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The Afghan predation of India had started ten years earlier, in December 1747, when Durrani attacked the opium-addled Mughal emperor Rangila, who got lucky when the invaders’ gunpowder magazine exploded. A year later, Durrani seized Sindh and Punjab (Pakistan), then conquered Kashmir, drawn into the vortex of India by the advance of the Marathas under the peshwa Balaji Rao, who after Shahu’s death ruled through a puppet chhatrapati. In 1749, the seventy-six-year-old Nizam of Hyderabad, a legend having survived eight emperors, one shah and eight battles, died, sparking a struggle between his heirs that drew yet more players into the vacuum. These princelings manipulated – and were manipulated in turn by – British and French soldier-merchants, aggressive adventurers attracted to a region that was politically chaotic but still commercially rich. Both the Nizam dynasts drew in rival Europeans: one was backed by a flashy French governor-general, Joseph, Marquis Dupleix, a veteran of the Compagnie des Indes Orientales, who was married to a part-Indian beauty known as Joanna Begum, a useful intermediary with the Indian potentates. Dupleix led his army of Indian sepoys dressed as an Indian nawab. The rival dynast hired a redoubtable EIC major, Stringer Lawrence. Then Balaji Rao and his Marathas joined the carve-up – and Durrani had to defend his new empire. None of the players in this mayhem – Indian, Afghan, French or British, Muslim, Hindu or Christian, white or brown – were scrupulous or peace-loving, and all were greedy and merciless.

Shah Durrani marched into Delhi, looting its treasures and collecting its concubines, but he did not seize the throne, telling the helpless Emperor Alamgir II, ‘I bestow on you the crown of Hindustan: come see me tomorrow morning in royal dignity.’ Afterwards he expressed his restraint in poetry:

I forget the throne of Delhi

When I remember the mountain tops of my beautiful Pashtunkhwa.

Holding court with his harem in the imperial apartments in Delhi, Durrani married his son Timur to the emperor’s daughter while he himself married Rangila’s daughter. Returning through Punjab, he and his son dealt with a new challenge: the Sikhs had been repressed by generations of Mughals, their gurus executed, but they had reacted by becoming a military-religious order, divided into armies and divisions, commanded by elected commanders, the sirdars. Durrani and Timur destroyed the Sikh holy cities of Kartarpur and Amritsar, razing the temples of the Chak Guru, desecrating them with cow blood, and soiling the sacred lakes. Sikh insurgents harassed the Afghans, who slaughtered Sikh civilians en masse.

As Durrani held court in the Mughal capital, a young British warlord was manoeuvring to destroy French power and dominate a distant but rich province: at nineteen, Robert Clive, a Shropshire vicar’s son, had joined the EIC as a bookkeeper. Gifted with manic energy interspersed with bouts of mental illness, Clive was a fighting accountant who craved action – ‘a man not born for a desk’ in Pitt’s phrase – and joined the EIC army, where he rose fast. At the time, 90 per cent of EIC profits came not from India but from China.^* Yet the chaos in India was an opportunity none of the players could resist. Just as in the west Durrani and Balaji Rao converged on Delhi, so in the east, during the 1740s, Dupleix and the French Compagnie des Indes Orientales launched an offensive against the passive British. Inspired in part by Dupleix, Clive won his first command. In 1751, he had made his name – and announced a new British dynamism – by seizing a fortress, holding it and then defeating an Indian potentate backed by the French. Pitt praised him. He married an eighteen-year-old girl who had come to Madras on her brother’s advice specifically to marry Clive, and they had nine children. When Clive suffered a nervous collapse, they returned rich to London, where he was elected an MP and bought a baronetcy. But he returned to India just in time for Pitt’s war.

‘A scene of anarchy, confusion, bribery, corruption and extortion,’ said Clive, ‘was never seen or heard of in any country except Bengal.’ He was not the only predator tempted by Bengal: Balaji Rao saw it too, raiding Bengal six times, killing 40,000 people. But Clive’s temperament was ideal for fighting the French and Indian warlords of the time, his aggressive spirit best summed up by a note to a subordinate facing a superior force: ‘Dear Forde, fight them immediately; I will send you the order of council to-morrow.’ Now a series of disasters befell British interests. The young nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daula, grandson of Alivardi Khan who had grabbed the province from the Mughals, seized the profitable British fort of Calcutta, where his sixty-four British prisoners were locked in a dungeon in the heat. Forty-three of them died.