October 22, 1764. Around 7,000 East India Company troops beat a combined army of over 40,000 that included the Mughal Emperor himself. The battle was over by midday. Everyone knows Plassey. Buxar is the one that actually handed India to a trading company, and almost nobody outside India has heard of it. Plassey in 1757 got the Company a puppet in Bengal. It did not settle anything, because puppets have a habit of deciding they would rather not be puppets. Mir Qasim was installed by the Company and then did the unforgivable thing, which was to try to govern. He moved his capital away from Company influence, reorganised his army along European lines, and then abolished the internal trade duties that Company men were dodging while Indian merchants had to pay them. He equalised the tax, which destroyed the private fortunes Company employees were making on the side. That was the war. He lost Bengal in 1763 and fled west, and there he put together the alliance that should have ended British power in India before it started. Three rulers. Shah Alam II, the Mughal Emperor, the nominal sovereign of the whole subcontinent. Shuja-ud-Daula, Nawab of Awadh and the Emperor's Grand Vizier, who had the best army of the three. And Mir Qasim himself. The Maharaja of Benares was with them too. Together, somewhere over 40,000 men against roughly 7,000. The Company force under Hector Munro was about 1,800 European regulars and 5,300 sepoys. Look at that ratio for a second, because it is the whole story of British India. The Company conquered India largely with Indian soldiers, paid regularly, drilled constantly, and commanded by men who could coordinate them. The fight started at daybreak when Mirza Najaf Khan attacked with the Mughal right. The Company lines were formed inside about twenty minutes and pushed the advance back. Twenty minutes. That is the real weapon. An eighteenth century battle is won by the side that can still deliver controlled volleys and change formation when everything is noise and smoke, and that comes from drill, which comes from regular pay and a permanent establishment. There was cavalry skirmishing, Durrani and Rohilla horse, and it did not change anything. By noon it was finished. Then the alliance destroyed itself. As the army fell back, Shuja-ud-Daula blew up his own gunpowder magazines and tumbrils to deny them. Then he retreated west across a bridge of boats over the Karmanasa River, got his own people over it, and destroyed the bridge behind him. On the wrong side of that river he left the Mughal Emperor of India and a portion of his own troops. Think about what that means. The Grand Vizier of the Mughal Empire abandoned his emperor on a riverbank to save himself. Najaf Khan got what was left organised around Shah Alam and withdrew, and the Emperor made the only decision available to him, which was to open negotiations with the British. Casualty numbers vary a lot by source, which is normal. One account gives Company losses around 847 of all ranks against roughly 2,000 allied dead. Another puts allied losses nearer 6,000. The Company also took 133 artillery pieces and over a million rupees in cash off the field. The consequences are the reason this battle matters more than Plassey. The Treaty of Allahabad in 1765 gave the East India Company the diwani, the right to collect the revenue of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa on the Emperor's behalf. That is the hinge of the whole thing. Not a conquest, a tax farm. A private company with shareholders in London was now the legal revenue authority for something like 20 to 30 million people, with the Mughal Emperor's own signature on the paper making it legitimate. It also made the Company self-funding. It no longer had to ship silver from Britain to buy Indian goods. It could tax Bengal and buy Bengal's own exports with Bengal's money. And the double government it created, where the Company took the revenue while the Nawab kept nominal responsibility for administration, meant nobody was actually accountable for governing. The Bengal famine of 1770 killed an enormous number of people, with estimates running to a third of the population in affected areas, under exactly that arrangement. In 1772 the Company dropped the pretence and took direct control. Mir Qasim, the man who started it by trying to tax the Company fairly, escaped with jewels said to be worth three million rupees and died in poverty in 1777. Shah Alam II spent the rest of his life as a pensioner of one power or another. He was eventually blinded by an Afghan warlord in 1788 and ended his days under British protection in Delhi, an emperor whose empire was a palace. One morning in Bihar, over by lunchtime, and the government of India changed hands for the next 183 years.