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

incarnation lost substantial amounts of money despite government subsidies, and it had to be refounded in 1719. Unlike its English counterpart, the French company was under firm government control. It was run by aristocrats, who cared little for trade but a lot for power politics. The form the French threat took was thus quite unlike that of the Dutch. The Dutch had wanted market share. The French wanted territory.
    In 1746 the French Governor at Pondicherry, Joseph François Dupleix, resolved to strike a blow against the English presence in India. The diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai, his Indian dubash , gives a flavour of the mood in the French fort on the eve of Dupleix’s coup. According to Pillai, ‘public opinion now says that the tide of victory will henceforth turn in favour of the French ... The people ... assert that the Goddess of Fortune has departed from Madras to take up her residence at Pondichery’. Dupleix assured him that ‘the English Company is bound to die out. It has long been in an impecunious condition, and what it had to its credit has been lent to the King, whose overthrow is certain. The loss of the capital is therefore inevitable, and this must lead to collapse. Mark my words. The truth of them will be brought home to you when you, ere long, find that my prophecy has been realised’. On 26 February 1747, as Pillai recorded, the French
    hurled themselves against Madras ... as a lion rushes into a herd of elephants ... surrounded the fort, and in one day astonished and bewildered the Governor ... and all the people who were there ... They captured the fort, planted their flag on the ramparts, took possession of the whole city, and shone in Madras like the sun, which spreads its beams over the whole world.
     
    Dismayed, the East India Company feared that it would be ‘utterly destroyed’ by its French rival. According to one report received by the directors in London, the French aimed ‘at nothing less than to exclude us from the trade of this coast [Madras area], and by degrees from that of India’.
    In fact, Dupleix had mistimed his move. The ending of the War of Austrian Succession in Europe with the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 forced him to relinquish Madras. But then, in 1757, hostilities between Britain and France resumed – this time on an unprecedented scale.
    The Seven Years War was the nearest thing the eighteenth century had to a world war. Like the global conflicts of the twentieth century, it was at root a European war. Britain, France, Prussia, Austria, Portugal, Spain, Saxony, Hanover, Russia and Sweden were all combatants. But the fighting raged from Coromandel to Canada, from Guinea to Guadeloupe, from Madras to Manila. Indians, native Americans, African slaves and American colonists all became involved. At stake was the future of empire itself. The question was simply this: Would the world be French or British?
    The man who came to dominate British policy in this Hanoverian Armageddon was William Pitt. Not surprisingly, a man whose family’s fortune rested on Anglo-Indian trade had no intention of yielding Britain’s global position to her oldest European rival. As Thomas Pitt’s grandson, Pitt instinctively thought of the war in global terms. His strategy was to rely on the one superior force the British possessed: their fleet and behind it their shipyards. While Britain’s Prussian ally contained the French and their allies in Europe, the Royal Navy would carve up their empire on the high seas, leaving the scattered British armies to finish the job off in the colonies. The key, then, was to establish a clear maritime advantage. As Pitt put it to the House of Commons in December 1755, before war had formally been declared, but well after the fighting had begun in the colonies:
    We ought to have our Navy as fully and as well manned as possible before we declare war ... Is it not then now necessary for us, as we are upon the very brink of a war, to take every method