The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

by William Dalrymple

With various instances of extortion and other deeds of maladministration … With impoverishing and depopulating the whole country … with a wanton, and unjust, and pernicious, exercise of his powers … in overturning the ancient establishments of the country … With cruelties unheard of and devastations almost without name … Crimes which have their rise in the wicked dispositions of men – in avarice, rapacity, pride, cruelty, malignity, haughtiness, insolence, ferocity, treachery, cruelty, malignity of temper – in short, nothing that does not argue a total extinction of all moral principle, that does not manifest an inveterate blackness of heart, a heart blackened to the very blackest, a heart corrupted, gangrened to the core … We have brought before you the head, the Captain General of Iniquity – one in whom all the frauds, all the peculations, all the violence, all the tyranny in India are embodied.2 Hastings, Burke explained, was, quite simply, a criminal: ‘He is a robber. He steals, he filches, he plunders, he oppresses, he extorts.’ He was ‘a professor, a doctor upon the subject’ of crime.3 Worse was to come. Hastings, said Burke, was also ‘a rat’, ‘a weasel’, ‘a keeper of a pig stye, wallowing in corruption’. ‘Like a wild beast, he groans in corners over the dead and dying.’4 Every