Georgian Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Georgian Era’
Edmund Burke told the House of Commons that the American colonies’ refusal to be dictated to by Westminster was the very spirit that had made the Empire great.
In 1766, Parliament truculently reasserted the right to tax and regulate Britain’s thirteen American colonies. The Americans were allowed no MPs in the Commons, but they had many friends, and barely a month before those first shots rang out in Lexington on April 19th, 1775, Edmund Burke warned the Government not to try to crush the manly English spirit that made Americans so independent.
A witness appeared before a Calcutta court, only to find that judge and learned counsel were determined to discredit her.
While visiting London in the early 1800s, Mirza Abu Taleb Khan was brazenly but quite legally defrauded of ten shillings by a litigious tailor, and he had heard hair-curling tales of similar judicial malpractice in Calcutta. He had also heard, however, of one occasion when the attorneys were given a taste of their own medicine.
When he left Calcutta in February 1799 for a tour of Europe, Abu Taleb Khan scarcely expected to spend so much of his time in England trying to keep out of the courts.
On January 21st, 1800, Mirza Abu Taleb Khan arrived in London, full of eager anticipation. What he never foresaw was the trouble he would get from litigious shopkeepers and tradesmen, who repeatedly defrauded him with the help of a corrupt judicial system. If the Indian ever felt he was being targeted he was quickly disabused: the natives of Jane Austen’s London were being skinned daily too.
Edmund Burke explained to the Duke of Bedford that in politics there is very great difference between change and reform.
In 1789, the leaders of the French Revolution promised liberty, equality and fraternity to the downtrodden people of France, and Francis Russell (1765-1802), 5th Duke of Bedford, admired them for it. But Edmund Burke warned him that to France’s new elite, righting the wrongs of the poor was infinitely less exciting than the chance to conduct a relentless socio-economic experiment on the peoples of Europe.
In 1756, the Nawab of Bengal allowed his frustration with British merchants in Calcutta to get the better of him.
With the Seven Years’ War brewing in Europe, no one was more pleased than Louis XV of France when in June 1756 the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, grew frustrated with the British in Calcutta and seized Fort William and all its wealth. The horrific sequel has been told in many ways: what mattered then was how it was told the following December to Admiral Watson, the man whose job it was to respond.
Before Siraj ud-Daulah became Nawab of Bengal in 1756, his grandfather begged him to keep the English sweet, and put no trust in Jafar Ali Khan. If he had only listened...
Robert Clive’s victory on June 23rd, 1757, over the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey near Murshidabad was vital to Britain’s successful defence of her colonies in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) against Louis XV of France, and fixed the British East India Company as the Mughal Emperors’ chief European trade partner. For Hari Charan Das, it was also a judgment on the Nawab’s refusal to listen to his grandfather.