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By Root 1228 0

plan was to wait out the bombardment and then, outnumbered twenty to one though they were, to counterattack late at night, relying on Mir Jafar to improve the odds by withdrawing his forces from the field. Suddenly, it began to pour with rain; with their gunpowder soaked, the nawab’s cannon were immediately put out of action. When Mir Jafar kept his promise, wheeling his forces off downriver, away from the fighting, the battle was as good as decided. The Company forces broke cover and chased down the nawab’s fleeing soldiers. Clive’s dispatch to the Company informed them that ‘five hundred [enemy] horses are killed and three elephants. Our loss is trifling, not above 20 Europeans killed and wounded.’ Siraj ud-Daula, who had attempted to escape ‘disguised in a mean dress … attended only by his favourite concubine … and eunuch’, was caught and put to death later.

Clive’s victory effectively doubled the size of British-controlled India, turning him into perhaps the most powerful British citizen of all time, with 40 million people living under his authority – five times the population of his home country. He had also transformed a seaborne trading enterprise into a land empire. The government in London – months away by sea – had had no say in this massive acquisition. But, whether they desired it or not, they now had an empire in India.

And with it came enormous personal temptations for Clive. As Macaulay put it, ‘In the field … his habits were remarkably simple … But when he was no longer at the head of an army, he laid aside this Spartan temperance for the ostentatious luxury of a Sybarite.’ Like others who joined the Company, Clive was in India to make his fortune – the phrase ‘buccaneering capitalists’ might have been invented for them – but he was in a class of his own: inventive and bold on the battlefield, scheming and devious in business. He made political deals the way he made business deals, audaciously, promiscuously, arrogantly, and was always ready to redefine what they meant. Victory at Plassey had delivered him the cornucopia of Bengal, and Clive set an example by immediately filling his boots. Having installed Mir Jafar on the throne, he turned to the question of payment due from his puppet, the first instalment of which was sent downriver to the British fort in a convoy of seventy-five boats under naval escort, perhaps the biggest haul of booty in history. Clive used the spoils of India as a shortcut to the trappings of eminence in England – country estates, works of art, to say nothing of the seat in parliament, along with others for his father and a close friend. Soon came a peerage to mark his victory. To his disappointment, it was only an Irish one, so he changed the name of his estate in County Clare to Plassey.

But there was more to come. The survival of the nawabs depended upon their ability to enforce the payment of taxes, and the Company’s army (much of it drawn from traditional mercenary or warrior sections of Indian society and officered by men recruited in Britain) was much the most powerful force in the land. The Indian princes’ military inferiority increasingly rendered them hostage to the Company. Mir Jafar, for example, was soon utterly dependent upon British forces, and the Company could insist that he foot the bill not merely for his own security but for their investment and campaigns elsewhere.

Clive returned to India in 1765 and found the Company’s army poised for a possible advance on Delhi, the seat of the Mughal emperor. He settled instead for a treaty with the emperor by which the Mughals recognized the British as tax collectors in Bengal, Orissa and Bihar in return for being left alone. The nawab had become now little more than an ornament. (Clive, characteristically, realized that the arrangement would make the Company even more attractive to investors, and used the development for some serious insider dealing.) When Clive arrived back in England again in July 1767, his personal fortune was estimated at £400,000, an enormous sum at the time. The government festooned him with more