In order that he might rob a neighbor whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America.

Macaulay is condemning the hypocrisy and moral corruption of imperial and dynastic politics: a European ruler, professing to defend a neighboring state, instead betrays it for gain. The consequences of that betrayal ripple outward through an empire’s machinery—colonial troops and Indigenous peoples are drawn into distant wars that are not their own, fighting and killing in places as far apart as India’s Coromandel Coast and the Great Lakes region of North America. The sentence compresses a global geography to show how elite greed and duplicity can mobilize racialized “others” as instruments, turning local communities into proxies for European quarrels and plunder.