England, France, and Spain restored to each other all that each had taken—no very considerable amount—and left the great question of their colonial and commercial rivalry quite unsettled. Another and a greater war was required to decide it. The results of the fighting beyond the seas between 1739 and 1748 had not been very important. We have already mentioned how the English had failed at Cartagena in 1741. On the other hand, they had captured the French island of Cape Breton, off the mouth of the St. Lawrence, in 1744, and had maintained with success a desultory struggle with the enemy along the inland frontier of Canada. One hazardous expedition against the Pacific ports of Spanish America had been carried to a brilliant end by Commodore Anson, who followed in the steps of Drake by capturing the great Acapulco galleon, with the yearly hoard of the mines of Mexico on board (1743). Like Drake, too, Anson returned to Europe by the Cape route, and brought his ship, the Centurion, back to Spithead in 1744, thus completing the circumnavigation of the world in three years.
India.—Breakup of the Mogul Empire.
While these comparatively unimportant events had been happening on the American side of the globe, the first war waged between England and France in India had been giving promise of more serious results. Down to the commencement of the eighteenth century the great empire of the Moguls had dominated Hindostan, and the traders of the English and French East India Companies had been no more than visitors to the coast, allowed to build factories at convenient ports by the bounty of the Great Mogul. But in 1707 had died Aurungzebe, the last powerful monarch of that house, and since his death the vast Mohammedan empire which his ancestors had built up was falling rapidly to pieces. Everywhere the Mogul viceroys, or "nawabs," were making themselves independent of their imperial master at Delhi. The native tribes of India also, more especially the brave Mahrattas of the Western Deccan, had been throwing off the Mussulman yoke and starting on a career of conquest. The European settlers in the ports of Southern India profited immensely by this relaxation of the central control which the Mogul government had been wont to exercise, and assumed a much less deferential tone when dealing with the revolted nawabs who now ruled in the Carnatic, Bengal, and the Deccan.
Collision between the English and French settlers.
It was first during the War of the Austrian Succession that the English and French ventured to engage in hostilities with each other, without paying attention to the native powers, whose sovereign rights they were thereby impugning. The factories of the two powers were scattered along the Coromandel coast in curious alternation, and it was here that the struggle took place. The English were based on their chief settlement at Madras, the French on their stronghold of Pondicherry.
Successes of Dupleix.
Four years of fighting gave a decided superiority to the French, who were headed by Dupleix, a man of great energy and far-reaching views. He was the first to discover the part that might be played in Indian politics by native troops officered and drilled by Europeans. These Sepoys (Sipahis is the more correct form) had originally been small armed guards employed by the governors of the factories. Dupleix discovered, from a chance encounter at St. Thomé (1746), that a small body of these disciplined mercenaries could defeat whole hordes of native cavalry, and used his discovery with skill and promptitude. Raising large numbers of Sepoys, he built up the first regular army that had been seen in India. In his struggle with the English he was very successful. Madras and almost all the other English factories fell into his hands, and it looked as if the French were to be the sole power in Southern Hindostan. The complete triumph of Dupleix was only prevented by his quarrels with his colleague Labourdonnais, the governor of the Mauritius, who had come to his aid at the head of a fleet. They were both energetic and arbitrary, refused to fall in with each other's plans, and so failed to completely expel the English from the Coromandel coast. The other settlements of the East India Company—the island port of Bombay, the old dowry of Catherine of Portugal, and the factory of Fort William at Calcutta in Bengal—were not molested.
To the intense disgust of Dupleix, the treaty of Aachen stipulated the mutual restoration of conquests, and the English settlements were all given back in 1748. In India, as in America, all was left unsettled, and the struggle for supremacy had to be deferred for a space.
The "Broad-Bottomed Administration."