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arren hastings, like Robert Clive, was central to the early Whistory of the East India Company; both men are considered founding fathers of the British Raj. Hastings’s career with the Com- pany spanned the eras of unfettered monopoly trade, aggressive imperial expansionism, and corporate and institutional reform; he is generally de- scribed as an e√ective administrator who was caught up in the shifting tides of policy revision and political change. Hastings and Clive had similar, impoverished backgrounds, and each first traveled to his respective employment in India as an adolescent; Clive was eighteen years old on his arrival in the colony, Hastings age seventeen. Each man began his career as a humble writer in the junior level of Company appointments; Clive, however, was seven years Hastings’s senior and had improved his professional standing in the Company by the time Hastings arrived in India in 1750. In 1749, for example, Clive had been appointed a commissioner of troop provisions and supplies—one of the suspected finan- cial conduits for the fortune he took home with him to England after his first term of service (1743–1753). Clive, the rising national hero, was central to the junior servant’s career. After the Battle of Plassey (23 June 1757), when the Company gained control of Mughal viceroy Nawab Siraj-ul-Dowlah’s Ben- gal territories, then Lieutenant Colonel Clive appointed Warren Hastings the Company’s representative at the court of Nawabs (1758–1761). Hastings was later appointed to the Company council, the institution’s ruling body in Calcutta (1761–1764). Hastings’s reign on the council initiated the beginning of his frequently contentious relationship with fellow councilors and Com- pany policymakers; gridlock and obstructionism caused Hastings to resign from the council and return to England in 1765. In 1771 Hastings was ap- pointed governor of the presidency of Fort William. In 1773 he was promoted

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to governor-general of Bengal, the materially rich region of the Indian sub- continent the English and French had each hoped to gain. Hastings’s career with the Company was assuredly influenced by the spec- tacular military campaigns of the Clive era. Clive’s uninhibited ability to judge situations, make bold and frequently risky decisions involving treaty negotiations, declarations of war, and seizures of native rulers’ territories influenced the domestic interpretations of the armed conflicts of the Has- tings era. Hastings was far more scholarly, cautious, and conservative than ‘‘Naughty Clive’’; however, his reputation in England was a√ected by his association with the financial corruption of the nabobs—the Indian-derived nickname for the Company’s newly created millionaires. Hastings’s career was also dramatically a√ected by the parliamentary Whigs’ anti-expansionist and free-trade/open-market sympathies. The Whig-supported East India Act of 1773 changed the nature of the governor-general’s administrative power; unlike in his governorship of Fort William, Hastings was now subject to the supervision of the Company-appointed council. Some of the council members (Lieutenant-General John Clavering and George Monson) were supported by the anti-nabob members of Parliament and King George III; another, Richard Barwell, was a Hastings loyalist. The fourth member of the council, Philip Francis, was considered a jealous competitor and an anti- expansionist and dogged critic of imperial zealotry; he was suspected to be ‘‘Junius,’’ the anonymous and passionate government critic and pamphleteer. Francis, more than any other councilor, was an aggressive and relentless investigator and reformer; his relationship with Hastings was so contentious that the two men eventually engaged in a duel. Francis was wounded and returned to England; once there, he continued to campaign against Hastings. Hastings’s questionable behaviors during his governor-generalship in- cluded his extension of the opium trade with China (he used opium profits to finance military campaigns); his requisitioning of treasures from the Begum of Oude; his autonomous decision- and policy-making; his alleged war- mongering; and his ambiguous involvement in the trial and eventual execu- tion of Raja Nand Kumar (or Maharaja Nandakumar), who had accused Hastings of bribing him for more than one-third of a million rupees. Nand Kumar claimed to have a letter from Hastings that would support his charges against the governor-general. The case was put before the newly instituted supreme court; the justice serving was a schoolmate and close friend of Has- tings. In the course of the proceedings, another Indian suddenly accused Nand Kumar of forgery; the Hastings accuser was tried, found guilty, and executed. Warren Hastings did nothing to prevent or prohibit Nand Kumar’s capital punishment.

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In Hastings’s 1773 ‘‘Letter to the Court of Directors,’’ he defended his administrative decisions and declared his commitment to and enjoyment of his professional position (‘‘I have catched the desire of applause in public life’’). This line of self-defense continued in his Memoirs Relative to the State of India. Hastings also explained that he inherited an institution that was growing and changing before his eyes; his decisions were always made, he argued, with the best interests of the British empire in mind. This argument did not persuade Whig parliamentarian Edmund Burke, who initiated im- peachment proceedings against Hastings in 1786. Burke charged Hastings with a series of crimes: abuse of powers, ‘‘bribery, oppression, and tyranny; . . . avarice, rapacity, pride, cruelty, ferocity, malignity of temper, haughtiness, insolence,’’ and ‘‘blackness’’ of heart. Burke’s high-flown moralistic rhetoric almost suggests that Hastings had become infected by a racial-viral disease, something very closely related to ‘‘Oriental despotism.’’ For Burke, one of Hastings’s great sins was his alleged abandonment of Western values and ethics. Rather than upholding English constitutional and humanistic values, Hastings had succumbed to ‘‘geographical morality.’’ Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1841 essay on Hastings examined the governor-general across a distance of time and with a cooler heart and mind. Contemporary critics may judge Hastings far more harshly than Macaulay did; many of his actions are clearly deserving of condemnation. However, it is also quite apparent that Warren Hastings was not singularly responsible for the excesses of British imperialism. Hastings’s trial lasted from 1788 to 1795; he was eventually acquitted of the charges against him. Contemporary readers might best understand the fantastic legal spectacle as the empire’s theater of politics—a proscenium on which the ambivalent feelings about expansionist imperialism and the ethical and financial costs of increasing involvement in colonial governance were pyrotechnically displayed.

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Edwardes, Michael. Warren Hastings: King of the Nabobs. London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1976. Feiling, Keith. Warren Hastings. London: Macmillan, 1954. Feuchtwanger, Lion. Two Anglo-Saxon Plays: The Oil Islands, Warren Hastings. London: M. Secker, 1929. Goldsborne, Sophia. Hartly House, Calcutta: A Novel of the Days of Warren Hastings. Calcutta: Stamp Digest, 1789. Marshall, Peter James. The Impeachment of Warren Hastings. London: Oxford University Press, 1965. Moon, Penderel. Warren Hastings and British India. New York: Collier Books, 1947. Parkash, Ram. The Foreign Policy of Warren Hastings. Hoshiarpur: Vishveshvaran and Vedic Research Institute, 1960. Sen, Sailendra Nath. Anglo-Maratha Relations during the Administration of Warren Hastings. Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1961. Suleri, Sara. ‘‘Edmund Burke and the Indian Sublime.’’ In The Rhetoric of English India. Chi- cago: University Press of Chicago, 1992. ——. ‘‘Reading the Trial of Warren Hastings.’’ In The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: Univer- sity Press of Chicago, 1992.

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