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stifling humidity, surrounded by disease and flies, everyone’s energies were concentrated on making money and staying on the Mughal emperor’s good side.
    Then in 1712 Emperor Bahadur Shah I died at his palace at Lahore, surrounded by his courtiers, generals, and concubines—even as the Duke of Marlborough’s workmen were erecting the stately towers of Blenheim Palace four thousand miles away. Although no one realized it, Bahadur was India’s last great ruler. After his death the magnificent Mughal Empire came apart with alarming speed.
    Bahadur’s death left that empire split in two, with competing Mughal capitals at Delhi in the north and Hyderabad in the south. External enemies like the Afghans and Persians, and internal ones like the Sikhs and Hindu warrior clans of Marathas and Rajputs, made their move. When the old nizam of Hyderabad died in 1748, the French and British merchant communities in India were forced, almost against their will, 15 to choose sides in the struggle for control of the southern half of the empire before it crumbled into chaos.
    The Frenchman Joseph François Dupleix was the first to grasp that by throwing the power of his Compagnie de l’Indie Ouest behind a candidate for the nizam’s throne, he could shape events decisively to his side. But it was his rival Robert Clive who put that insight to work as a formula for empire-building.
    In 1751 Clive was just another underpaid East India Company clerk in Madras, tormented by fever and prickly heat and bouts of manic depression. Twice he had tried to commit suicide, and twice the pistol he used had failed to fire. He had no military experience at all when his superiors suddenly decided to put him in charge of taking the nizam’s fortress at Arcot.
    But Clive grasped better than anyone else that power in India came literally out of the barrel of a gun. India was descending into anarchy. In order to protect its interests against both local marauders and the French, the East India Company had created its own army, with regiments of native soldiers (or sepoys ) and cavalrymen (or sowars ) serving under British officers and using modern muskets and European-style discipline and training. 16 Recruited largely from north India and the Hindu and Muslim villages between Bihar and Agra, these British-trained sepoys were far superior to troops any native ruler could field. So with a few hundred of them and some supporting European troops, Clive was able to take Arcot, hold it against all comers, and then form an alliance with a local Maratha chieftain to begin driving the French out of southern India—and to make himself a fortune.
    From Hyderabad Clive went to Bengal, the Mughal Empire’s richest province, where he and his barefoot sepoys did the same thing. By the time Clive routed France’s Bengali allies at the Battle of Plassey in 1758, he had turned the East India Company’s mercenary army into an unstoppable engine of conquest. The emperor in Delhi was forced to appoint Clive governor of Bengal, with British control over Bihar and Orissa as part of the deal.
    The pattern for the future was set. With a rising tide of conflict and chaos on the subcontinent, no Indian prince could afford to be without British help. Yet the more a prince relied on British help, the more it weakened his own ability to control events or maintain order, leading to more conflict and chaos. Under these uncertain conditions, the one sure bet was the East India Company and its invincible army. And the company’s soldiers, horses, and cannon were all paid for by revenues of the territories it conquered, which were then collected and administered by the local princes it left in place. Only eight years after Clive appeared on the scene, the East India Company had become a power, and a law, unto itself.
    It was a setting that inevitably led to corruption. Clive himself set the standard with his looting of Bengal. As another future East India Company servant put it, Clive