To this end, the companies brought in private armies to help their allies. Here, as in Persia, the enemy, for each group of Europeans, was not the local population but other Europeans. In supporting their Indian allies, the European corporations were actually fighting proxy wars against one another. The Portuguese lost out early, the Dutch were eliminated next (from India, anyway—they remained dominant in Southeast Asia) and the contest for India finally came down to the British versus the French.
