Before Siraj ud-Daulah became Nawab of Bengal in 1756, his grandfather begged him to keep the English sweet, and put no trust in Jafar Ali Khan. If he had only listened...
Robert Clive’s victory on June 23rd, 1757, over the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey near Murshidabad was vital to Britain’s successful defence of her colonies in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) against Louis XV of France, and fixed the British East India Company as the Mughal Emperors’ chief European trade partner. For Hari Charan Das, it was also a judgment on the Nawab’s refusal to listen to his grandfather.
Harry Paulet was going about his unlawful business when he spotted a French fleet slip quietly out of Brest and into the Atlantic.
Three years into the Seven Years’ War of 1756-63, the Kingdom of France was building up pressure on Britain’s beleaguered North American colonies. Despite a bruising setback at Lagos in August, the French still had hopes of an invasion of Scotland, and by November 14th a fleet was ready to sail; but the story goes that the tides of history were turned by Harry Paulet, a cross-Channel smuggler.
Georgian Britain braced for war as relations with France in North America, India and mainland Europe took a turn for the worse.
The Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) reached from French and British colonies in North America and India to states in modern-day Germany. It seemed glorious at the time for Britain, but it doubled the national debt, and measures to recover the costs triggered the American War of Independence.
The people of Penzance in Cornwall did not think an Algerian corsair much better than a French warship.
It may seem quaint that Cornish villagers ran home to lock up their daughters when they heard of shipwrecked sailors on the beach. But this was 1760, when everyone was braced for a French invasion in the Seven Years’ War, and when Algiers was the centre of a miserable human-trafficking industry which specialised in ‘goods’ from Christian Europe.