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On 5 February 1757, Clive marched his tiny army through the vast Indian camp – running the so-called Calcutta Gauntlet – to retake the fort. On 23 June, his decisive ‘battle’ of Plassey was a pantomime. The safest way to win a battle is to negotiate the outcome. His army – 1,100 Europeans, 2,000 sepoys – was minute; the nawab’s ministers and army mostly changed sides thanks to Clive’s negotiations; the rain soaked the gunpowder; and he lost only twenty-two sepoys (and no Europeans). Having undermined the French, he also defeated the Dutch, reporting to Pitt, ‘I’ve made it pretty clear to you that there will be little or no difficulty in obtaining the absolute possession of these rich kingdoms; and that with the Mughal’s own consent.’ He secured Bengal for the EIC. In Parliament, Pitt praised ‘Clive … that heaven-born general’ who fought with ‘an execution that would charm the king of Prussia’. Enjoying their nabobian fortune of £300,000 (a billion pounds today) the new Lord and Lady Clive of Plassey bought the duke of Newcastle’s estate and shocked London with their ostentation: her pet ferret wore a £2,500 diamond necklace and her pet prodigy – Mozart – performed in their salon. Clive remained fragile: addicted to opium, he suffered another breakdown.

Yet Bengal was just one province. Back in Kandahar, Durrani, now rich from his looting of Delhi and the revenues of Punjab and Khorasan, was happy to leave the Mughals alone, provided the Marathas did the same. But a Maratha general, accompanied by Balaji Rao’s teenaged son Vishwas, marched into Delhi and placed his own emperor on the throne, provoking Durrani. On 14 January 1761, the two armies met at Panipat, where Babur had won India in 1526. Durrani killed the general, Vishwas, and 28,000 Marathas, enslaving 22,000 women and children. The battle confirmed the end of Mughal India – which, following occupations by the Persians, Marathas and Afghans, was now no more than a symbolic entity.

Durrani celebrated with a triumphant entry into Delhi then looted the city for the second time in five years. But in his absence the Sikhs had rebelled – their guerrilla tactics and aggressive impetuosity made them hard to defeat. The Afghans launched a campaign of annihilation against Sikh civilians since they could not catch the warriors. On 5 February 1762, Durrani slaughtered around 20,000 Sikhs, mainly women and children. The Sikhs still call this Vadda Ghalughara – the Great Massacre – an imperialist atrocity unparalleled in modern Indian history. Travelling with fifty carts of Sikh heads, Durrani again blew up the Harmandir Sahib shrine in Amritsar, desecrating the sacred lake with the bodies of men and cows. But as the temple exploded, a fragment hit him on the nose – a wound that would eventually kill him – but it looked as if the new hegemon of India would be Durrani or the Hindu peshawas.^*

Back in London, Pitt’s annus mirabilis had delivered the first British empire but Frederick seemed finished – until he got lucky. Empress Elizaveta left the Russian throne to a poxy Germanic coxcomb, Peter III, who worshipped Frederick and immediately recalled Russian armies. Frederick was amazed: ‘What dependence may be placed on human affairs if the veriest trifles can change the fate of empires? Such are the sports of fortune.’ Frederick privately mocked the ‘divine idiocy’ of Peter III, who swiftly offended the Russian army, the nobility and, most unwisely, his clever, charismatic wife Catherine. Maria Theresa’s monarchy was exhausted; the French were near bankrupt and grieving over their losses at the expense of a sated Britain, which had cleaned up on the continent where the war began – America. Fort Duquesne, taken by Colonel Washington and his Virginia Regiment, was renamed Pittsburgh. By 1763, Britain’s American empire was won^* – but it would last scarcely a decade.

EMPIRE BUILDERS: COMANCHE WARLORDS AND PITT THE SNAKE

Yet the American vastness had scarcely been penetrated by British-Americans, French or Spanish. Europeans just occupied the Thirteen Colonies on the east coast. Elsewhere, tiny posses of European adventurers sheltered in wooden palisades and traded in furs, negotiating with the Native Americans who controlled the interior. While snuff-snorting bewigged aristocrats in European capitals traded these lands on maps, this made little difference on the ground. That expanse was ruled by an ever-changing map of indigenous nations who did not measure power in terms of boundaries and kingdoms. Yet they were not at peace with each other; they too were empire builders.