Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff
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nervously as they battered his tiny group of men. Yet he could see no sign from Mir Jafar. Had Clive been betrayed, too?
Then a sign arrived, unexpectedly, from above. It began to rain. The monsoons were coming—and coming to the Company’s rescue. For as the rain pelted down, soaking the men (Clive, drenched to the skin, stepped inside Plassey House to change his clothes) and spilling off the trees around them, water saturated the enemy artillery: gunpowder turned to mush, the fuses into useless strings. The firing—so fatal just moments before—fizzled out. And through the rain, the soldiers in the mango grove watched their enemy dissolve. To the right Clive and his men saw a huge contingent of cavalry move down the river and away from the fighting; it was Mir Jafar leaving the scene of the battle, as promised. On the field ahead, the nawab’s men began to scatter and flee. For six miles they were chased by Company soldiers, who scooped up abandoned cannon, equipment, and stores along the way. The next day, Mir Jafar met with Clive, then traveled straight on to Murshidabad, “took quiet possession of the Palace and Treasures and was immediately acknowledged Nabob.”23 Siraj ud-Daula, who had fled the city “disguised…in a mean dress,…attended only by his favourite concubine and…eunuch” was captured some days later and executed by Mir Jafar’s men.24
The battle of Plassey was a setup, not a set piece. Quite unlike the battle of the Plains of Abraham, it does not make for very glorious retellings, nor did it at the time. Yet somewhere in that swamp of conspiracy, heat, and cannon fire in the mango grove, something new coalesced about the nature of the British presence in South Asia. It was not until 1765 that Clive would consolidate his victory in Bengal by gaining the diwani from the emperor, thereby putting the reins of Bengal government directly into the Company’s hands. But there is a reason that 1757 serves as the conventional starting date for the history of “British India.” It was at the battle of Plassey that the East India Company irrevocably and victoriously asserted itself as a military and ruling power in the Mughal domains.
Plassey’s central significance for the Company was to marry territorial conquest and, from 1765, administration, to trade. But two further elements in the events of those months would remain part of the imperial landscape in India for decades to come. First, rivalry with France had acted as a spur and pretext for Company attack. It was rather beside the point whether the French threat to British interests was genuine or whether it had been exaggerated. What mattered was that Francophobia and Anglo-French war formed the framework within which Company expansion took place. The Seven Years War has often been seen as the end of France’s bid for empire in India, but the specter of a French resurgence—fomenting in the courts of anti-British Indian princes—haunted British rhetoric and plans right into the nineteenth century.25
A second enduring feature of the events surrounding Plassey was that alliances and enmities cut across ethnic, cultural, and religious lines. The Company owed its victory to a partnership with Mir Jafar, the Jagat Seth banking family, and other Calcutta merchants.26 Siraj ud-Daula’s strength, in turn, depended in part on assistance from the French. Crying “collaborator” in such a sea of interest groups is meaningless. Indeed, in Bengal as well as in the raging conflicts of southern India, it was, if anything, the animosity between the British and the French (however malleable these groupings themselves were) that helped define who was friend and who was foe.
In the short term, Plassey was the making of East India Company Bengal. With the compliant Mir Jafar now installed as nawab, the region was fair game to Company profiteers. Calcutta boomed, quickly replacing Madras as the East India Company’s social and political capital. Fort William, on the east bank of the River Hooghly, was rebuilt in brick, heavily moated, and studded with six hundred cannon.27 In 1756, the old Fort William was manned with two hundred European troops; by 1765, the garrison was two men short of sixteen hundred.28 Outside the fort’s walls, the number of civilians grew so fast that house-building could barely keep up. The new town, as one visitor described it, was “so irregular that it looks as if all the houses had been thrown up in the air, and fallen down again by accident as they now stand.”29 Those who could afford it (and many could) began to carve out plots in the jungle south of town for the “garden houses” of their dreams.30 From 1767, the many victims of Calcutta’s climate found a shady enclosure of their own, in the Park Street Cemetery.
Fantastic wealth, tremendous opportunity, the seeds of a new colonial society: it was as if Plassey had brought the East India Company an empire overnight. But what were Britons to make of it all? In Bengal lay profit for many. Yet there also lay great and unknown responsibilities, in the hands of an untested, unsupervised, largely unregulated Company government. While some Britons welcomed the opportunities presented by the Company’s conquest, others worried about its costs, its dangers, and, indeed, its morality. Whatever else, ruling Bengal was risky business. And nobody would appreciate both the rewards and the risks of this new empire more acutely than its conqueror himself: Robert Clive. For Plassey was also the making of Robert Clive—and he was determined to make it in Britain next. In India, Clive had committed himself to empire-building for the Company, but in Britain he used his Indian fortune to start building a vast material empire for himself.
III. Clive of India, Clive of Britain
The life of Robert Clive lends itself to telling as a parable about the founding of empire. More biographies have been written about him than about any other figure in the history of British India, if not, indeed, the British Empire. In the formulation of the early Victorian historian Thomas Macaulay, Clive’s history and the history of Company rule were effectively one and the same. “From his first visit to India,” Macaulay wrote, when Clive scored major victories over France in the Carnatic, “dates the renown of the English arms in the East.” “From Clive’s second visit to India”—Plassey—“dates the political ascendancy of the English in that country.” And “from Clive’s third visit to India,” Macaulay continued, when he received the grant of the diwani, “dates the purity of the administration of our Eastern empire.”31 This is the man known quite simply as “Clive of India,” great man of empire par excellence.
But Clive had been dead more than sixty years by the time the ardently imperialist Macaulay wrote this 1840 appreciation. In his own day, Clive had also seemed to personify Britain’s new Indian empire, but to considerably less welcome effect. Contemporary Britons saw Clive as the greatest in a growing band of “nabobs” (an Anglicized form of nawab) who were returning from Bengal flush with ill-gotten gains.32 While the nabobs fattened themselves on Bengal’s revenues, as many as one in three Bengalis may have starved to death in the famine of 1770—a terrible contrast that moved the architect Lancelot “Capability” Brown, seeing a chest of gold in Clive’s house, to wonder “how the conscience of the criminal [Clive] could suffer him to sleep with such an object so near to his bedchamber.”33 Worst of all, the nabobs’ “Indian” corruption threatened to infect Britain itself. In Pitt the Elder’s resonant words, “The riches of Asia have been poured in upon us, and have brought with them not only Asiatic luxury, but Asiatic principles of government.”34 Corrupt, corrupting, maybe even criminal: both Robert Clive and the empire he helped