Indigenous Alliances, Not Spanish Numbers, Toppled the Aztec and Inca Empires

A few hundred Spaniards did not conquer the Aztec and Inca empires by themselves. They brought horses, steel weapons, ships, and experience using them. Indigenous allies supplied most of the soldiers—and had their own reasons to fight. Military historian Si Sheppard describes the Aztec and Inca empires as political systems that looked formidable from a distance but contained many peoples with different interests. The Tlaxcalans, surrounded by the Aztecs and cut off from the coast and its salt supplies, had reason to gamble on an alliance with Cortés. Totonacs on the coast and communities near Lake Texcoco also resented Aztec authority. In Peru, communities brought under Inca rule—including the Cañari, Chachapoya, and Ayarmaca—joined the Spaniards during the siege of Cuzco.

These alliances were not acts of submission. The Tlaxcalans regarded themselves as partners, not subordinates, and drove a hard bargain: they wanted territory taken from the Aztecs and a position for themselves in Tenochtitlan. Their own record of the alliance, the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, depicts Spaniards and Tlaxcalans at comparable scale, negotiating as equals. A modern mural at the Tlaxcala governor’s mansion, based on the Lienzo, carries the same emphasis. The images give the alliance a political point of view: Tlaxcalan leaders understood themselves to be making use of a foreign force to pursue their own aims.

The numbers make the distinction clear. Cortés had only a few hundred Spaniards when he reached the Aztec capital. In the final campaign against Tenochtitlan, Sheppard estimates that Spaniards made up about half of one percent of the total force. Most of the fighters were other Mesoamerican peoples. The Spanish supplied military skills and equipment that could give a larger coalition leverage; they did not supply its manpower.

The alliance survived a major setback. After Cortés returned from dealing with a rival Spanish expedition, he found that Pedro de Alvarado had attacked Aztec nobles during a festival. The survivors rallied the city against the Spanish. Moctezuma, already in Spanish custody, tried to calm the crowd; people threw stones at him. He died soon afterward. Sheppard says the accounts differ over whether the Spaniards killed him.

Cortés and his men then tried to escape across Tenochtitlan’s causeways in the night later called La Noche Triste. Many Spaniards were killed or captured and later sacrificed; Cortés escaped with a fraction of his force. At Otumba, Aztec forces tried to finish off the retreating column. Cortés identified the Aztec commander and led a cavalry charge that disrupted the army’s command. But reaching Tlaxcalan territory and being sheltered there mattered at least as much as that battlefield success. Sheppard says that if the Tlaxcalans had turned against Cortés, the Spaniards would likely have been destroyed.

The codex images associated with these events make the alliance visible as more than a Spanish force with local auxiliaries. The Florentine Codex depicts Spaniards and Tlaxcalans fighting together at Otumba; the Lienzo de Tlaxcala records the alliance from the Tlaxcalan side. Together, they point to two different moments in the campaign: Cortés’s retreat, when the alliance could have ended, and the partnership that made it possible to return.

For the next campaign, Cortés needed control of the lake around Tenochtitlan. His forces obtained sulfur from the crater of Popocatépetl for gunpowder and built brigantines in sections. Indigenous porters carried the pieces over the mountains; the boats were assembled on Lake Texcoco. The flotilla gave the Spanish coalition a way to contest the lake, while the land forces could press the city from its causeways and surrounding territory. This was military technology built around local labor and allied manpower. Tenochtitlan fell in 1521.

The final campaign depended on combining these elements rather than on the Spaniards’ numbers. Cortés had reinforcements arriving on the coast, but the army directed against Tenochtitlan was overwhelmingly Indigenous. The boats enabled the coalition to challenge the city’s position on the lake; the allies supplied the force needed to sustain the attack. Sheppard presents the conquest as a coalition’s assault on an imperial capital, not as a few hundred Europeans defeating millions in isolation.

In Peru, the same political arithmetic appeared during the siege of Cuzco. Manco Inca’s forces had taken the fortress of Sacsayhuamán and cut off Spanish reinforcements in the mountain passes. The Inca could destroy relief expeditions in terrain they knew. Yet Indigenous groups continued joining the Spanish defenders in the city. Some had been forcibly resettled by the Inca; others had their own histories of rivalry with them. During the long siege, the Spanish force gained allies rather than simply exhausting its supply of them.

