The British were permitted to trade in Bengal by a special
dispensation from the Mughal Emperor Farrukhsiyar, granting
the English East India Company the special privilege of duty
–free trade. But the servants of the company, most of
whom were engaged in private trade, abused this concession
by using it for personal gain. Such illegal extension of a
privilege granted only to the company robbed the Bengal administration
of an enormous amount of revenue. This remained a contentious
issue between the English Company in Calcutta and the Nawab
of Bengal in Murshidabad throughout the first half of the
18th century. In 1756, the Nawab, Siraj-ud-daula, attacked
Calcutta, forcing the British to retreat further downriver.
The British counter-attack, mobilized from Madras, was led
by Robert Clive.
Clive did not depend on military might alone to defeat Siraj-ud-daula’s
army, but hatched a conspiracy with a disgruntled faction
of the Nawab’s court. As a result, Mir Jafar, the Nawab’s
commander-in-chief, remained a passive observer on the battlefield
when, in June 1757, the two sides met at Plassey, a few miles
south of Murshidabad. The Nawab’s army was routed in
what proved to be no more than a skirmish. Mir Jafar became
a puppet Nawab and both the English Company and its servants
reaped the harvest of victory as military power consolidated
and reinforced economic domination. In such a situation, fortunes
were easy to come by, and it was not unusual for an ordinary
Briton to return home an extremely rich person : a nabob as
he would have been known in the 18th century. |
