WEST COMES EAST 233fore, to take the guesswork out of it and try to control the outcomes of
local power struggles. To this end, the companies brought in private armies
to help their allies. Here, as in Persia, the enemy, for each group of Euro-
peans, was not the local population but other Europeans. In supporting
their Indian allies, the European corporations were actually fighting proxy
wars against one another. The Portuguese lost out early, the Dutch were
eliminated next {from India, anyway-they remained dominant in South-
east Asia) and the contest for India finally came down to the British versus
the French.
As it happened, the French and the British were also the finalists in the
contest for North America, halfway around the world. There, a skirmish
between a few dozen Europeans kicked off a chain of events that ended up
making all of India a British colony. It started in the spring of 1754, when
a British army major named George Washington was leading a surveying
party up the Ohio River and stumbled across a French scouting party.
Shots were fired, one Virginian and ten Frenchmen died, and a global con-
flict erupted between Great Britain and France, with most of the other Eu-
ropean powers jumping in quickly. In North America the conflict was
called the French and Indian War, in Europe the Seven Years' War, and in
India the Third Carnatic War.^3
As the name implies, the European rivals in India had already fought
two proxy wars in the Carnatic region north of modern-day Madras, try-
ing to seat their respective allies on minor thrones. The fighting, in each
case, was conducted by the East India Companies of Britain and France.
In 1756, the nawab of Bengal, Siraj al-Dawlah, overran the British fort at
Calcutta. On a sweltering June night, someone {not the nawab; he knew
nothing about it) locked up sixty-four British citizens in an airless under-
ground prison cell. "Someone" was supposed to process them out that
night and send them home, but signals got crossed and the prisoners were
left in the dungeon overnight. By morning, forty-three of them were dead.
The report swiftly made its way to England. The press went crazy.
They titled the nawab's dungeon "the black hole of Calcutta." In each
retelling of the story, the dimensions of the cell shrank and the number of
prisoners burgeoned, finally reaching 146, while the number of dead rose
to 123. The story outraged the British public. In India, a one-time com-
pany clerk named Robert Clive, now a captain in the company's private