In 1738, Nader Shah of the Iranian Afsharid dynasty invaded the Mughal Empire, sacking Delhi in early 1739. With the Mughal power structure shattered after their devastating military losses, vassals in name only began asserting their independence, and soon, the Mughal Empire had fractured into a number of smaller states, each vying for power over the continent. 

In Bengal, the ruling Nawabs leveraged their historical power under the Mughals to legitimize their rule of Bengal. However, the Baro-Bhuyan inspired by Isa Khan’s, called the Confederation of Bengal (বাংলার কনফেডারেসি), quickly became a dominant political actor in the region as the Nawabs proved incapable of defending Bengal from outside invasion. Having spent nearly 150 years as an idea dispersed among the people of Bengal, the dream of Bengali freedom had amassed a great deal of the people’s trust. So, when the Nawabs attempted to exert greater centralization in the 1730s after the Mughals’ fall, they faced mass desertion and low morale, including from important officers who helped to run the army. Conversely, the Confederation’s forces swelled with experienced military fighters and commanders, soon outnumbering the Nawab’s forces. In March 1749, after a gruelling, years-long campaign, the Confederation’s forces prevailed at the Battle of the Hooghly River (হুগলি নদীর যুদ্ধ), defeating the poorly armed and poorly commanded Nawab forces. 

After the battle, the Confederation set up a permanent government at the city of Rajshahi (রাজশাহী). They chose Rajshahi (রাজশাহী) because it is equally distant from the two largest cities in Bengal, Kolkata (কলকাতা) and Dhaka (ঢাকা), and so would not privilege either city. Also during this time, Rajshahi had a roughly equal population of Hindus and Muslims living among one another, and so was thought to be perfect as the capital of the Confederation.

The founders of the Confederation of Bengal (বাংলার কনফেডারেসি), the First Council (প্রথম কাউন্সিল), knew that their religiously and culturally diverse population would not remain united for long, and so sought to establish a plurireligious identity through the use of a common language. They commissioned Adrija Das (আদ্রিজা দাস), a prominent poet of the era, to write a standard Bengali grammar (the Tongue of the Confederacy, “কনফেডারেশনের ভাষা”) in 1746. 

Also during the Summer of 1746, the First Council met in Rajshahi to create the government. As the Baro-Bhuyan which birthed the Confederation, the executive branch of the government the Confederation created was divided amongst 12 elected representatives from around Bengal. By tradition, seven of those representatives are Muslim and five are Hindu, but as this was never legally binding there have been a number of Buddhists on the council over the years as well. Most of the executive council would live and work in the capital for half the year in two intervals, each for three months, but staggered so there were always at least four members of the council in Rajshahi. During the remaining months of the year, those representatives were expected to work the fields or in an industry, even if in practice, whether they did or not fluctuated. All members of the executive council had equal power, but they selected one of their own to be the Head Councillor (প্রধান কাউন্সিলর), and the four most senior councillors held strong procedural power. Typically, the Head Councillor is the representative from either Dhaka or Kolkata, but this pattern has been broken several times throughout Bengal’s history. The executive branch is the only branch involved in decisions regarding national defense and war in general. The council is understood as a compromise because each representative is elected, however a given province chooses to select their representative, and the council must vote on every matter, including those of war. Throughout the 1750s and 60s, repeated incursions from the Maratha from the Southwest triggered such actions five times, signing a peace treaty in 1771 establishing peace between the two nations and the Subarnarekha River as their mutual border. 

The legislative and judicial branches of Bengal’s government are both linked to the country’s religious institutions, as well as to each other. The First Council understood that the core of the two religious communities’ holy texts, those being the Vedas, the Qur’an, and others, functioned to organize society. So, they built the legislative branch of the Bengali government to assume that role, compiling Bengali works of philosophy, law, history, religious works, and customary laws into a central corpus describing Bengali society, called the Book of the Country (দেশের বই), which would act as Bengal’s central legal framework. The legislative branch would make laws according to the Book, which included diverse religious and cultural perspectives. This branch handled taxation and broad budgetary allocation, while the executive branch handled the finer details of that allocation. The legislative branch had significant leeway in interpreting the Book while laws were being written and passed, but the ultimate authority to decide what a law meant lay with the Judicial Branch. 

The Judicial branch, technically part of the legislative branch, was made up of five Justices (বিচারপতি) appointed by a 2/3 majority vote in the executive council, each serving until their retirement at the age of 70. It primarily applies the Islamic ideas of reasoning and analytic logic from the Hanafi school, commonly followed among Bengal’s Muslims, to the secular Book of the Country. Importantly, those ideas were strictly used as a methodology rather than for their religious value. Early Justices tended to be appointed from among either the Hindu or Muslim scholarly circles, who had existing traditions of analyzing works of religious literature in a very similar way. Such a strong tradition of Islamic jurisprudence in particular lent itself well to the systematic analysis of the Book, and within 50 years, a class of lawyers assembled the Interpretations (ব্যাখ্যা), a companion text to the Book of the Country, including within it 50 years of legal cases and arguments. By 1800, the Rajshahi School of Jurisprudence became a widely-renowned, if only locally-used, philosophical movement. However, as the 1800s began, a class of secular legal experts began to grow, eventually coming to dominate the Judicial Branch. 

