Articles tagged with Bengal

Dalton: Ten Years in England

Dalton's Life of Thomas Pitt, Chapter 5

Dalton has relatively little to go on for his un-imaginatively titled chapter, Ten years in England. As a result, he yields to the temptation to spin out what speculations he can.

Unreliable dates

In 1688 he bought from James Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, the manor of Stratford under the Castle, and was returned as member for Old Sarum in the election of the Convention Parliament, and for New Sarum (Salisbury) in the Parliament of 1690. In 1691 he became the owner of the site of Old Sarum, and the votes attached to it, thereby securing the representation of the borough for himself and his heirs. p. 69

In fact his election in 1690 at Old Sarum was overturned. He did not gain control of that borough until a later date, and the last contested election there was not until 1705.

Question of motivation …

Bengal: saltpetre

A seventeenth-century army increasingly relied on gunpowder, and the production of that vital resource required three mineral ingredients - charcoal, sulphur and saltpetre. Of these, the two minority ingredients were charcoal, which could be obtained readily wherever there were trees, and sulphur, which was mined in many places and was fairly cheap. However, three-quarters or so of the mix was taken up by saltpetre, the mineral potassium nitrate. Saltpetre forms naturally in small quantities in some locations, but for regular supply it had to be 'farmed' by heaping animal dung with earth in large beds that were then treated with urine for a period of months. Bacterial action produces potassium nitrate, which with the right technique can be refined to a relatively pure crystalline product.

The Mughal army was as gunpowder-based as the European armies. At the start of the sixteenth century the technologies were very similar, with European powers making …