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Robert Clive

Robert Clive (1725-1774), also known as ‘Clive of India’ and Baron Clive of Plassey, masterminded the expansion of the East India Company in India. Best known for his victory at Plassey in Bengal in 1757, Clive’s reputation suffered in his own lifetime from charges of corruption and subsequently as one of the main architects of British imperialism in India.

The East India Company

Robert Clive was born into a country gentry family at the ancestral home of Styche Hall in Shropshire, England, on 29 September 1725. His father was Richard Clive and his mother Rebecca Gaskell. He studied at Merchant Taylor’s school in London from 1737 and then accounting in a specialist school in Hemel Hempstead. At just 17, Clive joined the East India Company (EIC) as a humble ‘writer’ or clerk in December 1742. He arrived in India in 1744 after an unusually long 15-month voyage since his ship had run aground on the coast of Brazil. It was here in India that he would fulfil his ambiguous destiny as both champion of the British Empire and utterly ruthless colonialist. The historian S. Mansingh gives the following summary of Clive’s character: “sturdy, violent, self-centred, emotional, generous, courageous, and brilliant in adversity” (101).

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