Merchant Kings

by Stephen R. Bown

  Before launching his attack, Clive regrouped his forces and sent an arrogant but formal letter to the nawab stating that “we have for these ten years past been constantly fighting—and it has pleased God Almighty to make me successful.” He then went on the offensive, taking a few smaller forts and suffering some heavy losses, before he and his men marched on Calcutta, triumphantly entering the city on January 2, 1757. A month later he defended it against a mighty army of the nawab, who tried to retake the city. The nawab’s army was reported to consist of two hundred horsemen and thirty thousand infantry. Even considering the likely exaggeration, it was a force that dwarfed Clive’s detachment of several thousand. Nevertheless, Clive ordered his men to attack on February 5 and routed the grand but bewildered army, sending horses and elephants in a panicked flight into their own ranks, which broke and ran in terror.

  Clive wrote to his father afterward, “Our success was very great . . . we killed 1300 men and between 5 & 6 hundred horse with 4 elephants. This blow has obliged the Nawab to decamp and conclude a peace very honourable and advantageous to the Company’s affairs.” But the city of Calcutta was in ruins, utterly desecrated—its buildings burned, its trees cut down. The cost of the damage was estimated at over two million pounds.

  The peace was short-lived. Suraj-ud-Dowlah’s great army had not been defeated, merely scattered. And hearing the news of war in Europe from his French allies—a war that had started in May 1756—the nawab strengthened his alliance and prepared to continue his struggle against Clive. Clive, meanwhile, had also received the news of the outbreak of what we now call the Seven Years’ War in Europe. The struggle for Calcutta was therefore no longer merely a corporate battle, but an extension of the larger European conflict. Accordingly, Clive felt it was within his rights, perhaps his duty, to march his army upriver and, under cover of several Royal Navy warships that silenced the French artillery guns at Chandernagore, to attack a fortified French trading outpost in March.

  Clive again had some royal troops under his command because his corporate army was too small—this was the beginning of the commingling of private and public interests that would later characterize the East India Company. He presciently recognized the potential for a conflict of interest in the future: “it had been better for the service,” he wrote, “they had never come and I had the like number of Company’s in their room.” These were the soldiers of his nation, certainly, but they were not the soldiers of his company. Having to rely on them, indeed even having them in India, muddied the waters of command. He would never have complete control over them, and they would never respect him in the same way they would respect regular officers. In fact, their presence pried open the great door of compromise and introduced a higher authority into Clive’s world, one that diminished his own power by the sheer immensity and intractability of the ancient hierarchies and sources of social power that it introduced.

  Although there was no immediate personal or corporate profit to cover or offset the considerable expense of Clive’s attack on the French outposts, the assault was certainly a major blow to the company’s primary competitor in India. Clive himself recognized it when he proclaimed, with his usual lack of humility, that he had dealt “an inexpressible blow to the French Company everywhere.” When the news reached London, stock in the English company soared by 12 per cent. The English East India Company was on the verge of both its greatest victory yet and its greatest profits. And Clive, who sent off numerous letters to the directors in London regaling them with his heroism, exploits and overriding duty and loyalty to the company, would again be put forth as the instrument of conquest.

  5

  THE BATTLE OF PLASSEY IS A DEFINITIVE TURNING point in the history of the world. On the face of it, it was a simple affair, though the known details are vague and difficult to sift from the myths that arose in its wake. In the three months after the French defeat at Chandernagore, the nawab Suraj-ud-Dowlah regrouped his dispersed army, augmented it with a strong French contingent and marched towards Calcutta.

  According to Clive’s hagiographer, Robert Orme, Clive was “surprised at their numerous, splendid and martial appearance.”

  This could be taken as an understatement, since what he saw arrayed before him was something of a nightmare. In all, the army was about fifty thousand strong and included up to eighteen thousand cavalry, heavy artillery and a contingent of armoured battle elephants draped in scarlet cloth. This force grandly arrayed itself across a jungle and mangrove plain known as Plassey, about twelve kilometres north of Calcutta. Hundreds of standards fluttered in the wind and the drums beat loudly as the multitudes arranged themselves into divisions. These troops, under French tutelage, appeared more disciplined than any Indian horde Clive had yet encountered. His force consisted of just over a thousand European troops and an infantry of about 2 ,200 sepoys and a few small guns. He had no cavalry at all. Defeat seemed a foregone conclusion. Yet Clive was well aware of both the strengths and the weaknesses of his own force and the weaknesses of the opposing hordes. He gambled that the vast forces arrayed across the plain would prove undisciplined and perhaps even disloyal; that they would be poorly paid, poorly provisioned, poorly commanded and poorly organized. His own advantage, on the other hand, was that his army was small enough for him to personally command, using to full advantage his reputation for assured victory—and his troops’ certainty that if they fled they would all perish.

