68 Waning Mughal Empire 

British conflicts with French ends

एक दुखी परिवार - 68

A new empire in India

French conflicts that began in the 1750s ended in 1763 with a British ascendancy in the southeast and most significantly in Bengal. There the local ruler actually took the Company's Calcutta settlement in 1756, only to be driven out of it by British troops under Robert Clive, whose victory at Plassey in the following year enabled a new British satellite ruler to be installed. British influence quickly gave way to outright rule over Bengal, formally conceded to Clive in 1765 by the still symbolically important, if militarily impotent, Mughal emperor.

What opinion in Britain came to recognise as a new British empire in India remained under the authority of the East India Company, even if the importance of the national concerns now involved meant that the Company had to submit to increasingly close supervision by the British state and to periodical inquiries by parliament. 

In India, the governors of the Company's commercial settlements became governors of provinces and, although the East India Company continued to trade, many of its servants became administrators in the new British regimes.

 Huge armies were created, largely composed of Indian sepoys but with some regular British regiments. 

These armies were used to defend the Company's territories, to coerce neighbouring Indian states and to crush any potential internal resistance.

(Cont.    .)