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The historian William Dalrymple was undoubtedly speaking for many when he described the founding of British rule in India as the ‘supreme act of corporate violence in world history’ — for the story of how the British East India Company, an unregulated private enterprise, succeeded in opportunistically wresting control of some of the richest lands on Earth has long been mired in controversy.
Militarily, the key moment came on 23 June 1757 at the Battle of Plassey — where an upstart Company clerk by the name of Robert Clive (who had arrived in India as a penniless 19-year-old just over a decade earlier) led a small army to victory over the forces of Siraj-ud-Daulah, the last Nawab of Bengal, and his French allies. By seizing control of Bengal, the subcontinent’s most fertile and densely populated region, the ambitious Clive managed ruthlessly to pave the way for almost two centuries of British rule over most of modern-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, carving out a substantial fortune for himself along the way.
Unscrupulous behaviour
For much of the next 200 years, Britain’s role in India would be presented as a proud part of its own national story, and the ‘jewel in the crown’ of an emerging imperial narrative. Despite his often unscrupulous behaviour, and what many would call the fundamentally rapacious nature of his project, Clive himself would also be celebrated at the heart of the British establishment, including in the form of a statue outside the Foreign Office. More recently, however — and especially since 1947, when India finally gained its independence — more searching questions have been asked: about the true nature of colonialism and empire, and how such figures as Clive (who faced censure in Parliament and was nicknamed ‘Lord Vulture’ even in his own lifetime) should really be commemorated.
In our special feature for this issue, Stephen Roberts first traces the life of this highly effective but undeniably divisive commander, then looks in more detail at the Battle of Plassey, the key victory that helped launch Britain’s empire in the subcontinent.
The pursuit of power: Robert Clive, 1725-1774
A soldier and administrator, Robert Clive (1725-1774) was born into the minor gentry, as the eldest of 13 children to a lawyer and small landowner of a long-standing Shropshire family, at the ancestral manor in Styche, close to Market Drayton. In a relative rags-to-riches story, he went on to be one of the founders of British India, and also a figure of much controversy even in his own lifetime. Brought up by an uncle near Eccles, in Lancashire, he attended four schools – including Merchant Taylors’ in London – but proved more adept at scrapping than schooling, putting a marker down early that he was someone who would fight to get what he wanted.
In 1743, Clive was sent to India in the employ of ‘John Company’ – the nickname of the East India Company, the British joint-stock company that had been founded in 1600 to trade in the region. Reaching Fort St George, in Madras (now Chennai), in June 1744 as a penniless 19-year-old Company clerk, he found himself so affected by the sheer drudgery of life there that he tried to take his own life, not once but twice. His pistol snapped on both occasions, however, and he tossed it away in disgust proclaiming: ‘It appears I am destined for something; I will live.’ That ‘something’ would be the struggle between the English and French to dominate India – for this provided him with the opportunity truly to make his mark. He would transfer to the Company’s army, and forget about longing for home.
In 1746, Madras was captured by the French, prompting a fairly rapid series of events (and promotions) in Clive’s life. First, he escaped to Fort St David, 50 miles south, where he assisted in its defence. Then came the Siege of Pondicherry (1748), which ultimately proved fruitless but enabled him to distinguish himself; the storming of Devikota (1749) and a potentially lucrative position as the commissary at Fort St George; and finally his audacious swoop on Arcot (1751), the capital of Karnataka, which he took on 1 September with an army of 200 whites and 600 Sepoys (Indian colonial troops), holding its huge citadel for seven or eight weeks against 120 French regulars and 7,000 Indian troops (some say 10,000), all the while dealing with the constant worry of fifth-columnists within its community. Here, Clive’s meagre force may have been reduced to 80 English and 120 Sepoys but, after one final, desperate assault was repulsed, the siege was raised on 14 November 1751 following a dogged defence lasting 53 days.
