kept its trading posts but agreed to keep no troops there, ending its hopes of an Indian empire. The Company, now freed from its European rival, turned to Bengal.¹²