Bolts’ most thought-provoking idea was that the Company’s claim to have obtained the Diwani by the Treaty of Allahabad was in fact a legal nonsense, invented by Clive to mask the reality of his military conquests. The Company, he wrote, ‘are become sovereigns of extensive, rich and populous Kingdoms, with a standing army of above 60,000 men at their command’. The Nawab of Bengal and Shah Alam were merely ‘nominal nabobs … puppets’, dangling at the EIC’s whim, and the land held not by law or treaty but ‘possessions acquired and held in reality by either violence or usurpation’.
