Warren Hastings
Governor of the Presidency of Fort William (Bengal) | |
---|---|
In office 28 April 1772 – 20 October 1773 | |
Preceded by | John Cartier |
Succeeded by | Position abolished |
Personal details | |
Born | Churchill, Oxfordshire | 6 December 1732
Died | 22 August 1818 Daylesford, Gloucestershire | (aged 85)
Nationality | British |
Spouse(s) |
Mary Buchanan
(m. 1756; died 1759) |
Residence | Daylesford House |
Alma mater | Westminster School |
Warren Hastings
Early life and education
Warren Hastings was born in Churchill, Oxfordshire in 1732 to Reverend Penyston Hastings and his wife Hester (née Warren), who died soon after he was born.[4][5][6] The family had been lords of the manor and patrons of the living of Daylesford in direct line from 1281 until 1715. The Daylesford estate was then sold, there having been a considerable loss of family wealth due to support given to Charles I.[7] Young Warren was brought up by his grandfather and educated in a charity school with the poorest children in the Gloucestershire village of Daylesford. At some point he was rescued by an uncle who sent him to London.[8]
Hastings attended
British traders still relied on the whims of local rulers, so that the political turmoil in Bengal was unsettling. The elderly moderate
For a while, Hastings remained in Murshidabad and was even used by the Nawab as an intermediary; but, fearing for his life, he escaped to the island of Fulta, where a number of refugees from Calcutta had taken shelter. While there, he met, fell in love with, and married Mary Buchanan, the widow of Captain John Buchanan (one of the victims of the Black Hole of Calcutta).
Rising status
In 1758, Hastings became the British
During Mir Jafar's reign, the East India Company exerted an increasingly large role in the running of the region, and effectively took over the defence of Bengal against external invaders when Bengal's troops proved insufficient for the task. As he grew older, Mir Jafar became gradually less effective in ruling the state, and in 1760,
Conquest of Bengal
Hastings was personally angered when investigating trading abuses in Bengal. He alleged that some European and British-allied Indian merchants were taking advantage of the situation to enrich themselves personally. Persons travelling under the unauthorised protection of the British flag engaged in widespread fraud and illegal trading, knowing that local
Ultimately, little was done to stem the abuses, and Hastings began to consider quitting his post and returning to Britain. His resignation was only delayed by the outbreak of fresh fighting in Bengal. Once on the throne Qasim proved increasingly independent in his actions, and he rebuilt Bengal's army by hiring European instructors and mercenaries who greatly improved the standard of his forces.[17] He gradually felt more confident, and in 1764, when a dispute broke out in the settlement of Patna, he captured its British garrison and threatened to execute them if the East India Company responded militarily. When Calcutta dispatched troops anyway, Mir Qasim executed the hostages. British forces then went on the attack and won a series of battles culminating in the decisive Battle of Buxar in October 1764. After this, Mir Qasim fled into exile in Delhi, where he died in 1777. The Treaty of Allahabad (1765) gave the East India Company the right to collect taxes in Bengal on behalf of the Mughal Emperor.
