NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 4 Enter the British — In-text Questions

Not by an invasion. The chapter’s answer is that the British takeover was gradual, calculated, and often disguised as commercial enterprise rather than military invasion — which is exactly why it worked. Follow the steps.

1. A charter with teeth. Queen Elizabeth I granted the English East India Company a royal charter with special powers — including the right to raise a private army. A trading company was armed from the start.
2. The pretence of being mere traders. That is how it got footholds along the coast in the 17th century with minimal resistance — Surat, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta among the first. Local rulers did not object, because welcoming foreign trade was a longstanding Indian practice.
3. Selling military help. Company agents cultivated political relationships and offered military support to one ruler against his rival, inserting themselves into Indian conflicts and emerging “as power brokers rather than foreign invaders”.
4. Divide and rule. They played on rivalries between regional rulers and on succession disputes within ruling houses, and they identified and often encouraged tensions between religious communities.
5. Plassey (1757). Clive found the disgruntled men in Siraj-ud-daulah’s court and promised Mir Jafar, the Nawab’s own military commander, the throne in exchange for betrayal. Mir Jafar’s troops — the bulk of the Nawab’s army — simply stood aside. The British won despite their smaller numbers.
6. Revenue, then annexation. A few years after Plassey the Company secured the right to collect revenue in Bengal, Bihar and Odisha — some of India’s richest regions. In the 19th century came the Doctrine of Lapse, annexing any princely state whose ruler died without a natural male heir, and the subsidiary alliance, under which a ruler kept his throne but paid for British troops and could deal with foreign powers only through the British.