Far more than any of his contemporaries, Hastings was conscious of the many flaws in the Company’s regime, and wrote about them tellingly: ‘To hold vast possessions, and yet to act on the level of mere merchants, making immediate gain our first principle; to receive an immense revenue without possessing protective power over the people who pay it … [these] are paradoxes not to be reconciled, highly injurious to our national character … and bordering on inhumanity.’
