Books in Brief: Clive of India

Clive of India, by Mark Bence-Jones (St. Martin’s, 303 pp., $8.95).

Our heroes today are seldom or never empire-builders and imperialist soldiers; rather, social workers and political reformers. But once, young boys were brought up to admire men like Cecil Rhodes, “Chinese” Gordon, and Robert Clive. Other times, other tastes. Clive, roughly speaking (and he could be very rough), was to eighteenth-century India what Rhodes became for nineteenth-century southern Africa—a zestful expansionist and conscientious administrator, lacking the far-reaching historical vision of a Rhodes, but sharing his renown, his many political enemies, and his weak health. The achievement of Robert Clive was to establish British power definitely in the region of Calcutta and Bengal, apparently without anticipating the grandeur of Queen Victoria’s Raj, which would stretch west to Bombay and the Khyber and south to the tip of the subcontinent His victories (Plassey among them) doomed not only French hopes in India but eventually the power of the decadent princelings of a land that was Asia’s answer to the ramshackle Holy Roman Empire. Clive’s aggressiveness in the 1750s and ’60s opened the road to India’s only age of prosperity and sound government in centuries: the years of the British viceregal dominion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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J. D. Futch

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Clive of India, by Mark Bence-Jones (St. Martin’s, 303 pp., $8.95).

Our heroes today are seldom or never empire-builders and imperialist soldiers; rather, social workers and political reformers. But once, young boys were brought up to admire men like Cecil Rhodes, “Chinese” Gordon, and Robert Clive. Other times, other tastes. Clive, roughly speaking (and he could be very rough), was to eighteenth-century India what Rhodes became for nineteenth-century southern Africa—a zestful expansionist and conscientious administrator, lacking the far-reaching historical vision of a Rhodes, but sharing his renown, his many political enemies, and his weak health. The achievement of Robert Clive was to establish British power definitely in the region of Calcutta and Bengal, apparently without anticipating the grandeur of Queen Victoria’s Raj, which would stretch west to Bombay and the Khyber and south to the tip of the subcontinent His victories (Plassey among them) doomed not only French hopes in India but eventually the power of the decadent princelings of a land that was Asia’s answer to the ramshackle Holy Roman Empire. Clive’s aggressiveness in the 1750s and ’60s opened the road to India’s only age of prosperity and sound government in centuries: the years of the British viceregal dominion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.