Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/199

Rh If we bear in mind how little could have been accurately known of India as a whole by an Englishman in 1746, we must give Colonel Mill credit for much sagacity and insight into the essential facts of the situation. He discerns the central points; he places his finger upon the elementary causes of India's permanent weakness, her political instability within, and her seacoast exposed and undefended externally. Within ten or twelve years the English had carried out Colonel Mill's scheme; and it will be shown hereafter that when Bengal had been taken, the further expansion of British dominion was quite clearly foreseen. By those on the spot it was treated not as accidental, but as inevitable.

In the year 1716, the English, whose trading factories had long been settled in Bengal, obtained from the Moghul emperor an important farmān, or imperial order, permitting them to import and export goods upon payment of a fixed tribute, and protecting them from the heavy and arbitrary taxes laid on them at the caprice of the Nawabs. Bengal was a province under a governor whose ordinary title was the Nawab Nazim, who held office during the pleasure of the emperor, and who was frequently changed, so long as the empire was in its vigour, lest he should become too strong for the central authority. But as the power of the emperor declined, the independence of the Nawabs increased in this distant province, until in the eighteenth century, when Maratha insurrections and the irruptions from Central Asia multiplied the distractions of the state,