A mere handful of businessmen from a distant island on the rim of Europe now ruled dominions that stretched continuously across northern India from Delhi in the west to Assam in the east. Almost the entire east coast was in the Company’s hands, together with all the most strategic points on the west coast between Gujarat and Cape Comorin. In just over forty years they had made themselves masters of almost all the subcontinent, whose inhabitants numbered 50 to 60 million, succeeding an empire where even minor provincial nawabs and governors ruled over vast areas, larger in both size and
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