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Subsidiary Alliance - The Poisoned Chalice - How the Nizam won and lost Berar

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Pankaj Sethi  Subsidiary Alliance was a strategy crafted by colonial powers in the subcontinent to control native states without having to fight them. The concept was pioneered by the French East India Company Governor General Marquis Joseph Francois Dupleix in the 1740s. It was refined by the British East India Company under Governor General Lord Wellesley, who gave the concept its final form fifty years later. History records the unqualified success that the concept delivered for the British. This is vividly illustrated by the fate of Berar, a part of the dominions of the Nizams of Hyderabad, after the Nizams became the first native ruler to sign a structured Subsidiary Alliance treaty with the East India Company. Berar in the Nizam’s title When the last Nizam Mir Osman Ali ascended the masnad in 1911 he was referred to as the “ Nizam of Hyderabad”. His ancestors had also held this title. By the time the British left in 1947 Osman Ali was addressed as the “Nizam of Hyderabad a...
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THE STORY OF SECUNDERABAD

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Warning: Long Post (This post is based on a video of my talk on the same subject. The video is available here:  https://youtu.be/Xb2vBaC6gGs ) Read on if you are a Hyderabadi.  Or if you are interested in history. Or both! Clock Tower,  Secunderabad  HISTORY OF HYDERABAD TILL THE FOUNDING OF SECUNDERABAD IN 1806 Today Secunderabad is subsumed in the vast urban sprawl called "Greater Hyderabad". Its sobriquet of Hyderabad's “Twin City” gives just a hint of days when the two were indeed different cities separated by several kilometres.  But Secunderabad was not an organic growth of Hyderabad. Rather, it came into being as a result of a Treaty. The two cities have different origins and development trajectories. This Post specifically attempts to trace the Origin of Secunderabad.  To understand why Secunderabad came into being as a twin of Hyderabad, it is instructive to look into Hyderabad's pre-history, dating to almost three centuries earlier....
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