Second Anglo-Mysore War

The immediate occasion for the Second Anglo-Mysore War was the breakdown of the treaty relationship between the East India Company and the Kingdom of Mysore, compounded by the Company's failure to honor mutual defense commitments from the First Anglo-Mysore War (1767–69). Mysore's ruler Hyder Ali had long nursed grievances over British refusal to provide promised military assistance when Mysore came under Maratha pressure, and by 1779 a series of Company military moves in the region — including the seizure of the French port of Mahé, which Hyder Ali regarded as under his protection — converted accumulated resentment into open war ^[1].

The structural context was the global conflict between Britain and France that had re-ignited in 1778 as a consequence of the American Revolutionary War. France and Mysore were aligned by a shared interest in curbing British territorial expansion in southern India, and Hyder Ali's calculation that France would provide naval and material support made a large-scale offensive against the Carnatic appear viable ^[2]. The entry of the Dutch Republic into the war against Britain in 1780 further complicated the Company's strategic position, stretching British naval assets across multiple theaters and reducing the reinforcements and supplies available to Company forces in India ^[3].

The Company's own conduct in southern India had created the political conditions that made Mysore's offensive coalition possible. Aggressive territorial encroachment, uneven enforcement of treaty obligations, and the extraction of revenue from nominally allied states had eroded confidence in British partnership among regional powers. Hyder Ali was able to mobilize this wider dissatisfaction, coordinating with the Marathas and the Nizam of Hyderabad at the outset of hostilities — a coalition that dramatically enlarged the military threat facing Company garrisons in the Carnatic ^[4]. The disastrous Company defeat at the Battle of Pollilur in September 1780, in which a substantial British-led force was routed and its commander Colonel William Baillie captured, illustrated how seriously the Company had underestimated the scale of Mysorean military power ^[5].

Underlying all of these proximate factors was a longer-term competition over paramountcy in southern India. From the 1750s onward, both Mysore under Hyder Ali and his predecessor regimes and the Company had been expanding their revenue bases, military establishments, and tributary networks at the expense of older Mughal-successor arrangements ^[6]. The two powers had become structural rivals for control of the Carnatic coast and its trade revenues, a competition in which neither could indefinitely tolerate the other's growth. The war that began in 1780 was in this sense not an aberration but the second major military test of a rivalry that would persist through two further conflicts before Mysore's final defeat in 1799.

The war ended with the Treaty of Mangalore, concluded in March 1784 between the East India Company and Hyder Ali's successor Tipu Sultan^[1]. The terms were broadly a restoration of the status quo ante bellum: both sides exchanged prisoners and returned conquered territories, leaving Mysore's sovereignty formally intact. It was the only treaty the Company concluded in India on terms that could fairly be described as equal — a point that Tipu's court regarded as a vindication and that the Company's directors in London found acutely embarrassing. The failure to press a decisive advantage after the reversal at the Battle of Pollilur and the subsequent grinding campaigns at Porto Novo and Sholinghur reflected the Company's strategic overextension across the subcontinent and the simultaneous drain of the broader Anglo-French war on available Crown resources^[2].

The political consequences within British India were substantial. The war exposed the dysfunction of divided command between the Madras Presidency, the Bengal Council, and the Crown's military officers — a structural weakness that Cornwallis's reforms of the late 1780s and the India Act of 1784 were designed to correct. That legislation, passed by Parliament in the same year the treaty was signed, imposed a Board of Control over the Company's political and military decisions, marking a decisive step in the Crown's absorption of the Company's governmental functions^[3]. The war's near-catastrophic early course, including the destruction of Colonel Baillie's detachment at Pollilur, had convinced influential opinion in London that the Company could not be left to manage Indian warfare without metropolitan oversight^[4].

Geopolitically, the conflict confirmed the Franco-Mysorean alignment as the principal strategic threat to British power in peninsular India. Tipu Sultan used the breathing space afforded by Mangalore to modernize his army further, seek renewed French military assistance, and pursue diplomatic contact with other powers hostile to the Company^[5]. The Dutch Republic's participation in the wider war had already prompted the Company to seize several Dutch colonial posts in Asia, accelerating a long-term shift in the balance of European power east of the Cape. French influence at Mysore, rather than being extinguished by the settlement, was tacitly legitimized, ensuring that the contest for southern India would resume once wider European hostilities created a fresh opening.

What the Treaty of Mangalore conspicuously failed to resolve was the fundamental incompatibility between an expansionist Company and an independent Mysore capable of fielding a modern army and cultivating European allies. The mutual return of conquests meant that the territorial and political grievances on both sides — Mysore's claim to territories lost in earlier conflicts, the Company's anxiety about a powerful inland state — remained entirely unaddressed. Three further wars would follow before the question was settled: the British would achieve the decisive destruction of Mysorean power only at Seringapatam in 1799. The social and economic dislocation wrought on the Carnatic by four years of warfare — scorched-earth raiding, the disruption of agrarian networks, and the collapse of revenue collection across large tracts — persisted for years after the armies withdrew, contributing to the chronic instability of the Nawab of Arcot's finances and deepening the Company's entanglement in the region's internal affairs^[6].