Commissioned by the SCOPUS journal, India Quarterly, for a special issue on diplomacy, this article engages the idea of the modern world by turning to two central concepts: diplomacy and resilience. Utilising primary source material left behind by 18th century British diplomats, demonstrated is the European intention to not colonise but tessellate into Asia. What this does, at a minimum, is to ironically undermine by using European sources, Europe’s story of its expansionism. Furthermore, the diaries also expose a multiplicity of forms of resiliency in a pre-modern society facing “modernity”. In combination, what this challenges is the extent of the West in creating Asian modernity, not least because the former was hesitant, the latter resilient, but also because of the briefness of the encounter that is supposed to have converted hundreds of millions of Asians.