Source: Google photo of the battle of Plassey of 1757 in Bengal
Synopsis: The Europeans were the pioneer colonialists who took over a large number of countries like India that was very rich in resources they could loot with impunity to enrich their own countries. So, England, France, Germany, Portugal, Holland and Spain all became the colonial powers in Africa, India and many other countries in Latin America and North America like the United States and Canada. Among them the British created the largest empire where the sun never set that made their economy strong with their loot. The blog looks at how the British with a handful of administrators and a small army of military officers were able to defeat the large armies of kings and sultans in India using deception and cunning to take over the country they ruled for over 200 years.
After writing about Africa in a blog called Rise of Africa, I had to write about the loot of India by the British who redefined the word loot and gave it new meaning in the annals of history of colonialism in Asia, Africa and other continents. The sheer amount of wealth looted from India by the British was extraordinary during some two hundred years of rule but in today's terms it was no less than an unbelievable sum of 40 trillion of dollars that will boggle your mind. Most people do not even know how many zeros are needed in one trillion let alone imagine how big an amount it was.
So, by going back into the history book, I come across a name that stands out among others that played a vital role in the British expansion of its territory in India. It was no other than the infamous name of Robert Clive. He has been well documented in the history books but very few people know about his childhood in England and how he grew up to be the adult and what role he played in a faraway country called India.
Source: Google photo of Robert Clive in Getty images.
Clive was born in a poor family where he developed the truant personality very early in order to survive poverty, so he started by demanding the rich people to pay him some protection money. When they refused and scolded him, he threw stones at their glass windows surreptitiously that cost them more money in repair than what Clive had demanded of them. Maybe he was the teacher from whom the modern-day politicians learned something except that Clive only wanted a few shillings but the modern-day politicians demand millions through blackmail and outright thuggery.
When he came of age, he started to think of what next to do with his life because he had run out of windows to throw stones at and thought his talent could be better used elsewhere so the idea of going to India seemed like a good one therefore, he applied. The British army in those days was in dire need of daring young men to spread their occupation of India so they hired him because Clive was a perfect fit for the job although no one had any inkling of what Clive could achieve in India.
They did not have to wait long. When they appointed Robert Clive as the quarter master of the British commissary in South India, he found his golden opportunity to shine in his nefarious ways that his seniors found very interesting. He started to save money of the army by providing cheaper and poor-quality rice for the soldiers who were natives of India. He had no qualms about giving poor quality ration to the natives who did not rate high from his point of view, so he continued to seek new ways to save money for his boss. He provided poor quality uniforms, cheap shoes that fell apart easily and in many other ways.
Needless to say, that he kept a good part of the money he saved for himself that his superiors did not know about. They thought of him as a promising young man who had saved lot of money for the army. Soon they realized that Clive was a cunning man who was a natural when it came to military matters. He advised his commanders on how to speed up the occupation of India and suggested military support to a rival king who had problems with his neighbor, but this support came with a high price tag. In those days India was ruled by numerous kings who lived in a perpetual state of war with the neighboring kingdoms.
Clive's cunning was in determining who had the greater chance of winning if given some military aid so that he could extract the reward afterwards. The victorious king then gave the British several hundreds of villages from where they could extract taxes and do whatever they wanted to do with it. It was a brilliant idea that pushed Clive into the higher echelon of the ranks, so he benefitted enormously while hiding his stash he had accumulated as a commissary chief.
The British at this time were interested in expanding their territory in the state of Bengal where a Moslem king called Shiraj ud Daulah ruled. He had a massive army that was well equipped to fight any war, so the British chose Clive as their emissary to spearhead this campaign to win the entire Bengal, but Clive knew that it was an uphill task to face the army of Shiraj who was formidable. They wanted to take revenge for the deaths of numerous British soldiers who were arrested by the order of Shiraz and pushed into a jail cell in the Fort Williams in Kolkata where they died of suffocation. Clive took with him a small army that did not stand a chance against the King of Bengal, so he chose to win the battle by deception. He paid in gold the two generals of the king so that at the critical moment, they will withdraw from the battlefield leaving Shiraj ud Daulah alone and helpless.
Please read my blog Who was Siraj ud Daulah? in this context.
This is exactly what happened. The two traitors of the king left the battlefield of Plassey with the troops while Shiraj stood alone helplessly with some loyal troops, so he lost the war and fled the battle ground but the British chased and killed him. The two traitors were also killed later by them and probably recovered the bags of gold Clive had given them as bribe knowing how cunning Clive was. But that is not important. Besides no one likes the traitors even today. What was important was the fact the victory in Plassey in 1757 gave the British the golden opportunity to become the ruler of a vast province called Bengal. They developed Kolkata and named it their capital from where they ruled the entire country.
Systematic loot of India
Clive was given his reward after the battle of Plassey, and he employed the same strategy in winning numerous other provinces that helped the British rapidly expand their territory that brought in huge amount of taxes and other riches. I will not go into how they collected their taxes using brutal methods but believe me when I say they were brutal. Blackmail of kings and generals with fake promises and gold that Clive was a master of was their tactic. They believed that anything was fair in war and love, but they were more interested in war. They had no love for India except making thousands of native women pregnant and create a new breed called Anglo Indians but chose cruelty as the method to rule over a vast country called India.
They suppressed the local textile industries by making it very difficult for the cotton farmers to raise decent crops and get a decent price and by raising taxes, so it broke the supply chain that supported the hand loom textile industry that suffered while the first-class cotton was shipped to England to make their textile industry grow. They made the clothes for the Indians in England and sent to India at a price of their choice to make huge profit.
