The East India Company's 'CEO' was Robert Clive. 'Clive of India' looted, literally, Bengal's treasury of all its gold and silver and loaded it onto a fleet of more than a hundred boats. The 'profit' to the company was £2.5 million (more than £200 million today), of which Clive's cut was £234,000 (£20 million). The 'multinational' was born, conceived by a breed known as speculators, who in 1784 drove up the price of food beyond the reach of India's poor. 'Estimates vary', wrote Robins, 'but up to ten million people may have died of starvation'. In a country which, in the seventeenth century, was the 'agricultural mother of Asia and the industrial workshop of the world.', where the weavers of cotton enjoyed a higher standard of living than their counterparts in England, life under British rule became a lesser commodity.