A troublemaking company clerk laid the foundations of British rule in Bengal
Robert Clive arrived in Madras in 1744 as a trading-company clerk, tallying accounts and haggling with suppliers. Thirteen years later his victory at Plassey put Bengal, India's richest state, under East India Company control, and he went home with a fortune of over £400,000. He remains one of Britain's most controversial colonial figures.
Clive was born in 1725 at Styche, near Market Drayton in Shropshire, the eldest of thirteen children. Sent as a toddler to live with an aunt in Manchester, he grew up, in his uncle's words, excessively addicted to fighting. Local stories say he climbed the church tower in Market Drayton to sit on a gargoyle and ran a teenage protection racket against shopkeepers. He was moved from school to school, though later in life he educated himself, and William Pitt called one of his Commons speeches the most eloquent he had heard.
His voyage to India stalled for nine months after his ship ran aground off Brazil, long enough to pick up some Portuguese, then widely used in south India. At Fort St. George he found the work dull but read widely in the governor's library. In 1746 French forces captured Madras. Refusing to swear not to fight the French, Clive disguised himself, slipped past a careless guard and walked some 80 kilometres south to Fort St. David, where he joined the Company's army, a step down in status that suited him.
He earned a reputation for nerve. At the fort of Devikottai he led 30 British soldiers and 700 sepoys in an assault that nearly ended in his death but won the fort. In 1751 he improvised an expedition that blocked French dominance on the Coromandel Coast, and after returning to India in 1755 he overthrew the ruler of Bengal, winning the Battle of Plassey in 1757.
Backing Mir Jafar as the new Nawab earned Clive a guaranteed an income of £90,000 a year. Between visits to India he bought an Irish barony and a seat in Parliament for Shrewsbury. He became the first British Governor of the Bengal Presidency, though he acted for the East India Company, not the British government. He left India for good in 1767 and died in 1774.
Source: Robert Clive
