Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/33

 INTRODUCTORY RETROSPECT 9 whatever territory the Company held, it held not on terms of military conquest but as a grant from a superior Mohammedan power. There was, no doubt, a_ fiction involved in all these proceedings—a masquerade as Clive chose to describe it—yet the English at this time held ground in Bengal chiefly as trader and secondarily as revenue-collector under the Mogul Emperor. The term “ British Empire in India” obtained currency from its first bold use in 1772 by Warren Hastings, who for the first time disclosed a deeper sense of the respon- sibilities of empire; but the possession of the sovereign rights by the Nawab was still recognised, and the long debate,' veliemently carried on, in the Court and on the Council Board, on the question of sovereignty in Bengal, would go to show how little the English trading company at this time was conscious of any conquest of the country by its military power, and how greatly it was conscious of the instability of its own footing. But though Plassey cannot be directly credited to have brought into being the British empire in Bengal, yet the great empire of the Mogul and its subahdar-ship in Bengal were gradually breaking down. The period between 1757 and 1765 witnessel also the down-fall of the French commercial settlements which left Bengal open to the English. In spite of Commercialism as a these and other opportunities, it dominating factor in এ the Company’s policy, took nearly half a century, however, for the British rule 10 establish itself firmly in Bengal. One of the chief reasons for this was that, during these years, commercialism was the dominating factor in the polievy of the Directors of the Company; and it was by slow degrees that they departed from their original commercial position. About ‘ Firminger, op. cit, p. Xiv-xxi: p. eclvi-colvii.