The British did the same for many other industries that had made India rich in the past so that England could prosper. There was a time when India had a share of 25% of the world trade that had made it very wealthy. Indian textile, minerals, cotton, manufactured goods and spices etc. were in great demand abroad that fetched a high price, but it dwindled after the British colonized the country. Actually, it went down to mere 2% so the British were successful in making millions of people very poor and jobless whose trades were decimated.
They manipulated the supply of rice in Bengal that led to a severe shortage and deaths of millions of people through starvation while Churchill redirected the ships loaded with rice from other countries to England and said that the Indians breed like rabbits so let them starve.
My family survived the famine because my father worked for the British as an accountant so was given ration, but others were not so fortunate. My mom watched helplessly the people dying in the streets of Kolkata.
The British still brag that they brought the railways and built ports in India, but they did so because they could move the minerals and cotton to England easily through their ports. It was not done for the Indians who were treated as second class citizens who were not allowed to mix with the British. They even put up signboards saying Dogs and Indians are not allowed in their clubs or gymkhanas.
Thus, they meaning the British set up the infrastructure to speed up the transport and delivery to England minerals and agricultural products while suppressing the local agriculture and industries. It is hard to believe that a country rich in soil and water where hard working farmers raised millions of hectares of food crops suffered famine due to the hoarding of rice by the British. They sent the rice to England instead that was suffering from a food shortage during the 2nd World War. Loss of millions of lives in Bengal meant nothing to them.
When I was a child, I knew that even a simple bicycle was imported from England and my father's cigarette came from London. The Indian women wore saris made in England while the Indian textile industry was systematically downgraded. A glorious and rich country called India was reduced to extreme poverty in just two hundred years by a foreign country that sucked its blood to rejuvenate their island nation thousands of miles away. That was a loot at a mind-boggling scale that their paid historians tried to omit from their history books and still say that the British brought railways to India.
But the loot of India was done not only by the British because there were many others who did the same as the hordes of looters from Afghanistan and other countries who attacked India again and again to loot and kill hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who had resisted their forced conversion to Islam. They literally drenched the soil of India with the blood of Hindus who were peace loving people and looted their temples in Somnath 17 times and carried the loot away to Afghanistan on long caravans of camels.
I will not get into the struggle for freedom that started in 1857 and culminated in independence in 1947 when Netaji Bose and his Indian National Army chased the British out because it is well documented in numerous books so I will stick to the loot part of this history.
The British forced the rice farmers to plant indigo because it brought them huge revenue so the farmers secretly planted rice to get food. The indigo plant looked like rice plant, so the British were initially fooled but they found out later anyway and punished the farmers with heavy fines, taxes and beatings. They developed numerous ways to exploit the poor farmers. They also banned the traditional schools run by the temples called gurukul where anyone could get free education and replaced them with the British run educational institutions like St. Joseph college, St. Anthony school, Boy's and Girl's high school, Loreto, Presidency college etc. throughout the country to teach British curriculum in English.
Their idea was to educate a large number of natives to make them aware of the glory of England as the most civilized country, their history of excellence in science and other subjects. The British missionaries were given this task in which they were quite successful.
They promoted the education in England they touted as the best in the world so the rich and not so rich Indians sent their children to get the British education that would make them qualified to get good jobs in India and make them beholden to the British for it. British did not have enough administrators of their own, so they trained Indians to do the job. They hired my father as an accountant because he was bright.
During the long period when the British were building and spreading their empire in India using brutal military force, they collected tax from the defeated kings and sultans in gold and silver coins that they shipped to England. My Ma said to me that she saw pure gold guinea in those days minted in England as well as silver coins. I have seen silver coins of one Rupee when I was a child with the image of King George V on it. The rich people hoarded massive amount of silver coins knowing very well that one day its value will increase a thousand-fold. Most of the gold left India in ships laden with spices, silk, jewelries, fine muslin, pashmina shawls, fine mahogany furniture etc. to be sold to the rich people in England who then filled up their estate mansions with it.
Now let me tell you what happened to Robert Clive when he finally went back home with his pockets full of gold and silver. He bought a huge mansion somewhere and acres of land around it to live his life in comfort provided by his numerous servants. He wanted desperately to move into the ranks of Lords and Ladies of England, but he was not accepted by the high nose people who thought of Clive as a low life person who did not belong to their upper class. So, his money and mansion could not get him the place in the aristocracy although he was given the title of Lord by the government. On top of that he was summoned to an enquiry into how he became so rich in India. This enquiry caused him so much trouble that he became very depressed and one day took his life.
The irony was that after his death, it became known that Robert Clive was not found to be guilty of anything illegal and was going to be sent to America where they needed him as the next Governor General.
All the foreigners be they British, French, Portuguese and even Dutch had only loot on their mind, but the Islamic invaders were the most destructive and cruel who not only looted the country, but they also imposed their religion on the hapless population using brutal force. This plague they brought to India still persists while the British have practically disappeared from the country except leaving behind numerous cemeteries full of epitaphs and broken stone graves that nature has taken over in a pitiful way. Their numerous marble statuaries all over the country have been removed and dumped unceremoniously somewhere out of sight. Their names have been removed from all the roads and boulevards and their bicycles and cigarettes are nowhere to be found.
India is a very different country now from what the British knew in those days although the impression persists that India, they left behind is still poor and backward because they cannot rule better than the British. It is reflected in their very biased reports on India in BBC that cannot accept that India is the 4th largest economy in the world and soon to be the third largest while England is in decline. India has now left England far behind in the economic development and military power.
India was occupied and looted over the centuries, but the British could not suppress the indomitable spirit of India. Indians never forgot how to rebuild their country that is once again on its way to be called the golden bird. The British called India their jewel in the crown but still ignore the fact that the jewel in their crown is Kohinoor that they stole from India.
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