History has a special liking for irony. Few lines illustrate this better than the remarks made by Robert Clive before the British Parliament in 1772: "When I think of my opportunities, I stand astonished at my own moderation."

This historic defence was not meant as a joke. Robert Clive, the two-time Governor of the Bengal Presidency, was quite serious, yet posterity has read it with raised eyebrows ever since.

To understand these remarks, one must travel back to a turbulent chapter of empire, intrigue and sudden fortunes: the events surrounding the Battle of Plassey in 1757. At the time, the East India Company was officially a trading corporation, not an imperial power. Its warehouses dotted the Indian coastline, and its clerks kept careful ledgers of cloth, spices and saltpetre. Yet commerce and power often complement each other. Thus Bengal, wealthy, fertile and politically unstable, soon drew the Company into deeper waters.

Robert Clive had arrived in India years earlier as a modest Company clerk, a restless young man who found book-keeping unbearable and warfare strangely attractive. Fortune, as it sometimes does in history, chose him as its instrument. By the mid-1750s he had become a soldier-administrator whose daring and opportunism were already the subject of legend.

Bengal at that time was ruled by Siraj-ud-Daulah, a young and volatile nawab who distrusted the Company's growing military presence. Tensions escalated, alliances shifted, and soon the stage was set for a confrontation that would........

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