ABSTRACT
Lord Cornwallis in 1792 reassuringly predicted that Tipu Sultan was unlikely to disturb the British in India ‘for many years to come’. Yet the British in 1799 attacked the capital of Mysore a second time, killed its ruler and inserted a puppet regime in his place. Few episodes in the history of British expansionism in India have been as controversial in their origins or bloody in their impact. The fourth war against Mysore also contributed to an accumulating sense of disgust at unending conquests which William Cobbett expressed in 1808. Every war over the previous thirty years, he wrote, had been described as the last war. Instead, ‘There is a constant, never-ceasing war in India’; indeed, ‘the history of the whole world does not afford an instance of a series of aggressions so completely unjustifiable and inexcusable’ as Britain’s drive for gain in the subcontinent. 1
