When in 1787 the Hyderabadi minister Mir Alam spent several months in Calcutta he was amazed at the scale of the Company’s Calcutta military establishments. He was particularly impressed by the arsenals he saw in Fort William: ‘Three hundred thousand muskets hung up in good order and easy to collect, ammunitions factories hard at work, and two to three thousand cannons in place with five to six thousand more in reserve and ready for use.’35 Forty years earlier, in 1750, the Company had been a trading corporation with a small security force and a few crumbling forts; by 1790 it had effectively
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