The Plassey Plunder: Lord Clive and the East India Company



Swapan Chowdhury is a retired senior banker and a stocks…
Explore the meticulously planned exploitation and plunder of Bengal by the British East India Company under Robert Clive, following the death of the last Great Mughal, Aurangzeb. This historical account delves into the Battle of Plassey, the gory loot of Bengal, the economic devastation, and the Great Famine, highlighting the ruthless tactics employed by the British to establish their dominance in India.
The British were not just traders but scheming, blood-sucking warrior traders who had planned their plunder of India very carefully. The last of the Great Mughals, Muhi-al Din Mohammad, aka Aurangzeb died in 1707. At the time India’s GDP was equal to the sum total of the GDPs of all the European countries put together (Aurangzeb: Audrey Truschke) And the British had set about to loot that, of which the largest volume of wealth was perhaps in Bengal.
Bengal Suba was the largest contributor to the Mughal GDP. The revenue of the province was ten times that of the GDP of France under Louis 14th. In the 1690s, India’s economy had grown faster than that of China to make it the biggest economy in the world, garnering 25 percent of the GDP of the world. Europe during that period was in economic regression, and hence, India became a base for the French East India Company, the Danish East India Company, the Dutch East India Company, the Austrian East India Company, the Ostend Company, and the British East India Company.

Bengal was then under the Afshar Dynasty – first Alivardi Khan and then Mirza Mohammad Siraj-ud Daula. Many think that the Afshar dynasty came from outside of India but actually, Alivardi, the founder of the dynasty, was born somewhere in the Deccan Plateau and came to Bengal. Siraj-ud-daula was born at Murshidabad. Siraj-ud Daula was immensely wealthy, gutsy, and powerful. He would not let the British get away with their arrogant plan of loot of his suba, or province. At that time, Siraj was the sole ruler of Bengal, Bihar, and Odisha. On June 20, 1756, the gutsy 24-year-old Siraj led his army and routed the East India Company (EIC) crushing the firangees (foreigners).

Robert Clive, who had entered the East India Company (EIC) at the level of just an assistant shopkeeper, called a “writer” (of books of accounts), had risen quickly by winning southern lands from the local rulers and the French. So after the sack of Calcutta by Siraj, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Clive was sent to recover the city, which he did. Then he went about planning the loot of Bengal. And for that, he had to capture and kill Siraj-ud Daula. Robert Clive and his Indian compradors like Jagat Sett, bribed Mir Jafar, the general of Siraj-ud Daula, and when the British attacked the royal army in the field of Plassey, Mir Jafar refused to fight. Siraj was routed and killed at the age of 24, and thus the Battle of Plassey entered the annals of world history, and the name Mir Jafar came to mean a ‘back-stabber’.

