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During the middle of the 17th century, British merchants under the banner of the East India Company (EIC; usually referred to as "the Company") arrived in India (South Asia or the subcontinent). Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta all had little protected enclaves where they set up shop. Neither the will nor the resources were there for the EIC to create a sizable land empire in South Asia at the time. The "native" powers were invariably defeated by the EIC's armed forces in the seldom conflicts that broke out between them. However, things began shifting in the 1740s. Several native Indian powers began striving to create their own territories after the dissolution of the pan-Indian Mughal Empire. The French and British were motivated to participate in local politics and expand into the interior of the subcontinent by the absence of a strong central authority and the possibility of negotiating economic concessions with the local potentates. The EIC had already conquered the French East India Company (Compagnies des Indies) by the 1750s. The EIC battled and defeated Mysore, the Maratha Confederacy, and the Khalsa Kingdom between 1760 and 1849 to become the dominant force in the Indian subcontinent. The military establishment in South Asia was the mainstay of British empire there. Between a third and half of the EIC's annual budget supported the armed forces. The EIC fed its forces not just with gold imported from England, but also with income taken from its vast agricultural bureaucratic dominion in the subcontinent. Heathcote (1995) depicts the development of the EIC's several armies. During this time, indigenous military forces were largely modernised and Westernised in response to EIC's presence and its capital-intensive infantry-artillery-oriented army.