The French and the British East India company initiate a protracted struggle for military control of South India in the middle of the eighteenth century.

The period is marked by shifting alliances between the two East India companies and the local powers, mercenary armies employed by all sides, and general anarchy in South India.

Cities and forts change hands many times, and soldiers are primarily remunerated through loot.

The four Anglo-Mysore Wars and the three Anglo-Maratha Wars see Mysore, the Marathas and Hyderabad aligning themselves in turns with either the British or the French.

Eventually, British power in alliance with Hyderabad prevails and Mysore is absorbed as a princely state within British India.

The Nizam of Hyderabad seeks to retain his autonomy through diplomacy rather than open war with the British.

The Maratha Empire that stretches across large swathes of central and northern India is broken up, with most of it annexed by the British.

The famine in Bengal, which kills ten million people, a third of the population, in four years, is the worst natural disaster in human history in terms of lives lost.

The Maharajah of Mysore, Bettada Chamaraja Wadiyar VIII, forces the British to agree a treaty of mutual assistance in view of the famine, but the British East India Company increases its demands on the Bengali people to keep profits up.