Robert Clive
Robert Clive won Bengal for the East India Company and killed himself at forty-nine. Born in Shropshire in 1725 into a family of minor gentry, he was an unruly child sent to several schools, and was shipped out as a Company writer — a clerk — to Madras in 1744. He was miserable, and is said to have attempted suicide twice with a pistol that failed to fire. The French captured Madras in 1746 and he escaped in disguise and took a commission. He made his name in 1751 at Arcot, seizing the capital of the French-backed candidate for the Carnatic with about five hundred men and holding it through a fifty-day siege, which broke French influence in southern India. He returned to Bengal after the Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah took Calcutta in 1756 and confined captives in a cell where a disputed number died. At Plassey in June 1757 he faced some fifty thousand men with about three thousand. The battle was decided by a conspiracy: Mir Jafar, the Nawab's commander, held his troops back under an agreement Clive had made with him, and a rainstorm soaked the Bengali powder. Clive lost about twenty men. He installed Mir Jafar and took an enormous personal fortune. In 1765 he obtained the diwani, the right to collect Bengal's revenue, which made a trading company the effective government of thirty million people. The Bengal famine of 1770 killed perhaps a third of the population under that administration. He was investigated by parliament, cleared, and died in 1774.
- Lived: 1725 CE – 1774 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: military_leader, governor_of_bengal, east_india_company_official
