Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [37]
The British had arrived in the east for much the same reason as other Europeans: they saw a chance to make money. In 1616 Sir Thomas Roe had presented himself to the Mughal emperor to request trading rights. He stayed at the emperor’s court for three years, ingratiating himself with presents including an English coach, swords, hats, mastiffs and liberal quantities of alcohol, which the notionally Muslim emperor enjoyed very much indeed. Roe did not anticipate the creation of a massive British colony: having looked at the way the existing Dutch and Portuguese trading missions operated, he concluded that it was a mistake to seek a land empire. ‘Let this be received as a rule that if you will profit, seek it at sea, and in quiet trade,’ he told the East India Company.
It is easy enough to imagine the seductive impression Mughal India must have made upon foreign visitors, for it was almost certainly the richest empire in the world at the time. Inside the vast Red Fort in Delhi (constructed a few years after Roe’s departure) cool water in pools set into the floor reflected gold and silvered ceilings. The walls were decorated with delicate mosaics and fountains played in the gardens. At the fort’s heart was a marble audience chamber where the emperor sat on a gem-encrusted peacock throne; above his head, picked out in gold on the ceiling, were the words ‘If there be paradise on earth, it is this, it is this.’ India was a place where anyone willing to take a few risks might make immense sums of money very quickly, as the experience of Thomas Pitt, the son of a West Country vicar, showed. He had first set himself up at Balasore in the Bay of Bengal as a dealer in sugar and horses in 1673, after jumping ship. His business career culminated in his purchase of a 410-carat diamond (‘the unparalleled jewel of the world’) which was smuggled to Europe and finally sold for many times its original price to become part of the French Crown Jewels. ‘Diamond’ Pitt had by then acquired the usual perquisites of wealth – English country estates and a seat in the House of Commons. His grandson and great-grandson both became prime minister. ‘Get rich quick’ might have been the recruiting slogan for the East India Company, which by the early eighteenth century had established four trading stations in forts at Surat, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta.
The man who did more than anyone else to transform the British presence in India into something distinctly imperial was Robert Clive. He had never looked likely to follow his father into the law – too headstrong, too unstable, too daredevil. Local legends in his home town of Market Drayton, Shropshire, talked of his climbing the local church tower and sitting there atop a gargoyle, of protection rackets in which his gang threatened to smash the windows of merchants who refused to pay up. There was certainly plenty of fighting. His family must have let out something of a sigh of relief when at the age of seventeen he took ship to become a clerk with the East India Company. The story of his rise from clerk to colonel, tearaway to tycoon, is the story of the British transition from trade to empire. When Robert Clive arrived at the Company’s Fort St George in Madras in June 1744 to begin work as a ‘writer’, the British presence in India was still confined to a handful of forts on the coast, of which St George was the oldest, with high walls and barracks and spired church within. The French were established in a similar toehold, along the coast at Pondicherry. Clive was ill suited to life as a clerk and prone to depression: he tried to shoot himself and was saved only because his pistol failed to fire. Twice. Then, in September 1746, a French warship appeared off the coast and with minimum inconvenience captured St George. Clive escaped and by three days of night marching reached