The Company

Haidar Ali ended the First Anglo-Mysore War by appearing outside Madras and dictating terms. The Treaty of Madras restored conquests and — critically — contained a clause of mutual defence: each party would aid the other if attacked.

When the Marathas invaded Mysore in 1771, the Company did nothing. The betrayal became foundational for both Haidar and his son. Every later British claim on Mysorean good faith was answered, implicitly or explicitly, by 1769. It is impossible to read Tipu Sultan's later refusal to accept British guarantees without it.

Tipu Sultan concluded the Second Anglo-Mysore War with the Treaty of Mangalore: mutual restitution of conquests, exchange of prisoners, no indemnity, no territory lost. It is remembered as the last treaty an Indian power imposed on the East India Company from a position of strength — and the Company regarded it as a humiliation to be reversed, which within six years it set about doing.

Cornwallis's coalition war reversed everything. Half of Mysore was ceded and divided among the Company, the Nizam, and the Marathas; an indemnity of 3.3 crore rupees was imposed; and as security for payment, Tipu Sultan's two young sons, Abdul Khaliq and Muiz-ud-din, were handed over as hostages — an episode British artists turned into one of the most reproduced images of empire. The boys were returned in 1794 when the indemnity was paid.

The treaty left Mysore a truncated state surrounded by beneficiaries of its defeat. Everything Tipu Sultan did in the following seven years — the rebuilding, the navy, the embassies to Kabul, Tehran, Constantinople, and Paris — follows from this document.

Wellesley arrived as Governor-General in 1798 with an explicit policy: no Indian state should retain independent foreign relations or French advisers. Armed with the Malartic Proclamation and Napoleon's intercepted letter, he demanded that Tipu Sultan accept a subsidiary alliance — British troops in his territory at his expense, a British resident at his court, and control of his foreign policy surrendered.

The correspondence survives, and its character is unmistakable: the demands escalated as replies arrived, and the army marched before the final answer was received. Tipu Sultan's letters grow shorter and more formal as it becomes clear what is happening. The last diplomacy of his reign was a formality conducted while the columns were already moving.

Almost everything we have about these negotiations comes from the Company's own archive, published promptly and selectively to justify what had been done — most notoriously the Official Documents Relative to the Negotiations Carried on by Tippoo Sultaun with the French Nation, printed in Calcutta in 1799 while the ashes were still warm. The documents are genuine; the selection is not neutral. This site uses them for facts the Company had no motive to invent, and flags them where their framing is doing the work.