{"id":794,"date":"2026-07-02T17:39:40","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T17:39:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=794"},"modified":"2026-07-02T17:39:40","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T17:39:40","slug":"why-the-last-battle-of-the-american-revolution-was-fought-in-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=794","title":{"rendered":"Why The Last Battle of the American Revolution Was Fought In India"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You\u2019re reading Global Notes<\/strong>, Ishaan Tharoor\u2019s weekly column on international politics.<\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

In April, 1782, a ship called the Hyder Ally cast off from the docks of Philadelphia for a mission into the Delaware Bay. The previous year, the British general Charles Cornwallis had surrendered, at Yorktown, to the combined might of the Continental Army and its French allies, a capitulation on land that\u2019s often considered the concluding event of the American Revolution. But the war was not quite over. The British Navy was still choking off shipping from Philadelphia, the U.S.\u2019s first capital, which was connected to the Atlantic via the Delaware River; loyalists to the Crown, slipping out in flat-bottomed boats from marshes and inlets, routinely harassed American merchantmen. To counter these attacks, the Hyder Ally, a single-masted sloop refitted with a battery of cannons, was tasked with escorting seven ships out of Philadelphia. A few days after the ship embarked, it encountered a flotilla of three British warships at the mouth of the Delaware, waiting to prey on the convoy. Outnumbered but undaunted, the ship managed to capture one vessel, while compelling another to run aground and the last to run away.<\/p>\n

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The startling victory of the Hyder Ally at the Battle of Delaware Bay, and the bravado of its twenty-two-year-old captain, Lt. Joshua Barney, marked an early triumph for the fledgling U.S. Navy. Barney became a Philadelphia hero, immortalized by the famous Revolutionary-era poet Philip Freneau, who wrote a poem celebrating the victory. An earlier poem of Freneau\u2019s, written to encourage recruitment for the Hyder Ally\u2019s maiden voyage, had explained that the vessel\u2019s curious name was an homage to the then Sultan of Mysore, Hyder Ali, who was locked in his own campaigns against the army of Britain\u2019s East India Company on the other side of the world. Freneau wrote, \u201cFrom an eastern prince she takes her name, \/ Who, smit with freedom\u2019s sacred flame, \/ Usurping Britons brought to shame, \/ His country\u2019s wrongs avenging.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The colonial struggle that preceded the founding of the United States, which, later this week, celebrates the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, is intertwined with the story of India in many ways. The 1773 Boston Tea Party that prefigured the Revolution was a protest against the Tea Act, which granted a subsidy on colonial tea to the East India Company\u2014a world-spanning corporate behemoth whose costly wars in South Asia had strained its finances. When the war for independence broke out, in 1775, it immediately became a global conflict\u2014some scholars have interpreted the Declaration itself as a cry for help, to France and Spain\u2014that saw skirmishes and sieges from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean to Africa. India was a major zone of contest between Europe\u2019s colonial powers, and the French wound up fighting alongside Hyder Ali. Mysore was one of the most powerful kingdoms in southern India; its military was among the more modernized and effective fighting forces in the hodgepodge of principalities that made up India\u2019s political map at the time. The resulting conflict, which historians have labelled the Second Anglo-Mysore War, involved battles that dwarfed much of what occurred in the thirteen colonies, in both scale and bloodshed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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As the name of Barney\u2019s ship suggests, the struggles in Mysore stirred the American imagination. Hyder Ali\u2019s decisive victory at the Battle of Pollilur, in September, 1780, in which he routed a column of British troops, was documented and discussed by the Founding Fathers. Edmund Jennings Randolph, a Virginia delegate at the Continental Congress, wrote to John Adams, then posted in Europe, in April, 1781, of how Hyder Ali\u2019s \u201cArmy of 80000 Horse\u201d had \u201ctotally defeated\u201d its British quarry. John Quincy Adams, a teen-age student in the Netherlands at the time, wrote excitedly to his mother, Abigail, about \u201cthe check the English have had in the East Indies,\u201d where they had \u201clost a great number of men.\u201d In a letter written in the summer of 1782, James Madison praised Hyder Ali\u2019s \u201csuperiority\u201d over his most implacable foe, Sir Eyre Coote, the British general tasked with pushing back Mysore\u2019s forces from the East India Company\u2019s southern Indian stronghold in what is now the major coastal city of Chennai. Nine days after the British surrendered at Yorktown, in October, 1781, a group of notables in Trenton, New Jersey, made a series of triumphant toasts that were accompanied by artillery fire; one of those toasts hailed the \u201cgreat and heroic Hyder Ali, raised up by Providence to avenge the numberless cruelties perpetrated by the English on his unoffending countrymen, and to check the insolence and reduce the power of Britain in the East Indies.\u201d (Hyder Ali died, of an apparent tumor, at the end of 1782, and his son, Tipu Sultan, followed as his successor.)<\/p>\n

