Baji Rao II

Baji Rao II was the last peshwa of the Maratha Confederacy. His unstable alliances with rival Maratha chiefs and the British East India Company led to the Treaty of Bassein and the Second and Third Anglo-Maratha Wars, ending his political power.

Baji Rao II was born in Dhar and died in Bithoor. Installed as peshwa with British support after the Treaty of Bassein, Baji Rao II later turned against the East India Company; defeat in the Third Anglo-Maratha War in 1818 ended the peshwa’s political office and left him a pensioned exile at Bithoor.

Anthony Morland’s The Maratha Checkmate uses Baji Rao II’s loss of Poona and British-backed restoration as the political trigger for its Second Anglo-Maratha War narrative. Major William Culpepper joins Arthur Wellesley’s campaign after the Peshwa’s flight has drawn the East India Company directly into Maratha succession and alliance politics. Baji Rao therefore matters not as a decorative court figure but as the ruler whose attempt to recover his position helps set the armies in motion, carrying the story through Assaye, siege warfare and the wider collapse of the settlement he had hoped British support would secure.