Clive

Robert Harvey traces Robert Clive’s transformation from a troubled Shropshire youth and East India Company clerk into the soldier who altered Britain’s position in India. The biography follows his improvised defence of Arcot during the Carnatic Wars, the contest with Joseph François Dupleix and the French, and the mixture of personal audacity, Company commerce and Indian alliance politics that made his early military reputation.

Clive’s return to Bengal after the capture of Calcutta leads to the conspiracy against Siraj ud-Daulah and the Battle of Plassey in 1757, after which the Company became a decisive territorial power. Harvey examines Clive’s relationship with Mir Jafar, his enormous private fortune, his later attempt to regulate Company corruption and the parliamentary inquiry into his conduct. The final chapters consider his declining health and controversial death in 1774, while assessing both his military achievement and his central responsibility for the foundations of British rule in Bengal.