It was an entirely random set of political circumstances that wrecked Clive’s ultimate ambition to become a politician, destroying his fortune and forcing him back into the arms of the Company. But it was a piece of happenchance that had immense and wide-ranging repercussions. It was Clive’s particular qualities of extreme aggression and devil-may-care audacity that drove the events of the next few months, and which directly led to one of the oddest events in world history: a trading company based in one small building in the City of London defeating, usurping and seizing power from the
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