Clive: The Life and Death of a British Emperor

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Description

The real-life story of Robert Clive would be judged as wildly improbable if it came from the pen of a novelist.

Clive of India used to be one of the crucial atypical and colorful figures Britain ever produced. The founder of Britain’s Indian empire, he used to be also Britain’s first great guerrilla fighter by the age of twenty-seven, conqueror of Bengal at thirty-one, and avenging angel of righteousness against the greed of his own fellow-countrymen at forty-one. In his later life Parliament brought him under painful scrutiny and he ended up one of the crucial hated men in Britain. He died violently under still-mysterious circumstances just before his fiftieth birthday.

The story of Clive will also be viewed on several levels: as a spirited military adventure by a man who defied death time and again, who withstood the greatest siege in British military history, and conspired to force one of the crucial absolute and cruellest monarchs on this planet off his throne; as the morality tale of a penniless young man who became the sole ruler of a huge empire, ended up as one of the vital richest men in Britain and used to be then brought to account and driven to despair; or as the story of a plundering early poacher-turned-gamekeeper who sought to establish a moral and legal order amidst slaughter and greed.

Clive today lies buried in an unknown grave in an difficult to understand corner of rural Shropshire, a reflection of the controversy he aroused in his lifetime and that still surrounds his legacy and the manner of his death. In this vigorous and revealing study Robert Harvey illuminates Clive’s life’s journey from the green fields surrounding Market Drayton through his adventures in India, his drive to success and self-destruction, to his vicious and premature death, by suicide or murder.

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