Carnatic Wars

The Carnatic Wars were three conflicts fought between 1746 and 1763 in southeastern India, chiefly along the Coromandel Coast, between the British East India Company and the French East India Company, each allied with rival local claimants to the Nawab of the Carnatic's throne. The wars unfolded as an extension of the broader eighteenth-century Anglo-French colonial rivalry, overlapping first with the War of the Austrian Succession and later with the Seven Years' War in Europe, and they saw the rise of the British officer Robert Clive, whose defense of Arcot in 1751 established his reputation. By the war's end in 1763 the British East India Company had decisively out-maneuvered its French rival, whose main Indian base at Pondicherry was reduced to a minor and largely demilitarized trading enclave under the Treaty of Paris. The Carnatic Wars left the British East India Company as the dominant European power in southern India, a position that set the stage for the Company's subsequent expansion across the subcontinent.