Clive of India: Hero, Villain or Both? The Man Behind Britain's Most Contested Statue

5 minutes ago

7 min read

Clive of India portrait beside an elephant parade; banner reads Hero, Villain or Both? in a bold colonial history collage

Quick answers

Who was Robert Clive?

A clerk turned East India Company general who won the 1757 Battle of Plassey, became governor of Bengal, and returned to Britain enormously rich, only to spend his final years defending himself against corruption charges in Parliament.

Why is his statue controversial?

Clive is blamed by many historians for the exploitative rule that helped cause the Bengal famine of 1769 to 1773, which killed millions, and campaigners argue a statue honouring him has no place outside a government building.

Where are Clive's statues, and has either been removed?

There are two: one outside the Foreign Office in Whitehall, London, and an older one in Shrewsbury, his hometown. Both are Grade II listed and both are still standing despite repeated campaigns to take them down.

Do historians agree on his role in the Bengal famine?

No. Historians including William Dalrymple blame Clive's administration directly for the famine's severity. Others, including Zareer Masani, argue his critics overstate his personal responsibility for a drought-driven disaster.

Robert Clive has been dead for over 250 years and Britain still can't agree on what to do with his statues. Not statue, statues, plural: there are two of them, one in Whitehall and one in Shrewsbury, and both have survived multiple removal campaigns since 2020, including one that flared up again as recently as August 2025 when a Labour peer and one of Clive's own descendants clashed publicly over it.

From clerk to conqueror

Clive arrived in India in 1744 as a lowly clerk for the East India Company, a private trading firm that had been granted a royal monopoly on English trade there back in 1600. He was in serious debt at the time. By the time he left for good, he was one of the richest self-made men in Europe. The turning point was the Battle of Plassey in 1757, where Clive's forces defeated the Nawab of Bengal and installed a puppet ruler in his place, handing the Company control of the wealthiest region in the subcontinent. William Pitt, then prime minister, praised him afterwards as a "heaven-born general".

The fortune that scandalised Britain

Bengal made Clive staggeringly wealthy. Estimates of his fortune on returning to Britain vary depending on which payments are counted, but the figure most commonly cited is around £400,000, remitted partly through the Dutch East India Company, on top of an annual pension of £30,000 negotiated directly from the ruler he'd helped install. Scaled up for inflation across two and a half centuries, that's routinely put at tens of millions of pounds today, with some estimates running past £100 million. When Parliament hauled him in front of a committee in 1773 to answer for it, Clive didn't deny taking the money. He simply argued he could have taken far more. "At this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation," he told the chamber.

The famine, and why historians still argue about it

The Bengal famine of 1769 to 1773 killed somewhere between 10 and 20 million people, by most estimates. It began after the monsoon failed in 1769, but historians including William Dalrymple and Jon Wilson argue the scale of the disaster was man-made: Clive's administration had already stripped away the institutions that once cushioned Bengal against exactly this kind of shock. Mughal rulers had kept grain stores full for bad years and eased taxes during them. Clive's East India Company did the opposite, continuing to enforce taxes at gunpoint even as people starved, while its own officers hoarded and profiteered on what grain remained. One Company officer who served under this system wrote afterwards that it had left half of Bengal's great cities deserted and its most fertile fields laid waste.

Not every historian accepts that framing. Zareer Masani, an Oxford-trained historian who spent much of his career pushing back on what he saw as one-sided readings of empire, was a vocal critic of Dalrymple's book on the Company, arguing that pinning a drought-driven famine on one governor's administrative choices oversimplifies a far messier picture involving Mughal-era precedent, wartime disruption and factors well beyond any single man's control. It's a genuine, ongoing disagreement between serious historians, not a settled question with an obvious villain.

Cleared by Parliament, condemned by everyone else

By 1772, London's newspapers were reporting Indians dying in the streets of Bengal while East India Company shareholders voted themselves a higher dividend. Parliament launched an inquiry, and Clive was accused of corruption, bribery and self-enrichment on a scale that shocked even his contemporaries. Satirists nicknamed him Lord Vulture and the Madras Tyrant. In 1773 a parliamentary vote formally cleared him, 155 to 95, judging that he had rendered valuable service to the country rather than convicting him of anything. It's worth noting that roughly a quarter of MPs at the time held investments in the East India Company themselves. Clive died the following year, aged 49, by his own hand, having reportedly attempted suicide once before as a young man. His contemporaries widely read the death as guilt catching up with him.

