Ferdinand Mount—a descendant of a famous Company general himself—recently explained, it was all the simple logic of capitalism: ‘The British empire in India was the creation of merchants and it was still at heart a commercial enterprise, which had to operate at profit and respond to the ups and downs of the market. Behind the epaulettes and the jingle of harness, the levees and the balls at Government House, lay the hard calculus of the City of London.’
