Introduction

Calcutta was one city of the British Empire which had the history of a meteoric rise from a riparian village to a capital of a vast south Asian empire. It acquired a global status becoming in the process the second city of the British Empire. In the eighteenth century, the urbanization of Calcutta was more incidental than an outcome of deliberate planning. For the first sixty years of the foundation of the city in 1698 Calcutta enjoyed very little of territorial dynamism. Some new lands were unofficially integrated to the city while some country formations made their forceful entry into the border areas around Calcutta, allowing in the process a formal union of the urban mind of an upcoming city of the English with the mind of Bengal’s countryside. The battle of Palasi was a watershed in Calcutta’s rise to prominence. The post-Palasi period marked the age of the political rise of Calcutta.