Only one thing kept the settlement going: Bengal was ‘the finest and most fruitful country in the world’, according to the French traveller François Bernier. It was one of ‘the richest most populous and best cultivated countries’, agreed the Scot Alexander Dow. With its myriad weavers – 25,000 in Dhaka alone – and unrivalled luxury textile production of silks and woven muslins of fabulous delicacy, it was by the end of the seventeenth century Europe’s single most important supplier of goods in Asia and much the wealthiest region of the Mughal Empire, the place where fortunes could most easily
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