Abstract
Sir John Malcolm’s final historical project, the Life of Lord Clive, took his survey of the history of the East India Company back, before 1784, to the start of British territorial conquest and expansion in India. Clive, the founder of the British empire in Bengal, remained a hugely controversial figure, reviled by many as the archetype of the corrupt and ostentatious “nabob” of the 1760s and 1770s. “Nabob,” a corruption of “Nawab,” was a term used in Britain to describe Company servants and others who used the vast fortunes they had made in the East to gain political influence and buy into the British landed elite.1 In the historiography of British India, Malcolm’s hagiographic Clive and Macaulay’s brilliant and more famous review of it, set the stage for Clive’s Victorian reputation as the illustrious founder of the empire in India.
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Notes
T. G. Percival Spear, The Nabobs. A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth Century India (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 12;
P. J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 43.
Martha McLaren, British India and British Scotland, 1780–1830. Career Building, Empire Building, and a Scottish School of Thought on Indian Governance (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2001); Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 994).
P. Lawson and B. Lenman, “Robert Clive, the Black Jagir and English Politics,” Historical Journal, XXVI (1983): 801.
T. B. Macaulay, “The Life of Robert Lord Clive; Collected from the Family Papers Communicated by the Earl of Powis. By Major-General Sir John Malcolm, K.C.B., 3 vols. 8vo. London: 1836,” Edinburgh Review 70 (January 1840).
J. W. Kaye, The Life and Correspondence of Major-General SirJohn Malcolm, G. C. B., Late Envoy to Persia, and Governor of Bombay: Late Envoy to Persia, and Governor of Bombay; from Unpublished Letters and Journals, vol. II (London: Smith, Elder, 1856), p. 427.
Douglas M. Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in Early Nineteenth Century India (London: Taurus Press, 1995), pp. 170–73.
Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics 1757–1773(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 23–24.
James Mill, History of British India, vol. II (London: Peer, Stephenson and Spence, 1844), pp. 106, 209.
D. M. Peers, “Conquest Narratives: Romanticism, Orientalism and Intertextuality in the Indian Writings of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Orme,” in Michael Franklin (ed.), Romantic Representations of British India (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 247.
Sinharaja Tammita Delgoda, “‘Nabob, Historian, and Orientalist.’ Robert Orme: The Life and Career of an East India Company Servant (1728–1801),” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3rd Series, 2 (1992): 373.
A number of important contemporary histories by Muslim authors carry the same sense of gloom and were available in manuscript form to British officials in India. The Sier is simply the most famous in this genre and the most relevant to Bengal. C. A. Bayly, “Modern Indian Historiography,” in M. Bentley (ed.), A Companion to Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 670.
T. G. Percival Spear, Master of Bengal: Clive and his India (London: BCA, 1975), p. 215.
Charles Caraccioli, Life of Robert Clive, Baron Plassey, vol. I (London, 1775), p. 1.
Stokes took Mill, the imperial administrator, to be a promoter of “utilitarian reform”; Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), p. xvi. His cautiousness about the implementation of sudden, sweeping reform in India is noted in the introduction to Mill’s History of British India, William Thomas (ed.) (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
Sir John Malcolm, The Life of Robert Lord Clive; Collected from the Family Papers, Communicated by the Earl of Powis, vol. I (London: John Murray, 1836), p. 164–65.
William Robertson, History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (London: Routledge, 1996).
This largely political interpretation was not really challenged until the 1970s. The work of individuals such as Frank Perlin, Richard Barnett, and C. A. Bayly has been significant here. See, for example, Christopher Bayly, Townsmen, Ruler and Bazaars: North India in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
This is still a popular interpretation. See, for instance, A. Calder, Revolutionary Empires: The Rise of the English Speaking Empires from the Fifteenth Century to the 1780s (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), p. 594.
For the importance of the Black Hole in the historical imagery of British India, see Kate Teltscher, “The Fearful Name of the Black Hole: Fashioning an Imperial Myth,” in Bart Moore-Gilbert (ed.), Writing India, 1757–1990: The Literature of British India, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 30–51.
J. Z. Holwell, A Genuine Narrative of the Deplorable Deaths of the English Gentlemen and Others, Who Were Suffocated in the Black Hole in Fort William, at Calcutta (London: A. Millar, 1758).
The importance of monetization in the political history of Muslim countries as an explanation of frequent dynastic changes in government can be found, among others places, in Andre Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society and Politics under the Eighteenth-Century Maratha Swarajya(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 23–35.
John W. Burrow, Stephen Collini, and Donald Winch, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 28.
Sir Cyril H. Philips, East India Company, 1784–1833 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1941), pp. 290, 294–5.
K. J. M. Smith, “Macaulay’s ‘Utilitarian’ Indian Penal Code: An Illustration of the Accidental Framework of Time, Place and Personalities in Law Making,” in W. M. Gordon and T. O. Fergus (eds.), Legal History in the Making: Proceedings of the 9th British Legal History Conference (London: Hambledon Press, 1991), p. 154.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Inscription on the Statute of Lord Bentinck,” in The Work of Lord Macaulay, vol. VIII (London: Longmans, Green, 1897), p. 379.
T. B. Macaulay to M. Napier, 28 November 1839 in T. Pinney (ed.), The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, vol. III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 309.
John W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 35.
See, for example, J. W. Kaye, The Lives of Indian Officers, Illustrative of the History of the Civil and Military Service of India (London: A. Strahan, 1867);
W. W. Hunter and G. D. Oswell, Sketches of the Rulers of India Volume Two: The Company’s Governors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), p. 126.
N. C. Chaudhuri, Clive of India: A Political and Psychological Study (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1975), p. 10.
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© 2010 Jack Harrington
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Harrington, J. (2010). The History of the East India Company II: The Life of Robert, Lord Clive . In: Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117501_7
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