Priya Satia
Late in 1774, Lord Robert Clive was found dead in his London townhouse. Rumors flew that conscience had finally compelled the rapacious conqueror to take his own life. Having just arrived in Pennsylvania from England, Thomas Paine recalled how the riches Clive wrested through “murder and rapine” and “famine and wretchedness” in India had enveloped him in the “sunshine of sovereign favor” at home, allowing him to enter into further “schemes of war … and intrigue” to amass an “unbounded fortune.” In the end, however, “guilt and melancholy” had proved “poisons of quick despatch.”
Clive was a reckless fortune-hunter in the British East India Company (EIC), the chartered monopoly company trading in the Indian Ocean region—heavily armed, to compel trade on its terms. When the British and French went to war globally in 1756, their rivalrous companies in India did, too, and Clive secured the EIC’s first major territory in Bengal in 1757. Long-held company towns at the subcontinent’s edges expanded into a company-owned state.
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