Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/614

 606 REVIEWS OF BOOKS October warfare which the occasional capture of spoils and even the regular grant of revenues by no means made good. Neither the careful managers of the Company nor the French ministers were prepared to shoulder such responsibilities. As Mr. Dodwell shows, Saint-Contest disavowed Dupleix in the strongest terms when the English ambassador raised the question. M. S. Contest told me that, so far from [approval, M. Dupleix] had received orders to comport himself as a man at the head of a trading Company, and not in the un- accountable manner he had lately done. This was in 1753, when the news of Dupleix's appointment as deputy to Muzaffar Jang must have reached France. Already the English Company feared the loss of its trading privileges when its French rival should be identified with the Mogul government. A second cause was the more personal one of jealousy of Dupleix. His gains were immense, both in the form of plunder, especially on the accession of Muzaffar Jang ; presents from Chanda Sahib, Muzaffar Jang, and Salabat Jang ; and the grant of a jagir (Valudavur) like Clive's. To the natural resentment felt by the Company in seeing their servant thus skim the cream of their opportunities in India, Dupleix added fuel by the arrogance and parade in which he indulged. But this carelessness of opinion was shown in a more fatal way. Dupleix underestimated the English opposition, and this miscalculation was the third cause of his downfall. Hardly conscious himself that his new policy was revolutionary, he actually protested against the English support of Muhammad Ali since a country power, and this is the only policy possible for them in India ', an amazing view for the man who himself abandoned that policy in supporting Chanda Sahib. In 1749 ' he minimised the assistance the English were prepared to give Nasir Jang, while ascribing the whole affair to their malevolent diplomacy '. There is one excuse for this failure to reckon with English resistance. The English were poorly supplied with troops, receiving only half as many recruits as the French between 1750 and 1753, but on the other hand he had had to feel the grit of English sailors in 1747, when Griffin's ships rode out the monsoon rather than desert Fort St. David, and yet he underestimated English sea-power, the final asset in all these colonial rivalries. In the second part of his work Mr. Dodwell reaches conclusions more open to debate. The test he applies to the conduct of the Company's servants is whether or no it conduced to English supremacy in India : with ultimate principles of justice he appears to have no concern. Clive he shows to have shrewdly observed the^ctivities of Dupleix and Bussy and to have in some instances followed, in others bettered their examples, and in so doing committed the English Company to a political career. As Dupleix had allied himself with Chanda Sahib and used French forces to establish first Muzaffar Jang and then Salabat Jang as nominal nawabs under his own real authority, so Clive by treaty with Mir Jafar and grant of the Great Mogul acquired for the English Company real control of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa, and finally the Mohammedan office of dewan : incidentally he incurred the jealousy of his employers as Dupleix had done
 * Europeans have never intervened in disputes between a European and