A History of England20 Elo 2021

53. Two young men unleashed: Robert

The second of our Two Young Men Unleashed, after James Wolfe, is Robert Clive. He too was of minor gentry background, but the resemblance ends there. His childhood was marked by some violence, courage, and even criminality: he ran a protection racket for a time. These qualities served him well as he emerged as an unexpectedly gifted soldier in the service, not of Britain, but of the British East India Company, using military force as well as bribery to advance its interests, and his own, in the subcontinent.

In this way, he helped turn India into a source of colossal wealth for the shareholders of the company, while also making a massive fortune for himself, even though it reduced the people from whom that wealth was being sucked, to dire poverty and even famine. His lack of scruples fits with an adolescence marked by violence and criminality.

Or, to put it differently, that past fits well with the nature of the imperial power he helped launch. Driven by profit, it treated all other concerns as secondary. And the Indians paid the price.

Illustration: Benjamin West, Shah 'Alam, Mughal Emperor, Conveying the Grant of the Diwani (the right to collect taxes in Bengal) to Lord Clive, August 1765. In reality, the transaction happened in Clive’s tent, with the throne being a chair placed on top of a table covered by a cloth.
From Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain, including in the US.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

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