The campaigns were not simply small European forces against large Indigenous populations. Spaniards inserted themselves into conflicts among Indigenous states and communities, and local leaders made choices according to their own aims. Those choices helped sustain campaigns that Spanish numbers alone could never have supported.

Coalition-building worked alongside another strategy: seize the figure whose authority held the political system together, then try to govern through him. Cortés and Pizarro both pursued the ruler rather than beginning by conquering every part of the empire.

When Cortés reached Tenochtitlan in 1519, Moctezuma II was the Huey Tlatoani, or “Great Speaker.” Doña Marina, also known as La Malinche, interpreted between the two men. Moctezuma knew the strangers were coming. He sent gifts and urged Cortés to leave, but the gold intensified the Spaniards’ interest. His advisers warned him against allowing the expedition into the capital. His brother Cuitláhuac, Sheppard says, warned that if Moctezuma let Cortés into his house, Cortés would take the house from him.

Moctezuma nevertheless allowed the Spaniards into Tenochtitlan. Sheppard argues that this decision may have been more defensible than it has often appeared: keeping Cortés close in the capital could have seemed safer than leaving a foreign force free to approach the empire’s subject peoples and encourage revolt. Sheppard also suggests Moctezuma may have believed Cortés’s claim that he represented Charles V, although Charles had no idea who Cortés was.

The decisive turn came when Cortés received word that an Aztec regional officer had attacked the Spanish forces left on the coast. Cortés used the incident as a pretext to enter Moctezuma’s palace, demand that the emperor come into Spanish custody, and threaten violence if he refused. Moctezuma submitted and told his people not to resist. Cortés then had the coastal officers brought before the emperor and burned alive. Sheppard presents the execution as a display of force for which Moctezuma’s court had no precedent.

With Moctezuma in Spanish hands, Cortés could attempt to govern through him. Sheppard’s interpretation is that the decisive vulnerability was not simply allowing Cortés into the city. It was Moctezuma’s remaining physically accessible there. Had he ruled through subordinates from another location, Cortés might have had no clear way to seize him, and his ability to control the empire would have been sharply reduced.

Pizarro’s encounter with Atahualpa at Cajamarca followed the same broad logic, but began in a different political crisis. The Inca ruler Huayna Capac had died in 1525, and his sons Atahualpa and Huascar fought a civil war. Atahualpa had just won and was travelling toward Cuzco to be formally enthroned when he heard that a small group of strangers had entered his realm.

Atahualpa’s envoy warned that the Spaniards were dangerous and could be killed. Atahualpa chose to meet them, apparently seeing opportunity as well as risk. Pizarro had roughly 168 men. The number of Inca troops present at Cajamarca is unknown, but Patel and Sheppard describe Atahualpa’s army as tens of thousands strong. Pizarro arranged the meeting in a confined courtyard. After a display of horsemanship intended to impress Atahualpa, the Spaniards ambushed the gathering with artillery, firearms, and cavalry.

The guns’ physical damage mattered less than their psychological effect. The Inca had never heard gunpowder weapons fired. The explosions and the sight of horses charging into the crowd helped trigger panic. People pressed against the courtyard walls trying to escape; the crush brought some of the walls down. The Spaniards pursued those who fled until nightfall. Sheppard identifies one Spanish injury: Pizarro’s hand was cut as he reached to seize Atahualpa. The courtyard, surprise, gunfire, and cavalry combined to create an opening for the capture; no single feature explains the outcome on its own.

The episode’s scale did not make its outcome inevitable. Atahualpa’s army had just won a civil war, and the Spaniards themselves feared what they were facing. Sheppard recalls their description of Inca campfires on the hills around Cajamarca, scattered like stars, and their admission that they were losing control of their bladders as Inca troops entered the courtyard. Atahualpa was eventually captured, but his decision to meet Pizarro in that setting gave the Spaniards an opening to seize the ruler at the center of a large army.

Capturing the ruler created leverage; it did not ensure that the captive could preserve his authority or secure his own safety. Sheppard describes Moctezuma as having undergone a psychological collapse after Cortés took him, and as trying to obey the Spaniards while still helping his people. His standing among his people appears to have deteriorated; Sheppard says they ultimately repudiated and replaced him. Atahualpa, by contrast, learned Spanish quickly and learned to play cards and chess. He offered Pizarro a room filled with gold and silver in exchange for his release. Pizarro accepted the ransom and then had Atahualpa garroted. Sheppard suggests Atahualpa may have believed he was dealing with someone who observed the rules between rulers; he was instead dealing with a conquistador who had no intention of keeping that bargain.

