Treasure Seekers: Empires of India Page #3

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the British empire in India

and in the process made himself

a vast fortune.

Now he stands accused of

criminal greed and exploitation.

In the House of Commons

he rises to his defense.

Gentlemen, a great prince was

dependent on my pleasure,

an opulent city lay at my mercy;

its richest bankers bid against

each other for my smiles;

I walked through vaults which were

thrown open to me alone,

piled on either hand

with gold and jewels!

Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand

astonished at my own moderation!

Robert Clive will not be bowed.

His life is ending as it began

in a furious and lonely struggle.

Born in 1725 in Shropshire

in the West of England,

he was given up by his mother as

a child and raised by relatives.

It happened at the insistence

of his father

an ineffectual lawyer from

the minor country gentry,

who barely earned enough to keep

the family afloat.

Rejected by his family

and naturally unruly,

young Robert was soon running wild

in the little town of Market Drayton.

He pioneered the business methods,

which would make him his later fortune

as the head of a juvenile gang.

It was a protection racket

if merchants agreed to pay a small fee,

the boys would agree

NOT to break their windows.

Robert was adventurous,

brave and bad.

He was an average student

and much more interested in

mischief than in school.

He climbed the church tower

of Market Drayton

and hung over the side

for the sheer thrill of it.

Robert grew up craving excitement,

but wanted acceptance

by his family even more.

When he was 17,

a job as a clerk in the East India

Company promised adventure,

money and a chance

to redeem his family.

Clive set his sights on India.

On the first of June 1744,

a cutter deposited Robert in a

rowboat just off the coast of Madras.

Splashing ashore,

he got his first sight of India.

The Madras, Robert discovered,

was an exotic melting pot

of Indian, Southeast Asian

and European influences.

Here British, French and Dutch

traders had established themselves

to take advantage of the

astonishingly lucrative trade

in cloth, spices and opium.

In those days the young men who

became clerks in the East India Company

were a little bit like the Eurobond

dealers of our day.

If you wanted to make a pile...

I mean there was a great risk

attached to this

because you could go out to India and

promptly die of some dreadful disease.

But there was a chance also,

that you might make a whole

sort of pile of money.

These early European colonialists

merged with the Indian population

much more completely than

later ones would.

Many traders went native, and began

to behave like local potentates.

So they lived as Indians,

wore Indian clothes quite often,

certainly adopted Indian manners

and customs.

Many of them had harems.

As far as the Indian princes

are concerned,

they looked upon the company as

another Indian presence,

not as a foreigner necessarily

invading.

This was global capitalism

in its infancy.

Clive and his friends were pioneers

of the system

that would soon dominate

the entire world.

But in 1745 Robert was

discovering that

the life of a clerk in India

was not easy.

His salary was five pounds a year.

He soon felt desperately lonely and

more cut adrift from home than ever.

His unhappiness came to a head when

several ships appeared in the harbor.

Every European in Madras received

a letter or package from home

except Clive.

He was devastated.

Clive had a mercurial temperament.

This apparent humiliation

at the hands of his family

plunged him into the depths

of depression.

Feeling utterly alone and cast off,

he put a gun to his head

and pulled the trigger.

Twice it failed to go off.

"Fate it seems must be reserving me

for some other purpose,"

he would later tell a friend.

In fact, fate had extraordinary

things in store for Clive

wild swings of fortune, dizzying

heights but also the darkest depths.

Throughout his life periods

of intense,

feverish activity would alternate

with bouts of deep despair.

He would probably be diagnosed today

as a manic depressive.

Clive soon discovered that

opium was the only cure

and he would use it as a medicine

for the rest of his life.

Clive got used to loneliness.

The British lived in

Fort St. George.

You had the fort and then you had

Blacktown outside.

They called it Blacktown,

and that's where all the Indians lived.

The British seldom ventured into

Blacktown

except when they wanted to go

and pick up hookers, basically.

And Clive, certainly it was known

he had this sort of

fondness for prostitutes.

Perhaps the one consolation for Clive

and his fellow

colonialists was that,

being so far from home, they could do

almost whatever they liked.

As a proverb of the time said:

"there are no sins south of

the equator."

As Europeans woke up to the phenomenal

profits to be made in India,

the competition for trade intensified.

Finally in 1746,

open war broke out between the

British and French in India

each side supported by

their local allies and clients.

It was just the push Clive needed.

He was galvanized by new energy

and enthusiasm.

For the next five years of

Anglo French conflict in India,

Clive fought in the militia of

the East India Company

where his raw aggression

and boundless energy won him

promotions and success

at the same furious pace.

In return for his victories against

the French,

culminating in the battle of Arcot,

he was rewarded with an appointment

as quartermaster of the company

factory at Madras.

He would find a way to make a profit

out of the soldiers' provisions.

Now, it doesn't sound very grand,

but the great thing

about quartermaster is

You were given a great wad of money

and told to go feed your troops.

And if you could feed your troops

on half the amount of money

you'd been given,

then you were allowed

to keep the rest.

By the time Clive was 27,

he had made himself a small fortune

Clive was also being credited with

turning the tide

against the French.

News of his success astonished

the family back in England.

His father is said to have remarked:

"Perhaps Robert is not such a booby

after all".

Finally Clive was getting

the recognition he craved.

Now he hungered for it

on a wider stage.

One event would set the seal

not only on Clive's fortunes in India

but that of the British as well.

In 1756, the Mughal Nawab,

or 'prince of Bengal' Siraj,

seized the British East India

Company's fort in Calcutta.

The British in India were furious.

Their outrage soared

when stories circulated

about the Mughals' treatment

of European prisoners.

When he seized the fort,

Siraj had ordered the imprisonment

of all company employees.

The Indians locked their

British captives in a cell

designed by the British

for Indian captives.

It was tiny 18 by 14 feet

with only a couple of minuscule,

barred windows.

The night of June 20th,

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