Clive

No one in the early days of the British ventures in India was as well known or as controversial as Clive became. In our own day when (informal) empire and globalism are talked about and witnessed with ease, Clive’s position as both a servant of the East India Company—which developed into the world’s largest transnational trading company at the time—and an agent of imperialism makes him a surprisingly resonant figure.

An accurate account of events in India in the central third of the eighteenth century is bound to read like a tale of adventure. Clive is a brief and well-balanced account of the way a great military and political leader struggled with the changes of the period and mastered them with results that shaped two centuries of British rule., A lively, informed, and balanced account of a remarkable but controversial career. Clive was an unlikely military commander who, in just a few years, transformed the fortunes of the British in India and enriched his family in the process.

C. BRAD FAUGHT is a professor and chair of the Department of History, Tyndale University College, Toronto. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a senior fellow of Massey College, University of Toronto. His books include Gordon: Victorian Hero (Potomac Books, 2008); The New A-Z of Empire: A Concise Handbook of British Imperial History (2011); and Into Africa: The Imperial Life of Margery Perham (2012). He lives in Toronto.