Hastings resigned in December 1764 and sailed for Britain the following month. He left deeply saddened by the failure of the more moderate strategy that he had supported, but which had been rejected by the hawkish members of the Calcutta Council. Once he arrived in London, Hastings began spending far beyond his means. He stayed at fashionable addresses and had his picture painted by
Madras and Calcutta
Hastings arrived in Madras shortly after the First Anglo-Mysore War of 1767–1769, when the forces of Hyder Ali had threatened the capture of the city. The Treaty of Madras (4 April 1769) ended the war but failed to settle the dispute and three further Anglo-Mysore Wars followed (1780–1799). During his time at Madras, Hastings initiated reforms of trading practices which cut out the use of middlemen and benefited both the Company and the Indian labourers, but otherwise the period was relatively uneventful for him.[20]
By this stage, Hastings shared Clive's view that the three major British Presidencies (settlements) –
While Governor, Hastings launched a major crackdown on
Governor-General
The
According to
- He got quickly to work, beginning the process of turning the EIC into an administrative service. Hastings' first major change was to move all the functions of government from Murshidabad to Calcutta ... Throughout 1773, Hastings worked with extraordinary energy. He unified currency systems, ordered the codification of Hindu laws and digests of Muslim law books, reformed the tax and customs system, fixed land revenue and stopped the worst oppression being carried out on behalf of private traders by the local agents. He created an efficient postal service, backed a proper cartographical survey of India by James Rennell and built a series of public granaries, including the great Gola at Patna, to make sure the famine of 1770-71 was never repeated ... Underlying all Hastings' work was a deep respect for the land he had lived in since his teens ... Hastings genuinely liked India, and by the time he became Governor spoke not only good Bengali and Urdu but also fluent court and literary Persian.[23]
In 1774, Hastings assumed control of the East India Company's opium monopoly.[24]: 6–7
War with France
In 1777, during the
War in India
The presidencies of Madras and Bombay became involved in serious quarrels with the greatest of the native states. Madras with the formidable Hyder Ali of Mysore and with the Nizam of Hyderabad, and Bombay with the Marathas. France sent a fleet under Admiral Pierre André de Suffren. The combination meant Hastings faced a formidable challenge, with only Oudh as an ally.[25] In six years of intense and confused fighting, from 1779 to 1784, Hastings sent one army marching across India to help Bombay, and another to Madras. His greatest achievement was in breaking up the hostile coalition. By 1782 he made peace with the Marathas. The French fleet had been repeatedly delayed. Suffren finally arrived in 1782 to discover that the Indian coalition had fallen apart, that Hastings had captured all the French ports, and Suffren could achieve nothing. When the wars ended in 1784, British rule in India had not changed, but the French position was now much weaker. The East India Company now had an efficient system in operation. However, Hastings's multiple wartime operations needed large sums of money and London sent nothing. His methods of using the local treasuries later became the main line of attack in the impeachment brought against him.[26][27][28]
Bhutan and Tibet
In 1773, Hastings responded to an appeal for help from the Raja of the princely state of
The Druk Desi returned to face civil war at home. His opponent Jigme Senge, the regent for the seven-year-old
In February 1782, news reached the headquarters of the EIC in Calcutta of the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama. Hastings proposed sending a mission to Tibet with a message of congratulation, designed to strengthen amicable relations established by Bogle on his earlier visit. With the assent of the EIC Court of Directors, Samuel Turner was appointed chief of the Tibet mission on 9 January 1783 with fellow EIC employee Samuel Davis as "Draftsman & Surveyor".[31] Turner returned to the Governor-General's camp at Patna in 1784 where he reported he had been unable to visit the Tibetan capital at Lhasa, but received a promise that merchants sent there from India would be encouraged.[32]
Turner was instructed to obtain a pair of
Hasting's return to England ended any further efforts to engage in diplomacy with Tibet.
Impeachment
In 1785, after 10 years of service, during which he helped extend and regularise the nascent Raj created by Clive of India, Hastings resigned. He was replaced by the Earl Cornwallis; Cornwallis served as Commander-in-Chief of British India and Governor of the Presidency of Fort William, also known as the Bengal Presidency.
On return to England, Hastings was impeached in the
Following the indictment by the House of Commons, Hastings was tried by his peers in the House of Lords; the trial started on 13 February 1788 and continued for 148 days of hearings over a period of seven years.[37] These hearings continued at great person cost to Hastings, who complained that he was being bankrupted by the cost of defending himself. He is rumoured once to have said that the punishment would have been less extreme had he pleaded guilty.[38] The House of Lords acquitted him of all charges on 24 April 1795.[39] The Company subsequently compensated him with £4,000 annually, retroactive to the date he returned to England, but did not reimburse his legal fees, which he claimed to have been £70,000. He collected the stipend for nearly 29 years.[40][41] Throughout the years of the trial, Hastings lived in considerable style at his leased town house, Somerset House, Park Lane.[42] He subsequently sold the lease at auction for £9,450.
