16.1 Political Affairs · Part 3

major developments following his death was the establishment of what have been called ‘successor states’. Mughal viceroys in various parts of the country Oudh, Bengal, Hyderabad and the Carnatic set themselves up as independent rulers. The English and the Dutch had understood this vulnerability of the Mughal state. In Bengal and the Carnatic, the Nawabs had borrowed heavily from the English, and assigned vast tracts of land to them so that the English could collect the land revenue as repayment for the loans. This marks the beginning of British rule as revenue collectors. The name Carnatic originally refered to the region occupied by the Kannada- speaking people. In the eighteenth century it included the region lying between the Eastern Ghats and the Western Ghats, in the modern Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and southern Andhra Pradesh. The Nawab of Arcot controlled this region. authority of the Vijayanagar emperor. In addition to the larger Nayak kingdoms, several local chiefs also controlled some parts of the region. The most notable of them was probably the Setupati of Ramanathapuram, who was also keen to assert his independence. Between and the region witnessed several military conflicts arising out of these unsettled political conditions. Madurai and Thanjavur fought several times to establish their superiority. There were also rebellions against the Vijayanagar emperor. Besides these on-going conflicts, Golkonda invaded the Coromandel in and annexed the area between Pulicat and San Thome, which also changed the political scenario in the region. The Dutch and the English were able to acquire territorial rights on the east coast during these years. They realized that they needed a base on the Coromandel coast to access the piece goods needed for trading with the spice-producing islands of Indonesia. The Dutch had successfully negotiated to acquire Pulicat (Pazhaverkadu) from the Nayak of Senji and constructed a fort there. The English got a piece of land further south from the local chief, Damarla Venkatadri Nayak on which they built Fort St. George in . Thus an English settlement came up which eventually grew into Chennai (Madras), the capital of