New Shun 1730

It was half past four in the afternoon.

The battle was over.

The Bengal army was defeated across the board, and only the French gunners held on to the last moment.

They blocked the cannon's fire gate with iron nails before they chose to surrender to the traitor Jafar's cavalry instead of the British.

Clive, who was extremely empty after the excitement, opened the bottle of opium tincture with his trembling hands to relieve the pain of emptiness after the excitement.

He now needed to calm down immediately to deal with the situation in front of him.

In front of him, the soldiers of the first battalion of the Dorsetshire Infantry Regiment, that is, the 39th Infantry Regiment, were confronting the guards of the Dashun Envoy Group.

The guards of the Dashun Envoy Group had already shown the flag of Dashun.

They just kept their formation, but did not raise their weapons or aim, but carried their backpacks, as if they were on their own land.

Lieutenant Colonel Al Kutt, the commander of the Dorsetshire Infantry Regiment, did not know what to do with the situation in front of him.

The Dorsetshire Regiment was not an army of the East India Company, but was loaned to the East India Company by King George of England.

It was the regular army of the United Kingdom. It was just loaned to the East India Company.

The flags of the Chinese soldiers on the opposite side were not the flags of mercenaries, but the real battle flags of the Dashun Army.

Lieutenant Colonel Coote was completely at a loss as to how to deal with this situation, because before coming here, people from the British government specifically told him to avoid war with the Chinese.

He was even told that if the Chinese and the French were mixed together, he should not attack the French who were mixed with the Chinese unless necessary.

They knew that China had an envoy in Bengal.

However, these Chinese envoys did not choose to retreat in the direction of Murshidabad, the capital of Bengal.

Instead, they clearly walked forward in the direction of the British army.

Clive, who had taken laudanum and calmed down, walked in front of the Dorsetshire Regiment. After exchanging a few words with Lieutenant Colonel Coote, the soldiers of the Dorset Regiment also put away their muskets.

Clive walked to the front of the Dashun Guards, took off his hat and greeted them. Zhang Sanbiao from the Dashun team also stood up.

"Excuse me, where are you going?"

Clive tried his best to be polite and asked the people from Dashun in not very fluent Chinese. He had worked as a company clerk in Songjiang for a while before. Although he didn't speak well, he could still understand what he was saying.

"We are going to Calcutta and take a boat back home from there. Can you send a guide? I'm worried that our team will cause misunderstandings in Calcutta."

Zhang Sanbiao replied in Chinese, and the translator translated these words into English and made inquiries.

Clive breathed a sigh of relief and turned back to communicate with Lieutenant Colonel Coote.

Since Dashun has already shown its military flag, it's best not to make trouble. What Britain fears most now is that Dashun will take action in India.

Even if there is no real war, just taking sides and letting the French navy go to Gaolangbu for supplies and repairs in Malacca will make Britain very uncomfortable in India.

Now the British don't want to test Dashun at all. The cultural gap between the two sides is too big. Often they talk at cross purposes and can't communicate effectively.

If, because of the cultural gap, they thought it was a small test, but Dashun understood it as a big humiliation, that would be troublesome.

Dashun's army is well-trained and has not been affected by the war and the defeat of the Bengalis at all. The formation is very neat.

Even so, with the 3,000 troops in hand now, it is not difficult to destroy such an army of a hundred or so people.

The question is, why fight?

How to end after the fight?

Not to mention that there is still a guard, even if there is only one Dashun envoy now, if they take out Dashun's festival, the British will not only send people to protect it and send it to the ship, but also send soldiers to protect it for fear that the Bengalese defeated soldiers will kill them.

Even if the French who escaped from Jindnagar Fort before assassinated Dashun's envoy in order to drag Dashun into the war and put the blame on Britain, that would be troublesome.

The main reason is that the British side can't understand what Dashun wants to do, or because they can't understand, they can only think that Dashun hopes to remain neutral in the war and make a fortune from the war.

From the perspective of trade, it seems that Dashun has no interest in India, which is also very reasonable.

Because, whether as a production area or a sales area, India is not very important to Dashun.

Relatively speaking, the conflicts between the British East India Company and the Dashun Western Ocean Trading Company in the Persian Gulf and other places are much more serious than in India.

From the perspective of trade, the East India Company hopes to get Bengal; but from the perspective of trade, the whole of Bengal is not as good as Mukha on the Red Sea.

Of course, the two sides did not go to the point of fighting in Mukha. After all, it was the territory of the Ottoman Turkey, and bribery, gifts, ganging up, finding agents, relying on relationships, and going through the door were still the main methods.

Dashun expressed its neutral attitude too early, which allowed the British to let go in India. After Dupleix was transferred, the British transferred the battalion of the Dorsetshire Infantry Regiment and the British field troops such as the 12th Artillery Regiment.

By the time the French realized that they had been tricked, it was too late.

The two field troops transferred from the mainland quickly gained the upper hand with the cooperation of the navy, and immediately broke the promise of truce between the two sides, and captured French fortresses such as Jindernagar. The artillerymen who served Siraj and Reinhard of Salzburg, who later became famous in India as the "Dark Mercenary Corps", were all French troops who escaped from that fortress.

The advantage left by Dupleix for France had disappeared at this time. Even if the French king woke up and sent Dupleix again, it would be useless.

After the French king transferred Dupleix away, the governors of various places thought that the French were unreliable and began to waver.

All this was based on the fact that Dashun watched the show throughout the whole process.

Otherwise, in the previous war, even if Dashun dispatched a battalion, or even only provided a group of professional gunners, it would not be a question of victory or defeat, but a question of the impossibility of fighting.

Before, there were differences within Britain on the issue of whether to fight or not.