Among many who supported him in print was the pamphleteer Ralph Broome.[43][44][45] Others disturbed by the perceived injustice of the proceedings included Frances Burney.[46]
Letters and journals of Jane Austen and her family, who knew Hastings, show they followed the trial closely.[47]
Later life
Hastings' supporters from the Edinburgh East India Club and a number of other gentlemen from India gave a reportedly "elegant entertainment" for Hastings when he visited Edinburgh. There was a toast to "prosperity to our settlements in India" and a wish that "the virtue and talents which preserved them be ever remembered with gratitude."[48]
In 1788, Hastings bought for £54,000 an estate at Daylesford, Gloucestershire, including the site of the Hastings family's medieval seat.[41] Thereafter he remodelled the house to designs by Samuel Pepys Cockerell with classical and Indian decoration and gardens landscaped by John Davenport. In 1801, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.[49]
In 1816, he rebuilt the Norman church, where he was buried two years later. In spite of substantial compensation from the East India Company, Hastings was technically insolvent on his death.[40]
Administrative ethos and legacy
In the last quarter of the 18th century, many senior administrators realised that to govern Indian society it was essential to learn its various religious, social, and legal customs and precedents. The importance of such knowledge to the colonial government was in Hastings' mind when he remarked in 1784, in his introduction to the English translation of the ‘’Bhagavad Gita’’ by Wilkins:[50]
Every accumulation of knowledge and especially such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exercise dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state... it attracts and conciliates distant affections; it lessens the weight of the chain by which the natives are held in subjection; and it imprints on the hearts of our countrymen the sense of obligation and benevolence.... Every instance which brings their real character... home to observation will impress us with a more generous sense of feeling for their natural rights, and teach us to estimate them by the measure of our own. But such instances can only be obtained in their writings: and these will survive when the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.[51]
During Hastings' term as governor-general, much administrative precedent was set, which profoundly shaped later attitudes towards the government of British India. Hastings had great respect for the ancient scripture of
In 1781, Hastings founded
Legacy
The city of Hastings, New Zealand, and the Melbourne outer suburb of Hastings, Victoria, Australia, were named after him. There is also a road and the neighbourhood of Hastings, Kolkata, in India named after him.
"Hastings" is the name of one of the four schoolhouses in
RIMS Warren Hastings was a Royal Indian Marine troopship built by the Barrow Shipbuilding Co. and launched on 18 April 1893. The ship struck a rock and was wrecked off the coast of Réunion on the night of 14 January 1897.
Literature
Hastings took an interest in seeing the
"Warren Hastings and His Bull", a short story by the Indian writer Uday Prakash, was adapted for stage under the same title by the director Arvind Gaur. It presents Hastings's interaction with traditional India in a work of socio-economic political satire.
A short story by the Hindi author Shivprasad Singh 'Rudra' Kashikeya called Bahti Ganga features
The Hastings career is much discussed in the historical mystery novel, Secrets in the Stones, by Tessa Harris.[56]
Hastings is named in Book 5 of George Eliot's novel Middlemarch, where his greed for Daylesford is compared to the character Joshua Rigg's greed for money.
Hastings was rumoured to be the biological father of Eliza de Feuillide, the daughter of Philadelphia Austen Hancock and a cousin of Jane Austen.[57] Some scholars have seen parallels between Hastings and Colonel Brandon in Austen's Sense and Sensibility: both left for India at age 17; both may have had illegitimate daughters named Eliza; both participated in a duel. Linda Robinson Walker argues that Hastings "haunts Sense and Sensibility in the character of Colonel Brandon."[58]
See also
References
- ^ Bengal Public Consultations, 12 February 1785, No. 2. Letter from Warren Hastings, 8 February, formally declaring resignation of the office of Governor General.
- ^ "Warren Hastings". BBC. Retrieved 17 July 2020.
- .
- ^ Gloucestershire, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538–1813.
- ^ Sir Alfred Lyall (1889). Warren Hastings. Macmillan and Co. pp. 1-2.
