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Britain, on the face of it, should never have been able to conquer India. It had no direct presence in the country, had a smaller population, and it was very far away. Indeed, they left the conquest of India to a private company, the East Indian Company. However, the British East India Company was able to lay the foundation of an empire in the Indian sub-continent because, from a British perspective, of a fortuitous series of circumstances.

These included the decline of the Mughal Empire. The country was divided red years politically, lacking European rivals, and no sense of national unity. The British were also shrewd in the manner of their conquest. They cleverly used the local elites to administer their new domains and adopted a piecemeal approach to extending their authority and rule. These factors helped to establish British rule in India, which lasted almost two hundred years until Indian independence after the Second World War. <ref> Smith, p. 78 </ref>