Robert Clive's troops defeat the Mughal forces…

Robert Clive's troops defeat the Mughal forces at Buxar (Baksar, west of Patna in Bihar) in 1765, and the Mughal emperor (Shah Alam, r. 1759-1806) confers on the company administrative rights over Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, a region of roughly twenty-five million people with an annual revenue of forty million rupees.

The imperial grant virtually establishes the company as a sovereign power, and Clive becomes the first British governor of Bengal.

Besides the presence of the Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French, there are two lesser but noteworthy colonial groups.

Danish entrepreneurs establish themselves at several ports on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts, in the vicinity of Calcutta and inland at Patna between 1695 and 1740.

Austrian enterprises are set up in the 1720s on the vicinity of Surat in modern-day southeastern Gujarat.

As with the other non-British enterprises, the Danish and Austrian enclaves are taken over by the British between 1765 and 1815.