Tipu Sultan presented the most powerful challenge to the might of Britain's East India Company in the period of its greatest territorial expansion. Building on the legacy of his father, Haider Ali, during the course of his relatively short reign as ruler of the kingdom of Mysore (1782-99), Tipu proved himself to be an efficient and firm governor of his state, flexible in forming alliances but ready to be aggressive towards his neighbours. As the British, based in Madras, sought to consolidate their control over the South, contested by the French, based in Pondicherry, they negotiated alliances with, but as often resisted, Indian powers in the region, including Thanjavur, the Marathas and the sultanate of Hyderabad. In the field of contest, all of these powers survived the period of unrest. But the ever-changing pattern of allegiances, and events both local and global, led to a point where the only solution to the mutual threat posed by Tipu Sultan and the British was the eradication of one or the other. As we all know, the British prevailed, but that did not appear to be the only possible outcome - or even the most likely one, even in British eyes - until it was actually accomplished. The Siege of Srirangapatna extinguished the most formidable threat that the British had faced in their history in India up till then; and they would not face anything che on the same scale again until the Revolt of 1857. Many of the details of the four Anglo-Mysore Wars, and the competing ways in which they have been narrated and interpreted, are explored in the chapters that follow. For now, in addition to asserting the scale and importance of the threat posed by Tipu, want to offer one reason why, for the British. he had to be treated so differently from other regional powers. In the beginning this was not so; the Treaty of Madras, which concluded the First Anglo-Mysore War in 1769, was a treaty of alliance, a promise of mutual support. So where and why did it all go wrong?