Kingdom of Mysore

A southern Indian kingdom that produced the army which came closest to throwing the East India Company out of India. The Wadiyar dynasty ruled from 1399 as vassals of Vijayanagara and independently after its collapse. In the 1760s power was taken by Haidar Ali, a soldier of obscure origin who rose through the army and governed in the raja's name. Haidar and his son Tipu Sultan built a state organised for war on European lines - French-trained infantry, a state monopoly on trade, a modernised revenue system - and fought Britain four times between 1767 and 1799. They twice came near to winning. Mysore rockets with iron casings, used in volleys against British lines, were taken back to Woolwich and copied into the Congreve rocket. Tipu was killed on the breach at Srirangapatna in 1799 in a war that Britain fought with Maratha and Hyderabad allies. The Wadiyars were restored as a princely state under British paramountcy and ruled until 1947, and the later maharajas made Mysore among the best-administered and most industrialised states in India, with hydroelectric power at Shivanasamudra from 1902 and a university of its own. Tipu's state was also an early experiment in economic warfare. He sent embassies to France, the Ottomans and Persia, planted a tree of liberty and corresponded with revolutionary France, banned the export of raw materials, and tried to build a commercial company of his own to compete with the British one. The library and workshops taken from Srirangapatna after his death fed European technical knowledge and European collections alike. Mysore under the restored Wadiyars then became the counter-example the same empire used to argue that Indian self-government worked, with a representative assembly from 1881, the first in India.

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