Straddling the Imperial Meridian: Warren Hastings as an observer of change in British India

ABSTRACT

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are now seen as a moment when the ‘second’ British Empire arose from the ruins of the ‘first’ one. One witness to, and participant in, the convulsions of the age was Warren Hastings (1732–1818), the first governor-general of Bengal. Hastings’ career in India, his trial in parliament, and his imperial afterlife all have received fulsome attention. Yet his retirement years have been overlooked, owing to the misperception that they were uneventful. This article introduces and presents a series of letters written by Hastings, late in life, to Governor-General Lord Moira. These letters, published here for the first time, show that Hastings remained an astute observer of British Indian politics. They provide a rich account of the ways in which Britain’s Indian empire evolved in the decades around 1800. Moreover, they reveal that one of that empire’s founders expressed a profoundly critical view of its progress.

KEYWORDS:

• British Empire
• India
• South Asia
• Warren Hastings
• East India Company
• Imperial Meridian

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Philip J. Stern, ‘Early Eighteenth-Century British India: Antimeridian or Antemeridiem?’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 21 (2020).

2 See especially C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989).

3 For Hastings’ career in India, see Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge, 2007), ch. 3; Joshua Ehrlich, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge, 2023), ch. 1. For his impeachment, see P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Oxford, 1965); Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, 2015), chs. 12, 15. For Hastings’ afterlife, see P. J. Marshall, ‘The Making of an Imperial Icon: The Case of Warren Hastings’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 27 (1999): 1–16; Alfie Banks, ‘The Imperial Afterlife of Warren Hastings, 1818–1947’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 50 (2022): 498–531.

4 The editor of some of Hastings’ later correspondence bid his readers to contemplate ‘the great Indian Dictator … in his night gown and slippers … in his green old age, settled down as a genial, scholarly, urbane, and neighbourly country gentleman.’ ‘Unpublished Letters of Warren Hastings’, Calcutta Review 26 (1856): 59–141, 60. Recent biographers have largely accepted this portrait. See for instance, P. J. Marshall, ‘Hastings, Warren’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).

5 Although from 1816 he was styled the Marquess of Hastings, Moira was not related to Warren Hastings.

6 For the initial letter, see Moira to Hastings, 11 Nov. 1812, British Library, Add. MS 39871, ff. 118r-122r.

7 See Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India, ch. 3.

8 On this policy, see Ehrlich, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge, ch. 1.

9 On these missions, see Alastair Lamb, ed., Bhutan and Tibet: The Travels of George Bogle and Alexander Hamilton, 1774–1777 (Hertingfordbury, UK, 2002); Kate Teltscher, The High Road to China: George Bogle, the Panchen Lama and the First British Expedition to Tibet (London, 2006).

10 Of the Company’s government Hastings had once written, ‘Its very constitution is made up of discordant parts, and contains the seeds of death in it’. Hastings to Laurence Sulivan, 18 Apr. 1779, in G. R. Gleig, Memoirs of the Life of The Right Hon. Warren Hastings, 3 vols. (London, 1841), vol. II, 275.

11 See G. J. Bryant, The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784: A Grand Strategic Interpretation (Woodbridge, UK, 2013).

12 Hastings struggled to explain this volte face when it was pointed out to him, in the Commons, in 1813. Speech in House of Commons Debate (30 Mar. 1813), Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 (London, 1803–), vol. XXV, cols. 426–7.

13 Ehrlich, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge, ch. 4.

14 Moira to Hastings, 3 Feb. 1814, British Library, Add. MS 29189, f. 124v.

15 See Ainslie Thomas Embree, Charles Grant and British Rule in India (London, 1962).

16 Parts of a draft of this letter (British Library, Add. MS 29233, ff. 1r-15v) were published in facsimile in ‘Warren Hastings on British Indian Administration’, Bengal Past and Present 79 (1960), 18–25. The draft was also consulted for Keith Feiling, Warren Hastings (London, 1954).

17 Philip Francis, George Monson, and John Clavering, who were appointed under the terms of the Regulating Act of 1773.

18 Lord Minto (1751–1814).

19 In 1780, at the Battle of Pollilur, during the Second Anglo-Mysore War.

20 The subsidiary alliance system.

21 Apparently the Ghaghara. Walter Hamilton, The East-India Gazetteer, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (London, 1828), vol. 1, 505.

22 The courtier Abu al-Fazl’s Ain-i Akbari, an English translation of which was prepared and published under Hastings’ patronage: [Abu al-Fazl,] Ayeen Akbery: Or, The Institutes of the Emperor Akber, trans. Francis Gladwin, 3 vols. (Calcutta, 1783–6).

23 Hastings’ translation differs from the one given in Abu Taulib Alhusseini, William Davy, and Joseph White, eds. and trans., Institutes Political and Military, Written Originally in the Mogul Language, by the Great Timour (Oxford, 1781), 349.

24 One such granary was completed in Patna in 1786, after Hastings’ departure.

25 The preceding cover letter has not been traced at Mount Stuart, but a copy can be found among Hastings’ papers at British Library, Add. MS 29234, f. 23r.

26 ‘The Teshoo-Lâma’s Journey to Pekin’, Oriental Repertory 2 (1791): 145–64.

27 Hastings’ tour of northern India in 1781 led to two of the charges on which he was tried later in parliament. For details, see Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings, chs. 5–6.

28 See John Sullivan to Warren Hastings, 29 Sept. 1813, BL, Add. MS 29188, ff. 266r-v.

29 Hastings’ nephew, Charles Chapuset, for whom he had procured a cadetship in the Company. Chapuset ‘proved a waster, got into debt, and was finally cashiered’. K. L. Murray, Beloved Marian: The Social History of Mr. and Mrs. Warren Hastings (London, 1938), 188–9.

30 The Anglo-Nepalese War or Gorkha War (1814–16).

31 Hastings probably encountered the legend of this lost tribe in Mountstuart Elphinstone, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, and its Dependencies, in Persia, Tartary, and India (London, 1815), 154–7.