Clive wrote to Raja Manikchand, the new Fort Keeper of Alinagar-Calcutta. He announced that he had come with a force of unprecedented size – ‘a larger military force than has ever appeared in Bengal’ and that ‘we are come to demand satisfaction’. But Clive’s threats had little effect. As Ghulam Hussain Khan commented, ‘the British were then known in Bengal only as merchants’, and no one at court ‘had any idea of the abilities of that nation in war, nor any idea of their many resources in a day of reverse’.