The first generation of the council (1730s-1770) was largely controlled by powerful local elites, often who invited French and Dutch merchants and advisors to work on technological advancement in Bengal. over the course of the next two centuries, power slowly became less and less concentrated within the ruling class. Especially after world war 1 and a slate of populist policy measures took hold, Bengal eventually became a beacon of democratic institutions. 

When European companies began trying to take control of more and more of India, these strong institutions prevented large-scale domination of Bengal. The British East India Company, headquartered at Bombay, attempted to overthrow the Confederation in the 1780s, but their armies were outsmarted and trapped at the Battle of Jharkhand in 1785 and the BEIC Navy was beaten by the Bengali Navy along Orisa’s coast later that year, ending the BEIC’s control over key beachheads and ports, effectively ending its campaign East. Instead of Kolkata, the British set up their colonial center on Bombay Island. Bengal would trade with the British and largely support their interests in India, so long as they left Bengal alone. To cement this status quo, Bengal established relations with France and the Netherlands, who supplied Bengal with European weapons until Bengali weapons began to be produced domestically.

Throughout the 1800s, the British East India Company solidified their control over India, forcing the submission of nearly every governing body on the continent by 1857. The Great Revolt of 1858 was triggered almost immediately as harsh working conditions were forced on the subcontinent, the company intending to bleed India dry of all its wealth. The revolt led to the dissolution of the BEIC by the Crown and the beginning of the British Raj.

Bengal and its neighbors remained outside of this system, instead developing its trade relationships with China and the European world, even if trade with the British Raj was inevitable. The Industrial Revolution was brought to Bengal by that early British trade, leading to rapid development in agriculture and textiles in Bengal. This early industrialization kickstarted the Bengali military, as the Army began trading for weapons with the Dutch very early, but the Bengali Navy especially was racing strides ahead of many of its contemporaries. Known for its unique type of Muslin thought to be light as woven air, Bengali textiles are famous around the world. They also exported mass amounts of rice and other crops, including dyes, medicinal plants, and sugarcane. By the Great Indian Revolt, Bengal had become a rising economic power. In its aftermath, the Anglo-Bengali Treaty of 1870 swapped some territory along the Subarnarekha River, establishing its modern borders. 

By the 1890s, Bengal had become too important for the British to leave independent, but too economically productive and integrated to be overtly conquered. Threatening to reroute the vital flow or trade keeping Bengal wealthy, the British negotiated the Treaty of Rajshahi, guaranteeing Bengali autonomy to control its internal matters, but establishing a protectorate over Bengal. By the early 1900s, Bengal’s neighbours were also brought into the British Empire in this way. Bengali soldiers were not required to fight in either World War, but valiantly defended their land against the Japanese invasion during the second when war was brought to their doorstep. For successfully halting the Japanese advance across Asia, the Bengali people were hailed as heroes across the Empire, the Bengal Brigade becoming legendary for their ferocious defence of the Empire. When India was partitioned in 1947, Bengal was allowed to remain whole, affirming its own independence with the Kolkata Decree on March 13, 1947. 

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the core institutions of the Bengali government remained constant, even as the executive council faced a number of power hungry councillors over the years, and British-oriented politicians tried to more formally bring the Confederation into the British sphere of influence. The question on every representative’s mind centered on whether the Confederation should succumb to British pressures and become a more specialized textile exporter, forsaking self-sufficient food production, or remain more economically diversified but somewhat cut off from the streams of British imperial commerce. During times of conflict, such as during both World Wars, the Russian Civil War, the Turkish War of Independence, and others, Bengal allowed itself to be commandeered for the war effort, producing cotton and linen in place of rice and other grain and trading the sails, uniforms, and other cloth goods for food grown elsewhere in the Empire. However, because of the extremely fertile soil and the early Industrial Revolution in Bengal, the Confederation was able to expand its domestic agriculture industry quickly and efficiently, by the Second World War, Bengal easily had the industrial might to both feed itself almost entirely and provide tangible cloth and other goods to the wider Empire during wartime. By its independence in 1947, Bengal had become an undisputed economic engine of South Asia. 

