False Economy - Alan Beattie [129]
Francis's personal vendetta found a receptive audience in London. The reality was sinking in, especially after the surrender of the British forces at Yorktown in 1781, that Britain had lost its North American colonies. So on top of the Bengal famine and the near-bankruptcy of the Company, parliamentary reformers had some supporting evidence for their argument that misgovernance was undermining the empire. In 1781, Parliament appointed a select committee to investigate the administration of justice in Bengal. By 1788, by which time Hastings had retired to London, it had accumulated sufficient evidence to attempt an impeachment.
The context for the impeachment was critical to understanding what was actually on trial. Eighteenth-century British politics was deeply corrupt. Robert Walpole, generally credited with being the country's first prime minister, presided over a ministry so steeped in bribery, chicanery, electoral malpractice, and gerrymandering that he became known as the "Grand Corruptor." As we saw with the sugar lobby, parliamentary seats and influence were routinely bought and sold. It would be going too far, however, to say that this system had settled into being a widely accepted norm. Satirists such as the artist William Hogarth bitterly attacked the venality of politics. His series of four paintings and prints An Election portrayed Britain as a broken-down coach that had ceased to progress because of rampant vote-buying. Reformist members of Parliament like Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox drew parallels between the collapse of the Roman empire, rotted from the inside by corruption, and the weakening of the British colonies.
During the impeachment, the competing sides put on trial the entire culture of the East India Company's operations in the subcontinent. Hastings's defense argued he had merely fallen into line with local practice. Hastings's chief counsel, the celebrated Edward Law, said of "entertainment allowances" received by Hastings from the nawab of Bengal's widow that "it is impossible for any persons to read any oriental history without knowing that custom has prevailed over the East, from the most ancient times to the present."
Edmund Burke dismissed what he called this "geographical morality." Via a comprehensive tour of comparative jurisprudence, taking in Islamic and Hindu law in India and Turkey, the legal code of Genghis Khan, and the difference between the Persian words for legitimate gift-giving and for a clandestine and corrupt bribe, he concluded, in a grand peroration: "Let him [Hastings] run from law to law. ... Follow him where you will; let him have Eastern or Western law; you find everywhere arbitrary power and peculation of Governors proscribed and horridly punished."
After an epic trial lasting until 1795, the impeachment failed. Perhaps the implied challenge to the prevailing culture of Westminster was too much. To make his case that the Company was violating established norms, Burke had to make the wildly unconvincing claim that bribery and corruption were alien to British political life.
Moreover, while there was growing criticism of the East India Company's monopoly powers, it was nonetheless still spreading British influence over a large part of the subcontinent and generating trade and wealth. Unlike the officials of the Portuguese empire, the servants of the Company were diverting for themselves a portion of a growing pile of spoils from victory, not grabbing what they could as the colonies went into decline. They were skimming cream, not playing Supermarket Sweep. The Company permanently lost its monopoly on trade with East Asia in 1834. But it was permitted to continue running India until it had failed even on its own terms, with a serious revolt of its own Indian soldiers in 1857. (In Britain at