Free Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power by Niall Ferguson

that confusion what can be expected?’ was Roe’s verdict in 1615), but the Mughals’ was a wealthy and mighty empire, which dwarfed the European nation states. In 1700 the population of India was twenty times that of the United Kingdom. India’s share of total world output at that time has been estimated at 24 per cent – nearly a quarter; Britain’s share was just 3 per cent. The idea that Britain might one day rule India would have struck a visitor to Delhi in the late seventeenth century as simply preposterous.
    It was only by the Mughal Emperor’s permission – and with the consent of his local subordinates – that the East India Company was able to trade at all. These were not always forthcoming. As the company’s Court of Directors complained:
    These [native] governors have ... the knack of trampling upon us, and extorting what they please of our estate from us, by the besieging of our factorys 5 [ sic ] and stopping of our boats upon the Ganges, they will never forbear doing so till we had made them sensible of our power as we have of our truth and justice ...
     
    But that was more easily said than done. For the time being, appeasing the Mughal Emperor was a crucial part of the East India Company’s business, since loss of favour meant loss of money. Visits had to be paid to the Mughal court. Company representatives had to prostrate themselves before the Peacock Throne in the Red Fort’s inner court, the Diwan-i-am. Complex treaties had to be negotiated. Bribes had to be paid to Mughal officials. All this called for men who were as adept at wheeling and dealing as they were at buying and selling.
    In 1698, despite their previous misgivings, the company decided to send none other than the interloper Thomas Pitt to Madras as Governor of Fort St George. His salary was just £200 a year, but his contract now explicitly acknowledged that he could do business on his own account as well. A fine specimen of the poacher turned gamekeeper (who could still do a bit of poaching on the side), Pitt almost immediately had to contend with an acute diplomatic crisis when the Emperor, Aurungzeb, announced not only a ban on trade with Europeans but their arrest and the immediate confiscation of their goods. Even as he was negotiating with Aurungzeb to have the edict revoked, Pitt had to defend Fort St George against Duad Khan, the Nawab of the Carnatic, who hastened to execute the Emperor’s edict.
    By the 1740s, however, the Emperor was losing his grip over India. The Persian Nadir Shah Afshar sacked Delhi in 1739 at the head of an Afghan-Turkic army; Afghans led by Ahmed Shah Abdali invaded northern India repeatedly after 1747. In addition to these ‘tribal breakouts’, the Mughals’ erstwhile deputies in the provinces – men like the Nawab of Arcot and the Nizam of Hyderabad – were carving out kingdoms for themselves. To the west the Marathas ruled without reference or regard to Delhi. India was entering a phase of internecine warfare that the British would later characterize dismissively as ‘anarchy’ – proof that the Indians were unfit to govern themselves. In truth, this was a struggle for mastery in India no different from the struggle for mastery in Habsburg-dominated Europe that had been raging since the seventeenth century. Precisely the threats from the north forced Indian rulers to govern more effectively, modernizing their tax systems to pay for large standing armies, much as their counterparts in Europe were doing at the same time.
    The European settlements in India had always been fortified. Now, in these dangerous times, they had to be garrisoned in earnest. Unable to muster enough manpower from its English staff, the East India Company began to raise its own regiments from among the subcontinent’s warrior castes – Telugu peasants in the south, Kunbis in the west and Rajputs and Brahmins from the central Ganges valley – equipping them with European weapons and subordinating them to English