70 Battles , as trading enterprise.
एक दुखी परिवार - 70
Territorial expansion- East India Co.
The conquests that had begun in the 1750s had never been sanctioned in Britain , as both, the national government as well as the directors of the Company , insisted that further territorial expansion must be curbed. Neither of the two had the vision of sprawling the Company's control to as large  geographical territory as the British India ultimately enlarged itself into.
This anti-expansionist vision went in  vain by reason of attending circumstances in India, occasioned by  the complex politics of post-Mughal India. There existed compelling circumstances for the Company to keep potential enemies at bay,  by forming alliances with neighbouring states. It were these alliances that had to be made under compulsion of self preservation that  led to increasing intervention in the affairs of such states and to wars fought on their behalf.
Now the Company had begun , not only to trade in arms or in army, but in battles too.
In Warren Hastings's period the British were drawn into expensive and indecisive wars on several fronts, which had a dire effect on the Company's finances and were strongly condemned at home.
 By the end of the century, however, the Company's governor general, Richard Wellesley, soon to be Marquess Wellesley, was willing to abandon policies of limited commitment and to use war as an instrument for imposing British hegemony on all the major states in the subcontinent.
A series of intermittent wars was beginning which would take British authority over the next fifty years up to the mountains of Afghanistan in the west and into Burma in the east.
(Cont.  .)