War is nothing else but the pursuit of politics by other means. (Clausewitz)

Scholarly research on the early political and military history of the British in India has been relatively neglected of late. Perhaps this is because any serious British writer on the subject has to tread warily through a critical minefield for fear of attracting accusations of being orientalist, triumphalist, militarist or determinist, or all four, in their work. Or perhaps it is because an analysis of the grand strategic aspects (the formulation of political aims and their implementation by peaceful and/or military means) of the origins of the Raj is best approached and analysed by rooting it in a narrative sequence of events and the reality of circumstance as viewed by individuals, hovering just above the fractal reality of personal and group experience and reaction. This way, form will emerge from a cumulative consideration of the significance of the particular, rather than by imposing a more fashionable structuralist framework on events based on generalist social scientific concepts – not that the latter lacks efficacy in suggesting lines of enquiry and providing eventual interpretative perspectives. Nonetheless, getting to the nub and a deeper understanding of the evolution and reality of grand strategy in early British India is best advanced, in my view, by evaluating the roles, opinions and contributions of only a small number of individuals at the top of government (mostly in the East India Company's three Indian Presidency Councils and Committees (i.e. governing bodies) of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta) since it was they who developed policy and made the crucial decisions, supervised in a weak and general way by the Directors in London with intermittent interjections from Westminster.