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He charged Warren Hastings with betraying the trust of parliament, dishonouring the character of Britain and subverting the rights of Indians, ‘whose country he has laid waste and desolate’. He talked of ‘oppressed princes, of undone women of the first rank, of desolated provinces, and wasted kingdoms’. The way the Company collected taxes was a disgrace. Burke claimed that enforcers employed by the local officials to whom Hastings had delegated tax collection behaved grotesquely. Fathers were flogged to extract money from them. Sometimes their children were beaten before their eyes. Virgins were brought into court where they were ‘cruelly violated by the basest and wickedest of mankind’. There was more. ‘The wives of the people of the country only differed in this; they had lost their honour, in the bottom of the most cruel dungeons … but they were dragged out, naked and exposed to the public view, and scourged before all the people … they put the nipples of the women into the sharp edges of split bamboos and tore them from their bodies.’ He was, he said, ashamed to go on. Even Hastings admitted later that listening to it had made him feel ‘the most culpable man on earth’. When Burke’s colleague Richard Sheridan took up the demolition job, people were said to be paying 50 guineas a time for tickets. Sheridan wasn’t a dramatist and impresario for nothing. After several days his speech culminated in the assertion that ‘the condemnation we look for will be one of the most ample mercies accomplished for mankind since the creation of the world!’ And then, with the words ‘My lords, I have done,’ he collapsed backwards into Burke’s arms.

After this melodramatic start, the trial dragged on for seven years, constantly interrupted by other Westminster business of one kind or another, and the public grew increasingly bored with the spectacle, especially when, across the Channel, France erupted into revolution. Eventually the trial petered out. The twenty-nine peers who claimed to be competent to pass judgement did so, and acquitted Warren Hastings by generous margins. He retired to the country estate at Daylesford which his Indian gains had allowed him to recover and lived out the rest of his days as a Cotswold squire.

What had really been on trial, said Burke, was the honour of the entire nation. His own motives seem mixed – he resented the ghastly nabobs buying up seats in parliament, acquiring country piles and marrying the daughters of indigent gentry. But the impeachment of Hastings marked the point at which Britain became the first of the modern empires to mount a detailed interrogation of what was being done abroad in its name. It was part of a wider moral awakening in the dying years of the eighteenth century, of a piece with a growing revulsion at the cruelties of the slave trade. But unlike slavery, which was wrong in principle, what was on trial with Hastings was merely the practice of imperialism. The British were too in love with their empire to challenge its expansion, which continued apace – by 1823, just about all of India was under either direct or indirect British authority. The proposition that Burke laid out – that the colonizer had a moral duty to those he colonized – became the central ethical tenet of the British Empire. Of course, it was better than the opposite principle, which had underlain piracy and slavery. But there was something inherently nonsensical about it: would not the moral duty have been better exercised by not seizing the land in the first place? How could the ultimate purpose of colonization be freedom?

The touchstone issue for the new morality of empire became the question of religion. Charles Grant was another young Scot who had embarked for India intending to restore his family fortunes: he had been named after Bonnie Prince Charlie, a short time before his own father was cut down at Culloden. (The son did well enough in India to buy an estate on Skye and to take a seat in parliament when he returned.) But during the family