To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  With the British defeat at Yorktown in 1781, and the dawning realization that Britain’s interests in America were drawing to an ignominious end, attention in London began to shift toward Indian affairs. Two select committees were organized by Parliament to investigate the failures of the East India Company and its officials. Hastings’ revenue reforms had been largely a failure. Replacing the zamindars with tax-farmers had succeeded in alienating almost everyone without significantly increasing revenues. The landholding class resented being denied their traditional role, the exactions were considered unduly harsh by the peasant cultivators of Bengal, while quotas remained unmet due to overbidding and overestimation of the value of land. With revenue stagnating, Hastings was forced to turn to unpopular indirect taxes on goods such as salt and opium. By 1784, the economy of Bengal was still not placed on a proper footing, while costs continued to skyrocket and rural resentment grew apace. Likewise, despite a strong desire to remain separate from internal Indian politics and warfare, Hastings’ vaunted ring fence had only served to draw the Company into the very wars it was designed to prevent, with the Company forced to fight against the Marathas, Benares, and Mysore, all while tangling with its traditional French foe. Peace with the Marathas had come in 1782 and with Mysore and France in 1784—but at a cost. Men, money, and prestige had all been sacrificed, seemingly to no avail. Britain’s enemies in India faced peace with confidence while the Company could only lick its wounds.

  The loss of the American colonies also provided an object lesson of the dangers of the expansion of overseas landed empires. Indeed, while the war was still raging, in the somber panic after the defeat of British forces at Saratoga, Secretary of the Treasury John Robinson argued that, despite the “absurdity” of Company rule in India, the rebellion of the American colonies aptly demonstrated the danger of the British state assuming direct control of far-flung imperial possessions. The American rebellion was rapidly draining British coffers and British manpower, as had the costs of defending the colonies during the Seven Years’ War, costs that had done so much to cause the revolt in the first place. Replacing Company rule with direct government control would only serve to create the very same conditions that were at that very moment threatening to beggar the nation. Direct rule would simply set the stage for further colonial unrest. Charles James Fox concurred (with the nature of the problem if not the proper solution), asking Lord North, then prime minister, whether he was content with losing the American colonies alone, or if he “wished to ruin the company’s possessions in India” as well.25

  At the same time, the fact that the American War had spread so quickly and violently to the subcontinent was ample testimony of the failures of Hastings’ strategy to keep the Company unencumbered with Indian warfare. In the perspective of many in London and Calcutta, Company rule had led to war with European and Indian powers and would surely continue to do so, but direct government administration would simply lead to a second colonial revolution in British India. If not for the American Revolution, then, the British government might well have embarked on a total reform of Indian administration, removing Company sovereignty for once and for all, and replacing it with direct state rule. Instead, a middle path was attempted.26

  In 1781 Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, making the loss of America all but certain and creating new pressure to finally solve Britain’s India problem. With the smell of defeat in the air, Lord North’s ministry rapidly unraveled. America might be beyond hope, but the war was still dragging on, and the loss of India on top of America was still a terrifying possibility. So, with all of the costs and consequences of the American Revolution stingingly in mind, attention turned more fully to India. A number of reform proposals were put forth, all designed to alter the East India Company and its Indian possessions in such a way as to prevent a second imperial revolution from further splintering the British world. Two parliamentary committees were formed: a Select Committee led by Edmund Burke, which delved once more into the alleged corruption and abuse of Company officials; and a Secret Committee led by Henry Dundas and John Robinson ostensibly tasked with investigating the causes of the wars with Mysore. Both committees made clear the urgent need for drastic reform, and when William Pitt the Younger came to power as prime minister in December 1783, he introduced a compromise reform bill based on those presented by Fox and Dundas.

  Pitt’s India Act of 1784 sought to address the major flaws that persisted in Company administration of its Indian possessions. First, in order to eliminate the dangerous independence of the Company and prevent further corruption and abuse, the Act created a “Board of Control” located in London that would oversee Company affairs in all their forms, civil, military, and financial. Unlike the Company’s Board of Directors, the new Board of Control would replace stock-holding directors with members of the ruling government ministry, with the Secretary of State presiding as president of the new body. In view of fractious infighting between members of the supreme council in Calcutta, the number of its members was cut from five to three, and the power of the governor-general to act independently, especially in times of war, was greatly increased. The independence of the governors of Bombay and Madras, a freedom that had in large part caused the wars with the Marathas and Mysore, was to be eliminated as well. The new, more powerful governor-general, however, was henceforth to receive his appointment directly from the crown. The aim of these reforms was clear. The East India Company was still to govern in India, but it was to do so as an arm or agency of the British state.27

  It was not enough merely to reform the Company, however. As governor-general, Hastings was clearly in the crosshairs. For his perceived failures to reform revenue collection and avoid costly wars, Hastings would certainly be recalled from his post, but this was not enough for some. Hastings had made enemies in Calcutta and these foes had returned to England to combine with such enemies of the Company and its governor-general as Edmund Burke, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Charles James Fox. For Burke and his allies, Company rule in India was nothing less than a stain on Britain’s national character, and India a country despoiled and exploited by rapacious, corrupt, and violent Company officials. Hastings was held to be responsible for this state of affairs, as well as for the costly expansion of warfare in India at the very moment when British resources were needed elsewhere. They were convinced the Hastings’ policies in India had been not merely incompetent or misguided, but criminal, and they set about advocating for impeachment.

