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connection they were not ready to break. The severe strain on the fabric of acquiescence on which the Nawab's government rested, due to the Maratha depredations in the post-1740s, made political power necessary for the British as the merchants could no longer serve as their intermediaries. When Siraj-ud-Daulah attacked Calcutta the Company was compelled to retaliate because their trade and network of interests depended on the privileged position of Calcutta. It was the conflict at the Darbar and the great merchants* dependence on the Company that inevitably brought in the British. Their interests at this stage were conservative, merely a restoration of previous privilege and position and it was the course of political events and the need to defend their commercial position that made them interfere politically.
It is difficult to accept that the interests of the commercial and banking class in Bengal were intertwined with the fortunes of the European Companies. If anything it was the East India Company that depended both financially and politically on the Jagat Seth banking house. The relationship was not of dependency but of conflict and cooperation. Moreover, the English East India Company was not the predominant component in this banking business of the Seth who lent equally large, loans to other Europeans. The disgruntled powerful elements in Siraj-ud-Daulah's court were merely using the English as mercenaries to acquire power with no plan of entertaining them in the institutional framework of the Nawab's regime. Again, there seems to be an underplaying in Marshall's analysis of the serious evil of duty, free private trade which was eroding the very economic stability of the Nawabi regime by the 1750s, combined with the arrogant refusal to comply with the Nawabi order to demolish fortification provoked Siraj's attack.
The last two chapters are concerned primarily with the East India Company's experiences and experimentations in post-Diwani Bengal. The Company's government, Marshall argues, aimed at commercial profit and military and political security. The Company thus bothered little about change or continuity as such, so long as their interests were not in danger. Many things continued from the old regime to the new one. Both regimes were aimed at political safety, at extracting revenue and using it for military purposes. The change was only in the administrative personnel, in the replacement of the 'untrustworthy' Indian officials in the higher bureaucratic structure, although in the lower rungs Indian intermediaries continued as before. Marshall, however, does not give due attention to an important dimension here. The change in the structure of political power inevitably drew from the very logic of the Company's rule, i.e. the promotion of commercial interests. What the conspirators of Plassey had failed to anticipate was how it would change the political balance in Bengal. While the level of business interplay between Indian merchants, the Company