Clive’s fame was now assured. He had established himself as a natural leader, a man of indefatigable stamina whom others would follow, someone who could improvise, who could be audacious, and who had luck on his side. At Arcot, Clive executed a masterclass in defending a bastion under siege – keeping the enemy guessing by continually harassing them with sudden forays, including night-time missions, using rapid-fire musketry to spook enemy elephants, and going on the offensive as soon as the relief column (commanded by Major James Killpatrick) arrived. As happened with the later and rather better-known sieges at Rorke’s Drift and Mafeking, Arcot would soon become part of the imperial narrative of outnumbered, plucky British garrisons defending a position against all odds. More crucially, and more practically perhaps, it showed that the French were not invincible.
Clive augmented his growing reputation with other victories in the so-called Carnatic Wars – fought between the East India Company and an alliance of Hyderabad, Mysore, and Maratha forces in south India’s coastal Carnatic region (which lies between the Eastern Ghats and the Bay of Bengal). There were successes at Arni and Kaveripak, plus the capture of Kovilam and Chingalpat. After Arcot, the fighting turned very much in Britain’s favour, the French aura of indomitability shattered as the victories of 1752-1753 were achieved by Clive and the Company’s new commander-in-chief: Colonel Stringer Lawrence, who had fought at Culloden, and would instruct Clive in some of the niceties of military tactics. The pair formed an effective partnership and a lasting friendship; lessons learned would serve Clive well in battles to come.
Somehow he also found time to marry. His bride, Margaret Maskelyne, was a society figure ten years his junior, and the sister of the Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne; another brother, Edmund, worked for the East India Company in Madras, where the couple were married on 18 February 1753 after a six-month courtship. Apparently, Clive had become enamoured with a miniature portrait of Margaret, shown to him by Edmund; luckily for him, she turned out to be something of a beauty in real life, too. The pair sailed that October for England, where Clive seems to have lived the high-life: being presented with a diamond-hilted sword; clearing his pa’s estate of a £6,000 mortgage; becoming a member of the politically active gentry and (having forked out £5,000 for a seat in Parliament) standing for St Michael’s (or Mitchell), a rotten borough in Cornwall, only to be unseated courtesy of a petition to the Commons; and spending his way through a veritable fortune (he was said to have pocketed £40,000 when he left India).
Clive’s destiny moment in India was yet to come, however – and, when it did, it would be all about Bengal, the subcontinent’s richest, most fertile, and most densely populated region. The trouble — one that would echo through history — was that Clive, among others, would forge an empire simply to protect the Company’s commerce. Bengal would fall to the British for reasons of political expediency and commercial advantage; there was no moral compass.
The ‘Black Hole’
Clive’s great rival in India up to now had been Joseph François Dupleix (1697-1763), who by 1741 had become governor-general of all the French Indies, his diplomatic skills making the Carnatic to all intents and purposes a French province. The East India Company had been wary of his power, so its leaders were presumably happy to see French infighting with Bertrand La Bourdonnais (1699-1753), the naval captain and governor who had forced the capitulation of Madras in 1746, before flogging it back to the British – an outcome that Dupleix roundly condemned as a betrayal of the French Company’s interest. La Bourdonnais was recalled to France in 1748, spending time in the Bastille, while Dupleix took the fight to the British. He attacked Fort St David and stubbornly defended Pondicherry, but his ambition to found a French Indian empire out of the ruination of the Mughal dynasty would be thwarted by Clive. The struggle between the two great adversaries continued until Dupleix’s own recall in 1754. When Clive returned to India the following year, he would at least no longer have to worry about such a formidable opponent.
After two years away, Clive was back in India at a propitious time. The Nawab of the Bengal region, Siraj-ud-Daulah, captured Calcutta on 20 June 1756, after attacking the British garrison there in protest at the East India Company’s fortification of the place. Fort William, named after William of Orange, had been built in 1696-1706, and Siraj imprisoned those who had been unable to get away in a small internal storeroom or guardroom in the fort. Measuring just 18 feet by 15 feet, this was the infamous ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’, as it became known, where according to some accounts well over 100 prisoners (the numbers are contested) perished from their wounds, the heat, and suffocation. On the night of 20-21 June, 146 British soldiers were said to have been kept here, their commander John Holwell (1711-1798) alleging that just 25 survived the ordeal.
As Governor of Madras, Clive was summoned to avenge the events of the Black Hole. Calcutta was quickly retaken in a sprightly night attack, with Siraj’s garrison expelled on New Year’s Day 1757, and the French settlement of Chandernagore was also taken. Clive had resolved that ‘regime change’ was needed, with the replacement of Siraj, if the Company’s trade in Bengal was to be secure. One thing to note is that, while some modern attempts at regime change get dressed up as benefiting the local communities, there was no attempt or desire to dissimulate here: this was about vested interest, plain and simple.
Clive’s career-defining moment then would come on 23 June 1757 at Plassey (see p.28), where his complement of 3,200, two-thirds of them Sepoys, defeated Siraj-ud-Daulah’s massive force of some 50,000. Clive had conspired with the Nawab’s uncle and general Mir Jafar prior to the battle, and in its aftermath Jafar had Siraj-ud-Daulah executed and was himself installed as Nawab under a British protectorate that now was all but total. This handover of power marked the downfall of the last independent Nawab of Bengal, and his replacement by the first dependent Nawab, beholden to the British East India Company.
The rape of Bengal
It was really from this time (1757) that the rapacity of Clive and Company servants became marked, as men set about making personal fortunes, with Clive leading by example. The Calcutta treasury also benefited to the tune of some 11½ million silver rupees within two or three months of Plassey – compensation for what had occurred in Calcutta. Clive annexed almost 900 square miles of land south of Calcutta for the Company, an area known as the ‘24 Parganas’. He would benefit himself as a landlord, raking in £30,000 a year in rents until he died, plus a one-off payment of £234,000 as compensation for all the bother he’d been put to; he was indeed a shrewd and ruthless operator. Not everyone back in Britain was happy, however. The Dublin-born philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke (1729-1797) denounced such aggressive greed in firebrand style in the Commons — for this was no longer about fair trade but the rape of Bengal, which was ‘animated with all the avarice of age’. Clive set about rebuilding the ill-fated Fort William, too, an expensive construction that was finally completed in 1781 at a cost of £2 million.
It wasn’t always the French or the locals that the British found themselves fighting. Trade adversaries the Dutch were nominally at peace, yet happy to launch an unprovoked attack on some East Indiamen in 1759, and furthermore to put men ashore up the Hooghly River (which flowed through Calcutta, Fort William being built on its eastern banks). Colonel Francis Forde, on the spot and mindful of the diplomatic niceties, wrote to Clive for a ruling. The Governor interrupted his card game to give Forde the blank cheque he needed: ‘Dear Forde – Fight them immediately and I will send you an Order-in-Council tomorrow.’ It was typical of Clive not to delay action for a moment, and to concern himself with the paperwork afterwards.
For three years, Clive was, in all but name, the sole ruler of Bengal. He would return home in 1760 equipped with a fortune of more than £40,000 per annum. Residing in England once more, he was immediately lauded by William Pitt, or ‘Pitt the Elder’ (1708-1778), as a ‘heaven-born general’, while he himself plotted a political career. Pitt was the effective British war leader between 1756 and 1761, as he oversaw the direction of the Seven Years War (1756-1763), sometimes regarded as the first truly global conflict. In 1761 Clive entered Parliament as MP for Shrewsbury, and the following year was elevated to the Irish peerage as Baron Clive of Plassey, before being made a Knight of the Bath in 1764 — by which time the Seven Years War had been brought to an end by the Treaty of Paris (1763). With fighting in North America, Europe, and India, the victory at Plassey had been a part of this bigger picture — one which had established Britain as the world’s leading colonial power. Clive, for one, did not believe that the French would take things lying down, and he predicted that they would at some point try to reverse the settlement of 1763.
It seemed, though, that India couldn’t do without Clive – even if he could do without India. In his absence, the East India Company’s affairs had become a total mess, and Clive was deemed the only fellow who could rectify matters. He was in Calcutta once more in 1765, now as Bengal’s Governor and Commander-in-Chief, setting about reforming the civil service and administration, and re-establishing the military discipline that had served the Company well in the past. His residency in Calcutta would have been comfortable, to say the least, as the transplanting of British ways and pleasures was becoming well advanced. Certainly by the 1780s it would have been possible to feel you were luxuriating at a Regency spa, albeit with a stickier climate and more insects to ward off. Dissolute ways had made the passage too, with Clive himself labelling Calcutta: ‘One of the most wicked places in the Universe… rapacious and luxurious beyond conception.’
Clive’s administration of Bengal affairs on behalf of the Company came to an end in 1767, when he quit India for the last time. He had spent less than a dozen years there in total, yet the changes he wrought would have enormous significance. That final stint saw him establish the Company’s absolute authority throughout Bengal. In return for propping up the 17th Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II (1728-1806), Clive’s settlement awarded the Company the huge advantage of the sole right to collect taxes, estimated to be worth £33 million a year. There was a Nawab too – 16-year-old Najm-ud Daulah (c.1747-1766), second son of Mir Jafar – but the real power rested with the Company.
Clive himself was not so fortunate this time around, however, and returned to England poorer than he’d left it. Worse, he came back to a storm of opprobrium, as he was lambasted for his ‘nabob fortune’. Clive was one of the growing band of such ‘nabobs’ who had secured a seat in the Commons (and whose numbers rose from 12 seats in 1761 to almost 30 by 1780). Characteristically, Clive came out fighting: ‘By God, Mr Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!’, he cried, in response to accusations of rapacity in March 1773. The drastic measures employed in India had stirred up a hornets’ nest of ill-feeling against him, however. His earliest measures in India were made the basis of a Parliamentary censure in 1772, then in 1773 became the hot topic of a Parliamentary select-committee. Clive, the ‘hero of Plassey’, found himself being interrogated ‘like a sheep-stealer’ — the censure hardly mollified by the committee’s concession that he ‘did at the same time render great and meritorious services’.
Legacy of controversy
Although ultimately cleared, Clive was worn down by sickness, opium (a common addiction), and depression. He died on 22 November 1774 at his own hand – though it is possible this was unintentional. If it was suicide, it is likely this was because of his painful illness rather than because he felt any regret over his actions or the damage done to his reputation by Parliamentary disapproval. Clive’s eldest son Edward (1754-1839) was Governor of Madras from 1798 to 1803, and became Earl of Powis in 1804, having married the last Earl’s daughter 20 years earlier; it was the kind of sleight of hand of which Clive himself would have approved.
Of course, Robert Clive – along with other colonial figures – has come under increased scrutiny in recent years, as more uncomfortable questions have come to be posed about the true legacy of empire. Such scrutiny has only been brought into sharper focus by the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement and the global protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, a black American man, in 2020. To some, the toppling in June of that year of a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol represented only the tip of a hefty iceberg, with memorials to Clive in London and Shrewsbury also being eyed up. The famous statue of Clive outside the Foreign Office, at the heart of UK government, has since been condemned as an affront by some, while others point out that continuing to honour a man known as ‘Lord Vulture’ seems tone-deaf to modern sensitivities. The call is for the statue – which was controversial even when completed in 1912 – to be removed and placed in a museum for purposes of education. So far, however, it survives. Meanwhile, the Shrewsbury statue has been the subject of two petitions calling for its removal, and now has an information board interpreting Clive’s colonial story. This may be a less drastic way forward. MHM
Further reading:
• Clive: the life and death of a British emperor (R Harvey, Sceptre, 1999)
• The Life of Robert, First Lord Clive (G R Gleig, Legare Street Press, 2023)
All images: Wikimedia Commons, unless otherwise stated
You can read the second part by Stephen Roberts here and find Calum Henderson's infographics here.
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