Company showed a substantial increase; they held five chief stations in India and they were trading with China, although it does not appear that they ever established themselves in the Spice Islands or the Malay Archipelago. The earlier governors, Lenoir and Dumas, managed their affairs with prudence and sagacity. Dupleix, who followed them, was a man of larger calibre, full of energy and ambition, who had distinguished himself as chief of the French factory at Chandarnagar on the Hugli River. When he was appointed to succeed Dumas in the governorship of Pondicherri in 1741, with supreme civil and military authority in the settlement, he lost no time in developing his bold and high-reaching projects for the promotion of his Company's interests.
In this manner it came to pass that, not long after the great settlement of Europe which was accomplished at the Peace of Utrecht, France and England alone faced each other as serious competitors for the prize of Indian commerce, having distanced or disabled all other candidates. Not only in the West, but in the East, the commercial and colonial rivalry between the foremost maritime states of Europe had reached its climax toward the middle of the eighteenth century. A high spring tide of maritime enterprise, setting strongly and decisively from Europe toward the unguarded coasts of India, was bearing on its rising wave the ships of these two jealous and powerful nations. So early as 1740 when war between England and France was imminently threatening, though not declared, the
