Paolo Solaroli di Briona. Un sarto novarese tra India e Risorgimento

The eighteenth century saw a fragmentation of Mughal power, the last, recognized Indian heads of the old order. A rapid political revolution followed, wars of succession, murder and usurpation, dismemberment of the empire, and rise of petty chiefs to independence everywhere, most of them ephemeral, but others containing the germs of a future worthier existence. Into this disintegrating world entered the Europeans, no longer the merchants that they had been for a century and more in the past, but as warriors and arbiters of India’s political destiny. Although the first mercenaries in Indian armies were active from the beginning of the seventeenth century, the last half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century was the golden age for these Europeans. Violence between different Indian successor states was at its peak, with Sikh, Maratha, French, British and numerous other armies engaged in one or more conflicts. The mercenaries came from more than fifteen European countries, even from United States, also differed from each other in terms of their socio-economic position in these home countries. While some, like Benoît de Boigne, George Thomas, Jean-François Allard, Jean-Baptiste Ventura, Catello Filose, Reinhardt “le Sombre” and Paolo Avitabile rose to be famous army commanders, of whom heroic stories were written, most of the mercenaries did not rise to be such celebrities in Europe. The Italian Paolo Solaroli is a separate case: almost unknown among the European mercenaries in India, except for a marriage with the extraordinarily rich descendant of the famous “le Sombre”, he rose to be a celebrity once he returned home during the Risorgimento wars.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC

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