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August 6 - August 10, 2020
My own view is that, while Aurangzeb is certainly a more complex figure than his detractors allow, and that it is true that early in his career he did protect Brahmins, patronise Hindu institutions and Hindu noblemen, and that he consulted with Hindu astrologers and physicians to the end, he was still an unusually cold, ruthless and unpleasant character, and his aggression and charmlessness did do much to undermine the empire he worked so hard to keep together.
For all the impressive detail of the report, the flotilla in Port Lorient was not in fact heading to India; indeed no troop-carrying French fleet left for Bengal in 1755, and when one did finally set sail, months later in December 1756, its destination was Pondicherry, not Calcutta.3 But right or wrong, the report was detailed enough to be credible, and was quickly transmitted from Port Lorient first to London and from there on to Calcutta.
Governor Drake immediately ordered work to begin on rebuilding and strengthening the city walls, an action explicitly forbidden by the Nawab of Bengal – which in turn quickly set off a chain of events fatal both for the people of Bengal and for the French in India.
Until a day earlier, this individual had been the MP for a Cornish constituency, a position from which he had just been summarily unseated due to alleged irregularities during the election. The directors did not hesitate to seize their chance. They summoned the thickset, laconic, but fiercely ambitious and unusually forceful young man, and then in formal Council presented Robert Clive with an offer of employment that he could not refuse.
This anonymity was not accidental. The Company, which had always found it useful to behave with great ostentation in India, had correspondingly found it advantageous to downplay its immense wealth at the London end of its operations.
It was not until 1648 that the Company finally moved to Leadenhall Street, operating from a humble, narrow-fronted house whose first-storey façade was decorated with images of galleons in full sail at sea. In 1698, when a casual passer-by asked who lay within, he was told ‘men with deep purses and great designs’.
Like so much about the power of the East India Company, the modest appearance of East India House was deeply deceptive.
From these rooms was run a business that was, by the 1750s, of unprecedented scale and which generated nearly £1 million out of Britain’s total £8 million import trade. Sales of tea alone cleared half a million sterling, which represented the import of some 3 million pounds of tea leaves.
The EIC’s stock was fixed in 1708 at £3.2 million, a figure which was subscribed to by some 3,000 shareholders, who earned an annual 8 per cent dividend. Every year roughly £1.1 million of EIC stock was bought and sold.
This was the business whose directors, on 25 March 1755, signed up the thirty-year-old Robert Clive, for the second time. This was something of a surprise to all parties: only eighteen months earlier, Clive had retired from the Company’s service having already made in India a substantial fortune by the age of twenty-eight.
Following several weeks of wrangling and horse-trading, a series of political shenanigans by the Tories, who were attempting to collapse the Whig government, had managed to unseat Clive by 207 votes to 183.
Clive, who first went out to India as a humble accountant, had proved to have unexpected talents in a quite different sphere. With no military training and no formal commission, and still only in his mid-twenties, the curt, withdrawn and socially awkward young accountant had been the surprise star of the Carnatic Wars, and the man who as much as anyone had prevented Dupleix from realising his dreams of expelling the EIC from India and establishing the French Compagnie in its place.
He had quickly gained a reputation as an unusually unruly and violent child: by the age of seven he had become ‘out of all measure addicted to fightin’’, according to his worried uncle, ‘which gives his temper a fierceness and imperiousness, so that he flies out upon every trifling occasion … I do what I can,’ he added, ‘to suppress the hero, that I may help forward the more valuable qualities of meekness, benevolence and patience.’
Instead, soon after hitting puberty, he had turned village delinquent, running protection rackets around Market Drayton, ‘now levying blackmail on anxious shopkeepers trembling for the security of their windows; now turning his body into a temporary dam across the street gutter to flood the shop of an offending tradesman’.
