Another Atrocious Man Named Clive

In photographs and paintings, eighteenth-century European soldier of fortune Major-General Robert Clive, the First Baron Clive of Plassey (also known as Clive of India), is often seen turning the impressive swell of his right buttock to the camera or painter, his fist pressed firmly into his fat hip, just above a ruffled khaki pocket. His military coat is red and his sash is red and his buttons are gold. It’s obvious that he’s trying to hold his mouth in such a way to evoke stoicism, but the tautness there pulls his ailing eyes downward, and the result is a depressing image of a depressive man holding something sour beneath his tongue as penance. But, sure: he has a nice ass.

Clive’s ass is the ass of an erratic sociopath who, during his occupation of Bengal in the mid-eighteenth century, was responsible for the slaughter and subsequent pillaging of countless villagers and their villages, and the enslavement of those he left alive, forcing upon them the torturous cultivation of opium. During his reign as governor, “There were not people enough left alive to bury the dead.”