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Historical person
1751–1799
Tipu Sultan was ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore from 1782 to 1799 and one of the most formidable Indian opponents of the British East India Company. The son of Hyder Ali, he gained military experience while still young and inherited an expanding state at war with Company forces and their Indian allies. Tipu strengthened central administration, promoted manufacturing and overseas trade, experimented with military organisation and used iron-cased rockets that became one of the best-known technologies of Mysorean warfare.
Tipu fought successive Anglo-Mysore wars while seeking diplomatic and commercial ties with powers including France and the Ottoman Empire. Defeat in 1792 forced him to surrender territory, pay a large indemnity and give two sons as temporary hostages. Renewed British intervention under Governor-General Richard Wellesley led to the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War. Tipu was killed defending Seringapatam in May 1799. His legacy remains contested, celebrated as resistance to colonial expansion while also scrutinised for coercive policies toward some conquered communities.
Lawrence James’ Raj also follows Indian rulers and confederacies that resisted or negotiated with the Company, including Tipu Sultan and Ranjit Singh, before annexation and reform under Dalhousie helped create the tensions that erupted in the rebellion of 1857. In Anthony Morland’s An Officer’s Justice, after the fall of Seringapatam and the death of Tipu Sultan, William Culpepper is sent into a Mysore unsettled by victory rather than pacified by it. Further fictional perspectives on Tipu Sultan can be found in Sir Walter Scott’s Chronicles of the Canongate, Alex Rutherford’s Fortune’s Heir, G. A. Henty’s The Tiger of Mysore, Anthony Morland’s The Tiger’s Last Roar, and Griff Hosker’s The Tiger and the Thief.
Series
The Life of William Culpepper follows a fictional British officer from the Revolutionary Wars in Europe into the East India Company’s campaigns in India. The sequence begins with the Flanders campaign and the Battle of Boxtel, then moves through the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War, the unstable aftermath of Tipu…
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The East Indiaman Saga follows Bill “Smudger” Smith from London poverty into the world of the East India Company. The books move through company ships, soldiers, Indian campaigns and the Battle of Assaye, using the early nineteenth-century British presence in India as a setting for escape, military discipline…
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The Ballantyne Chronicles follow Nicholas Ballantyne from a threatened youth in 1744 Scotland into the expanding world of the British East India Company. Sent to India for his safety, he forms a decisive friendship with Robert Clive and becomes involved in the contest between British and French interests…
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The Sharpe series follows Richard Sharpe from service as a private soldier in India to command in the British Army during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The novels place him at the Siege of Seringapatam, Battle of Assaye, Siege of Gawilghur, Battle of Trafalgar, British attack on Copenhagen,…
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The Waverley Novels are Walter Scott’s long sequence of historical romances, named after the anonymously published Waverley of 1814. The series moves across Scottish, English and continental European history, placing fictional protagonists between older systems of loyalty and the political, commercial and legal institutions replacing them. Scott’s characters…
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Standalone books
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
