Book Extract: Governors of Empire: The East India Company’s Chief Functionaries in India
In Governors of Empire, historian Amar Farooqui traces the journeys each of these men undertook, from arriving on Indian shores, through acquiring territories using equal parts trade agreements and political deceit, all the way to returning to Britain considerably wealthier than before.
December 12, 2025 / 14:02 IST
Excerpted with permission from the publisher Governors of Empire: The East India Company’s Chief Functionaries in India Amar Farooqui, published by Aleph Book Company. ***THE ASCENDANCY OF CLIVE The early career of Robert, Lord Clive, is quite typical of the eighteenth-century Company employees sent out in their teens as copying clerks to the various agencies, factories, and presidencies that the EIC had in the Indian subcontinent. The expansion of its activities necessitated a large workforce in India, for which boys usually aged sixteen to seventeen were recruited in England from among families with connections to the EIC’s directors. A position as a ‘writer’, which was the official designation of these copying clerks—who spent all their working hours writing, producing copies of documents prepared by more senior personnel—could only be obtained through a recommendation by a director of the Company. Clive’s father, Richard, belonged to the lesser gentry, a social class who were owners of small landed estates in the English countryside. Those belonging to this class took great pride in their ancestry, which linked them to illustrious nobles and aristocrats of previous centuries. Their conditions in the early eighteenth century were quite different—a circumstance to which the bigger landowners had contributed by gradually enlarging their estates at the cost of the lower strata of landowners, leaving the lesser gentry generally impoverished. Many of these families had meagre means, possessing ancestral country residences that they were unable to maintain.The Clive family had its seat at Styche Hall in Shropshire. Styche Hall had been in the family’s possession for nearly 300 years, and the Clives claimed to have an impressive genealogy linking them to, among others, George Clyve, chancellor of the exchequer for Ireland during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Richard Clive had an income of about £500 from the rents he received on the estate he had inherited. His attempt to augment his income by practising law was not successful, nor was his foray into business. It was the family’s hardship that impelled Robert’s parents to send him when he was three years old to the house of his mother’s sister. His aunt and uncle lived in Manchester. As he grew up, Robert was sent to a series of schools. The quality of education at these schools seems to have been below average, a reflection of the state of school education in England for children whose parents could not afford elite public schools. Later in life, Clive did not show much interest in learning. The last institution he attended taught him how to improve his handwriting (though his handwriting remained untidy) and book-keeping. This would have been in preparation for his writership, for which an application was made sometime in 1742, around the time Clive attained the age of seventeen. Reasonably decent handwriting and some basic knowledge of accountancy were the only two essential requirements for the job. Being in the legal profession, Richard had some direct or indirect connections with the EIC establishment in London. It was somewhat of a departure from contemporary convention for the eldest male child of the owner of an estate in the countryside—even if it did not yield an adequate income—to be pushed into such a career. As the eldest son, Robert would have succeeded to the estate. That he was sent out to India suggests that the family’s financial condition was worrisome. At the same time, it indicates that choosing to serve the Company in India was, by the 1740s—when it was on the verge of large scale territorial expansion—quite an attractive career option for young boys due to the solidity of the EIC’s business, the steady income the job provided, and prospects of increase in earnings with promotion, combined with profits from private trade. A sum of £500 had to be deposited as security before the formalities for the appointment could be finalized. Robert reached Madras in 1744 to take up his duties. The journey from England to the Coromandel Coast took more than a year, as the ship on which he was travelling strayed in the direction of Brazil, where it spent several months. Ships destined for the Cape could, if they ran into adverse weather conditions, be blown across the Atlantic to the South American coast. The detour made the trip arduous and extraordinarily lengthy, certainly not a pleasant experience for a teenager on his first trans-oceanic journey.It was exactly a century since Clive’s place of work, Fort St George, had been built. Madras had grown in size and attracted a large number of migrant weavers, artisans, and traders who resided in the ‘Black Town’, which had grown up adjacent to the fortified ‘White Town’ of the Europeans. About 3,00,000 inhabitants resided in the former, and 200 in the latter, in the closing years of the seventeenth century. Of the two hundred Europeans, thirty were EIC employees, whose number would have risen marginally by the time Clive joined. His arrival coincided with the outbreak of hostilities between the English and the French in India, engulfing large parts of southern India in the First Carnatic War (1746–48). England and France were also embroiled in a European conflict at the time—the War of Austrian Succession (1740–48)—in which the two sides backed different candidates for succession to the Habsburg throne. France declared war against England in 1744. The French and English companies had so far kept away from the European conflicts in which their respective states were involved. On this occasion, the war extended to Asia and the Indian Ocean. What is more, given the intensity of their business rivalry by the 1740s, the companies used this as an opportunity to inflict damage on each other’s commercial, political, and military power in the region. Clive had barely settled down when Madras was captured by the French in 1746. The campaign against the EIC was led by Joseph François Dupleix, who had taken over as governor of the Compagnie’s possessions in 1742, remaining in the position till 1754. He pursued a vigorous policy for expanding the operations of the French company in India by aggressively promoting trade through sustained political and military intervention. In the second week of September 1746, Madras was bombarded by a French naval fleet commanded by Mahé de La Bourdonnais. Fort St George was unable to withstand the offensive, and French troops landed in the town, occupying the citadel and the Company’s warehouses without much resistance. Having achieved his main objective, La Bourdonnais offered