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* As in Virginia, female house slaves, often teenagers, were the prey of their proprietors. In Guadeloupe, on his Saint-Georges plantation, a French planter called George de Bologne had a son with a maid, Nanon, aged seventeen. The son Joseph could not inherit nobility but, indulged by his father, he was educated in music, classics and philosophy and was later sent to boarding school, where it turned out he was a musical prodigy, virtuoso violinist and composer.

* A month later when the French counter-attacked and captured Washington, he was lucky not to get a tomahawk in the head himself.

* Elizaveta, a dashing blonde amazon wearing a breastplate and riding a sleigh, had seized power in a coup. She had inherited her father’s ruthlessness and proved a capable if inconsistent and whimsical autocratrix, while enjoying many simultaneous affairs with young lovers. Chief of these was the handsome Ukrainian Cossack chorister Alexei Razumovsky, whose brother Kyril she appointed as the grand hetman of the Cossacks: he was the last semi-independent hetman before 1918.

Romanovs and Durranis, Pitts, Comanche and Kamehamehas

PITT’S WAR: THE GREAT COMMONER

A born performer, melodramatic, tempestuous and hard-drinking, Pitt, after an early spell of soldiering, had made his name with vicious attacks on Walpole and the Pelhams, skewering their domestic corruption and global inertia. While raging against venal factions (and brilliantly coordinating them), Pitt sat for the constituency Old Sarum, an uninhabited ruin bought by Diamond Pitt. Married to Lady Hester Grenville, daughter of a powerful clan, he was supported by his own faction: this tiny clique of Pitt–Grenvilles dominated politics for the next half-century.

George II loathed Pitt, but in December 1756, realizing that Newcastle was out of his depth, he accepted that the preeningly vain orator had a plan and acquiesced in a Pitt ministry, nominally under the Duke of Devonshire. ‘I am sure I can save this country,’ boasted Pitt, now secretary of state for the south, ‘and no one else can.’ When he was manoeuvred out of power, Pitt launched a national campaign that revealed the new importance of public opinion and forced his recall, now popularly acclaimed as the Great Commoner; this time he was in partnership with Newcastle.

Pitt masterminded the country’s first global conflict, the Seven Years War: his strategy was to win ‘Canada on the banks of the Rhine’, paying Frederick to fight France while his swashbuckling protégés – ‘Pitt’s boys’ – attacked French colonies. He seized French slaving castles in Senegal and Gambia, and stormed Guadeloupe; in America, Louisburg and Quebec fell. But not everything went right: at Monongahela, in the Ohio valley, a bunglingly arrogant British general, Edward Braddock, ignored the advice of his Virginian deputy, Colonel Washington, expert in colonial warfare, and was routed by French–Iroquois forces. Braddock was killed; Washington had two horses shot from under him. It was decisive in a different way: Washington noted British insouciance and resented his superiors’ refusal to recognize or promote him and his colonial troops. But that was a rare setback.^*

In India, a new game was opening: a voracious and brutal foreign invader was about to ravage the land.

INDIAN WARLORDS: DURRANI AND CLIVE

His name was Ahmed Durrani, the extraordinary Afghan shah, former bodyguard of Nader. In January 1757, just as Pitt was orchestrating his world offensive, Durrani marched into Delhi. It was far from his first invasion of India, and altogether he would invade India eight times and loot Delhi twice.