The Spaniards’ equipment gave their small forces an edge, but Sheppard cautions against treating firearms as the main explanation. Early guns were slow to reload. Their noise and novelty could shock an opponent, but once Indigenous fighters understood their limitations, firearms were not especially effective battlefield assets.

Steel mattered more. Local weapons included wooden clubs edged with obsidian, a volcanic glass that could be honed to a sharp edge. The source shows a macuahuitl, an Aztec obsidian-edged club. Sheppard says such weapons could be dangerous as slashing arms, but were less effective against Spanish steel helmets and armor. Spanish swords, used as thrusting weapons, gave their wielders a different advantage against opponents whose weapons were more often used to cut or slash. The weapons came with inherited military training and experience in using them.

Horses changed what a small force could do. There were no horses in the Americas when the Spaniards arrived, and the Aztecs had no equivalent pack animal. The Inca used llamas to carry supplies, but horses gave Spanish forces speed, reach, and the ability to charge through formations that lacked the training and discipline to withstand cavalry. They also made retreat easier: when a fight went badly, mounted Spaniards could get away faster than foot soldiers could pursue them.

The Spaniards also brought large war dogs trained to attack people. An Indigenous painting shown during Sheppard’s account depicts people being attacked by dogs while a Spaniard watches from horseback. The image makes the dogs part of the coercive force confronting Indigenous communities, alongside mounted soldiers and unfamiliar weapons.

Cavalry was not invulnerable. Europeans had already developed ways to stop mounted fighters. Sheppard points to the Swiss use of men standing shoulder-to-shoulder with long pikes, holding horses at a distance and breaking the impetus of a charge. But that method required appropriate weapons, training, discipline, and institutional knowledge. Mesoamerican formations were looser, leaving gaps that horses could exploit. The problem was not that a large army could never stop cavalry; it was that the Spaniards’ opponents did not have the established formations and experience needed to do it at once.

The Spaniards’ advantage was also conditional on the terrain. In Tenochtitlan, its islands, bridges, and causeways constrained cavalry. Aztec fighters learned to attack from rooftops and to move between buildings through openings too small for horses. Near Lake Texcoco, they broke dikes and flooded a city, trapping some Spaniards and their allies. In water, metal armor could become a liability by dragging its wearer down. The Inca later flooded a river near Ollantaytambo, bogging down Spanish cavalry.

Indigenous fighters improvised with the weapons and tactics available to them. They attached captured Spanish swords to long wooden poles, approximating pikes. The Inca used bolas to entangle horses’ legs. Sheppard recounts one Aztec warrior allowing himself to be struck by a lance and holding on to it so companions could swarm the rider. Captured Spaniards were made to show the Inca how to use firearms; Aztec fighters learned to use captured crossbows. Manco Inca, leader of the Inca resistance, learned to ride a horse himself to demonstrate that it could be done.

These were not signs of incapacity or indifference. The Aztec and Inca forces recognized the threat and found ways to respond. But the learning curve was steep, and the time available was short. They had to adapt to unfamiliar technology and tactics while their political orders were under attack. A tactic that worked in a particular place did not immediately become an army-wide system capable of matching Spanish cavalry or equipment.

The siege of Cuzco shows both what adaptation could achieve and what constrained it. Quizo Yupanqui used narrow mountain passes to ambush Spanish reinforcements, blocking the routes and sending boulders down from above. In those conditions, horses could not charge up steep slopes, and armor could not protect soldiers from a boulder. Yet Manco later ordered Quizo to attack Lima across open ground, where Spanish cavalry could operate. Quizo was killed and the assault collapsed. The Inca could exploit terrain to win particular encounters, but success depended on keeping the fighting in conditions that neutralized Spanish advantages.

Cuzco’s defenders also benefited from the city’s narrow streets and fortified buildings. Spanish survivors fell back to a few strong positions, where narrow entrances restricted the force that could attack at once. When the siege pressure eased, the Spaniards could bring their horses out into the larger plazas and surrounding countryside. The Inca had overwhelming numbers, but those numbers could not all be used at once in confined streets. The siege continued for months, and some fighters left to return to their homes and farms. Sheppard emphasizes the agricultural calendar: armies needed people to plant and harvest, or they risked a hard year without enough food.

