Why The Last Battle of the American Revolution Was Fought In India

Art work from Universal Art Archive / Alamy Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story You’re reading Global Notes, Ishaan Tharoor’s weekly column on international politics.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’s 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.’s 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.

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’s, written to encourage recruitment for the Hyder Ally’s maiden voyage, had explained that the vessel’s 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’s East India Company on the other side of the world. Freneau wrote, “From an eastern prince she takes her name, / Who, smit with freedom’s sacred flame, / Usurping Britons brought to shame, / His country’s wrongs avenging.”

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—a 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—some scholars have interpreted the Declaration itself as a cry for help, to France and Spain—that saw skirmishes and sieges from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean to Africa. India was a major zone of contest between Europe’s 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’s 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.