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The Black Hole of Calcutta refers to a prison cell which was used to hold 146 mostly British prisoners captured after the Nawab of Bengal had taken over the city of Calcutta from the East India Company. Interred on 20 June 1756 in a tiny cell in Fort William, 123 of the prisoners died of dehydration and suffocation.

The number of the Black Hole deaths may have been exaggerated, but testimonies to the event actually happening are numerous. The East India Company used the story as a justification for taking over Calcutta completely. It was really in the next century, though, that knowledge of the incident was spread through textbooks and literature as one of a host of equally dubious means to justify Britain's colonial presence in India. The incident's grip on the popular imagination can be seen in the long-lasting use of the expression "like the Black Hole of Calcutta" to refer to any dark and forbidding place.

News of the fall of Calcutta and the Black Hole incident stirred the EIC into action. Robert Clive (1725-1774), who had already won several military victories in the EIC's name, was dispatched in command of an EIC army. Clive's task was not necessarily to retake the city but, as the Company's real priority was always to make money, to re-establish trade in Calcutta. Clive described the loss of Calcutta as a "general calamity," and in a letter to the directors of the EIC in London, he described the impact of the news of the Black Hole prisoners: "every breast here seems filled with grief, horror, and resentment; indeed it is too sad a tale to unfold".

Sailing in five ships and with an army of some 1,500 men, Clive succeeded in gaining control of the city in January 1757. Clive then met Siraj ud-Daulah's army at the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757. Clive won an important victory, and a new EIC-friendly nawab was installed. Siraj ud-Daulah was executed, and Clive was appointed the Governor of Bengal in February 1758. So began the systematic exploitation of the region by the EIC. Revenge had been achieved, but the scale of the subsequent suffering of 20 million Bengalese people far outweighed that of the Black Hole victims. Holwell, meanwhile, became the acting governor of Bengal in the interim period between the two governorships of Robert Clive and Henry Vansittart. Holwell also set up a memorial outside the infamous prison cell.