Conflicts between the Great Powers 399and Russian expansion and was thus determined that Poland survive as an
independent state. The Diplomatic Revolution of 1756 now ended more
than a century of intermittent warfare between France and the Austrian
Habsburgs. Alarmed by the expansion of Prussian power, Austria now
allied with France, and then Russia, with the goal of recapturing Silesia.
The cost of France’s support would be its future annexation of the Austrian
Netherlands and Austrian neutrality in the war between Britain and
France (which in 1756 had been going on in North America for two years).
Frederick the Great, determined to keep Silesia, turned to Britain, France’s
enemy. To France and Russia, Britain’s sudden and shocking alliance with
Prussia seemed a betrayal, even as France reversed its century-old opposi
tion to Habsburg interests. Having changed partners, the great powers
went to war again.
In 1757, Frederick defeated a large French army and then a Habsburg
force. But a Russian army attacked from the north, occupying Berlin, while
more Austrian troops marched on Prussia from the south. Prussia’s situa
tion seemed desperate, leading the king to compare his state to “a man with
many wounds who has lost so much blood that he is on the point of death.”
But as luck would have it, Peter III became tsar of Russia in 1762, succeed
ing Empress Elizabeth, Frederick’s determined enemy. The new tsar admired
the Prussian king and called the Russian troops home. At the cost of per
haps 300,000 soldiers, Prussia preserved its full independence.
The rivalry between the European powers in India took the shape of a
struggle between the British and French East India Companies against the
background of intrigues and warfare among Indian rulers. The Mughals
had conquered most of the subcontinent in the seventeenth century, but
along the southern coast, where Mughal control was limited, the European
trading network had continued to expand. In the meantime, India became
the largest producer of textiles in the world, threatening the production of
English cloth. The Mughal Empire collapsed during the first half of the
eighteenth century following invasions from Iran and Afghanistan. Bengal,
the wealthiest part of the Indian subcontinent, became autonomous. The
resulting political chaos in the 1740s aided the subjection of India by
Britain, even if in 1750 there were only about 5,000 British residents (and
20,000 soldiers) in the subcontinent.
Robert Clive (1725—1774), the son of a provincial gentleman and lawyer,
led troops of the East India Company and Indian mercenaries into Bengal.
There the prince preferred French to British traders and in 1757 had
incarcerated more than a hundred British subjects in a room so small and
stuffy that most of them died—the “Black Hole of Calcutta.” That same
year, Clive’s force defeated the prince’s army at Plassey, north of Calcutta.
After putting a pliant puppet on the Bengali throne, Clive continued to use
British troops to further not only the interests of the British East India
Company, but himself as well. He became very rich through imperial
acquisitions and secured a British peerage. By 1761, the stage was set for