Describes the invention and use of impeachment by the British Parliament from 1376 through the 1780s, with particular focus on its primary purpose as a legislative counterweight to royal oppression and overreach, as well as its role in defining the limits of the British constitution.

Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of Bengal (1772-85), patronized learning on a larger scale than any previous East India Company official. This chapter argues that he did so in an attempt to square the Company’s growing political footprint with its hybrid constitution. The Company’s conquest of Bengal from midcentury had stirred up arguments in Britain and India that a body of merchants could not, or should not, rule vast and populous territories. Hastings sympathized with such arguments, but he was bound by duty and circumstances to oppose them. “Conciliation” offered him a means to do so. This idea, derived from both European and Mughal sources, denoted a commercial style of politics based on accommodation and negotiation. In the context of scholarly patronage, it tapped into widespread positive associations between commerce and knowledge. Hastings maintained that patronizing European scholar-officials and Indian learned elites would conciliate opinion toward the Company state. If this hybrid entity was to last, he suggested, it must traffic not only in material goods but also in intellectual ones.

In the decade after Warren Hastings’ departure (1785–98), his idea of conciliation encountered new and formidable opposition. He relied on the idea in his defense against impeachment in parliament, but his principal accuser, Edmund Burke, identified it with corruption. Conciliation also acquired a bad name in India, where Hastings’ acting replacement, John Macpherson, made it the watchword of his scandalous administration. Hence, it fell to Lord Cornwallis to rid the idea of its unsavoriness, as part of his attempt to restore metropolitan faith in the Company state. The governor-general’s alliance with Sir William Jones helped in this regard. In the 1790s, pressure on the Company state and on the idea of conciliation abated. Yet this was to be a temporary reprieve. Soon, both would be challenged afresh by the governor-generalship of Lord Wellesley.

Between 1798 and 1818, a theory and practice of paramountcy was forged, with lasting consequences for the Company’s empire in India. Though the subsidiary alliance system first emerged in the mid-eighteenth century, and the first Residents were posted to Indian courts in the 1770s, British conceptions of their own role in the subcontinent were initially limited to maintaining the status quo. Governor General Richard Wellesley, however, replaced the older emphasis on the balance of powers with a new, more moralizing vision of tranquillity in the subcontinent, with the Company acting as the ultimate political and military arbiter. Though Wellesley’s ambitions were repudiated initially, his insidious legacy lived on through the Residents who matured under his influence. By 1818, the Company’s right to intervene in allied kingdoms had moved beyond the realm of debate, even if the appropriate degree of intervention was never conclusively settled. Precedents from 1798 to 1818 would be cited as late as 1929 to justify the British government’s sweeping powers relative to its Indian allies. While 1857 is usually presented as a point of rupture in the history of the princely states, the period 1798–1818 set the terms for debates that rumbled on until Indian independence.

This chapter shows how the judicial reforms of Governor Warren Hastings in 1772 attempted to recentre sovereign authority in the British settlement of Calcutta byco-opting and recasting late Mughal venues and practices of petitioning and dispute resolution. It explores how Hastings attempted to found the Company's legal system, not just on 'religious' forms of Muslim and Hindu law, but on Mughal practices of revenue administration. Even after 1772, the chief revenue office in Calcutta (khalisa sharifa or ‘khalsa’) – retained an important role as a site for investigating disputes over land and revenues, and for discovering a new form of ‘civil law’ based on the Company’s interpretations of late Mughal precedents.

Chapter 10 begins with discussion of Burke’s critique of Warren Hastings’s rule in Eleventh Report of Select Committee. Under Hastings, the East India Company fueled bribery, extortion, and fraudulence, which eroded the bond of trust between England and Indian natives. I then discuss Speech on Fox’s India Bill, one of Burke’s most illustrious speeches in which he outlined his plan to reform the maladministration of the Company. I explain why Burke both defended the prescriptive legitimacy of the Company and argued that the corporation should return to being a commercial institution, rather than continue to operate in the capacity of a public administrator. I also explore the six mercantile principles Burke proffers in the speech that he believed were necessary maxims of ethical and effectual commercial activity. Additionally, I demonstrate that Burke’s rebuke of the Company’s violation of Indian property rights disclosed his broader belief in the importance of private property in establishing a strong landed aristocracy and vibrant commercial culture. I conclude that Burke’s attack on the Company underlined his steadfast opposition to the concentration of political and economic power.

Chapter 9 explores Burke’s economic critique of Britain’s East India Company in India. I first outline Burke’s general approval of government trading monopolies, which he defended for opening up new trade routes and promoting commerce in distant lands. I then transition to discussing the Select Committee report that detailed the Company’s pattern of abuse in India, Ninth Report of Select Committee, of which Burke was its primary author. Burke condemned the firm for disrupting the supply and demand laws of the local Indian economy and manipulating the competitive price system. He also criticized the company for using surplus revenue as a means to stimulate trade, rather than use trade as a means to increase revenue. Similarly, I elaborate on Ninth Report’s criticisms of the Company’s monopoly on opium, saltpeter, and salt, which produced destructive economic and social consequences and further exposed the firm’s gross misconduct in India.