Carnatic Sultanate

The Carnatic Sultanate, the Carnatic or Arcot State, was the Muslim kingdom of India's southeast coast between about 1690 and 1855, ruled by a nawab under the legal purview of the Nizam of Hyderabad. From Arcot the nawabs taxed the richest rice deltas of the Coromandel, played the French of Pondicherry against the English of Madras through the Carnatic Wars, and sheltered Chanda Sahib, Muzaffar Jang and a generation of adventurers. Muhammad Ali Wallajah's long reign made Arcot a byword for debt: the nabob's bonds were traded in London coffee houses and ruined a dozen members of Parliament. Stringer Lawrence and Robert Clive learned their trade in its wars, and Clive's defence of Arcot in 1751 made his name. The Company bled the state with subsidies, deposed the titular nawabs one by one, and in 1855 annexed the Carnatic outright on the doctrine of lapse, folding its revenues into Madras and closing a century and a half of Indo-Muslim rule in the south.