The Sultan

Haidar Ali died of illness in December 1782, in the middle of the Second Anglo-Mysore War, while his son commanded on the Malabar coast. The succession was the most dangerous moment a first-generation dynasty faces, and it passed almost without incident: Tipu Sultan returned, took control of the army and treasury, and prosecuted the war for two more years. It ended in March 1784 with the Treaty of Mangalore, signed on terms of mutual restitution and remembered as the last treaty an Indian power dictated to the East India Company from a position of strength.

Unlike his father, who had ruled behind the fiction of the Wodeyar raja's throne, Tipu Sultan dropped the pretence. He styled himself sultan, took the title of Padshah, removed the Mughal emperor's name from his coinage, and sought legitimacy instead from Islamic sovereignty — including recognition from the Ottoman caliph — and from the sheer performance of effective rule.

The court at Srirangapatna mixed soldiers, scholars, and technicians: Purnaiya at finance; Mir Sadiq as a senior minister, whose name became a byword for treachery after 1799; commanders like Ghazi Khan and Sayyid Sahib; French officers and artificers in the arsenal; and envoys maintained at foreign courts from Muscat to Constantinople.

Tipu Sultan presided from a throne he had sworn not to mount until he defeated the English — an octagonal tiger throne of gold, which the conquerors broke up for prize money in 1799.

These three programmes were not separate enthusiasms. The administration existed to make the revenue collectable; the revenue paid for the army and the workshops; the commercial monopolies aimed at the East India Company's own foundation, which was trade before it was ever conquest. Economic sovereignty was pursued as a weapon, and the shape of the state follows from the war it expected to fight.

How well any of it worked is genuinely disputed, and the argument differs by pillar — over who really bore the revenue burden, and over whether the commercial programme amounted to a break toward state-directed development or an energetic version of ordinary early-modern extraction. Those disagreements are set out on the pages where the evidence sits, rather than settled here.