Dwarkesh Patel points to two apparent failures of Indigenous tactics: Aztec warriors sometimes tried to capture Cortés for sacrifice instead of killing him, and conspicuous dress could make commanders easy targets for Spanish cavalry. Sheppard connects the first to a military system in which taking captives brought status and religious meaning. The Aztecs did not simply overlook the possibility of killing; their existing incentives rewarded capture. He compares this with European practices of taking important enemies alive for ransom, while emphasizing that the Aztec practice was bound up with a different religious and political order.

Sheppard also cautions against imagining that the Inca could simply concentrate all their soldiers at once. The siege of Cuzco was fought through narrow approaches and fortified positions, and many of the army’s members came from communities with limited loyalty to Inca rule. Some left the siege to return to their families and farms. A larger force could still fail to deliver a decisive blow if it could not be kept together, supplied, and brought to bear under favorable conditions.

The Spanish expeditions were not unified enterprises. Cortés had taken his expedition beyond the authority granted by Diego Velázquez, governor of Cuba. Velázquez sent Pánfilo de Narváez with a force larger than Cortés’s original expedition to arrest him. Cortés left Alvarado in charge in Tenochtitlan, marched to the coast, defeated Narváez in a minor battle, and persuaded most of the new force to join him. The attempt to stop Cortés instead supplied him with reinforcements.

That success depended on persuasion as well as arms. Cortés argued that the men should not fight each other when an empire and its wealth were within reach. They joined his expedition, but their arrival did not resolve the danger of leaving Tenochtitlan in the hands of a subordinate. Alvarado’s attack on the festival turned the city against the Spanish while Cortés was away. A command divided across a large distance could not prevent a subordinate’s decision from changing the whole campaign.

Pizarro’s venture also contained Spanish rivalries. His associate Diego de Almagro believed that Pizarro was receiving too much of the spoils. After Manco Inca had laid siege to Cuzco, Almagro returned, besieged the city, and captured it. Pizarro eventually died not fighting Indigenous forces, but in an attack by rival Spaniards at his home.

Patel asks why Indigenous rulers could not exploit these disputes in the same way that Cortés and Pizarro exploited divisions among Indigenous peoples. Sheppard’s distinction is that Spanish rivalries unfolded within a shared Spanish orbit. They were personal and political conflicts among men with common backgrounds, and he argues they could unite if they faced an existential threat. The divisions among Indigenous societies were conflicts between communities and political systems with histories of their own.

After the Spanish retreat from Tenochtitlan, Cuitláhuac, who succeeded Moctezuma, sent emissaries to the Tlaxcalans and the Tarascans to propose a broader alliance against the newcomers. Younger Tlaxcalans considered the proposal, but the elders who still held power rejected it after decades of fighting the Aztecs. The Tarascans wanted nothing to do with their Aztec enemies. They saw the Spanish campaign as the Aztecs’ problem.

The limitation was not that Indigenous leaders could not imagine cooperation. It was that an appeal to shared interests arrived after long-standing political conflicts had already shaped their choices. The Spanish could offer themselves as new partners in those conflicts. Local leaders had reasons to accept that offer, even when it carried risks they could not fully anticipate.

The lack of other European powers narrowed the options further. At the time of the Aztec and Inca conquests, the Spaniards were the only outsiders of this kind that local rulers had encountered. They could not play Spain against England, France, or the Dutch. Sheppard suggests that a wider European presence might have allowed Indigenous leaders to use competing powers against one another. That possibility came later, not at the moment when Cortés and Pizarro were consolidating their footholds.

The capture of a ruler could destabilize the Aztec and Inca systems because authority was concentrated at the top. Sheppard contrasts this with peoples whose political power was more dispersed. The Spanish could not do to the Maya what they had done to the Aztecs or the Inca. Maya city-states defended their autonomy against one another, so the Spanish had to reduce them individually. Sheppard says that process continued almost to the end of the seventeenth century, and that dissent persisted afterward.

The comparison does not mean that dispersed societies were immune to conquest. It means there was no single ruler whose capture could serve as a shortcut to control. Sheppard points to the Comanche and to Indigenous forces at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876 as examples of opponents who could assemble temporarily and then disperse. At Little Bighorn, he says, the 7th Cavalry lost the initiative against warriors who had come together, fought on horseback with guns, and were difficult to pin down afterward. In his account, subduing such groups required a long campaign that included attacking the material basis of their lives, including the buffalo.