  Five main charges were leveled against Hastings and presented to the House of Commons in 1787. Hastings was charged with pursuing a war with the Rohillas for personal gain, with forcing the Raja of Benares to make military contributions beyond those stipulated by treaty, with exploiting the begums of Oudh, with personally accepting gifts beyond the limits allowed for Company officials, and with favoring friends with advantageous contracts. The Rohilla charge was dismissed by the House of Commons, but the others were accepted, and the trial of Warren Hastings began in the House of Lords in 1788.

  In February 1788, Edmund Burke addressed the members of the House of Lords assembled in Westminster Hall with the full force of his considerable rhetorical power, castigating Hastings and imploring the Lords to right a historical wrong.

  I impeach . . . Warren Hastings, in the name of our Holy Religion, which he has disgraced, – I impeach him in the name of the English Constitution, which he has violated and broken, – I impeach him in the name of Indian Millions, who he has sacrificed to injustice, – I impeach him in the name, and by the best rights of human nature, which he has stabbed to the heart. And I conjure this High and Sacred Court to let not these pleadings be heard in vain!28

  The trial, opened by Burke’s thunderous condemnation, was a spectacle of histrionic oratory, vicious invective, and a stubborn refusal to conciliate or bend. Day after day, year after year, for nearly seven years, Burke and Sheridan and Fox lashed Hastings with evidence of his perfidious incompetence while crowds of curious onlooker
s crowded the galleries to witness what was surely to be the trial of the century. Through it all, Hastings remained utterly steadfast in his conviction that he was not only innocent of the charges arrayed against him, but that he deserved the grateful admiration of the government and the nation for his role in India. He was certain that he acted honorably—telling the assemblage, “My Lords, I do most solemnly declare that I acted to the best of my judgment, paying due regard on the one hand to the laws of justice, and on the other to the interest of my employer”—but also that he had saved India for the Company and country.

  To the Commons of England, in whose name I am arraigned for desolating the provinces of their dominion in India, I dare to reply, that they are . . . the most flourishing of all the state in India. It was I who made them so. The valor of others acquired—I enlarged and gave shape and consistency to—the dominion which you hold there. I preserved it . . . I gave all; and you have rewarded me with confiscation, disgrace, and a life of impeachment.

  Throughout the tiresome ordeal, he never wavered in his belief that, in the end, the trial, for all its drama, would prove him right. As he told a friend back in India, “you may rest assured that the worst shall affect me no more than the spray of the wave, or the Beating of the Tempest, can injure the Plumage of an Albatross in the wide Ocean.”29

  When the verdict was read in 1795, after years of public humiliation, Hastings was vindicated. The American War had ushered in a “new climate of opinion of a more assertive nationalism” that, in the years since the trial commenced, had been solidified by the horrors of the French Revolution. The result was a shift in attitudes toward empire. No longer was Hastings seen as the personification of the shame and tragedy of empire, but as the defender and savior of a crucial aspect of British greatness. The conservative, authoritarian turn, which had done so much to squelch British liberties at home, now gave a new shine to empire. Indeed, at his trial Hastings had done his best to paint himself as the defender of British interests in an age of imperial contestation, arguing that rather than think of his own fortune or prospects, he had been “too intent upon the means to be employed for preserving India to Great Britain, from the hour in which I was informed that France meant to strain every nerve to dispute that empire with us.” Hastings was convinced of the merits of his behavior, and in the climate of nationalism and imperial expansion, he succeeded in convincing the public and, crucially, the House of Lords. He was found not guilty of all charges.30

  While Hastings sweated in the dock in London, his replacement as governor-general, Lord Cornwallis, made his way to Calcutta. Charles Cornwallis, 2nd Earl Cornwallis, might seem a curious choice to spearhead the new, reformed government of British India. He was, after all, the commander whose surrender at Yorktown in 1781 did so much to change the tide of the American Revolution in the favor of the rebellious colonies. Paroled by the triumphant Americans, he had shamefacedly returned to England in the company of Benedict Arnold in 1782, but despite widespread critique, Cornwallis crucially retained the confidence of the king and many of his ministers. In 1786, after serving as an ambassador to the court of Frederick the Great in Prussia, and a series of protracted negotiations about the nature of the post, Cornwallis was appointed governor-general and commander-in-chief of British forces in India. He arrived in Calcutta in February of 1786, with a mandate to reorder, reform, and remake Britain’s growing possessions in India.

