This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
By the late eighteenth century the East India Company fielded an army of some 200,000 men, larger than the standing army of Britain itself and organized into three presidency armies, Bengal, Madras and Bombay, each recruiting overwhelmingly from Indian soldiers, sepoys, under a comparatively thin layer of British officers. This was not a national force answering to Parliament but the private security arm of a commercial enterprise, raised, paid and directed to protect the Company's trade, extend the Company's revenue, and, increasingly, to fight the Company's wars of conquest against Indian states, from Mysore to the Maratha Confederacy to the Sikh Empire. Encyclopaedia Britannica's account of the Company notes how thoroughly this arrangement blurred the line between commerce and sovereignty: a body accountable to shareholders in London was, in practical terms, making war and peace across an entire subcontinent. The arrangement finally broke in 1857, when grievances among the Company's own sepoys, over pay, promotion, and rumors that new cartridges were greased with cow and pig fat offensive to Hindu and Muslim soldiers alike, ignited the Indian Rebellion. The British government answered the uprising by abolishing Company rule outright in 1858, absorbing its army and administration directly into the Crown and closing the unusual chapter of a corporation maintaining an army that could conquer, and nearly lose, an empire.