The Gory Loot of Bengal
According to the conspiracy, Mir Jafar would be made the Nawab of Bengal. In lieu, he would have to remit Rs 44 lakh as compensation for the army and British riverine fleet. That amounted to £64 million: in today’s valuation, Rs 610 crore.
Not just that. Clive also squeezed out of Mir Jafar another Rs 2.5 crore for the upkeep of the EIC army from 1757 till 1760. That amounts today to around Rs 30,000 crore. (Source: The Hindu, June 23, 2018).
And Clive’s personal booty? A personal jagir of £30,000 (equivalent to 54 crores) per year, which was the rent the EIC would otherwise pay to the Nawab for their tax-farming concession. This is interesting, because Clive’s salary as a writer at that time was £5 PER YEAR, and an additional £40 per year was paid as office expenses and personal, that is a total of £45 per year, or Rs 4,773/-. In India, had he lived today, Robert Clive would not be even a BPL, but because of that jagir he squeezed from Bengal, he would have today in India Rs 54 crore!
Looting A Dream
Eventually, what was the EIC drawing as revenue from Bengal? In his tome, Early Land Revenue System in Bengal and Bihar, historian DN Banerjee gives this table.
May to April. Amount (in Rupees)
1761-62 677,832
1762-63 635,199
1763-64 631,416
1764-65 606,132
1765-66 (including Bihar) 16,81,427
1766-67 (including Bihar) 25,50,094
1767-68 (including Bihar) 24,51,255
1768-69 (including Bihar) 24,02,191
1769-70 (including Bihar) 21,18,294
1770-71 (including Bihar) 20,09,988
1771-72 (including Bihar) 23,80,165
So very clearly, the EIC wrung Bengal dry and financially ripped Bengal apart,
I would like to say here that history is never an isolated narrative. Any historical analysis must take into consideration the then existing social, economic, and political factors. For instance, Banerjee shows that between 1761 and 1765, the revenue milked out by the EIC from Bengal increased from Rs 600,000 per annum to Rs 2,500,000. The Company’s excuse was that the money was needed to fight the Buxar War.
It was a ruse they invented: the British East India Company fought the Battle of Buxar to expand its territorial command and its revenue base. The Battle of Buxar took place on October 22, 1764, between the British East India Company, commanded by Hector Munro, and the united forces of Shuja-ud-Daula, the Nawab of Awadh; Mir Qasim, the Nawab of Bengal; and the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam. All of them had challenged the EIC’s loot of their motherland.
The Indian coalition forces lost and so, apart from the Rs 25 lakh in compensation, the EIC concluded the Treaty of Allahabad and seized from the Nawab his entire proud territory that once stretched across Bengal-Bihar-Odisha. So, the Company took over the entire revenue of this vast area. And this means that while the British till then were ripping only the treasuries of the princes and Nawabs, after the Treaty of Allahabad, EIC had the right to rip the common man at its will and fancy!
The Great Famine
While the Nawab administration used to levy a tax on farmers @15 per cent of the produce, under the EIC, by 1771-72, it reached a whopping 50 per cent! Moreover, during the Mughal period, 35 to 50 per cent of the land was tax free. The village councils used to utilise the income from these tax-free lands to maintain the places of worship of the village, the village schools, small irrigation systems, and even help the poor at the time of atrocities.
The EIC brought those lands under a tax regime, shutting off the Income of the village councils. Besides, unleashing a reign of intolerable terror on the farmers, the EIC forced them to cultivate poppy seeds (opium seeds, as the British were exporting opium to China to save their trade-related billions) and indigo plantation, a natural dye the newfound British textile industry needed to whiten their coarse mill cloths. The excessive taxation meant the farmers lost their food surplus on the one hand. And on the other, EIC forced the farmers to cultivate commercial crops (opium and indigo) the food production also fell drastically.
If you note, there was a drastic drop in revenue from Rs 25 lakh in 1767 to Rs 20 lakh in 1771, This double whammy soon led to an acute shortage of food, leading to the infamous ‘Bengal Famine of ’76’. (This is because while the year according to the Gregorian Calendar it was1770-71, according to the Bengali (Bangabda) calendar, the year was 1176. One-third of the entire population of Bengal was wiped out. Ten million Bengalis died out of sheer hunger in one year.
The EIC was not affected by a whisker, because it had gained so much! But how much? The man who had arrived in India as a petty clerk, at an annual salary of Rs 4,773, became EIC’s Governor Bengal Province first between 1758-60 and again between 1764-67, and by the time he reached back to the shores of England (1767), the EIC had garnered an annual revenue of £4 million, which was the highest amongst all European countries. And when Clive died (by suicide) in 1774, his personal fortune was estimated at £500,000, today valued at £33 million, or Rs 350 crore.
With the money that he had, he bought for himself and his father two permanent seats in the British House of Lords (Source: National Army Museum, UK: https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/robert-clive)
And what about the England under King George III? Almost the entire hallowed Industrial Revolution (1760 to 1840) was financed by the loot from India. It does not require much imagination to see that Siraj-ud Daula was killed at Plassey in 1757, and the loot of Bengal had started, and within three years, 1760, the much applauded Industrial Revolution had kicked off.
Of course, there is no need to read this financing by loot in just financial terms. The ECI took other terrible measures. One was the forced cultivation of indigo and poppy. But even more horrifying was the assault on the core industry of Bengal: Indian textiles. The finest muslins in the world were produced in Bengal, especially from the area now under Bangladesh, and were prized across Europe and America as an emblem of class status. These English textiles, produced with machines constructed with Indian loot money, overshadowed the coarse cloth. The upper class refused to look at England’s mill-made cloth.
Thus it is that the British cloth mills engineered the death of the fabulous Indian handloom textile industry and (ensured that by chopping off the thumbs of thousands of Bengali handloom weavers. There’s no authentic source, but the book Considerations on Indian Affairs, by one William Bolts, and Anarchy by William Dalrymple described the oppression and the tyranny unleashed by the EIC and their accomplices at that time.
And thus it is that the British brought India out of a ‘dark medieval period’ and made us ‘modern’. We were given the Bengal Renaissance (?). And the Bengali Babu class received the patronage of the British in lieu of helping the latter with their loot. And yet, the fact that even the servitude of this newly ‘rewoken’ Babu class did nothing to change the British mindset towards Indians is evident from an infamous quote of British Prime Minister Winston Spencer Churchill.
During the Second World War, the second planned genocide of the Famine of 1943, killed five million Indians. When this figure was told to Churchill, he cryptically asked: “So why is Gandhi still alive!” And when he was requested to send aid to India, he said: “Indians are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” He rejected the allegation that the famine was due to his decision of stockpiling food in India for feeding British soldiers, and dismissed the cause of the famine because “Indians breed like rabbits”!
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Swapan Chowdhury is a retired senior banker and a stocks trade analyst. In the course of his job, he had been posted all across the eastern and northeaster states. He has a great passion for writing. He has written many deeply touching stories about the common men and women he got to meet during his tenure. He is also a specialist contrarian amateur historian especially on issues like the history of Bengal and of the Bengal Renaissance.