result was
complete failure. A British protege henceforward ruled in the Carnatic;
a British force replaced the French at Hyderabad; and the revenues of
the Northern Sarkars, formerly assigned for the maintenance of the
French force, were handed over to its successor. Meanwhile in the rich
province of Bengal a still more dramatic revolution had taken place.
Attacked by the young Nawab, Siraj-uddaula, the British traders at
Calcutta had been forced to evacuate that prosperous centre (1756). But
Clive, coming up with a fleet and an army from Madras, applied the
lessons he had learnt in the Carnatic, set up a rival claimant to the
throne of Bengal, and at Plassey (1757) won for his puppet a complete
victory. From 1757 onwards the British East India Company was the real
master in Bengal, even more completely than in the Carnatic. It had
not, in either region, conquered any territory; it had only supported
successfully a claimant to the native throne. The native government, in
theory, continued as before; the company, in theory, was its subject
and vassal. But in practice these great and rich provinces lay at its
mercy, and if it did not yet choose to undertake their government, this
was only because it preferred to devote itself to its original business
of trade.

Thus by 1763 the British power had achieved a dazzling double triumph.
It had destroyed the power of its chief rival both in the East and in
the West. It had established the supremacy of the British peoples and
of British methods of government throughout the whole continent of
North America; and it had entered, blindly and without any conception
of what the future was to bring forth, upon the path which was to lead
to dominion over the vast continent of India, and upon the tremendous
task of grafting the ideas of the West upon the East.

Such was the outcome of the first two periods in the history of
European imperialism. It left Central and South America under the
stagnant and reactionary government of Spain and Portugal; the eastern
coast of North America under the control of groups of self-governing
Englishmen; Canada, still inhabited by Frenchmen, under British
dominance; Java and the Spice Islands, together with the small
settlement of Cape Colony, in the hands of the Dutch; a medley of
European settlements in the West Indian islands, and a string of
European factories along the coast of West Africa; and the beginning of
an anomalous British dominion establ