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By Root 948 0

did better than the Portuguese was its personnel policy. While the Portuguese, as we have seen, doled out colonial offices to foppish sons of a decadent aristocracy, the Company became a way for bright young men from more modest backgrounds to transcend their origins. Many were from Scotland, where opportunities for more conventional social advancement were limited by English dominance. In Bengal between 1775 and 1785, nearly half the men appointed to serve as "writers," the officials who kept accounts and corresponded with London on behalf of the Company, were Scots. Becoming a writer could be a very lucrative position indeed, and competition for the places was intense. Often they were simply put up for sale. Ostensibly, the employees worked for the Company, which was itself a contracted-out agent of the crown. In practice, they could semi-openly make money on the side for themselves. Not until the mid-1760s were Company officials even formally prohibited from using their position to trade on their own accounts.

There was a widespread attitude among its employees that, in the same way that the Company itself was given a monopoly in return for undertaking difficult and risky long-distance trade, so a lengthy stint in an uncomfortable and dangerous part of the world entirely justified their returning with more than a modest pension. Though better than the insulting pay of Chinese imperial bureaucrats, Company salaries were not particularly impressive. One successful Company official was quite open on the subject: "We are men of power, you say, and take advantage of it. Why, man, what is the use of station if we are not to benefit from it?"

But with political power comes responsibility, and when the government in India (and elsewhere in the British colonies) failed, the culture of the colonial officials came under more scrutiny. Beginning in 1769, Bengal suffered a severe famine in which around 10 million people—about a third of its total population—died. Debates abound to this day about the relative proportions of bad luck, callousness, and incompetence that caused the catastrophe. But the disruption, combined with a general depression in trade in Europe, meant that the directors of the Company had to appeal to Parliament to bail it out from bankruptcy.

This gave Parliament the excuse to put the Company on a tighter leash and make it more accountable to the crown and the wider public as well as just its shareholders. Suspicion, no doubt mixed with envy, had grown of the vast fortunes that senior officials of the Company were bringing back. Robert Clive, who had returned to England, was cross-examined by a parliamentary committee about the source and legitimacy of his wealth. His argument, that his personal reward had been comparatively small, given the service he had rendered the empire, culminated in a self-exculpatory climax that has passed into legend: "By God ... I stand astonished at my own moderation!"

But as hard as the principal pulled on the leash, the agent strained at it. Clive was not the last Company official in India to face criticism of greed and corruption in Parliament. Warren Hastings, an experienced administrator who had joined the Company as a clerk at the age of eighteen, was made the first governor-general of India in 1773. His powers were balanced by a council appointed by government, a move driven through against fierce opposition by the Company's shareholders and their friends in Parliament. The move to regulate the Company also saw judicial officials sent out from Britain to administer the legal affairs of India.

But Hastings fought hard against those members of the council opposed to his rule, and succeeded in subverting the judicial oversight when a school friend, Sir Elijah Impey, became chief justice. (Impey later named one of his sons Hastings.) In one episode, Maharaja Nanda-kumar, an Indian tax official, accused Warren Hastings of receiving huge payments from one of the widows of the nawab of Bengal. Conveniently for Hastings, Nandakumar was himself accused of forgery, tried before Impey