The French

The French came later than the others: a trading post at Surat in 1668, then Pondicherry in 1674, where they set up their East India Company.

They had big plans for a French empire in India, and one man is central here: Dupleix, Governor-General of French India from 1742 to 1754.

The key sentence about him is easy to miss: he "pioneered several colonial strategies that would later be adopted by the British".

Two of those strategies shaped everything that followed. First, he trained Indian soldiers in European ways of fighting, creating disciplined foot soldiers called sepoys.

That was a huge idea. A European power no longer needed to ship armies from Europe: it could raise them in India, from Indians, much more cheaply.

Second, he developed indirect rule through puppet Indian rulers (rulers who did what they were told), put in place by interfering in local quarrels over who should inherit a throne. Control without looking like conquest.

French plans were stopped in the Carnatic Wars (1746–1763) against Britain. Despite early successes (Dupleix captured Madras in 1746), the French lost ground, and their colony shrank to Pondicherry and a few smaller areas.

Like the Dutch, and unlike the Portuguese, the French did not much interfere in Indians' social and religious life. The rare exception was the destruction in 1748 of Pondicherry's large Vedapurishwaran temple, ordered by Dupleix at the repeated request of the town's Jesuit priests and his own wife.