1 - Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

Summary

Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of Bengal (1772-85), patronized learning on a larger scale than any previous East India Company official. This chapter argues that he did so in an attempt to square the Company’s growing political footprint with its hybrid constitution. The Company’s conquest of Bengal from midcentury had stirred up arguments in Britain and India that a body of merchants could not, or should not, rule vast and populous territories. Hastings sympathized with such arguments, but he was bound by duty and circumstances to oppose them. “Conciliation” offered him a means to do so. This idea, derived from both European and Mughal sources, denoted a commercial style of politics based on accommodation and negotiation. In the context of scholarly patronage, it tapped into widespread positive associations between commerce and knowledge. Hastings maintained that patronizing European scholar-officials and Indian learned elites would conciliate opinion toward the Company state. If this hybrid entity was to last, he suggested, it must traffic not only in material goods but also in intellectual ones.