- ^ Lawson, Charles (1897). The Private Life of Warren Hastings. Madras Mail Press. p. 9.
- ^ John Chambers (1820). Biographical Illustrations of Worcestershire: Including Lives of Persons, Natives Or Residents, Eminent Either for Piety Or Talent. W. Walcott. pp. 486–501.
- ^ a b Dalrymple 2019, p. 145.
- ^ Patrick Turnbull, Warren Hastings. New English Library, 1975, p. 17.
- ^ Turnbull pp. 17–18.
- ^ Turnbull pp. 19–21.
- ^ Turnbull p. 23.
- ^ "Warren Hastings — Statesman and Diplomat". westminster-abbey.org. Archived from the original on 12 June 2023. Retrieved 15 January 2024.
- ^ Turnbull pp. 27–28.
- ^ Turnbull pp. 34–35.
- ^ Turnbull pp. 36–40.
- ^ Turnbull p. 36.
- required.)
- ^ "Marian Hastings". The British Museum.
- ^ a b Turnbull p. 52.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-19-516677-4.
- ^ The Earl of Birkenhead, Famous Trials of History, Garden City: Garden City Publishing Company, 1926, p. 165.
- ^ Dalrymple 2019, pp. 238–239.
- ISBN 978-1-4780-1121-7.
- ^ Penderel Moon, Warren Hastings and British India; (1947) pp 201–243.
- ^ Ramsay Muir, British History, 1930, pp. 441–442.
- ^ Henry Dodwell, "Warren Hastings and the Assignment of the Carnatic." English Historical Review 40.159, 1925, pp. 375–396 online.
- ^ Kumar Badri Narain Singh, "The War of American Independence and India" Proceedings of the Indian History Congress Vol. 38, 1977 online.
- ISBN 978-0-313-07696-1.
- ^ Younghusband 1910, pp. 5–7.
- ^ Davis, Samuel; Aris, Michael (1982). Views of Medieval Bhutan: the diary and drawings of Samuel Davis, 1783. Serindia. p. 31.
- ^ Younghusband 1910, p. 27.
- ISBN 978-0-226-31747-2.
- ^ Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Warren Hastings (1841)".
- ^ The Earl of Birkenhead, Famous Trials of History, Garden City: Garden City Publishing Company, 1926, p. 170.
- ^ Mithi Mukherjee, "Justice, War, and the Imperium: India and Britain in Edmund Burke's Prosecutorial Speeches in the Impeachment Trial of Warren Hastings." Law and History Review 23.3 (2005): 589–630 online. Also see Mukherjee, I ndia in the Shadows of Empire: A Legal and Political History (1774-1950) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010).
- ^ Sir Alfred Lyall, Warren Hastings, London: Macmillan and Co, 1920, p. 218.
- ^ The Earl of Birkenhead, Famous Trials of History, Garden City: Garden City Publishing Company, 1926, p. 173.
- ISBN 0-88738-406-4
- ^ a b 'The captain-general of iniquity': The impeachment of Warren Hastings.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-7190-4725-1.
- ^ "Park Lane", Survey of London: volume 40: The Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair, Part 2 (The Buildings) (1980), pp. 264–289, accessed 15 November 2010.
- ^ Letters from Simkin the Second to his dear brother in Wales, for the year 1790; giving a full and circumstantial account of all the most material points during the trial of Warren Hastings. John Stockdale. 1790.
- ^ Ralph Broome (1791). The letters of Simkin the second: poetic recorder of all the proceedings. J. Stockdale.
- ^ Ralph Broome (1790). An Elucidation of the Articles of Impeachment Preferred by the Last Parliament Against Warren Hastings, Late Governor General of Bengal. Stockdale.
- ^ The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d'Arblay) I. 1791–1792, p. 115 ff.
- ^ Jane Austen's colonial connections.
- ^ W. M. Gilbert, ed., Edinburgh in the Nineteenth Century, Edinburgh, 1901, p. 44.
- ^ "Fellows details". Royal Society. Retrieved 23 January 2017.