Why is there a statue at all?

Neither Clive's own contemporaries nor the Victorians who came after them wanted to celebrate him. The London statue is an Edwardian creation, unveiled in 1912 and moved to its current spot outside the Foreign Office in 1916, the same year Empire Day became an official state holiday. It was the idea of Lord Curzon, a former Viceroy of India who believed the British Empire was one of the greatest forces for good the world had ever produced. Even Curzon struggled to get it built: the government preferred a statue of the Italian revolutionary Garibaldi, the general public showed little interest in paying for it, and it was largely funded by Curzon himself alongside a handful of retired colonial officials. A 2024 academic study of the original fundraising campaign found it was meant to include a matching statue in Calcutta too, and that the whole project provoked real opposition in the Bengali press at the time, long before anyone was using the word decolonisation.

Two statues, two separate fights

The London statue's most recent flashpoint came in August 2025, when Labour peer Baroness Thangam Debbonaire used a panel at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to call for it to come down, describing the bronze relief around its base as showing "tiny, tiny little Indians" bowing to a towering Clive in a way she called historically inaccurate. Clive's real-life descendant, James Windsor-Clive, publicly disagreed within days, arguing that "we can't airbrush our history as simply as that" and suggesting a new plaque for context instead of removal.

The Shrewsbury statue, unveiled in 1860 and predating the London one by over fifty years, had already been through its own fight back in 2020, when competing petitions for and against removal both landed on Shropshire Council's desk in the same month. The council voted 28 to 17, with one abstention, to take no action beyond exploring a new plaque giving fuller context. Deputy leader Steve Charmley put the council's position simply: "we should not erase controversial history." The council's Conservative leader at the time, Peter Nutting, pointed out that a Clive statue also still stands in Kolkata, arguing that if postcolonial India hadn't felt the need to remove its own, Shropshire didn't need to either. The local MP, Daniel Kawczynski, went further, arguing the empire had been "a tremendous source for good" that deserved respect rather than erasure.

Why nothing's actually moved

Both statues are Grade II listed, which means removing either one legally requires listed building consent rather than a council vote alone. The London statue is owned by English Heritage under licence from Historic England, and the actual decision would fall to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in central government, not Westminster Council, which has repeatedly said its own powers here are limited. That bureaucratic reality, as much as any argument on either side, is a large part of why both statues are still exactly where they were in 2020, and in 1912, and in 1860.

An argument with no ending in sight

More than 250 years after Clive's death, the case for and against his statues hasn't really changed, it's just found new voices. A sitting peer and a real descendant arguing it out at a book festival is, in its way, a direct continuation of the same fight that broke out the moment the London statue went up: whether honouring a specific man is the same thing as honouring, or hiding from, the history he was part of. It sits alongside a wider, still unresolved argument on the site about the East India Company Clive helped build, and about darker chapters of British rule in India that followed it, like the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the fiercely contested legacy of Lord Mountbatten.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a Clive statue in India?

Yes, one still stands in Kolkata, and it's regularly cited by British defenders of the UK statues as evidence that even postcolonial India hasn't judged the case for removal as clear-cut.

What happened to Clive's fortune?

Much of it stayed in his family for generations, funding the purchase of Powis Castle in Wales, now run by the National Trust, where treasures Clive brought back from India are still on display.

Did the East India Company face any real consequences over the famine?

Not really. Parliament's 1772 to 1773 inquiries exposed widespread corruption and vote-buying at Westminster, but the Company itself continued operating, and continued ruling large parts of India, for another eighty years after Clive's death.

How did Clive die?

He died in London in 1774 at the age of 49. Multiple historical accounts describe it as suicide, following years of poor health and the strain of the parliamentary inquiries into his conduct.

Is the Windsor-Clive family related to the royal family?

No, despite the name. The Windsor-Clive surname comes from a 19th-century marriage between a Clive descendant and the Baroness Windsor, an old aristocratic title that predates and has no connection to the royal House of Windsor.