"East Indian Company troops" Topic

Did any EIC Troops fight in Spain?

No. During the period, the majority of HEIC troops could not be compelled to serve outside of "India".

Some Bombay troops were sent to Egypt in 1800 but didn't do any fighting.

Well if you include the Dutch EIC.. subsequently taken over by the British then yes: Reg de Meuron.

link

Cheers!
Beeker

Sorry for taking this old thread… but if you like the history of the East Indian Co… now you have…

"Wiip and Roy Kapur Films have revealed that The Last King of Scotland and Mrs. Brown scribe Jeremy Brock will pen the TV series adaptation of William Dalrymple's bestseller THE ANARCHY! The massive production to be shot in UK, USA and India will tell the story of how one of the world's most magnificent empires, the Mughal empire, disintegrated and came to be replaced by the British East India Company – a dangerously unregulated private company based thousands of miles away in a small London office just five windows wide. No news on the adaptation of Dalrymple's Koh-I-Noor book which was also announced three years ago."

Armand

Yes, I recently read "The Anarchy". A really good book, although it actually spends FAR more time on the history of the local empires and princedoms than it does on the EIC. The history of the EIC's slow takeover of the subcontinent is amazing. At the time they first showed up (around 1600) the Moghul Empire was arguably the richest and most powerful empire in the world. Remember the scene in "The Man Who Would Be King" where they are shown the treasure room? Multiply that by about 10,000 and that's the sort of wealth the Moghul's controlled. At need they could put a couple of million soldiers in the field. So between 1600 and the early 1700s the British (and French) were ALLOWED to stay and that permission could have been revoked at any time and there was nothing they could have done about it. The Moghuls had muskets and artillery and were technologically about on par with the Europeans. It was internal disputes and foreign invasions (from Persia) that did them in and the British simply moved into the vacuum (with an army made up almost entirely of locally recruited Sepoys). The British didn't really conquer India, the Indians conquered themselves.