En route, Clive lost much of his baggage off Brazil, then managed to fall overboard and narrowly avoided drowning; he was only spotted by a sailor entirely by chance, fished out and saved.
unknown, unremarkable and without the necessary introductions, he led a solitary life, occasionally quarrelling with his fellow writers and getting into fights. ‘Dour, aloof and withdrawn’, on one occasion he behaved so badly to the Secretary at Fort St George that the Governor made him formally apologise.
None of his letters from Madras contain a word about the wonders of India, and he gives no hint of the sights he saw; nor does he seem to have made any attempt to learn the languages. He had no interest in the country, no eye for its beauty, no inquisitiveness about its history, religions and ancient civilisations, and not the slightest curiosity about its people whom he dismissed as universally ‘indolent, luxurious, ignorant and cowardly’.
What he did have, from the beginning, was a streetfighter’s eye for sizing up an opponent, a talent at seizing the opportunities presented by happenchance, a willingness to take great risks and a breathtaking audacity.
It was at this point, under the tutelage of Stringer Lawrence, that the Madras authorities began to imitate the French initiative and for the first time started training up their own sepoys – at first mainly Telugu-speakers – and drilling them to fight in infantry formations, supported by mobile European field artillery.
On 26 August 1751, Clive first made his name when he volunteered to march through torrential monsoon rains to relieve the siege of Arcot, the capital of the Nawabs of the Carnatic, with only a small force of 200 Europeans and 300 sepoys.
The use of speed and surprise was to remain his favourite strategy as a soldier. War in eighteenth-century India was often a slow, gentlemanly and formal affair, as much a sophisticated chess game as an act of aggression: bribes and negotiation usually played a more important role than formal assaults; armies could be bought off, or generals turned and made to break with their paymasters. Clive was happy to play these games when it suited him, but as often as not broke with these conventions, attacking when least expected and with as much ruthlessness and offensive force as possible, making
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their tame Nawab, Muhammad Ali.
Wait
On 13 June 1752, the French commander, Jacques Law, a nephew of the founder of the French Compagnie, surrendered to Clive and Lawrence outside the magnificent island temple of Srirangam, the ancient centre of Tamil Vaishnavism. Seven hundred and eighty-five French and 2,000 Compagnie sepoys were made prisoners of war.
Soon afterwards, Dupleix was sacked, arrested and sent back to France in disgrace.17 Clive, in contrast, returned to Madras a hero. In a letter of congratulation, Clive’s father urged him quickly to gather what wealth he could in India:
On 18 February 1753 Clive impulsively married the formidable Margaret Maskelyne, sister of Nevil, the Astronomer Royal, in St Mary’s, Fort St George.
Reflecting his odd position, strung between the Company’s Civil and Military services, Clive rejoined in the senior position of Deputy Governor of Madras, and was also given a military rank in the army: a local commission as a royal lieutenant colonel, effective only in India.
The decision was soon made to send out a squadron of Royal Navy warships under Admiral Watson to support the EIC’s own private army, along with some regular British army troops in order to match the regiment believed to have been sent by the French.20 Clive followed it a month later in a separate flotilla. In his pocket was a Royal Commission to take charge of the troops on arrival in India.
It was an entirely random set of political circumstances that wrecked Clive’s ultimate ambition to become a politician, destroying his fortune and forcing him back into the arms of the Company. But it was a piece of happenchance that had immense and wide-ranging repercussions.
a trading company based in one small building in the City of London defeating, usurping and seizing power from the once-mighty Mughal Empire.
Since Charnock’s death, Calcutta had quickly grown to become the jewel among the Company’s overseas trading stations: it was by far the EIC’s most important trading post in India and the major source of British textile imports.
As a result of these huge flows of cash, the city had been transformed: its fortifications, wharves and honeycomb of warehouses now straggled three miles down the silt banks of the river, towards the jungles of the Sunderbans, its flat skyline dominated by the low ramparts of Fort William, and a number of grand new ‘Grecian’ buildings:
Calcutta probably now contained around 200,000 people – though some wilder estimates put the figure at almost double that – of whom around a thousand were Europeans.
