In the service of the British East India Company, first as a military officer and then its governor in Calcutta, Clive mastered the art of the “nabob game.” Eventually the subject of a parliamentary inquiry, he later committed suicide on 22 November 1774.

(1725–1774), the first baron Plassey, governor of Bengal (1758–1760 and 1765–1767).

At the time of his birth, Robert Clive’s once-respected Shropshire family was in decline. They were, however, able to secure him a clerkship in the British East India Company in 1744. Shortly after his arrival in Madras, war broke out between France and England. Madras fell to the French, and Clive found himself a prisoner of war. This experience gave him an incentive to reflect on the success of the French in outmaneuvering the British by playing the “nabob game,” supporting rival claimants to contested thrones of Indian states and thus expanding European influence. Clive then embarked on a military career in the company’s service, during which he mastered and then bested the French at their own game. He helped topple a key French ally, Chanda Sahib, their nawāb of the Carnatic, through bold military actions that restored British prestige and earned him great wealth.

When Clive returned to England in 1753, he was lionized as a military genius. However, after expending virtually all his Indian fortune restoring his family to its former estate, he had little choice but to accept the company’s offer of promotion to lieutenant colonel and appointment to the governorship of Fort St. David. Clive arrived in Madras just in time to hear of disastrous events in Bengal. There, the company agents’ attempt to use the recent wars with France as a cover for expanding the company’s financial interests had become transparent. The young nawāb of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Dawla, had retaliated by moving against the British factories in his province. With characteristic speed, Clive sailed to Bengal and quickly found rivals in Siraj-ud-Dawla’s court, eager to supplant him. When an intermediary, the Hindu financier Umichand, threatened to reveal their treachery unless rewarded for his silence, Clive seemingly agreed to his demands, then defrauded him. On 23 June 1757 Clive’s three thousand mixed European and Indian troops confronted Siraj-ud-Dawla’s fifty-thousandstrong force near the village of Plassey. Though Clive had some last minute doubts, all ran according to plan. The nawāb’s army turned against their ruler, who was promptly executed by elements loyal to Clive’s coconspirator, Mir Jafar, who was then installed as nawāb. Clive next secured for the company the twenty-four parganas (villages) that were to become Calcutta, while openly arranging for an amount equal to its revenue (£30,000) to be assigned to him by Mir Jafar as his personal jagir (feudal land grant). He and other corrupt company officials then gorged themselves on the prostrate state’s treasury, which made many of them “nabobs” but eventually left Mir Jafar bankrupt. Clive then defeated a Dutch assault in Bengal, ending their role in the province, and soon eliminated French influence in the neighboring northern Circars.

In 1760 Clive once again returned to England in triumph and was given an Irish peerage. But tragic events in Bengal so darkened the company’s future that he was asked to return there as governor. In Clive’s absence, Mir Jafar had been deposed by company officers. His successor, Mir Qasim, had rebelled and ultimately fled to Oudh where he allied himself with its ruler, Shuja-ud- Dawla, and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II in a bid to regain Mughal control of the province. However, before Clive’s arrival, their combined forces were defeated by British troops at Buxar in 1765. Clive’s skills at playing country politics were equal to the challenges that remained. He restored Oudh to Shuja-ud-Dawla in return for the latter giving two of his districts to Shah Alam II, to whom the company then gave a 26 lakh (£30,000) tribute in return for the emperor’s grant of the lucrative diwani (collector of revenue) for Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. The settlement of the diwani on the company led to a notoriously corrupt “dual government,” by which avaricious company agents controlled the civil administration and acted as revenue collector, while the cowed Indian nobility was left with the burdens of the nawābi, or executive authority (now virtually reduced to the enforcement of criminal law). The number of “nabobs” multiplied, the company now commanding the affairs and revenues of more than 20 million people, with no money left to those burdened with “governing” them.

Clive did not exploit India’s condition to the extent he had previously, which made it easier for him to address his other assigned task: to stop the abuse of company resources by its own agents. Clive had the company’s servants sign covenants prohibiting bribery and other corrupt practices, though he stopped short of eliminating their lucrative private trade. He also reduced the allowances enjoyed by officers in the company’s army and suppressed a mutiny that this economy spawned. Though limited in scope, these reforms laid the earliest foundation of the Indian Civil Service.

Clive left India in 1767, having established the company as a power on the subcontinent and having initiated its administrative structure; by that time, however, he had made enemies within the company’s directorate and in Parliament, which convened a committee of inquiry. Some members of Parliament may have been legitimately alarmed by Clive’s situational ethics and self-enrichment. However, since the charges brought against him pertained to events that had occurred a decade earlier, some suggested that the accusations were motivated by a personal or political vendetta rather than genuine reformist zeal. Clive was defiant in his own defense. Questioned as to his acquisition in India of rewards totaling over £234,000 from 1757 to 1759, he declared that, considering the potential wealth he could have acquired by his overthrow of Siraj-ud-Dawla, he was “astonished at my own moderation.” The inquiry closed on 21 May 1773 with an ambiguous Parliamentary resolution that censured him for misappropriating company funds but praised him for having done “great and meritorious service to the state.” Disheartened by the mixed results of the Parliamentary inquiry, Clive fell into one of the many bouts of depression he experienced throughout his life. He committed suicide on 22 November 1774.