John Adams and his colleagues helped broker a preliminary peace deal with the British in the autumn of 1782, in Paris\u2014a few months later, Britain would forge a separate set of deals with Spain and France. But combatants in the subcontinent were unaware of the initial truce that had been made in the West, and dozens more battles took place around the world. The last clash of the American Revolutionary War, some historians suggest, occurred along India\u2019s Coromandel Coast, in June, 1783; as the British laid siege to a fort in Cuddalore, then occupied by a joint Franco-Mysorean force, a smaller French fleet scored a naval victory nearby. The siege was finally lifted after news of the earlier peace arrived.<\/p>\n

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What solidarity Americans had with Mysore proved fleeting after independence. France withdrew direct aid to Mysore following the 1783 Treaty of Paris, at a moment when Mysore\u2019s forces could have pressed their advantage. In the years thereafter, Hyder Ali\u2019s son, Tipu, would likely rue having allied with the wrong European power; the French, struggling financially and on the verge of their own revolution, could do little to support his kingdom against the emboldened British. In 1788, Thomas Jefferson, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to France, wrote of the arrival of a number of diplomats from Tipu\u2019s court, and noted that he would attend their reception in Versailles, but was unsure what any of it would achieve. \u201cIf their mission has any other object than that of pomp and ceremony, it is not yet made known,\u201d he wrote in a letter. As early as 1792, the U.S. sent an American consul to Calcutta, the East India Company\u2019s main port in Asia\u2014an implicit recognition of the growing power of the British in India, and a sign of how the U.S. saw its early trade interests in Asia best served.<\/p>\n

Cornwallis, the British general who surrendered at Yorktown, may be remembered as a loser in America, but he was an empire builder in India, serving as governor-general in Bengal and chief commander of the East India Company forces. In the early seventeen-nineties, he campaigned against Tipu Sultan, capturing Bangalore and a huge chunk of Mysorean territory. Tipu\u2019s kingdom finally fell in 1799, when British and allied forces overwhelmed his fortress at Seringapatam, a few hours\u2019 drive from present-day Bangalore.<\/p>\n

These battles have completely receded from the American imagination, even though, in some ways, the American rebellion was a sideshow to a far greater imperial drama. Britain, arguably, decided to cut its losses with the unruly thirteen colonies to better safeguard its more lucrative possessions in the Caribbean and South Asia. Meanwhile, every Indian schoolkid knows of Tipu Sultan\u2019s last stand, and generations of Britons were raised on tales of colonial derring-do and the menace of the \u201ctiger of Mysore,\u201d Tipu\u2019s sobriquet. (An ornate automaton that Tipu once possessed, of a tiger eating a British soldier, is probably the most well-known object in London\u2019s Victoria and Albert Museum.) In more recent years, the culture wars waged by India\u2019s ruling Hindu nationalists have complicated the image of Tipu and his father, who some now have recast as bloodthirsty Muslim warlords rather than icons of national resistance. But that was not the case when, as a teen-ager, multiple decades ago, I went with my family on a tour of the ruins of Tipu\u2019s fortress. Guides spoke of the monthlong siege that ended only because of the treachery of a local noble who turned on the sultan and allowed British troops to scale the walls. Tipu himself was found slain near a passageway once used to bring water into the fort; it\u2019s dubbed the Water Gate. \u201cFirst Watergate, Seringapatam,\u201d the guide told us, elongating the consonants in melodious, if broken, English. \u201cSecond Watergate, Washington.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Behind the Supreme Court\u2019s Ruling on Transgender Athletes<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The conflicts elsewhere in the world have receded from our imagination, but the American rebellion was a sideshow to a greater imperial drama, Ishaan Tharoor writes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":793,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-global-notes"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy The Last Battle of the American Revolution Was Fought In India - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=794\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why The Last Battle of the American Revolution Was Fought In India - 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