ABSTRACT
The ruling classes of the south sought to turn the United States into a peripheral empire like serf holding Russia. But the bourgeois development of the north was in clear contradiction with this perspective. The British empire in the Victorian saw itself not just as a military or economic power, but also as a global moral force. This claim recognised by a significant part if not by most of the world community, unlike the analogous pretensions by the leaders of the USA in the early twenty-first century. The struggle against the slave trade was undoubtedly an important moral ace in the hands of the empire. The exploits of Robert Clive did not bring about the conquest of India by the British, but led to the establishing of British economic and political hegemony over the subcontinent. Meanwhile, neither the East India Company itself nor the government in London perceived the resulting situation as temporary or transient.
