[Sidenote: Robert Clive]
[Sidenote: French Failure in the Carnatic]
The hopes of the experienced and crafty Dupleix were frustrated, however, by a young man of twenty-seven—Robert Clive. At the age of eighteen, Clive had entered the employ of the English East India Company as a clerk at Madras. His restless and discontented spirit found relief, at times, in omnivorous reading; at other times he grew despondent. More than once he planned to take his own life. During the War of the Austrian Succession, he had resigned his civil post and entered the army. The hazards of military life were more to his liking, and he soon gave abundant evidence of ability. After the peace of 1748 he had returned to civil life, but in 1751 he came forward with a bold scheme for attacking Arcot, the capital of the Carnatic, and overthrowing the upstart nawab who was supported by Dupleix. Clive could muster only some two hundred Europeans and three hundred sepoys, but this slender force, infused with the daring and irresistible determination of the young leader, sufficed to seize and hold the citadel of Arcot against thousands of assailants. With the aid of native and British reënforcements, the hero of Arcot further defeated the pretender; and, in 1754, the French had to acknowledge their failure in the Carnatic and withdraw support from their vanquished protégé. Dupleix was recalled to France in disgrace; and the British were left to enjoy the favor of the nawab who owed his throne to Clive.
[Sidenote: Plassey]
[Sidenote: British Success in India]
Clive's next work was in Bengal. In 1756 the young nawab of Bengal, Suraj-ud-Dowlah by name, seized the English fort at Calcutta and locked 146 Englishmen overnight in a stifling prison—the "Black Hole" of Calcutta—from which only twenty-three emerged alive the next morning. Clive, hastening from Madras, chastised Suraj for this atrocity, and forced him to give up Calcutta. And since by this time Great Britain and France were openly at war, Clive did not hesitate to capture the near-by French post of Chandarnagar. His next move was to give active aid to a certain Mir Jafir, a pretender to the throne of the unfriendly Suraj-ud-Dowlah. The French naturally took sides with Suraj against Clive. In 1757 Clive drew up 1100 Europeans, 2100 sepoys, and nine cannon in a grove of mango trees at Plassey, a few miles south of the city of Murshidabad, and there attacked Suraj, who, with an army of 68,000 native troops and with French artillerymen to work his fifty- three cannon, anticipated an easy victory. The outcome was a brilliant victory for Clive, as overwhelming as it was unexpected. The British candidate forthwith became nawab of Bengal and as token of his indebtedness he paid over £1,500,000 to the English East India Company, and made Clive a rich man. The British were henceforth dominant in Bengal. The capture of Masulipatam in 1758, the defeat of the French at Wandewash, between Madras and Pondicherry, and the successful siege of Pondicherry in 1761, finally established the British as masters of all the coveted eastern coast of India.
[Sidenote: The Treaty of Paris, 1763]
The fall of Quebec (1759) and of Pondicherry (1761) practically decided the issue of the colonial struggle, but the war dragged on until, in 1763, France, Spain, and Great Britain concluded the peace of Paris. Of her American possessions France retained only two insignificant islands on the Newfoundland coast, [Footnote: St. Pierre and Miquelon.] a few islands in the West Indies, [Footnote: Including Guadeloupe and Martinique.] and a foothold in Guiana in South America. Great Britain received from France the whole of the St. Lawrence valley and all the territory east of the Mississippi River, together with the island of Grenada in the West Indies; and from Spain, Great Britain secured Florida. Beyond the surrender of the sparsely settled territory of Florida, Spain suffered no loss, for Cuba and the Philippines were restored to her, and France gave her western Louisiana, that is, the western half of the Mississippi valley. The French were allowed to return to their old posts in India, but were not to maintain troops in Bengal or to build any fort. In other words, the French returned to India as traders but not as empire builders. [Footnote: During the war, the French posts in Africa had been taken, and now Gorée was returned while the mouth of the Senegal River was retained by the British.]
[Sidenote: Significance of the Seven Years' War to Great Britain and
France]
Let us attempt to summarize the chief results of the war. In the first place, Great Britain preserved half of what was later to constitute the United States, and gained Canada and an ascendancy in India—empires wider, richer, and more diverse than those of a Cæsar or an Alexander. Henceforth Great Britain was indisputably the preëminent colonizing country—a nation upon whose domains the sun never set. It meant that the English language was to spread as no other language, until to-day one hundred and sixty millions of people use the tongue which in the fifteenth century was spoken by hardly five millions.
Secondly, even more important than this vast land empire was the dominion of the sea which Great Britain acquired, for from the series of wars just considered, and especially from the last, dates the maritime supremacy of England. Since then her commerce, protected and advertised by the most powerful navy in the world, has mounted by leaps and bounds, so that now half the vessels which sail the seas bear at their masthead the Union Jack. From her dominions beyond the oceans and from her ships upon the seas Great Britain drew power and prestige; British merchants acquired opulence with resulting social and political importance to themselves and to their country, and British manufactures received that stimulation which prepared the way for the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Thirdly, the gains of Great Britain were at least the temporary ruin of her rival. Not without reluctance did France abandon her colonial ambitions, but nearly a century was to elapse after the treaty of Paris before the French should seriously reënter the race for the upbuilding of world empire. Nor was France without a desire for revenge, which was subsequently made manifest in her alliance with Britain's rebellious American colonies in 1778. But French naval power had suffered a blow from which it was difficult to recover, [Footnote: Yet between 1763 and 1778 the French made heroic and expensive efforts to rebuild their navy. And as we shall presently see in studying the general war which accompanied the American revolt, France attempted in vain to reverse the main result of the Seven Years' War.] and much of her commerce was irretrievably lost. If toward the close of the eighteenth century bankruptcy was to threaten the Bourbon court and government at Versailles, and if at the opening of the next century, British sea- power was to undermine Napoleon's empire, it was in no slight degree the result in either case of the Seven Years' disaster.