This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
When the East India Company first opened a trading post at Surat in 1613, it operated entirely at the sufferance of a Mughal Empire far stronger than any European power then present in India, trading under an imperial farman, a formal grant of permission, that could be revoked at will. William Dalrymple's The Anarchy traces how that balance inverted over the following century and a half, not through any single conquest but through the compounding effect of Mughal internal decline, which accelerated sharply after Aurangzeb's death in 1707 as succession wars, regional revolts and the rise of breakaway regional powers such as the Marathas and the Nawabs of Bengal fractured effective central authority, and Company opportunism, which stepped into exactly the power vacuums that decline created. Robert Clive's victory at the 1757 Battle of Plassey, won as much through bribery and political intrigue against Bengal's own Nawab as through battlefield tactics, delivered the Company's control of Bengal's revenue collection, still nominally under Mughal authority but in practice answering to a corporate boardroom in London. By 1765 the Mughal emperor himself, reduced to a pensioner of the very Company his ancestors would once have expelled, formally granted the East India Company the diwani, the right to collect revenue across Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, a legal fiction dressing corporate conquest in the language of imperial permission. The last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah II, briefly became a figurehead for the 1857 Indian Rebellion against Company rule before the British Crown deposed him and abolished the Company government altogether, closing an empire whose final decades had been spent, in practice, providing legal cover for the trading company that replaced it.