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A political history of Britain in the places where it happened: parliament and palace, courts and counting houses, and the streets where people pushed back.
Placed outside the India Office in 1912 to give the empire an origin story.
EmpireIdeas & memoryFree to enter
Robert Clive rose through the East India Company and, after Plassey in 1757, did more than anyone to turn a trading concern into a territorial power in Bengal. He came home enormously rich and was investigated by Parliament over how; he was controversial in his own lifetime, not only in ours. John Tweed's bronze stands on these steps because Lord Curzon campaigned for exactly this spot: without Clive, he argued, India's affairs would never have been run from the building behind it. That makes the statue a document of Edwardian confidence rather than of the eighteenth century, and it is argued over now that historians have moved from conquest-as-achievement to the questions of extraction, violence and famine.
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