GOLCONDA^161the Madré de Deus—a sum that would amount nowadays to more than
$1 billion.* Mir Jafar hardly cared. The money would not come from
his pocket. Even so, the Bengali treasury could not satisfy these ex-
travagant demands. In the end, about half the sum was paid, in specie
and jewels. The rest was rescheduled, then rescheduled again; and with
each postponement, the company received compensation in the form
of privileges, territory, and revenues. The EIC Council members, how-
ever, got their money in full—a lesson in priorities.**
Attached to these extortions was a quiet codicil, granting the com-
pany zamindari rights over a large tract of land around Calcutta. This
land paid a quit-rent to the nawab of some £23,000 but yielded a
gross rental of £53,000—a net gift, then, of some £30,000. And as
Calcutta grew, so did the value of land around it, so that by the end of
a decade, rentals rose to £146,000. Meanwhile the nawab had turned
his right to the quit-rent over to Clive, since named governor of the
company's settlements in Bengal: the employee was now his employer's
landlord. Clive also received a jagir, a feudal right of command over
some six thousand foot and five thousand horse in the army of the
Moghul emperor. The confusion of political and commercial within the
company was duplicated in the identity of its agents.
In India, then, as in Indonesia, power was money, and money was
power. India's surplus, once creamed off by the Moghul state and its
feudal dependencies, now shifted to the East India Company and its of-
ficers and agents. Merchants and civil servants welcomed their inade-
quate salaries as a pretext for private enterprise and public venality.
Young, ambitious men paid money for appointment to company ser-
vice. Members of Parliament and people of influence sought jobs for
friends and relations and paid for them in their own way. The India
House was a "lottery-office, which invited every body to take a chance
- The conversion is based on the then prevailing wage of a skilled worker (£50 a year)
into the equivalent modern wage of $25,000. In conversions of this kind, covering
long periods, the best standard of comparison is the price of labor.
** Clive 's cash reward was the equivalent of some $140 million in our money. Some
regarded this fabulous sum as extortionate, but Macaulay says that Clive could as eas-
ily have had twice that for the asking: "He accepted twenty lacs of rupees [2 m. ru-
pees]. It would have cost him only a word to make the twenty forty"—Macaulay,
"Clive," p. 243. This is certainly what Clive gave the world to understand. Cf. Keay,
Honourable Company, pp. 320 ff. Macaulay does raise the question, however, whether
it was appropriate for a British subject to accept a large gift from a foreign ruler. True,
it was not against the law; but what would people have said, he asks, if Wellington had
accepted such a gift from Louis XVIII of France?