When, twenty years later, the tea merchant and traveller Thomas Twining stopped his boat trip up the Ganges to visit the now deserted site of the Battle of Buxar, he wrote in his diary that ‘here then may be said to terminate the extraordinary series of military achievements which brought the finest parts of Asia under the dominion of British merchants, who first appeared in the character of needy adventurers on the coasts of India. There are, perhaps, few events in history more remarkable than these transactions. Results so disproportionate to the means which produced them seem quite
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