Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff

32Philip Lawson and Jim Phillips, “ ‘Our Execrable Banditti’: Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Philip Lawson, A Taste for Empire and Glory: Studies in British Overseas Expansion (Aldershot: Variorum Collected Studies Series, 1997), XII, pp. 225-41.

33P. J. Marshall, Bengal the British Bridgehead (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 18; Macaulay, p. 78.

34Quoted in Lawson and Phillips, p. 238.

35For the Walpole quote and evocations of this splendid landing, see A. Mervyn Davies, Clive of Plassey (New York: Scribners, 1939), pp. 326-27, and Bence-Jones, pp. 188-89.

36Margaret Clive to John Carnac, May 6, 1761, OIOC: MSS Eur F 128/27.

37See Clive ’s financial journals from 1763 to 1774 in NLW: Robert Clive Papers, F2/1-14. For conversions from eighteenth-century pounds sterling to modern equivalents, I have used the multiplication factor of eighty suggested by Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 1990), p. xv.

38Robert Clive to Henry Vansittart, February 3, 1762, quoted in Lucy S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 86n.

39Henry Strachey to Robert Clive, February 8, 1774, quoted in Bence-Jones, p. 298.

40Of all Clive ’s activities in Britain, his political career is the only aspect that historians have chronicled in detail. See Sutherland, pp. 81-137; H. V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757-1773 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 169-86.

41He won narrowly at the polls, but lost on appeal—together with the £3,000 it cost him to run. The division list is given in Linda Colley, “The Mitchell election division, 24 March 1755,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research XLIX (1976): 80-107.

42L. B. Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1957), II, pp. 320-32, 352-63. Namier complained that “Clive ’s biographers follow him on his conquest of an empire in Asia, and do not dwell on his capture of a Parliamentary borough at home” (p. 352n). This oversight has been amply corrected by Philip Lawson and Bruce Lenman, “Robert Clive, The ‘Black Jagir’, and British Politics,” in Lawson, A Taste for Empire and Glory, XI. For a breakdown of nabob political factions, see James M. Holzman, “The Nabobs in England: A Study of the Returned Anglo-Indian, 1760-1785” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1926), pp. 103-16.

43P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688-2000 (New York: Longman, 2002), pp. 22-37.

44Bence-Jones, pp. 189, 203, 257, 265.

45Namier, II, pp. 293-97. Even in this age of rotten boroughs, Bishop’s Castle was “notoriously corrupt” (p. 304).

46NLW: Robert Clive Papers, EC2/1.

47Andrew Wilton and Ilaria Bignamini, eds., The Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1996). Something of the scale of the practice is captured by John Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701-1800 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997).

48Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England, 1680-1768 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 207-9.

49Ibid., pp. 101-2; Christie ’s statistics are based on my own tabulation.

50Robert Clive to Henry Strachey, May 15, 1771, OIOC: MSS Eur F 128/93.

51Robert Clive to Henry Strachey, May 15, 1771, OIOC: MSS Eur F 128/93. In one of Clive ’s several letters to Strachey of that day, he wonders “whether Chas. Clive could not be of some use in ascertaining the Value and Condition of Sir James Wright’s Pictures.”

52On Clive ’s wardrobe: Malcolm, II, pp. 181-83.

53According to the Christie ’s auctioneer’s books, Clive bought nine paintings for £362 4s. 6d. at the high-profile sale of a collection formed by the speculator Robert Ansell, on February 15-16. But the ledger of Clive ’s accountant shows a further payment of £1,086 15s. to “Mr. Christie for Pictures” on February 18, which means that the vast majority of Clive ’s acquisitions were made by others bidding on his behalf. West and Patoun were also present at the sale. (Christie ’s: Auctioneer’s Books, January-March 1771. NLW: Robert Clive Papers, F 12/11.)

54Robert Clive to Henry Strachey, May 15, 1771, OIOC: MSS Eur F 128/93.

55Robert Clive to Henry Strachey, May 16, 1771, OIOC: MSS Eur F 128/93.

56“A Capital and Valuable Collection of Italian, Flemish, and Dutch Pictures, Fine Bronzes, etc. Collected by A Gentleman [i.e., Peter Demasso] Well known to the Vertu, for his Knowledge, and refined Taste,” Christie ’s, March 8-9, 1771. Before 1760, according to Pears, well under 5 percent of paintings sold for more than £40 (p. 216).

57Clive ’s accounts show a payment in this amount to “H. Hoare Esqr. Cost and Charges of 2 Pictures by Vernet” on June 16, 1773. NLW: Robert Clive Papers, H9/7.

58Bence-Jones, pp. 295-96. Some of these purchases, at Christie ’s and elsewhere, can be traced in the cash books of Clive ’s accountant, Edward Crisp. The last volume lists “Customs and Charges on 2 Pictures and 4 Cases of Figures and Marbles,” acquired on Clive ’s trip to Italy in 1774 (NLW: Robert Clive Papers, H9/9). On his visit to Florence that year, Clive met Johan Zoffany, who said Clive wanted “a picture similar to what I am now painting of the Tribuna, but poor man, he could not go to the expense” (Ingamells, p. 221).

59Quoted in Bence-Jones, p. 266. He notes that