13 - Burke on India

Summary

India was one of the great causes of Burke’s political career, one that he pursued from around 1780 until his retirement from parliament. Indeed, in his own retrospective judgement, it was the cause ‘on which I value myself the most’ (WS, IX: 159). By ‘India’ here is meant the incipient British empire in India or, more precisely, the regime of the English East India Company, to which parliament had ceded not only a commercial monopoly, but also authority over those parts of India that came under British control. ‘India’ also denotes the distant country and people as Burke tried to imagine them, and for whom he became a passionate advocate.

Burke became convinced that the East India Company (and by extension parliament) was abusing its trust by perpetrating (or permitting) severe forms of oppression and plunder of India and, more ominously, destroying the social foundations of a great, though alien, civilisation. Analysing and exposing the various abuses of imperial rule, Burke (together with his fellow Whigs under Fox) called for reforms. More dramatically, as a way of raising both parliamentary and public consciousness about the affairs of India, Burke pursued the prosecution and impeachment of Warren Hastings, the former governor-general of Bengal, whom Burke believed had directed and personified many of the abusive practices.