The Aztec and Inca empires, meanwhile, had their own imperial subjects and rivals. The Inca had forcibly resettled communities, and a source visual defines mitimaes as forcibly resettled communities and yanakuna as hereditary servants of the Inca elite. The Aztec wars against Tlaxcala, Sheppard says, had developed from ritualized conflicts for captives into campaigns of encirclement and conquest. These arrangements gave particular communities reasons to welcome the possibility of a change in power.

In Sheppard’s account, imperial hierarchies created a point of political concentration: if the ruler was captured, the system could be governed through intermediaries or a puppet. But the empire’s subjects did not necessarily share one political interest. A map showing Aztec territory alongside Tlaxcala, the Totonacs, and the Tarascans makes the limits of a simple map-boundary view apparent: the empire’s apparent reach coexisted with independent rivals and subject peoples with reasons to resist it.

Sheppard describes history as an interaction between the “great wheels” of geography and climate and the smaller wheels of individuals’ decisions. Cortés could have been killed early, leaving the expedition without its central organizer. If Atahualpa had kept negotiations at a distance instead of entering Pizarro’s trap, he might have used the surviving Inca state and its numbers to frustrate the Spanish campaign. In Cuzco, a more successful attack on Spanish relief columns—or keeping pressure on the defenders at night—might have changed the siege.

Those possibilities concern the immediate campaigns. Sheppard argues that longer-term pressures still weighed against the Indigenous empires. He links Eurasia’s history of domesticated animals and close human contact with livestock to the circulation of contagious diseases across the region. Indigenous peoples of the Americas had not experienced the same exposure or acquired immunity. Smallpox killed Cuitláhuac after a short reign. Sheppard’s counterfactual is that even if the Aztec or Inca had won early battles, epidemic disease and the resulting demographic crisis would have weakened their ability to remain politically integrated. As imperial authority weakened, subject peoples might have broken away.

He also points to a recurring pattern in the history of large pre-Columbian centers. Tenochtitlan was a wealthy, densely populated metropolis when Cortés arrived. Sheppard speculates that, had the Spaniards arrived in 1619 rather than 1519, they might have found a swamp with moss-covered mounds. He compares this possible trajectory to Teotihuacan, an earlier major city that grew, put pressure on its environment, and collapsed. Sheppard’s view is that European settlement would probably have expanded inland eventually, even if the initial Spanish campaigns had failed and the process had taken longer.

A different history might have given Indigenous societies more time to adapt. The Norse explored parts of North America around 1000, but their settlements were too small and met fierce local resistance. Sheppard speculates that if they had established a lasting presence, they might have introduced European technology, animals, and diseases gradually. Five centuries later, the Spanish might have met Indigenous societies with some resistance to European diseases, experience with iron, and horses. “If that was the case, all bets are off,” he says.

The asymmetry in accumulated knowledge mattered in the campaigns that did occur. Cortés drew on earlier Spanish activity in the Caribbean and improvised as he went; Pizarro could learn from Cortés’s experience and follow much of the same playbook. The Aztecs and Inca, by contrast, had limited contact with one another. They did not share information about the Spaniards or prepare a common response before facing them. European knowledge could accumulate across expeditions while Indigenous forces encountered the new threat in separate, short crises.

Many conquistadors came from Extremadura, which Sheppard describes as a hard region of small farms and unproductive, dusty terrain. They had a warrior tradition shaped by Spain’s recent unification and the Reconquista, but, in his account, little to show for it. For men with few assets beyond their fighting skills, an expedition across the Atlantic offered a high-risk chance to become somebody and gain wealth.

Sheppard distinguishes the perceived opportunity in the New World from fighting in campaigns against the Moors or Turks. Those conflicts were dangerous, but the men he describes saw their potential rewards as limited. Reports from the Atlantic suggested that the risks in the Americas might be lower and the rewards much greater. The early Spanish campaigns in the Caribbean had encountered island populations that were not unified and had limited military capacity. Some conquistadors assumed the mainland would be similar. They encountered far stronger resistance, but by then they had also seen the scale of the wealth and cities they hoped to seize.

Religion supplied another justification. Cortés and Pizarro travelled with clergy, and both later emphasized their opposition to human sacrifice. Sheppard says the Spaniards could have been genuinely horrified by what they saw in Tenochtitlan, including the blood and remains at the temples. They could also understand the destruction of Indigenous religious objects and the promotion of Christianity as serving a higher purpose. Sheppard does not treat that justification as the principal motive: he describes it as a way to salve consciences in ventures driven by the prospect of taking wealth.

