THESE addresses have been trying to explore the obvious paradox in eighteenth-century Britain's fortunes overseas: a North American empire, as I suggested last year, deeply rooted in the rich soil of a close-knit transatlantic community, was to come crashing down in the gale unleashed by the new imperial anxieties and ambitions of Britain's rulers. A British empire was, however, to be successfully planted in the unpromising terrain of alien Asian peoples. It is to the creation of this new Indian empire that I wish now to turn.