from the court of Delhi.* The government of Surat followed a course exactly similar;† and, at the same time, the piratical tribes which have, from very ancient periods, infested the Malabar coast, so increased in power and activity as sensibly to affect the advancement of the British trade. Meanwhile, the Perso-British settlements were greatly depressed, the kingdom of Persia being at war with the Turks, and in a state of the utmost confusion and embarrassment.§ But the greatest source of trouble followed afterwards, in the invasion of Hindostan by the Persian conqueror, Nadir Shah; a calamity which took place in 1739, and which, immediately and powerfully affecting the heart of the empire, convulsed, more or less faintly, its remotest extremities. The impression, however, produced by these events on the general prosperity of the Company, although at an earlier stage of their history it would have been profound, was less material, and therefore less detains the eye of the historian, on the comparatively extended scale which their af fairs had now reached. On the whole, their trade increased. They gradually enlarged their exports. They extended their influence by esta

The Company exported the following sums in goods and bul

lion,

blishing commercial relations with the petty princes on the Malabar coast south of Goa. Such were the Rajahs of Cherical and Cartinad; and the Queen or Rannee of Atinga,† whose territory is said to have stretched from Quilon to Cape Comorin. Above all, they gradually confirmed their connexion with China, in spite of innumerable difficulties and obstructions interposed by the singular and jealous policy of the Chinese government. Not fewer than three or four Chinese ports seem at that time to have been accessible to British commerce, which the court of Pekin, probably from apprehensions excited by the British conquests in the East, has now rigidly closed.

The war which broke out between France and England in 1745, had the effect of producing, at length, an important variety in Indo-European 0 4

lion, during successive quinquennial periods, from the year 1710 to the year 1745.

history. That war lighted up reciprocal hostility in the most distant possessions, wherever they chanced to be contiguous, of the two nations; and, in India, where the French settlements had now attained considerable importance, it occasioned fierce contests both by sea and land. In 1746, Madras was besieged by a French armament under M. de la Bourdonnais, and compelled to capitulate. The authority of La Bourdonnais, however, was disputed, as perhaps his high and well-merited fame was envied, by M. Dupleix, governor of Pondicherry, the principal establishment of the French in the East-Indies. The obstacles which this rivalry interposed in the way of the French commander, together with the discomfiture of his fleet by storms, checked, happily for the English, the progress of his conquests. Admiral Boscawen afterwards made an ineffectual attempt to avenge the capture of Madras by that of Pondicherry; but the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle restored the former settlement to the English. In the course of these operations, the army of the Nabob of the Carnatic, within whose jurisdiction both Madras and Pondicherry were situated, and who successively took part with the combatants on both sides, sustained a total defeat from a prodigiously inferior number of French. The event is memorable, chiefly, as presenting the first occasion on which the superiority of European arms was signally manifested in Hin

dostan.

The peace did not remove the military means which had been collected in Pondicherry by the previous contest. On the contrary, an army remained in that settlement, of very respectable size; for the European force alone is estimated to have consisted of three thousand men. During the war, also, the French had acquired, and very deservedly, a considerable military reputation; so that, in every view, the Gallic interests, in the East, seemed at this moment preponderant.

The transactions which have been touched upon, may be considered as in some degree a prelude to the very momentous events which speedily ensued in India, and in part on the very same scene. Perhaps they even conduced to those momentous events; so far at least as they stimulated the already eager ambition, and augmented the warlike resources, of the French leaders at Pon

dicherry. In any other view, the Indian operations of the war of 1745 are of no peculiar consequence. A minute detail of them, therefore, would not here be necessary, even were they not eclipsed, both as to their actual magnitude, and in their importance with respect to the design of this history, by the wars and revolutions immediately subsequent. The wars and revolutions in question are no other than those that invested the British nation with political power and dominion in the East-Indies.

་

THE

CHAPTER II.

From the year 1748 to the year 1766-7.

HE territory of the Carnatic was one of the subordinate principalities, immediately governed by nabobs, but subject to the provincial viceroy, or subahdar, of the Decan, who was considered as the immediate feudatory of the Mogul emperor. Nizam ul Muluk, a subahdar of the Deca-n, distinguished for his ability and power, though of a base and iniquitous character, dying in 1748, the vacant province was disputed between Nazir Jung, his second son, and a grandson by his daughter, named Murzafa Jung. In the consti, tution of the Mogul empire, nobility being mere. ly official, all hereditary rank, excepting that of the members of the imperial family itself, is unknown. Both the competitors for the Decan, however, produced regular instruments of inves, titure as from the Mogul court; instruments, possibly, on both sides forged; for, in the now declining and distracted state of the empire, this species of fraud had become of frequent practice. At the same time, the Nabob of the Carnatic, Anwaradeen Khan, who had been regularly established in that office by Nizam ul Muluk, was op