  The change engendered by the transition from Hastings to Cornwallis was momentous. Pitt’s India Act had given the new governor-general more absolute, centralized powers in India, and Cornwallis was not shy in using them to correct the abuses he perceived in Hastings’ system. As we have seen, Hastings had sought to organize British rule along lines similar to indigenous modes of governance, focusing on continuities with the now faded Mughal system in direct parallel with the other successor states that emerged over the eighteenth century. His concentration on greater centralization and the creation of a fiscal-military state based on revenue extraction through a reformed tax-farming system echoed Mughal policy and reforms instituted by Mysore, the Marathas, and other expansionist native states. His use of alliances and a system of clientage resting on military obligations and fees to expand British influence and increase military power was likewise consistent with indigenous political and fiscal practices. In the realm of law and justice, Hastings had encouraged the continued use of various strands of local Hindu and Muslim law, and even clashed with Chief Justice Impey over the expansion of the jurisdiction of English-inflected courts.

  To many, perhaps most in Britain, Cornwallis among them, Hastings’ Orientalist regime had proved an abject failure. When Cornwallis arrived in India in 1786, the East India Company was mired in a post-war economic crisis. The revenue of the Company was still failing to meet its costs, corruption and incompetence seemed to invade every corner and crevice of Company administration, and Britain’s enemies in India seemed to be worryingly in the ascendant, poised to strike at vulnerable, mismanaged Company territories. The American War had been costly for the East India Company, requiring a massive outlay of capital to defend its interests at the very moment when global warfare disrupted the overseas commerce that was the foundation of its wealth. The British government and Company officials in London placed most of the blame for the poor state of the Company’s finances squarely on the shoulders of Warren Hastings, and the corrupt, venal incompetence of his administration in India. Edmund Burke and other critics believed that empire imparted a moral responsibility to govern for the benefit of both Indians and Britain. Hastings’ actions and tactics during the war, they argued, had breached this compact between governors and governed, alienating the Indian population in the same way British colonial officials in America had alienated the colonial population in the lead-up to the American Revolution. If British India were to avoid a similar revolutionary fate, the Company administration would have to be reformed, corruption eliminated, abuses weeded out. Though he had failed as a military commander, Cornwallis was well-suited to spearhead the reform of British India. Honest, upright, and rigidly moral, Cornwallis shared Burke’s commitment to the overhaul of colonial government. To ensure the support of the Indian population, Cornwallis’s reformed government would target corruption and abuses, but would also seek to establish a loyal class of Indian property owners with fixed interests in the country by transforming the institutional basis of British colonial rule.31

  There were other lessons to be taken from the American Revolution as well. In the years since settlement in colonial America, British settlers had slowly established a Creole political class with its own divergent American interests. As Americans came to identify more with the interests of the colonies than with the wider interests of Britain and the British Empire, conflict and revolution were almost inevitable. Cornwallis, who had seen the disastrous consequences of American separatism first-hand, feared that British India was well on its way to repeating the mistakes of British America. To prevent the growth of a distinct British political class in India, Cornwallis passed measures intended to divide British officials from India and Indians. Outside of Calcutta, Company officials were forbidden to purchase property. To prevent the intermarriage common in eighteenth-century India—and the local ties it inevitably created—Cornwallis passed laws barring Indian women from Company society, and limiting the employment options for mixed-race children in both the military and civil service. By 1790, native Indians were forbidden from holding offices worth more than £500 per year, and Sepoys were excluded from the ranks of commissioned officers. By 1791, it was decided that “no person, the son of a Native Indian shall . . . be appointed by this Court to Employment in the Civil, Military or Marine Service of the Company.” Eventually, in 1795, all Company officials were required to have proof of two European parents to be eligible for office.32

  The effects of this attempt to avoid the mistakes that had doomed British America were drastic and long-lasting. From the 1780s, once-fluid ethni
c boundaries became more and more rigid as the divide between British and Indians grew to become an impenetrable barrier. As the means of rule changed and British rulers and Indian subjects diverged, British India ceased to be merely one of a number of Mughal successor states modeled on Mughal precedents and emerged for the first time as a foreign imperial occupation with laws and institutions based not on indigenous forms and practices, but on explicitly European models. The American War, in many ways, signaled the birth of the “British Empire” in India.

  Cornwallis thus gradually began to overhaul Hastings’ system, replacing a hybridized indigenous Indian continuity with a Europeanized colonial state. Before Cornwallis arrived, Company officials had been allowed, at least tacitly, to combine their official responsibilities as Company agent with private trading for personal enrichment. This allowed the Company to pay its employees very little, but also encouraged corruption and inattention, and beggared both the Company and communities as wealth was siphoned into private hands. The private fortunes that could be made were immense, and back in Britain, these wealthy “nabobs” were viewed with a combination of fear and disgust. With money plundered from the Orient, it was believed, the nabobs could indulge their dubious tastes, and use their capital to purchase power and influence in a Britain where both were readily for sale. Hastings himself had acquired a massive fortune from his time in India, and this ill-gotten wealth was one of the targets of his impeachment.