During the 20th century, the issue of caste became increasingly politically relevant. As Communism began to take hold in Eastern Europe and East Asia following the widespread collapse of European states at the end of World War I, the significant gatherings of lower caste and particularly Dalit communities began to concern the executive council and legislators of the Confederation. The leaders worried that a large socialist movement in Bengal could threaten the Confederation’s privileged position within the British Empire and undo the influx of wealth pouring into Bengal as it began to supply the Empire’s textiles. To avoid this outcome, legislators and representatives asked secular legal scholars to scour the Book and the Interpretations for a potential solution. It turned out that the caste system, while a relic more present in certain areas than others, had no non-Hindu support for such a system of social organization within the Book. In addition, the mostly-Muslim authors of the Interpretations had generally disliked the caste system and used their influence in the early days of the government to limit its legitimacy in legal interpretation. Using these facts, the executive council approved the 1923 Social Reorganization Act (সামাজিক পুনর্গঠন আইন), which formally abolished the caste system. That said, social stigma surrounding caste of origin persisted for several generations after their legal emancipation. 

The Social Reorganization Act of 1923 began a long period of social reforms in Bengal. Led by the populist Head Councillor Sabhas Samaddar (সুভাষ সমাদ্দার), the council heavily invested in the agricultural and textile industries, aiming to begin a process of soft nationalization of the industries. Famously, the Muslin Street Fire of 1928 claimed the lives of dozens of spinners, weavers, tailors, seamstresses, and other textile workers, as the street had been gated off during the work day to prevent workers from leaving. Using the government’s outsized influence in these key drivers of Bengal’s economy, the executive council fought to enforce improved working standards and brought the employers to justice, eventually nationalizing both agriculture and textile industries by the 1950s. 

The Great Depression did not hit Bengal particularly hard, as the country was able to more than provide for itself through domestic production and had the institutions to support the government through the crisis. However, the Great Depression did trigger an uptick in secular identity, especially in urban centers, alarming the more traditional factions. From that time through Independence, Bengal remained subservient to the British Empire in name only, becoming the financier for a large loan to the British crown in 1935. Upon independence, however the remaining debt was forgiven, having been negotiated away in exchange for the British troops peacefully leaving Bengal. 

Bengal remained a non-aligned nation throughout the Cold War. It had strong Liberal institutions, but nationalized the two biggest industries for the sake of efficiency and ease of production. Like many other nations, Bengal balanced on the edge, trading with whoever it could while jealously guarding itself against external influence. Internally, however, Bengal was becoming politically fragile. Now that the secular scholars of the 1700s had had children, and they had had children, and they had had children, and so on until the present, there had been growing a large atheist minority in the country. They argued that the Book of the Country was a secular document with which they could identify more strongly than either Islam or Hinduism. In 1957, one of these atheists was elected to represent Dhaka at the executive councils triggering a constitutional crisis. Because it had only been tradition that Hindu and Muslim representatives had been elected almost universally, the atheist was allowed to remain in his seat after a ruling handed down by the Judicial Branch in 1959. Suddenly, there was no longer a religious majority on the executive council. This brief lapse in religious oversight allowed a number of secular laws to be passed, including the nationalization and secularization of education, healthcare, and energy production, eventually leading to the government’s being able to use profits from those five industries to suspend taxation within Bengal. 

In the latter 1900s, Bengal continued to invest in its own industries and improving its infrastructure, public investment peaking in the late 1980s. However, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the near total implementation of neoliberal economic policy on the global stage, Bengal’s heavily government-guided economic system attracted the United States’ attention. The two began a trading relationship, neither entirely trusting of the other. However, Bengal’s worries about China wanting to exert influence over Arunachal Pradesh brought Bengal into a mutual security and trade agreement with the United States. Both would resist China’s growing global influence and in exchange for a near total free trade agreement with Bengal, the US would not interfere in Bengal’s domestic politics. 

This period was also marked with social upheaval as the religious and irreligious communities of Bengalis began to engage in armed conflict. Starting in 1965, a prolonged period of conflict known as the Great Turmoil (মহা অশান্তি). Between 1961 and 1987, thousands of Muslim, Hindu, and Atheist Bengalis had lost their lives. In 1987, the Act of Harmony (হারমনি অ্যাক্ট) passed the legislature, legally enshrining religious protections for each of its historical religious communities and opening government-run religiously-affiliated schools and hospitals. The Act of Harmony also established a third major Bengali legal text, the New Understandings (নতুন বোঝাপড়া) which clarified issues regarding religious and secular law. 

Since the 1990s, Bengal’s economic and demographic growth have somewhat slowed. Today, it has the oldest median age in South Asia (35 years), and has largely moved into a post-manufacturing economy. Bengal’s once ultra-productive textile factories lay dormant, crowding the once-great industrial cities of the past. Textile manufacturing, exported to India, China, and Myanmar, had been abandoned by the Bengali people due to low wages and increasing international competition, now producing only specialty goods like Dhaka Muslin. 

As uncertain as the economic future of Bengal is, its social future remains promising. The increasingly secular-run executive council began calling into question all laws with exclusively religious foundations. Soon, all laws which originated from religious prohibitions were effectively lifted. 

The Confederation of Bengal has become an important economic power in South Asia, providing a large portion of the world’s rice, flax, and cotton. It also attracts a great deal of tourists, especially in its Northern mountains on the border with China. Altogether, Bengal has survived through many potentially-fatal ordeals, but its future is looking up. 