Sir John Malcolm

Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Sir John Malcolm’

Major-general Sir John Malcolm (1769-1833) served as the East India Company’s Governor of Bombay from 1827 to 1830. Born in Dumfriesshire, he went out to India in 1783 as a cadet, and served alongside Sir Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington) in the Anglo-Maratha war of 1803-05, the two men becoming fast friends. He was also entrusted with a series of diplomatic missions to Iran, and subsequently wrote a pioneering history of the country. Frustrated with lack of promotion, in 1822 he settled down in England to write on Iran and India, but in 1827 returned to India as Governor of Bombay. He retired in 1830, and sat as MP for Launceston until his death three years later. Monuments to him stand in Westminster Abbey and Bombay’s Town Hall.

1

Robert Clive’s Vision for India by Sir John Malcolm

As Governor of Bengal, Robert Clive hoped to use his powers and his formidable reputation to make the East India Company mend its ways.

As Governor of Bengal in 1757-60 and 1765-66, Robert Clive strove to reform the East India Company’s wasteful, mercenary and supercilious bureaucracy. The Company responded in 1773 with a Parliamentary smear campaign so masterly that to this day, many regard Clive as a microcosm of all that was wrong with British colonialism, but it is hard to see that Clive in Sir John Malcolm’s account of him.

Read

Clay Lane The Copybook