Portillo's Empire Journey - First Season

A century ago, Britain ruled over a quarter of the planet.

In this series, I will go in search of Britain's imperial past...

I have found gold.

..and uncover its legacies.

How did a small island on the edge of Europe end up

dominating the world?

He turned a miserable group of accountants

into swashbuckling pirates.

From its proudest achievements...

..to its most shameful failures.

We were ripped away from mother Africa into a strange land.

And how has the history of empire transformed Britain?

We became the black people of Britain.

On this journey, I uncover the extraordinary story

of the biggest empire that the world has ever seen.

In this programme, I'm exploring the jewel in the crown of empire,

the way that Britain established its rule here would provide a model

for the globalisation of today.

In India, Britain's imperial power was founded upon one of the world's

first great multi-national companies.

Unlike today's corporate giants,

it exercised political power directly with guns.

This company went in for a type of exploitation

that the world has not seen.

They had a divine right to rule.

It was as simple as that.

Opportunities to trade and corporate greed led Britain

into entanglements all over the world.

But in India, those base motives were gradually converted

into the pomp, grandeur and glory of the British Raj.

India has long gripped the British imagination.

A vast and exotic subcontinent home to ancient civilisations,

powerful rulers and untold riches.

Here, Britain honed its imperial skills,

and possessing India attracted the grudging admiration of rivals

and added to British power.

This is the Queen Victoria Memorial Hall,

dedicated to the Empress of India.

The Raj was at its pinnacle during her reign.

It was, in a way, the perfection of the colonial idea -

a moment when Britain was totally committed to the governance

of the Queen's 300 million subjects here,

and when India seemed indispensable to Britain's prestige.

At the time of Queen Victoria's death in 1901, Britain ruled

over a quarter of the planet and 400 million people.

No other possession competed with the glamour of India,

with its capital at Calcutta.

British authority did not originate with the state or military conquest.

The father of empire in India, the man responsible for securing

British power, was a businessman.

He was bold, opportunistic and visionary.

Some would say a greedy villain.

The back wall of these houses must be the outer wall

of the Clive House.

Clues about how Robert Clive led a profit-hungry corporation -

with its own private army - to rule over millions

lie hidden in these back streets.

The fine brickwork of the Clive House now forms one side

of that little street.

Clive completely transformed Britain's role in India,

but his former home now lies in ruins, all but forgotten.

Ah!

This filthy, rubbish-strewn passageway is now the way

into the house, I don't think it was the main entrance.

Although there are steps left here.

And the place has been taken over by crows,

and goodness knows what other creatures.

And this must've been a spectacularly grand room,

where there has been some restoration, I think.

Look at these wonderful, classical pillars. I imagine before

they were rendered and maybe made to look like marble.

Clive took over a Mughal villa of a single storey

and he added another one.

And here you see the two storeys.

Robert Clive was the delinquent son of a minor Shropshire landowner.

When he was 17, his family bought him a job in the East India Company.

It had existed for more than a century, but this young firebrand

would lead it to become a superpower.

I've found one of the present-day inhabitants.

Beautiful high ceiling here.

This could also have been a grand room.

And here, I think, the main entrance.

Very handsome flight of rounded steps.

And the visitor would be confronted with this set of magnificent

arches, very imposing.

Clive knew how to live.

The India that Clive stepped into was ruled by the Mughals.

At its height, their mighty empire stretched from

modern-day Afghanistan, down the length of the subcontinent.

They built awe-inspiring forts, mosques and mausoleums

that expressed their immense wealth and power.

But in the 18th century, the Mughal empire was fracturing,

and Clive challenged its waning power

with the help of the East India Company's private army.

With no military training, he deployed the company's troops

against the French in India.

And when the Mughals occupied Calcutta,

he expelled them at the Battle of Plassey in 1757.

With actions like that,

the company was transformed from a trading venture

into a military and imperial power.

And Robert Clive became the undisputed ruler of Bengal.

The traders of the East India Company had ventured in search

of fortunes for themselves and their shareholders in Britain.

At that time, India offered a dazzling concentration of riches,

representing well over a fifth of the world's wealth.

Here's what lured the European powers to India -

pepper, spices, silks, cottons, perfumes.

The appetite for such fineries was insatiable.

For 150 years, the British East India Company competed with others

to win or force trading concessions from the wealthy Mughals.

Jawhar Sircar is a noted historian and a former secretary

of India's Ministry of Culture.

How does it happen that a man who's bought his position as a clerk

becomes a military leader?

He came in as a clerk and pushed his pen for two dull years,

it didn't excite him much.

But then when the battle started, he showed an extraordinary courage.

He had an in-built suicidal streak, and that earned him

more and more pips on his shoulder, and he rose very fast.

What change do you think Robert Clive brought about

in the East India Company?

No-one before him or after him was such a buccaneer.

Without his bravado, without his excesses,

without his stratagem, his cunning, his ruthlessness

in getting things done, which are most untrader-like,

he turned a miserable group of accountants...

..into swashbuckling pirates.

He turned the East India Company into a power to reckon with.

Battlefield success and backroom deals

gave Clive the leverage to force an extraordinary concession

from the Mughals - the right to collect Bengal's taxes.

A company of traders, answerable to no-one but its shareholders,

now had the power of emperors.

And that unleashed an era of rapacious corporate greed.

Clive made a lot of money.

He would never have made that in Shropshire.

Or... He would not make it anywhere.

It was mindboggling.

For the East India Company, profit was king -

as long as the corporation made money,

employees were free to line their own pockets too.

Clive, now one of Britain's wealthiest men,

bought up grand houses back home

and stuffed them with priceless Indian treasures.

Company men like him also used their plundered riches

to acquire political power in Britain,

putting MPs on the payroll, and buying elections to Parliament.

Here in Bengal, the greed went unchecked.

It had disastrous consequences.

One third of the population of this province,

which was 30 million,

one third - that's almost ten million people - died.

And the Brits are held responsible, even till today.

They died how?

Starvation. Starvation.

He started tampering around with natural lines of supply,

storage, taxing, overtaxing.

So the peasants fled their farms.

It's very much part of the psyche

that we had what was called this great man-made famine.

The East India Company after Robert Clive, the way he develops it,

can you compare it to anything in our modern life?

This company went in for a type of exploitation

that the world has not seen.

The convergence of profit with state power,

with military power

is a prototype of all transnational,

exploitative companies that we've seen.

The actions of the East India Company

caused scandal in Britain,

with Parliamentarians condemning the rampant greed and corruption.

The East India Company's mismanagement in Bengal

sent its shares crashing.

But, as in the recent banking crisis,

it was deemed too big to fail.

It was bailed out by the government, which acquired influence

over how it was run - a sort of public-private partnership.

Within a year, Robert Clive was dead in mysterious circumstances.

Samuel Johnson said, "he'd acquired his fortunes by such crimes

"that his consciousness of them impelled him to cut his own throat."

Others have suggested that he overdosed

on the highly addictive drug

that would become the East India Company's most profitable commodity.

Its trade would turn the company, backed by the British state,

into history's biggest narcotics dealer.

By the 1770s, the traders of the East India Company

had laid the foundations of Britain's empire in India.

Calcutta was at its heart, and its arteries of international

trade reached across the globe.

From the west coast of Africa, British ships carried

enslaved people to the Caribbean to grow sugar for the British market.

From China, East India Company ships brought the tea

on which the British were hooked.

But to quench Britain's growing thirst,

the company needed to sell Chinese people

a product they wanted to buy.

The answer was a highly addictive drug,

grown here in Britain's Indian territories.

In the Opium Agency of the East India Company,