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

officers. In theory, this was simply the company’s security division, intended to protect its assets in time of war. In practice, it was a private army, and one that would soon become crucial to its business. Having begun as a trading operation, the East India Company now had its own settlements, its own diplomats, even its own army. It was beginning to look more and more like a kingdom in its own right. And here was the key difference between Asia and Europe. The European powers could fight one another to their hearts’ content: the winner could only be European. But when the Indian powers went to war, the possibility existed that a non-Indian power might emerge as victor.
    The only question was, which one?

Men of War
     
    Gingee is one of the most spectacular forts in the Carnatic. Perched on a steep hill that rises abruptly out of the haze of the plains, it dominates the hinterland of the Coromandel coast. But by the middle of the eighteenth century it was garrisoned not by the British, nor by the area’s local rulers. Gingee was in the hands of the French.
    The English conflict with the Dutch had been commercial. At root, it had been strictly business, a competition for market share. The struggle with France – which was to rage in every corner of the globe like a worldwide version of the Hundred Years War – would decide who would govern the world. The outcome was far from a foregone conclusion.

    They say that on any given morning the French Minister of Education knows exactly what is being taught in every school under his control. Every French pupil is taught the same syllabus: the same maths, the same literature, the same history, the same philosophy. It is a truly imperial approach to education. And it applies as much to the French lycée at Pondicherry as to its counterparts in Paris. Had things gone differently in the 1750s, schools all across India might have been the same – and French, not English, might have become the world’s lingua franca .
    The counterfactual is far from fanciful. To be sure, the Anglo-Dutch merger had greatly strengthened England. And, with the union of the Parliaments in 1707, a second merger had produced a redoubtable new entity: the United Kingdom of Great Britain, a term originally propagated by James I to reconcile Scotland to being annexed by England – and the English to being ruled by a Scot. By the end of the War of the Spanish Succession (1713), this new state was now unquestionably Europe’s dominant naval power. Having acquired Gibraltar and Port Mahon (Minorca), Britain was in a position to control access to and from the Mediterranean. Yet France remained the predominant power on the continent of Europe itself. In 1700 France had an economy twice the size of Britain’s and a population almost three times as large. And, like Britain, France had reached out across the seas to the world beyond Europe. There were French colonies in America in Lousiana and Quebec – ‘New France’. The French sugar islands like Martinique and Guadaloupe were among the richest in the Caribbean. And in 1664 the French had set up their own East India Company, the Compagnie des Indes Orientales, with its base at Pondicherry, not far south of the British settlement at Madras. The danger that France would win a struggle for global mastery against Britain was a real one, and remained real for the better part of a century. In the words of the Critical Review in 1756:
    Every Briton ought to be acquainted with the ambitious views of France, her eternal thirst after universal dominion, and her continual encroachments on the properties of her neighbours ... [O]ur trade, our liberties, our country, nay all the rest of Europe, [are] in a continual danger of falling prey to the common Enemy, the universal Cormorant, that would, if possible, swallow up the whole globe itself.
     
    Commercially, it is true, the Compagnie des Indes posed a relatively modest threat to the East India Company. Its first