Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff
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through the container must have been like unpacking a treasure chest. There were turban ornaments, jeweled bands with spiked brooches set with emeralds and diamonds. There were gorgeous hookahs encrusted with brilliant enamels, their ornamental snakes wrapped with gold wire, mouthpieces studded with gems. These were only the most obviously valuable objects. They might well have been given to Clive by his rich and powerful Indian associates, in keeping with ritualized conventions of diplomatic giftgiving. (And not exclusively, as Clive’s enemies would have charged, as shameless bribes.) Alongside these objects, Clive had also packed away various smaller accoutrements of his residence in India. Filigree boxes, silver bowls, golden scissors, betel-nutcrackers, ivory combs, brightly enameled bottles for rose water, and shallow jade bowls polished to a hard, glassy finish: the chest was stuffed full of the precious everyday objects of a privileged Mughal life. Unlike the ostentatiously splendid pieces, these were things Clive may very well have used and kept as personal effects. Somewhere in the chest, Edward even found his father’s set of ivory playing cards, painted with fairskinned princesses, and princes on elephant-back shooting tigers.
Then there were the weapons. Many European officers brought weapons back from India, not least because they had many opportunities to collect them. Besides, as a visit to any armory in the world will rapidly confirm, displaying an enemy’s weapons involves no small share of triumphalism. But Europeans collecting Indian weapons were not moved to do so only out of imperial arrogance. They were beautiful, these things, elegantly and richly decorated. They were also often technically sophisticated, and appealing because of fascinating workmanship and unusual design. And they were exotic, or so Edward must have thought when lifting a scimitar out of the chest, with its cruel, enchanted blade inscribed with verses from the Koran. There were steel daggers curving out of shining hard-stone hilts. There were matchlocks with barrels a yard long, inlaid with silver. There were battle-axes and spears of a kind long gone from European battlefields in this age of cannon and musket.69 All these things were foreign to Edward. But to Robert, their collector, they would have been as familiar as the sword he hung at his hip—perhaps the part of India’s material culture that he, a soldier, would have known best.
In the chest of “Indian Curiosities,” Edward discovered another side of his father’s life, hidden as carefully as it was preserved. Curiosities was something of a misnomer. For these were not curiosities like the gifts Robert Clive had once delivered from the Mughal emperor to King George III, flashy diplomatic presents that would be seen and admired once, as exotic novelties, before being tossed into a storehouse and forgotten.70 Nor were they curiosities like the miscellaneous objects, found and made, that filled up eighteenthcentury cabinets of curiosities, token emblems of distant parts. These objects were the record of Robert Clive’s Indian life: the things he had surrounded himself with, the things he had chosen to preserve as a collection. As Edward picked through the gifts, trophies, souvenirs, and ornaments that his father had so neatly kept for him, he handled the most intimate existing archive of Clive of India. Edward had never gone with Robert to India—they had lived in separate countries for nine years, and under the same roof for no more than five. In these objects, he was touching a father he barely knew.
Robert Clive devoted his life in Britain to concealing his questionable Indian career behind a British façade. Yet in death, his legacy to his son Edward served to emphasize just how entangled the Indian and British parts of his life had always been. Whether it was acquiring political power, estates, houses, or fine art, Clive used collecting to fashion his British persona as a plutocrat and a connoisseur. In this sense, he formed an emphatically British collection, consisting of objects and status symbols designed to win him a place in British elite society. Yet this was an inescapably Indian collection, too—at its most elementary, because it was bought with Indian money, but in inspiration also, because it was supposed to echo in Britain, as well as compensate for, the fame and power that Clive had earned in India. In his collections, as in so much else, Clive of India and Clive of Britain were one and the same.
Clive’s own collecting project, to use his imperial fortune to refashion himself, distilled the larger process in which he had also played his part: the East India Company’s acquisition of Indian resources, and attempt to shape a ruling image for itself. Robert Clive’s death coincided with the end of the first chapter in Britain’s Indian empire. The East India Company had begun to rule as well as ™ military and fiscal control were asserted; the seeds of British government were planted. Britons back home began to confront and come to terms with a new, and in many respects unwelcome, form of empire. This was no longer a principally Atlantic, maritime empire of settlement and trade. It now included large, populous territories in Asia, acquired by conquest. It took shape under the nominal aegis of an extant and legitimate indigenous power, the Mughal Empire. And it was enmeshed in global war and rivalry with France.
These were all to some extent the legacies of Robert Clive, overseas empire-builder. There would also be consequences of Clive’s more personal legacies. In 1804, Edward Clive fulfilled his father’s dearest ambition: he became an English earl. But there was to be another way in which Edward built on his father’s foundations—and another place for the Clives in this book. In 1798, Edward traveled to India himself and served for five years as governor of Madras. There, he and his own family became Indian collectors, acquiring Indian art and artifacts with an enthusiasm and purpose that Robert had invested in European objects instead. When Edward came into his inheritance he had no intention, and still less desire, of following Robert to India. But could it be that as he looked through his father’s Indian chest, the idea of going there first crossed his mind? Could it be that the end of one collector’s vision contained the beginning of another’s?
1I have drawn my account chiefly from Francis Parkman’s magisterial Montcalm and Wolfe (New York: Modern Library, 1999), pp. 398-414; and Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of the Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), pp. 344-62. Cf. Simon Schama, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (New York: Vintage, 1992), pp. 3-39, 66-70. The competing accounts of Wolfe ’s death are judiciously summed up in A. Doughty and G. W. Parmelee, The Siege of Quebec and the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, 6 vols. (Quebec: Dussault and Proulx, 1901), III, pp. 201-37. As Bruce Lenman observes, Parkman (like Benjamin West) played up the significance of the battle as part of a generally triumphalist, patriotic reading of the Seven Years War—an interpretation that endures. (Bruce Lenman, Britain’s Colonial Wars 1688-1783 [New York: Longman, 2001], pp. 153-55.)
2This was by no means the first time that Britain erupted in patriotic rejoicings around a broadly “imperial” victory: Admiral Vernon’s defeat of the Spanish at Portobello, in 1739, inspired a massive public outpouring. (Vernon was celebrated across the Atlantic, too, in the name of the Washington family manor, Mount Vernon.) But Wolfe ’s victory may have been all the more gripping as it was performed not by the beloved navy but by the much-maligned army. Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755-63 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 54-57; Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 140-65.
3Though Edward Penny’s 1763 version of the same scene—a composition bearing several similarities to West’s—also used modern dress. Schama, pp. 21-39.
4The 1929 Cambridge History of the British Empire divided its subject in these terms, for instance; “First” and “Second” are still often used as shorthand labels for the British Empire before and after the American Revolution. For reevaluations of this periodization, see P. J. Marshall, “The First British Empire,” and C. A. Bayly, “The Second British Empire,” in Robin Winks, ed., Oxford