  Nevertheless, the odds on this day seemed stacked against Clive. He hesitated, calling a council of war to debate the options, wondering “whether in our present situation, without assistance, and on our own bottom, it would be prudent to attack the Nawab, or whether we should wait till joined by some country power?” Probably he was waiting to gauge the results of his intriguing with high-placed leaders within the nawab’s army. One famous version of the story has Clive receiving a letter from one of the nawab’s confidants named Mir Jafar and then, after reading it, strolling in the shade of some giant trees in contemplation before firming up his mind. On June 21 it rained heavily, and when the sun rose the next day, Clive took action: brash, decisive, foolhardy action. Perhaps he feared not living up to his reputation or falling short of the destiny he had laid out for himself. In any event, he attacked.

  The unexpected move startled the nawab, and his forces merely watched as Clive’s troops advanced and entrenched themselves in a stand of mangrove. On June 23 the forces engaged in battle, with little of significance happening other than Clive’s small cannons blasting and killing hundreds of infantry—until the moment Clive had been awaiting: the defection of a great portion of the nawab’s army, led by the treacherous Mir Jafar. Clive had promised him great offices if the English company succeeded. As the nawab advanced, Jafar retreated. Clive’s guns peppered away at the French forces as they slowly marched forward. Then, as Clive had predicted, the elephants refused to march into gunfire. They panicked, the French stood back from the battle and the cavalry stood their ground when their commander was shot and killed, undermining their morale. A torrent of rain, lightning and thunder soaked the battlefield in the afternoon, an event Clive had anticipated; he had ordered his men to cover their ammunition and guns.

  The guns of the nawab and his French artillery were soaked.

  Believing Clive’s to be as well, the infantry advanced. Their advance slowed and then halted in the hail of bullets. Suddenly Clive ordered an audacious bayonet charge. The infantry turned and fled, dropping everything in their haste, abandoning their camp, their dead and wounded, their supplies, weapons, equipment and provisions. It turned into a total rout.

  An amusing and inaccurate painting of the battle shows a heroic Clive in the vanguard of his army, astride a charging horse, boldly exhorting his men to victory on a battlefield littered with the abandoned detritus of the nawab’s humiliating flight. There were only a few hundred dead on the nawab’s side, and just a handful on the company’s. Clive’s was not a military victory, but a victory of chance, treac
hery and diplomacy. Clive, however, claimed it as a superb military victory and pronounced himself a great general. It was the sort of boast that was beginning to irritate people—claiming an ever greater share of the limelight for himself while barely recognizing the contributions of others or acknowledging the important role of fate or luck.

  The spoils of war for Clive and the company were immense. According to the agreement they had reached beforehand, Clive installed the treacherous Mir Jafar on the throne. Marching into the opulent chamber in one of the nawab’s principal palaces, Clive observed the conspirators clustered about Mir Jafar; none sat upon the throne until Clive graciously indicated to Mir Jafar that now was time for him to assume his seat. Clive then offered a handful of gold coins to the new nawab as a symbol of his respect and submission.

  Mir Jafar granted Clive a jagir, or land grant, along with all its revenues, of all the land surrounding Calcutta. The jagir yielded 27,000 pounds per year, funds extracted from the local populace and paid to Clive in rent from the company. In addition to his annual jagir, Clive also possessed some 300,000 pounds of plundered loot, or “gifts” for his services. Mir Jafar’s other payments for securing his position were equally staggering: 160,000 pounds personally to Clive; another 500,000 or so pounds to be distributed among the company’s army and navy, additional gifts worth tens of thousands of pounds each to many other company officials and an ongoing annual fee of 100,000 pounds to the company to cover its military expenses. In November 1758 Clive was appointed governor of Bengal by the directors in London. Now he was also a landlord, and a sort of feudal lord ranging over his company’s most profitable trading centre. This type of arrangement was not unusual. Others certainly made fortunes from similar arrangements, but Clive’s take was unparalleled and bound to cause problems later on. What right did he have to amass such wealth for fulfilling his duties as a company employee, particularly when British national troops had aided in some of the battles?

  Clive’s struggle was not over. Over the next several years he rushed around putting down insurrections and consolidating the company’s gains. In this ongoing war between the French, English and even Dutch, their companies no longer used their meagre forces to augment the armies of local rulers, but had taken up the battle wholly on their own. The English company could not actively work to change local politics and remain merely a trading enterprise. “Either all must abstain from intervention in Indian politics,” writes Michael Edwardes in Clive: The Heaven-Born General, “an impossible eventuality after Plessey—or one must prevent any other from becoming a ‘country power’ . . . For the British, the consolidation of their position as a ‘country power’ and the reduction of the Dutch and French to mere trading status went hand in hand.”

  With Clive’s many victories military and political, the company was set to become one of the strongest powers in India.

  Historian James P. Lawford, writing in Clive: Proconsul of India, notes that Clive was now “a soldier statesman who saw a battle not as an end in itself, but only as one aspect of a policy for attaining a political objective.” The company established Bengal as its core stronghold and the seed from which British India would steadily grow. After conquering Bengal, the company controlled access to Bengal saltpetre, the greatest source of the most vital military ingredient in the world, and under that company, and later the British government, saltpetre was cut off entirely from hostile nations during times of war. The first to feel the squeeze were the French. France’s sudden and unexpected loss of Indian saltpetre in 1758 and her forced reliance on poorer-quality domestic gunpowder have been proposed by historians as key factors influencing the French to sue for peace in 1763 , ending the Seven Years’ War. The French company henceforth was allowed to trade at certain factories but would never again be permitted to host any troops.

