INDIA ON THE EVE OF CROWN GOVERNMENT 65
The battle of Plassey in 1757 and the battle of Wandewash in 1761 gave the English supremacy in Bengal and Madras respectively and they turned both of these victories to their account. Clive, the victor of Plassy became really the kingmaker. He sold his support to the Nawab who promised better terms. He not only got great bribes from the Nawabs and Jehagir (Estate) and controlled the salt monopoly in spite of the wishes of the Home authorities but gave perfect liberty to the civil servants—Burke’s—“birds of prey and passage”—to indulge in private trade to monopolize certain trades to the utter exclusion of the natives : as a result of this the people were greatly oppressed and reduced to poverty. The wealth of Clive and the poverty of the people are well described by Macaulay, who says “As to Clive, there was no limit to his acquisitions but his own moderation. The treasury of Bengal was thrown open to him. There were piled up, after the usage of the Indian princes, immense masses of coins, among which might not seldom be detected the florins and byzants with which before any European ship had turned the Cape of Good Hope, the Venetians purchased the stuffs and spices of the east. Clive walked between heaps of gold and silver, Crown rubies and diamonds, and was at liberty to help himself…… Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness …….This misgovernment of the English was carried to a point such as seems hardly compatible with the very existence of society. The Roman proconsul, who, in a year or two squeezed out of a province the means of rearing marble palaces and baths on the shores of Campomia, of drinking from Amber, of feasting on singing birds, of exhibiting armies of gladiators and flocks of camelopards; the Spanish viceroy, who, leaving behind him the curses of Mexico or Lima, entered Madrid with a long train of gilded coaches and of sumpter-horses trapped and shod with silver, were now outdone.”
Clive ruined the Bengal populace. Hastings the first GovernorGeneral turned to the potentates. His ill-treatment of, and exactions from the Raja of Benares and the Begums of Oudh, his massacre of the Rohillas excited the Catholic sympathies of that great 18th century political philosopher Edmond Burke who by impeachment of Waren Hastings re-enacted so to say, the