Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff

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Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850 - Maya  Jasanoff


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a synopsis of the “rise” of British rule in Bengal, his career in Britain provided another, rather different perspective on the founding of Britain’s Asian empire. This other Clive, Clive of Britain, is rarely profiled, yet it was perhaps his truer face, creased with the tensions and insecurities of early Company rule.

      Clive needed a foot in Parliament (or fourteen feet, as the case may be) in order to secure his Indian interests in general, and specifically to prevent his enemies—of which he had many—from moving to block him from accepting his jagir payments from Mir Jafar, which they considered a kickback. But this Westminster fiefdom—a sort of human collection—was also tied up in Clive’s perennial quest for a British peerage and a seat in the House of Lords. After the 1761 election, for example, he threw in his bloc of votes behind the Duke of Newcastle, a leading contender for prime minister, hoping to be rewarded for his loyalty with an earldom. Much to his chagrin, he received only the Irish peerage and the Order of the Bath. For the rest of his life, Clive remained convinced that by spending more money and cultivating more connections he could win the title he so craved.

      Of course, there was not much point in having so much land if one didn’t live on it in style. In London, the Clives established themselves in a handsome gray Palladian town house in up-and-coming Berkeley Square. They hired Britain’s premier architect, Sir William Chambers, to renovate the London house and their country house at Walcot. In fashionable Bath, where Clive often retired to take the waters for his troubled digestion (one of India’s less welcome gifts), he bought a grand mansion that had previously belonged to Pitt the Elder. But all these dwellings paled before Clive’s grandest estate of all, Claremont, in Surrey. Clive had bought it from the Duchess of Newcastle for £25,000 (bargaining her down from an asking price of £45,000)—about £2 million in today’s terms—and intended to make it his main country seat. (Had he received his coveted earldom, he would surely have taken the title Clive of Claremont.) Claremont truly was fit for a lord, with a distinguished house built in the reign of King George I, by Sir John Vanbrugh, and gardens laid out in the 1730s by the innovative William Kent.

      But Clive’s first act as owner of Claremont was to tear the whole thing down. The building, he thought, was too damp. He summoned Capability Brown, Britain’s best landscape architect, to rebuild the property. A statement of work to be done in 1772 gives some impression of the degree of magnificence Clive sought:

      Principal Floor…with very neat Mahogany Sashes, Best Plate Glass, Silk Lines, inside Shutters double hung, the mouldings of which…to be richly Carved, the Architraves, Base and Surbase mouldings also to be enrich’d with Carving…the


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