  But all was not well. As Philip Lawson has commented in The East India Company: A History, “the trading mandate that had governed the Company’s existence since the seventeenth century disintegrated. Where commerce had once reigned supreme there now appeared territorial and political power in India with all its vexed responsibilities for the Company.” These sentiments were echoed by the contemporary observer John Nicholls in his Recollections and Reflections, published in 1822: “This Empire has been acquired by a Company of Merchants; and they retained the character of exclusive trader, after they had assumed that of sovereign . . . Sovereign and trader, are characters incompatible.” The company was starting to face responsibilities it was ill-equipped to handle as a trading corporation. Clive’s victories had given it the beginning of an empire to govern, but how to govern? Even Clive seemed aware of the enormity of the company’s new responsibilities, and perhaps also of its growing conflict of interest. In a letter he wrote to William Pitt in 1759, Clive observed: “But so large a sovereignty may possibly be an object too expensive for a mercantile company; and it is feared that they are not of themselves able, without the nation’s assistance, to maintain so wide a dominion.” Corruption began to run rampant as company officers, commanders and traders, holding near absolute power, degenerated into rapacious plunderers. The wealth of millions of Indians was slowly seeping away to quietly fill the pockets of grasping and greedy company officials and employees.

  Britain’s acquisition of the embryonic empire in Bengal was to prove far more costly and complex than could have been imagined. Indeed, the initial celebration and soaring stock prices that followed the news of Clive’s victory at Plassey were soon dampened by subsequent events, for Clive left an unstable and volatile political situation in India when returning to England in 1760. The ongoing struggles between the various nations’ companies in India mirrored the national struggles in Europe. These struggles, played against the backdrop of the decaying and crumbling Mughal Empire, perhaps made it inevitable that whichever company was victorious would have to keep expanding and destroying all its competitors—or risk being destroyed itself if it failed. The English East India Company had lost control over its destiny.

  6

  AFTER FOUR EXHAUSTING Y EARS OF WARRING WITH the French and the Dutch and trying to bring stability to the chaos threatening to overtake parts of India, Clive decided to return to England for a rest. He was now thirty-five years old.

  His annual jagir was more than the entire original capital of the English East India Company when it was founded in 1600.

  Ironically, because his personal wealth was so large, Clive dared not risk transporting it to London himself; neither did he dare to use his own company’s services. Instead he commissioned the services of the enormous Dutch East India Company, the voc, as a sort of exchange bank, depositing the sums with them in India and claiming the credit for them in England. He was now one of the most affluent individuals in England, a nation where enormous wealth was concentrated in the hands of a very few privileged aristocrats. Clive marked his return in 1760 with a great display of his riches. He bought numerous large houses and desirable estates for his family, strewing money about the land as if his wealth were limitless, which for him it basically was. He was called to a royal audience and met King George iii; he was granted a peerage in Ireland and thereafter was known as Baron Clive of Plassey; and he got himself elected to the House of Commons (in order to keep a hand in influencing political developments in India). Some of his friends were elected as well, money being of no concern to one of the wealthiest men in the nation. He also received an honorary degree from Oxford. However, Baron Clive quarrelled with powerful people in Parliament, arousing their enmity, envy and even hatred. Creating spectacles with his lavish and ostentatious display of wealth, he was caricatured as a swaggering “nabob,” a derogatory twist on the term for an Indian ruler, and one that was appended to any merchant with a vast fortune and pretensions to aristocracy.

  Clive began a lengthy and dangerous dispute with the chairman of the English East India Company, Lawrence Sulivan, and other members of the company’s board of directors. Sulivan had bridled at Clive�
�s suggestion to Pitt that the revenues from Bengal should be directed to the government rather than to the company. He threatened to block Clive’s receipt of the income from his landholdings, the jagir, around Calcutta. Although the nawab had given over the jagir to Clive personally, the company had not voted to officially approve his right to it. Despite his astronomical wealth, Clive needed the annual 27,000-pound jagir payment to maintain his extravagant lifestyle. “My future power, my grandeur,” he wrote, “all depend upon the receipt of the jagir money.” Money, and the respect engendered by its copious display in eighteenth-century Britain, was an essential ingredient in forming Clive’s larger-than-life persona. In 1763 Clive marshalled his resources to depose Sulivan, but the chairman won re-election and immediately tried to block Clive’s receipt of the jagir money. A legal battle ensued, and Clive sought to use his influence in government to pressure the company to pay him. At the same time he wrote letters to the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam ii, India’s paper ruler, to seek confirmation of his due.

  While Clive wasted his time on these frustrating squabbles, the company’s troubles in India grew larger. Its council in Calcutta replaced Mir Jafar, whom Clive had placed on the throne, with a new nawab “in a proper and public manner, that he as well as the country may see that he receives his government from the Company” and began to extort ever-greater sums from the territory in exchange for its role as kingmaker. But even the richest province in India had a limit to its wealth. Eventually armies were raised against the company by the Mughal emperor and other local princes in an attempt to destroy the English company.