From traders to rulers

Britain dominated the Indian subcontinent for nearly two centuries, and the chapter calls this "one of history's most remarkable examples of how a trading company could transform into an imperial power".

The key word is 'company'. The British takeover was not a classic conquest: no army sailed from Europe to invade.

It was gradual, calculated, and often disguised as business rather than military invasion.

The English East India Company was set up as a trading company and given a royal charter by Queen Elizabeth I. That charter gave it special powers, including, notably, the power to raise a private army.

Read that again. A trading company was legally allowed to have soldiers of its own. The ambition to rule was in the paperwork from the start.

But its agents kept up the act of being mere traders. That let them set up footholds along India's coast in the 17th century with little resistance: Surat, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta among the first.

And local rulers did not mind. They generally welcomed foreign trade, which had been normal in India for centuries. A trading post did not look like a threat. (But why build a fort, if you only came to trade? That question came later.)

"These modest beginnings concealed the Company's long-term ambitions." The chapter's opening painting shows what those ambitions looked like from London: 'The East offering its riches to Britannia', over three metres long, ordered specially for the Company's London headquarters.