WEST COMES EAST 235who worked for the British crown. It should be noted, however, that only
the officers were European. The grunts who carried the rifles and took the
bullets were local recruits or draftees known as sepoys.
In Bengal, Clive set a precedent that would soon be repeated in many
other states. He established that Britain had the power and right to appoint
and depose rulers in any part of India where the East India Company had
business interests. After 1763, this was every part of India, because France
lost the Seven Years' War and had to abandon the subcontinent.
Britain soon decreed that whenever an Indian ruler died without a male
heir, the British crown inherited his territory. In this way, Great Britain
gradually took direct control of many states. In others, it installed a proxy
who ruled in accordance with British wishes and interests. India became a
patchwork of states ruled directly or indirectly by the British, the East
India Company gradually emerging as the top power in the subcontinent
and the true successor of the Moghuls.
Great Britain lost its North American colonies at almost exactly the
same time that it was gaining control of India. General Cornwallis, well
known to American-history buffs as the man whom George Washington
beat at Yorktown, was the second governor general of India and the one
who really consolidated British control there. Seen only in the context of
American history, Cornwallis was a loser, but the chances are that he died
proud of his life's accomplishments, because India became "the jewel in the
British crown," the country's most precious colonial possession, and the
key to its dominance around the world.
With the vast resources of the subcontinent on tap, Great Britain could
finance further colonial adventures in Africa and elsewhere around the
globe. Naturally, therefore, it was very touchy about any threats to its
jewel. And just such a threat did begin to emerge as the eighteenth century
gave way to the nineteenth: the threat posed by an expanding Russia.
When the Turks conquered Constantinople, they plunged Orthodox
Christianity into a crisis. Constantinople had been "the New Rome" and
the heart of the (Orthodox) Christian world. Without a heart, how could
the faith live on? The grand duke of Moscow stepped into the breach. This
man, Ivan the Third, declared his capital "the Third Rome," the new heart
of Orthodox Christianity. His grandson Ivan the Terrible took on the title
of Caesar, thereby claiming the imperial tradition of ancient Rome. (In