Treasure Seekers: Empires of India Page #6

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were a little bit like the Eurobond

dealers of our day.

If you wanted to make a pile...

I mean there was a great risk

attached to this

because you could go out to India and

promptly die of some dreadful disease.

But there was a chance also,

that you might make a whole

sort of pile of money.

These early European colonialists

merged with the Indian population

much more completely than

later ones would.

Many traders went native, and began

to behave like local potentates.

So they lived as Indians,

wore Indian clothes quite often,

certainly adopted Indian manners

and customs.

Many of them had harems.

As far as the Indian princes

are concerned,

they looked upon the company as

another Indian presence,

not as a foreigner necessarily

invading.

This was global capitalism

in its infancy.

Clive and his friends were pioneers

of the system

that would soon dominate

the entire world.

But in 1745 Robert was

discovering that

the life of a clerk in India

was not easy.

His salary was five pounds a year.

He soon felt desperately lonely and

more cut adrift from home than ever.

His unhappiness came to a head when

several ships appeared in the harbor.

Every European in Madras received

a letter or package from home

except Clive.

He was devastated.

Clive had a mercurial temperament.

This apparent humiliation

at the hands of his family

plunged him into the depths

of depression.

Feeling utterly alone and cast off,

he put a gun to his head

and pulled the trigger.

Twice it failed to go off.

"Fate it seems must be reserving me

for some other purpose,"

he would later tell a friend.

In fact, fate had extraordinary

things in store for Clive

wild swings of fortune, dizzying

heights but also the darkest depths.

Throughout his life periods

of intense,

feverish activity would alternate

with bouts of deep despair.

He would probably be diagnosed today

as a manic depressive.

Clive soon discovered that

opium was the only cure

and he would use it as a medicine

for the rest of his life.

Clive got used to loneliness.

The British lived in

Fort St. George.

You had the fort and then you had

Blacktown outside.

They called it Blacktown,

and that's where all the Indians lived.

The British seldom ventured into

Blacktown

except when they wanted to go

and pick up hookers, basically.

And Clive, certainly it was known

he had this sort of

fondness for prostitutes.

Perhaps the one consolation for Clive

and his fellow

colonialists was that,

being so far from home, they could do

almost whatever they liked.

As a proverb of the time said:

"there are no sins south of

the equator."

As Europeans woke up to the phenomenal

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