The reputation of the Company’s army would never be the same again. But as well as exposing the limits of the Company’s military power, the failed Pune expedition also revealed the degree to which the Company now had ambitions to reshape and interfere in the politics of the entire South Asian region. For the brilliant Maratha Prime Minister Nana Phadnavis, ‘the Maratha Machiavelli’, this was the moment that he realised the urgent need for the various Indian powers, whatever their differences, to pull together and form an alliance against the alien intruders, and to attack them with a united
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