within two months of the overthrow of Siraj ud-Daula, the Company’s merchants in Patna were not only successfully encroaching upon Mir Ashraf’s trade, they actually seized his entire saltpetre stocks by force of arms: in August 1757, a particularly aggressive Company factor named Paul Pearkes, whose name appears in several letters of complaint from Mir Jafar, actually broke into Ashraf’s warehouses in an armed attack, using the 170 sepoys stationed to guard the Company’s fortified upcountry base, the great Patna factory.