It was Lieutenant Colonel Coote and Clive who repeatedly expressed their strategic views - time was on the side of the Bengalis. If the Bengalis could not be defeated before the rainy season, Siraj would integrate the legacy left by his grandfather, complete internal cleansing and integration, and then the company would no longer have a chance to win - this led to the outbreak of the battle.

This was only the strength of Bengal itself. As long as Dashun was slightly down, then this battle would be impossible to fight.

The British side had a clear understanding of the combat effectiveness of the Dashun army.

Although there was no large-scale field battle in the previous battle with the Netherlands in Southeast Asia, the efficiency of Dashun knocking on the Dutch castle was enough to shock the world.

This was an era when it was very simple to judge the combat effectiveness of the opponent.

An army that captured a fortress in about half a month without siege must be the benchmark of the elite troops at this time. The last one with such efficiency was the French army that beat the Netherlands into a disaster year.

Therefore, in the eyes of Clive and Coote, the Dashun army of more than 100 people was not weak. Behind it stood a behemoth from Siberia to Java; from Central Asia to Japan.

This kind of monster should not be provoked.

Therefore, some nobles and textile factory owners in Britain also clamored to teach Chinese smugglers a lesson.

But the East India Company stood firmly on the side of opposition. Indeed, the smugglers of Dashun were very annoying, but that was just annoying. If they really fought, it would not be as simple as annoying, but the East India Company could directly declare its dissolution.

The East India Company also frequently showed goodwill to Dashun during this period.

This year, it said that the company had lobbied a large number of parliamentarians and might release the tea tariff. You wait a little longer, and there will be news soon.

Next year, it said that the company has considered increasing the import volume of cotton cloth from Dashun. You wait a little longer, and the cotton cloth tariff will be cancelled immediately.

But in general, the East India Company still placed its hopes on the strategic directions of Dashun's integration of Nanyang, seizing Japan, expanding Japanese trade, immigrating to South Oceania, developing trade, occupying the western part of America, etc.

This is also the result of Liu Yu's continuous chanting to the group of people in the East India Company in recent years. Liu Yu's chanting is very simple. The problem of the Chinese Empire is that there is not enough land and too many people. We must first solve the internal contradiction between people and land. Land without a large population is the favorite of the Chinese Empire.

Buying the casket and returning the pearl, do you understand? The difference between taking jade as a treasure and taking righteousness as a treasure, do you understand?

Things that you think are worthless, we think are very valuable, do you understand?

You are dominated by commercial capital, and we hope to be dominated by industrial capital, do you understand?

My reform in Songsu has always been to enhance the attributes of cultivated land as a means of production and dilute the financial investment attributes of cultivated land, do you understand?

He chanted the sutra for the good of the British East India Company and to give them some psychological comfort.

But it is really difficult to communicate.

The production thinking of the agricultural empire and the trade thinking of the commercial country have traditionally had a huge difference in tone.

After all, even the enlightenment philosopher Voltaire once used the most harsh words to evaluate North America - it's just a few acres of snow, what's so good about it - of course, he won't evaluate it like this now, because from the perspective of business thinking, North America is valuable again because of ginseng and sable fur, and France is unlikely to exchange the whole of North America for a palm-sized Guadeloupe that produces white sugar.

As for these sutras, whether the British believe them or not, Liu Yu doesn't care, anyway, it's the East India Company that believes it or not.

Don't believe it? If you don't believe it, then the shareholders will invest, build a battleship fleet in India, recruit 50,000 soldiers in India, and prepare 300 cannons.

Anyway, North America has been disturbed by the trade of Dashun, and its value has doubled. This is the situation. Dashun will not move at all, believe it or not.

If you believe it, fight the French in India and grab India before Dashun completes its internal integration.

If you don't believe it, let the shareholders sell their property to help the crisis, build a fleet and 50,000 regular troops in India, and be on guard at any time.

It's not much money. It's estimated that 30 million pounds will be invested in ten years, which is about 100 million taels of silver.

Oh, you don't have that much money?

You still don't believe it without money?

The current situation is that whether you believe it or not does not depend on your brain, but on the material, and whether you can come up with the money.

Since they were forced to the material level, they could only jump into the pit that Liu Yu had designed for Britain and France long ago.

Anyway, the pit was there. The hundreds of soldiers of Dashun could only watch the excitement on the battlefield of Bengal, and after watching the excitement, they still asked the British to send people, guides, and translators to send them to Calcutta.

After Clive and Lieutenant Colonel Coote discussed for a while - of course they were not discussing whether to send someone to escort the Dashun group to Calcutta, this issue did not need to be discussed - Clive came forward again and asked politely: "Siraj's rule is over."

"He brutally massacred innocent and law-abiding British people, and his rule was alienated by his friends and relatives, cruel and alcoholic, which made his people and subordinates stand against him to overthrow his brutal rule."

"The London East India Company can guarantee that your country's saltpeter trade contract with Siraj will continue to be implemented and will not be affected in the slightest. This is the company's promise."

"If your country's envoys are willing to stay in Calcutta for a while, the company also expresses great welcome. After they elect a new Bengal Jiedushi, the company will facilitate them to sign a new saltpeter trade contract immediately."

Niu Er, who had been silent all the time, stood out from the crowd at this time, his face deliberately pretending to be gloomy, and decided to leave some memorable bombs for Bengal and the East India Company before leaving.

"The Celestial Empire has its own morality. The loyalty of the ministers to the monarch is the first priority. I witnessed a betrayal on the battlefield. I will report what happened here to the emperor."

"Moreover, I doubt whether your company is capable of guaranteeing the execution of the Celestial Empire's saltpeter trade contract with such an ambitious betrayer. I personally am very dissatisfied with the morality of the betrayer Jafar."