For Calcutta was a city where great wealth could be accumulated in a matter of months, then lost in minutes in a wager or at the whist table. Death, from disease or excess, was a commonplace, and two-thirds of the Company servants who came out never made it back – fewer still in the Company’s army, where 25 per cent of European soldiers died each year.39 The constant presence of mortality made men callous: they would mourn briefly for some perished friend, then bid drunkenly for his effects – his horses and buggies, his inlaid ivory Vizagapatam furniture, even his Bengali bibis.40 This meant
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