Patel points to accounts of violence against Indigenous people, including the use of war dogs to tear people apart. Sheppard agrees that the accounts describe extreme violence and says the Spanish could rationalize it by invoking human sacrifice, but he rejects the idea that the conquests were selfless. He describes the claimed benefit to Indigenous people as, at best, a side effect or “window dressing” for colonization. He also distinguishes the Inca case: he says there was no comparable tradition of mass human sacrifice there, though the Inca sometimes carried out rare, specific sacrifices in the high mountains.

The immediate Spanish prize was precious metal, but the longer consequence was a new system of global exchange. Spain’s early colonial economy was extractive. Some conquistadors who survived settled on encomiendas, estates where Indigenous people were compelled to work. Later, bureaucrats arrived to administer the colonies. The men who conquered territory did not necessarily understand the significance of the system they were helping to create.

Silver from the Americas, especially from Potosí in what is now Bolivia, helped connect trade across the Pacific. Spanish ships carried silver to Manila, where merchants from China, Japan, and Siam brought goods for exchange. Patel describes Spanish silver as a medium of exchange Chinese traders could use; the goods moving west included silk, porcelain, spices, and other products. Sheppard’s broader argument is that the conquest helped complete a shift from trade across Eurasia or the Atlantic to trade on a global scale.

For Spain, the flow of bullion was not an uncomplicated gain. It helped fund wars against the Ottomans and efforts to maintain Spanish power in Europe. But Sheppard argues that the influx of silver also raised prices and reduced real wages. In his account, the ease of obtaining bullion weakened incentives to build capital markets and independent banking institutions of the kind emerging in England and the Netherlands. Spain could finance immediate ambitions without building an equally durable productive economy at home.

Sheppard presents Spain’s relative economic decline as a consequence of that dependence, not as a simple result of the conquests themselves. He argues that Spain and Portugal did not develop the same financial institutions as the Netherlands and England, and that Spain remained less industrialized and more rural. The silver helped Spain pursue military and religious ambitions, he says, but did not produce broad gains for the average Spaniard.

The comparison with England and the Netherlands is part of Sheppard’s wider argument about windfalls. These powers entered imperial expansion later and, in his view, had fewer natural resources to exploit. Without an easy source of wealth, they had stronger incentives to innovate in trade and finance. He makes a related comparison between the American North and South: the South could invest in enslaved labor and cash crops, while the North developed more heavily around commerce, finance, and industry. His argument is that easy returns can narrow the range of institutions a society has reason to develop.

The global system created dependencies far beyond Spain. Sheppard says the Ming increasingly based exchange on silver. When access to silver was reduced during the first half of the seventeenth century, a cash crisis arrived at a moment of pressure from the Manchus. In his account, the Ming could no longer fund their armies as needed; the Manchus took power and established the Qing dynasty. Silver connected distant economies, but dependence on it also made disruptions to its flow consequential.

The Mughal Empire did not simply fall because European powers divided its rulers against one another. Sheppard says it had begun to weaken after Aurangzeb, whose successors lacked the authority or charisma to maintain the hegemony he had built. As imperial momentum faded, local power brokers had more reason to break away. In his view, the empire would have fragmented even without European intervention, probably into a patchwork of states, with the Maratha Confederacy among the major powers.

European sea power helped determine which outside force could take advantage. Sheppard says the Royal Navy allowed Britain to force the French out of Canada and India. A larger French population or military force was of little use if it could not be projected across the sea lanes.

Patel raises another advantage: the East India Company could hire and replace leaders, rather than depending on dynastic succession. A ruler who died might be followed by an incompetent heir, as Patel argues happened after Alivardi Khan in Bengal. Local financiers and military leaders could then decide that the British were a better partner than the ruler they served. The Company’s initial control of Bengal’s tax revenue gave it resources to extend its power.

Sheppard agrees that corporate organization could make European companies more flexible than dynastic states. He points to the East India Company and its English and Dutch counterparts as commercial organizations able to act at a distance, shift leadership, and respond to local circumstances. They could enter existing diplomatic arrangements and use accumulated grievances to build alliances. Their advantage was not simply that particular British officers were more capable; the company form let leadership be replaced without the succession crises that could disrupt monarchies.

In Sheppard’s account, the British and Dutch combined this flexibility with commercial motives and sea power. The East India Company’s pursuit of profit could redirect local tax revenues and production toward its own ends, with severe consequences for local people. The company structure created an organization capable of exploiting political openings; it did not make those outcomes benign.