The Clives

Robert Clive is often folded into the Mysore story, and he does not belong in it directly: he died in 1774, eight years before Tipu Sultan came to the throne and twenty-five years before the storming of Srirangapatna. He never faced him in the field, and the British officer who fought at Srirangapatna and later defeated Napoleon was Arthur Wellesley, not Clive.

The Clive family belongs to this history for two other reasons, and both are substantial.

Before Clive, the East India Company was a trading concern with fortified factories. After Plassey in 1757 and the grant of the diwani of Bengal in 1765, it held the revenues of the richest province in India — and could pay for armies out of Indian taxation rather than London capital.

That is the change that made the Anglo-Mysore Wars what they were. Every advantage the Company brought against Mysore — the ability to absorb defeat and come back, to buy allies, to keep a siege train in the field for a year — rested on the fiscal base Clive secured in Bengal. Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan were not fighting a trading company; they were fighting a state financed by an Indian province, and it is why economic sovereignty runs through everything Tipu Sultan attempted, from the state trading houses to the Gulf network.

The direct link is the son. Edward Clive was appointed Governor of Madras in 1798, and held the post throughout the war that destroyed Mysore — the presidency from which Harris's army marched. He had married Henrietta Herbert, daughter of the Earl of Powis, in 1784, which is how the story ends in Wales.

After the fall of Srirangapatna in May 1799 the city was plundered. Among the objects Edward Clive acquired was Tipu Sultan's tent — the campaign tent of the dead ruler, taken by the governor of the presidency that had made the war.

When Edward and Henrietta came home, what the family had gathered in India came with them. The Clive Collection at Powis Castle in Montgomeryshire is now the largest private collection of South and East Asian objects of its kind in Britain, held by the National Trust.

Its Mysorean holdings are remarkable and specific: Tipu Sultan's tent, and a tiger's head finial from his golden throne, set with rubies, diamonds and emeralds. The throne he had sworn not to mount until he defeated the English was broken up for prize money; its pieces are now distributed between the British Museum, the Royal Collection, and a Welsh castle.

Because it completes the shape of the story. The wealth of Bengal paid for the armies that took Mysore; the objects of Mysore then travelled to the country houses of the men who commanded them. The Sarkar-i-Khudadad was dismantled and redistributed — territory to the Company and its allies, revenue to Calcutta, and the Sultan's own tent to a castle in Montgomeryshire. See Legacy & Memory for where the rest of it went.