John Company's Armies - Peter Stanley

Explores the unique multi-ethnic British Indian armies under the East India Company.The armies of British India were, as one of its members wrote, ‘the most extraordinary phenomenon in the history of the world.’ Multi-ethnic, composed of men of diverse ethnicities and faiths, under the flag of the East India Company – ‘John Company’ –they conquered or controlled much of the Indian sub-continent by 1850, victorious in all but one major war (the first disastrous intervention in Afghanistan).Four armies served and fought for John Company: the three ‘presidency armies’ of Bengal, Madras and Bombay, and the regiments of the British Army, rented from the Crown by the Company. Together, this disparate collection of European and ‘Native’ corps – regular and irregular –numbered over 300,000 uniformed men at its height. The army that the 1857 Mutiny destroyed or changed out of recognition essentially dated from the reorganisation of 1824. In the intervening 33 years, John Company’s armies not only fought half-a-dozen major wars (in Burma, Afghanistan, China, the Punjab, and across India itself), it also faced dozens of insurrections and rebellions, some of which entailed such sustained conflict that they gained their units battle honours. In doing so, the armies of British India created a distinctive military culture, one that the Mutiny decisively changed.John Company’s Armies traces what those forces constituted and how they wer
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