On 24 October 1746, on the estuary of the Adyar River, Mahfuz Khan tried to block the passage of 700 French sepoy reinforcements under Paradis. The French beat off an attack by the 10,000 Mughal troopers with the help of sustained musketry, their infantry drawn up in ranks, file-firing and using grapeshot at close quarters in a way that had never b

India with its own small civil administration, the status of a municipality and a population of 40,000. By the 1670s the town was even minting its own gold ‘pagoda’ coins,

Drake had set off in 1577 on his three-year circumnavigation of the globe in the Golden Hinde. This was only the third time a global voyage had ever been attempted, and it was made possible by developments in compasses and astrolabes – as well as by worsening relations with Spain and Portugal.9 Drake had set sail in ‘great hope of gold [and] silver

is always a mistake to read history backwards. We know that the East India Company (EIC) eventually grew to control almost half the world’s trade and become the most powerful corporation in history, as Edmund Burke famously put it, ‘a state in the guise of a merchant’. In retrospect, the rise of the Company seems almost inevitable. But that was not

Smythe and his associates had decided that, because of the huge expenses and high risks involved, ‘a trade so far remote cannot be managed but by a joint and united stock’.21 Costs

The wording was sufficiently ambiguous to allow future generations of EIC officials to use it to claim jurisdiction over all English subjects in Asia, mint money, raise fortifications, make laws, wage war, conduct an independent foreign policy, hold courts, issue punishment, imprison English subjects and plant English settlements.

The Mughal war machine swept away the English landing parties as easily as if it were swatting flies; soon the EIC factories at Hughli, Patna, Kasimbazar, Masulipatnam and Vizagapatam had all been seized and plundered, and the English had been expelled completely from Bengal. The Surat factory was closed and Bombay was blockaded.

The body was then thrown to the dogs while his head was stuffed with straw and sent on tour around the cities of the Deccan before being hung on the Delhi Gate.

This time the settlement – soon known simply as Madras – flourished.