Robert Clive

Early career

Clive, from a modest Shropshire gentry family, arrived in India in 1744 as a young writer (clerk) for the East India Company at Madras, a posting he reportedly disliked and is said to have attempted suicide twice in his early years there out of despondency, though accounts of this vary. He transferred to a military role during the Company's conflicts with the French East India Company over influence in the Carnatic, part of the broader Anglo-French rivalry for dominance in southern India that was fought largely through Indian proxy rulers, distinguishing himself in the defence of Arcot in 1751, a siege in which a small Company garrison under his command held out against a much larger besieging force allied to the French, an action that established his early military reputation and was later celebrated in Britain as a formative feat of the Company's rise in India.

Battle of Plassey

Clive returned to England briefly in 1753 before going back to India, where he was placed in command of the response after Siraj-ud-Daulah, the young Nawab of Bengal, attacked and captured Calcutta in June 1756, an episode remembered in British accounts for the deaths of a number of Company prisoners held overnight in a cramped guardroom afterward known as the "Black Hole of Calcutta," though the number and circumstances of the deaths were disputed even at the time. Clive recaptured Calcutta in early 1757 and then moved against Siraj-ud-Daulah directly. At the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757, Clive's smaller force defeated the Nawab's much larger army, a victory secured in large part through a prior conspiracy with Mir Jafar, a senior commander in the Nawab's army who withheld his forces from the battle in exchange for being installed as the new, Company-backed Nawab of Bengal afterward. The victory gave the Company effective political control over Bengal, then among the wealthiest regions of the Mughal empire, and Clive personally received an enormous fortune, including a jagir (land grant) and large payments from Mir Jafar, that made him one of the richest men in Britain; he was created Baron Clive of Plassey, in the Irish peerage, in 1762. Mir Jafar proved an unsatisfactory client and was later replaced, then reinstated, by the Company as Bengal politics remained unsettled through the early 1760s.

Governorships

Clive served as Governor of Bengal from 1757 to 1760, consolidating the Company's new position, before returning to Britain. He went back to India for a second term as Governor from 1765 to 1767, following the Company's further military success at the Battle of Buxar in 1764. In 1765, Clive negotiated the grant of the Diwani, the right to collect revenue, from the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II, for the provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, an arrangement that placed the Company in direct control of the region's finances while leaving nominal Mughal sovereignty intact. During this second term he also attempted reforms to curb the private trading and gift-taking of Company servants, though with limited lasting effect.

Wealth, dual government and later criticism

The system of governance Clive established after 1765, under which the Company held the Diwani and controlled revenue while a nominal Nawab retained criminal justice and local administration, became known to contemporaries and later historians as the "dual government" of Bengal. It left effective power with Company servants who bore no formal administrative responsibility, an arrangement widely criticised, including by Clive's own eventual successor Warren Hastings, as unworkable, and it is frequently cited by historians among the causes of the severe Bengal famine of 1769-70, which struck the province a few years after Clive's second governorship ended; the extent of Clive's personal responsibility for the famine, as opposed to that of the administrative structure he had set up and the officials who ran it after his departure, remains debated. Concern in Britain over the Company's mounting financial difficulties and the conduct of its servants in India, sharpened by Clive's case, contributed to Parliament's passage of the Regulating Act of 1773, the first significant British legislative intervention in Company governance.

Controversy and parliamentary inquiry

Clive's wealth and the methods by which it was acquired became a subject of controversy in Britain, feeding broader anxieties about corruption ("nabobery") among Company officials returning from India with fortunes disproportionate to their formal salaries, and about the Company's growing political and financial power at home. A parliamentary inquiry, prompted partly by the Company's own financial troubles in the early 1770s, examined Clive's conduct in India between 1772 and 1773; despite considerable personal and political attacks in the Commons, including proposals to confiscate his estate, the House ultimately passed a resolution acknowledging that Clive had rendered "great and meritorious service to his country," clearing him of the most serious charges, though his public reputation remained damaged by the proceedings.

Death

Clive suffered from chronic ill health, including severe pain attributed to gallstones, and had developed a dependence on opium, which he used to manage it. He died in London on 22 November 1774; the death is generally believed to have been suicide, though contemporary accounts were not fully conclusive.