Set back from the riverfront, the European houses in Calcutta were usually large, comfortable and airy buildings, painted bright white, with wide verandas, stable blocks and large gardens.
The profits from Calcutta’s trade were huge and still growing, but what really attracted Indians to this foreign-owned Company town was the sense that it was safe and secure. Throughout the 1740s, while the Carnatic Wars were raging in the south, the Marathas had attacked Bengal with horrifying violence, killing what the Dutch VOC chief in Bengal estimated to be as many as 400,000 civilians.
The Marathas followed a scorched-earth policy, burning the neighbouring villages to prevent grain from reaching the enemy. The Nawab’s soldiers were thus denied food, conveyance and their own baggage, and so rendered ineffective, something the Company factors graphically described in their letters home.
What was a nightmare for Bengal turned out to be a major opportunity for the Company. Against artillery and cities defended by the trained musketeers of the European powers, the Maratha cavalry was ineffective.
displaced Bengalis now poured over it into the town that they believed offered better protection than any other in the region, more than tripling the size of Calcutta in a decade.
Calcutta had become a haven of private enterprise, drawing in not just Bengali textile merchants and moneylenders, but also Parsis, Gujaratis and Marwari entrepreneurs and business houses who found it a safe and sheltered environment in which to make their fortunes.34
The city’s legal system, and the availability of a framework of English commercial law and formal commercial contracts, enforceable by the state, all contributed to making it increasingly the destination of choice for merchants and bankers from across Asia.
by 1756 the city had a fabulously diverse and polyglot population: as well as Bengalis, and Hindu and Jain Marwari bankers, there were Portuguese, Armenians, Persians, Germans, Swedes and Dutch, some – judging by an early census – with sophisticated and sometimes bizarre skills: watch- and clockmakers, painters, pastry cooks, goldsmiths, undertakers and wig fabricators.
The Black Town – the Indian section of Calcutta, with its countless temples and mosques and bustling vegetable markets – was even more chaotic, dirty and swampy than the White Town.
Telling names
Whatever their many vices, wrote Shushtari, the English welcomed and rewarded talent: ‘the English have no arbitrary dismissal,’ he noted, ‘and every competent person keeps his job until he writes his own request for retirement or resignation. More remarkable still is that they take part in most of the festivals and ceremonies of Muslims and Hindus, mixing with the people. They pay great respect to accomplished scholars of whatever sect.’
Shushtari was not alone in being suspicious of Calcutta’s rakish English inhabitants. They had come east with just one idea: to amass a fortune in the quickest possible time, and most had little interest in either the mores of the country they were engaged in trade with, or indeed in the social niceties of that which they had left behind.
Calcutta was a city where great wealth could be accumulated in a matter of months, then lost in minutes in a wager or at the whist table.
two-thirds of the Company servants who came out never made it back – fewer still in the Company’s army, where 25 per cent of European soldiers died each year.
Most found that Calcutta was an expensive town to live in: keeping a decent house in Bengal at this time cost around £1,000 per annum* and almost all of Calcutta’s European inhabitants were to some extent in debt to Indian moneylenders.
Amid all these frantic attempts at money-making, Drake’s Calcutta Council had forgotten one major consideration: the importance of maintaining the city’s defences. The fort walls were visibly crumbling, the guns rusting and new buildings had encroached on all sides of the battlements, in several cases looking down over the fortifications.
The experiments made in Madras during the Carnatic Wars of training up the local warrior castes as sepoys had not yet been introduced to Bengal. As Captain David Renny reported, ‘Calcutta is as deficient of military stores, as it is of soldiers’:
Jean Law,
Oh come on
Aliverdi Khan, who was of mixed Arab and Afshar Turkman stock, had come to power in 1740 in a military coup financed and masterminded by the immensely powerful Jagat Seth bankers, who controlled the finances of Bengal.
