| Popis: |
This chapter discusses how Robert Clive managed not only to undo Laurence Sulivan's supremacy at East India House but also to be returned to Bengal with extraordinary civilian and military powers. This dramatic reversal of fortune was not the result of Clive's fortitude but rather of the convergence of four major sociopolitical developments in late 1763 and early 1764. Taken together, these four developments—metropolitan, pan-imperial, and South Asian in scope—seemed to portend the unraveling of Britain's political order and imperial state. The Baron of Plassey emerged as the military guarantor of the British Empire in the face of the anarchic, destabilizing forces that threatened it on all sides. |
