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The British East India Company arrived in India in 1612 as a trading firm, and victories at Plassey in 1757 and Buxar in 1764 won it the diwani, the right to collect land revenue in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. By 1857 it ruled most of the subcontinent through conquest and subsidiary alliances and fielded over 300,000 Indian sepoys against about 50,000 British soldiers. Its Bengal Army recruited high-caste Brahmins and Rajputs from Awadh and Bihar, then alienated them in 1856 by annexing Awadh and passing Lord Canning’s General Service Enlistment Act, which made new recruits accept service overseas.

The spark was a rumor that cartridges for the Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle, bitten open during loading, were greased with cow tallow and pig lard. On March 29, 1857 Mangal Pandey fired on officers at Barrackpore and was hanged, and on May 10 sepoys at Meerut mutinied and marched on Delhi to proclaim Bahadur Shah Zafar Emperor of Hindustan. The revolt failed as the Bombay and Madras armies, the Sikhs and major princely states sided with the British, and the Government of India Act of 1858 ended company rule and created the British Raj.

• Historian Kim Wagner finds little evidence the greased cartridges were ever widely issued to Indian troops.
• The company’s switch to ungreased cartridges looked to sepoys like an admission of guilt.
• At Kanpur, General Wheeler entrenched in a fragile hospital barracks instead of the stone magazine.
• Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi took up arms after the British annexed her territory.
• Estimates put British deaths at around 6,000 and Indian deaths above 800,000.