CHAPTER VII
THE CONQUEST OF BENGAL
In the foregoing chapter the summary of affairs on the east coast has been carried up to the date of Suffren's expedition in order to present an unbroken view of our relations with the French in India. It is now necessary to go back some years in order to take up the narrative of events in Bengal.
The rise and territorial expansion of the English power may be conveniently divided into two periods, which slightly overlap each other, but on the whole mark two distinct and consecutive stages in the construction of our dominion. The first is the period when the contest lay among the European nations, who began by competing for commercial advantages and ended by fighting for political superiority on the Indian littoral. The commercial competition was going on throughout the whole of the seventeenth century; but the struggle with the French, which laid the foundation of English dominion in India, lasted less than twenty years, for it began in 1745 and was virtually decided in 1763.
The second period, upon which we are now about
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