- ^ "The Bhagavat-Geeta, Or, Dialogues of Krishna and Arjoon in Eighteen Lectures". Retrieved 28 December 2022.
- ISBN 978-0-19-564167-7.
- ^ University History. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
- ISBN 0-8021-3797-0.
Not the least of Warren Hastings' achievements had been the foundation in 1784 of the Bengal Asiatic Society which, under the presidency of [Sir William] Jones, became a veritable clearing-house for intellectual data about India.
- Macmillan. p. 394.
- ^ Garrett, John; Wilhelm, Humboldt, eds. (1849). The Bhagavat-Geeta, Or, Dialogues of Krishna and Arjoon in Eighteen Lectures. Bangalore: Wesleyan Mission Press. Retrieved 18 January 2017.
- ISBN 978-0-7582-9342-8. excerpt from Secrets in the Stones, Postscript.
- ^ Shelden, Michael (7 September 2002). "Cousin Eliza, the incurable flirt who inspired Jane Austen". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 12 January 2022. Retrieved 6 June 2020.
- ^ Walker, Linda Robinson (2013). "Jane Austen, the Second Anglo-Mysore War, and Colonel Brandon's Forcible Circumcision: A Rereading of Sense and Sensibility". Persuasions On-Line. 34 (1). Jane Austen Society of North America. Retrieved 6 June 2020.
Bibliography
- ISBN 978-1-63557-395-4. excerpt
- Alfred Mervyn Davies, Strange destiny: a biography of Warren Hastings (1935)
- Suresh Chandra Ghosh, The Social Condition of the British Community in Bengal: 1757–1800 (Brill, 1970)
- Keith Feiling, Warren Hastings (1954)
- Philip Lawson, The East India Company: A History (Routledge, 2014)
- P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (1965)
- P. J. Marshall, "Hastings, Warren (1732–1818)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn, Oct 2008 accessed 11 Nov 2014
- Penderel Moon, Warren Hastings and British India (Macmillan, 1949) online
- Patrick Turnbull, Warren Hastings. (New English Library, 1975)
- Younghusband, Francis (1910). India and Tibet: a history of the relations which have subsisted between the two countries from the time of Warren Hastings to 1910; with a particular account of the mission to Lhasa of 1904. London: John Murray.
Primary sources
- G. W. Forrest, ed., Selections from the State Papers of the Governors-General of India: Warren Hastings (2 vols.), Blackwell's, Oxford (1910)
- Sir George Forrest (1892). The Administration of Warren Hastings, 1772-1785. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Print.
- Warren Hastings (1782). A Narrative of the Insurrection which Happened in the Zemeedary of Banaris in August 1781. Calcutta: The Governor General.
- Warren Hastings (1782). A Narrative of the Late Transactions at Benares. London: J. Debrett.
- Warren Hastings (1786). Memoirs Relative to the State of India. London: J. Murray.
- G. R. Gleig (1841). Memoirs of the Life of Warren Hastings. Vol. I. London: Rich. Bentley.
- G. R. Gleig (1841). Memoirs of the Life of Warren Hastings. Vol. II. London: Rich. Bentley.
- G. R. Gleig (1841). Memoirs of the Life of Warren Hastings. Vol. III. London: Rich. Bentley.
- Lionel James Trotter (1892). Warren Hastings. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Sir Charles Lawson (1895). The Private Life of Warren Hastings: First Governor-General of India. London: S. Sonnenschein.
- Sir Charles Lawson (1897). The Private Life of Warren Hastings: press reviews. Madras: Madras Mail Press.
- Warren Hastings (1905). Sydney C. Grier (ed.). The Letters of Warren Hastings to His Wife. London: W. Blackwood.
External links
- Works by or about Warren Hastings at Wikisource
- "Warren Hastings" an essay by Thomas Babington Macaulay (October 1841)
- Warren Hastings at Project Gutenberg (within Critical and Historical Essays (Macaulay))
- Warren Hastings public domain audiobook at LibriVox
- Newspaper clippings about Warren Hastings in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW