For some time the directors had been growing alarmed at how Indian military techniques were rapidly improving across the region: the easy victories of the Plassey era, a decade earlier, were now increasingly eluding the Company. It had taken Indian states some thirty years to catch up with the European innovations in military technology, tactics and discipline that had led to the Company’s early successes; but by the mid-1760s there was growing evidence that that gap was fast being bridged:
