Dazzled Victorians saw the nineteenth-century Indian Raj as the jewel that gave lustre to the British imperial Crown, its defence secondary only to that of the homeland in grand strategic considerations. But the Raj had not originated in the customary ‘heroic’ and celebrated manner of some other empires – the realisation of the dreams of conquering soldier-statesmen such as Shih Huang Ti, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Babur or Napoleon: or the ‘lucky’ creation of adventurers such as Cortez or Pizzaro; or, again, the product of steady accretion by dynamic political systems such as Rome or the Ottomans; all in search of glory, land, power, wealth or converts. Instead, the foundations of the Raj were laid between 1750 and 1784 by a trading corporation (the English East India Company, chartered by Queen Elizabeth in 1600), initially as a reaction to a perceived political and military threat to its commercial position in India by the French after 1748 in the wake of the War of the Austrian Succession. For 150 years the Company had focused on making a profit in Eastern marketplaces as cheaply and therefore usually as peaceably and politically unobtrusively as possible. Now, out of its depth in a new political and military milieu in India, it found itself engaged in a form of armed diplomacy that eventually led it to engage in an indirect military conflict to counter the French (when a formal peace existed between their sponsoring states) who had linked up with some local Indian princes to promote their joint political interests.