William Baillie (East India Company officer)
Military officer in the British East India Company, captured in the 1780 Battle of Pollilur
Lieutenant-Colonel William Baillie (died 1782) was a British lieutenant-colonel in the East India Company's service. He was captured by Hyder Ali in 1780 at the Battle of Pollilur, and died in captivity in Seringapatam.
Records in the India Office show that he entered the army of the East India Company on 18 October 1759 as a lieutenant in the infantry at Madras, and that the dates of his subsequent commissions were as follows: brevet-captain 5 September 1763, substantive captain 2 April 1764, major 12 April 1772, lieutenant-colonel 29 December 1775.
The historian Wilks identifies him with the Captain Baillie who did good service as commandant of one of the three 'English' battalions in the pay of the company, employed under Colonel Joseph Smith, in the operations against Hyder Ali in 1767–8 (Wilks, Hist. Sketches, vol. i. and index to work). He was in command at Pondicherry during the destruction of the French works there in 1779 (Vibart, vol. i.), and in 1780 was at the head of a detached force, consisting of two companies of European infantry, two batteries of artillery, and five battalions of native infantry, in the Northern Circars. When Hyder Ali, with an army of 100,000 fighting men, swooped down on the Carnatic by way of the Changama Pass in July of that year, Baillie was ordered to unite his force with the army collecting near Madras under command of Lord Macleod, who was immediately afterwards succeeded by Sir Hector Munro.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8004946. VIAF identifies the subject as 305407459. The Library of Congress control number is no2014048223. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1782, 1780, 1759 and 1763.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Baillie (East India Company officer)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.