1/4 Paisa - Muhammad Ali

The Nawabdom of the Carnatic was by the late eighteenth century a deeply compromised political entity — nominally independent but increasingly subject to British East India Company pressure following the three Carnatic Wars. Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah, who ruled from 1749 until his death in 1795, maintained his court at Madras while accumulating debts to the Company that would eventually strip his successors of any real authority. This copper fractional issue belongs to a coinage produced under those strained circumstances.

The Carnatic nawabs lost formal sovereignty over their mint operations progressively through this period, with the Company assuming effective financial control well before the nawabdom was abolished in 1801.