to evacuate Madras and release Company servants who had been held captive, in return for the payment of a sum equivalent to about £420,000, which was to be paid over three years. All the EIC’s stores were to be confiscated. The Madras council had already, La Bourdonnais’s colleagues learnt, given a fairly large sum of money to the French commander in his private capacity. It was alleged that this was the reason for imposing what were regarded as relatively reasonable conditions for ending the occupation of Madras. The offer was opposed by Dupleix, who intended to continue with the occupation as a prelude to driving the English out of southern India. He ordered the annulment of the agreement made by La Bourdonnais, which the latter was unwilling to do. While the two were trying to sort out their differences, the onset of the Northeast Monsoon on the Tamil Nadu coast in mid-October was catastrophic for the French naval operations. The fleet under La Bourdonnais had to abandon the coast, removing the challenge to Dupleix’s authority.The English were informed that the agreement made with La Bourdonnais was no longer valid. Madras would remain under French occupation. The captives were released on the condition that they promised not to take up arms against France, pending an exchange of prisoners of war. Following his release from detention in Madras, Clive proceeded to another of the Company’s outposts on the Coromandel Coast—Fort St David near Cuddalore, about twenty-five kilometres south of Pondicherry. This was a fortified factory, subordinate to Madras, with the chief EIC official designated as deputy-governor of Coromandel settlements. The site on which Fort St David was built had been in the possession of the English since the end of the seventeenth century. The adjacent town of Cuddalore, where the Indian textile dealers resided, was the centre of the EIC’s trade. Fort St David soon became the target of the French, who attacked it several times. Whereas the junior employees who had been attached to the Madras civilian establishment were put to work at Fort St David as writers, some of them offered to (or were asked to, as the routine tasks would have been disrupted by the French offensive) enlist temporarily as volunteer soldiers to supplement the small English force that constituted the local garrison. Clive, who was among the volunteers, was commissioned as an ensign in 1747. This was the lowest commissioned rank in the EIC’s nascent land force and was the military equivalent of a civilian writer in the Company’s rigid hierarchy.Participation in the defence of Fort St David gave Clive his preliminary experience of warfare. For the English, the situation changed when Stringer Lawrence assumed command of the Company’s troops in January 1748. Lawrence, who had retired from the royal army as a captain, was engaged by the EIC as commander of its troops in Madras with the rank of major. He played a key role in the early history of the EIC army, helping it develop as an efficient fighting force in which the soldiers were recruited from among Indians while the officers were European. The charters granted to the Company had, since the 1660s, authorized it to raise its own army in India. It was during the Anglo–French conflict that the army grew substantially in size, recruiting a large number of troops from the regional military market in South India as sipahis (‘sepoys’). Nevertheless, the EIC had to frequently rely on the crown’s European land forces at critical moments, as in its armed conflict with the French. This often-created difficulties during military operations due to disagreements over the chain of command. Royal officers invariably tended to look down on the Company’s officers whom they regarded as socially inferior and militarily inept. It took time for the Company to build its cadre of commissioned officers. In the meantime, its army had to make do with the available resources. The acute shortage of officer material and the prevailing military emergency were the reasons for the speed with which the Fort St David officials accepted Clive’s application.**********Amar Farooqui, Invisible Housemates: Governors of Empire: The East India Company’s Chief Functionaries in India, Aleph Book Company, 2025. Hb. Pp.344In April 1608, when a ship named Hector—belonging to the English East India Company—arrived on the shores of Surat in present-day Gujarat, no one foresaw how some of the merchants on board would go on to alter the course of history in India. From the moment of its docking to the Revolt of 1857, a succession of its eminent passengers helped transform the Company from a trading collective to a colonizing juggernaut. In Governors of Empire, historian Amar Farooqui traces the journeys each of these men undertook, from arriving on Indian shores, through acquiring territories using equal parts trade agreements and political deceit, all the way to returning to Britain considerably wealthier than before.Beginning with Robert Clive, the self-proclaimed hero of the British imperial project who played a pivotal role in the annexation of Bengal, the book follows several important governors whose actions ultimately delivered India into the hands of the Crown. After Clive came Warren Hastings, who began his tenure as governor of Bengal and settled down to govern both Bengal and Bihar. His ‘rule’ was followed by the regime of Charles Cornwallis, often portrayed as the golden age of British rule in India—a claim supported by colonially-sponsored historiography alone. After him, lesser-known figures like John Shore and Robert Hobart were followed by Richard Wellesley, under whom the system of ‘subsidiary alliances’ became a regular feature of the Company’s expansionist policy in India.Lord Moira came next, and demolished the peshwai, destroying the rule of the Marathas in western India. William Bentinck’s governor-generalship then marked an interlude before a violent phase of large-scale warfare that completed the Company’s conquest of the subcontinent. Lord Dalhousie, who followed Bentinck, played a key role in the annexation of Punjab and Awadh, expanding the Company’s frontiers to cover swathes of northern India. He was succeeded by Charles Canning, the last governor general to be appointed by the Company, and John Lawrence, the last of the Company’s old timers to rule over the Indian empire (he was crucial to the recapture of Delhi after the Revolt of 1857).Through rigorously drawn portraits of the Company’s key functionaries, Governors of Empire brings to vivid life the story of the East India Company’s conquest of India through the lives and deeds of its governors.Amar Farooqui is Professor of History (retired), University of Delhi. He taught history for many years at Hansraj College, Delhi; and has been Fellow, Prime Ministers Museum and Library (formerly known as Nehru Memorial Museum and Library), New Delhi. He is currently Visiting Professor at Ashoka University.
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