A Dereliction of Duty
Edmund Burke tore into the directors of the East India Company, accusing them of doing less for the country than India’s mediaeval conquerors.
1783
King George III 1760-1820
Edmund Burke tore into the directors of the East India Company, accusing them of doing less for the country than India’s mediaeval conquerors.
1783
King George III 1760-1820
In 1783, Edmund Burke urged the House of Commons to strip the East India Company of its administration of India, arguing that the Mughal Emperors and other foreign conquerors had done more for the people than the Company seemed likely to do. His blistering attack on the Company’s record repays reading, as it applies just as well to modern aid programmes, interventions and regime changes.
abridged
THE difference in favour of the first conquerors is this; the Asiatic conquerors very soon abated of their ferocity, because they made the conquered country their own. They rose or fell with the rise or fall of the territory they lived in. Fathers there deposited the hopes of their posterity; and children there beheld the monuments of their fathers. Here their lot was finally cast; and it is the natural wish of all, that their lot should not be cast in a bad land. If hoards were made by violence and tyranny, they were still domestic hoards; and domestic profusion, or the rapine of a more powerful and prodigal hand, restored them to the people.* With many disorders, and with few political checks upon power, Nature had still fair play; the sources of acquisition were not dried up; and therefore the trade, the manufactures, and the commerce of the country flourished.
But under the English government all this order is reversed. The Tartar invasion was mischievous; but it is our protection that destroys India. It was their enmity, but it is our friendship. Our conquest there, after twenty years, is as crude as it was the first day.
* That is, the poor were often given back at least some of the money that had been taken from them, either because their ruler happened to be generous, or because some more powerful king had conquered them and was trying to buy their loyalty. The Company, Burke suggested, did neither.