Robert Clive
The East India Company clerk whose bribed victory at Plassey in 1757 made a trading firm the ruler of Bengal and launched British India.
Robert Clive arrived in Madras in 1744 as a bored, quarrelsome clerk for the East India Company, a young man who by legend tried to shoot himself twice before deciding India might be more interesting than a ledger. Within fifteen years he had made himself the most consequential Englishman in Asia and turned a trading firm into the ruler of Bengal, then the richest province in India. He did it with a mix of nerve, luck, and cash.
Plassey, bought and paid for
By 1756 the Company and Siraj-ud-Daulah, the young Nawab of Bengal, were at war; the Nawab had stormed Calcutta and, by British account, crammed prisoners into the cell remembered as the Black Hole. Clive retook the city, then set out to replace the Nawab altogether. His masterstroke at the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757 was less tactical than financial. He secretly bought off Mir Jafar, the Nawab's own commander-in-chief, promising him the throne. When the guns opened, Mir Jafar's huge contingent simply stood aside. Clive's roughly 3,000 troops routed an army of some 50,000 while losing about 22 dead. Siraj was hunted down and killed; Mir Jafar became a puppet Nawab, and the Company collected its price.
The Company as tax collector
Plassey did not just win a battle; it flipped the Company from merchant to sovereign. In 1765 Clive secured the diwani, the right to collect the land revenue of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, from the Mughal emperor. A private corporation now taxed tens of millions of people and ran India's richest region as a revenue farm. This 'dual system' let London draw the profit while leaving Indian officials to take the blame. Clive grew fabulously rich, drawing a jagir worth about 27,000 pounds a year, and Company men copied him, stripping Bengal of its wealth. When drought struck in 1769, misrule turned it into catastrophe: the Bengal famine of 1770 killed perhaps ten million people, about a third of the province, while the Company kept demanding its taxes.
Censure and the razor
Clive sailed home enormously wealthy and widely resented, the original 'nabob' whose fortune reeked of plunder. In 1773 Parliament called him to account. He defended himself with a famous boast, declaring himself astonished at his own moderation given the treasure that had lain open to him. The Commons condemned the principle but voted that he had rendered great and meritorious service. Vindicated on paper, dogged by illness, and reliant on opium, he cut his own throat in London in November 1774, aged 49. The company he had armed would rule India for another century, then hand it to the Crown, its foundation still resting on the mango grove at Plassey.