As a consequence, in 1686 a considerable fleet sailed from London to Bengal with 19 warships, 200 cannons and 600 soldiers. ‘It will,’ Child wrote, ‘become us to Seize what we cann & draw the English sword.’84 But Child could not have chosen a worse moment to pick a fight with the Emperor of the richest kingdom on earth. The Mughals had just completed their conquest of the two great Deccani Sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda and seemed also to have driven the Marathas back into the hills whence they had come. The Mughal Empire had thus emerged as the unrivalled regional power, and its army was
...more
