A Cheat, a Sharper and a Swindler

Brian Young

  • Dawning of the Raj: The Life and Trials of Warren Hastings by Jeremy Bernstein
    Aurum, 319 pp, £19.99, March 2001, ISBN 1 85410 753 4

Early in his career as the first Governor-General of the East India Company in Bengal, Warren Hastings instituted an annual dinner for fellow old boys of Westminster School. He paced his own contribution to these occasions superbly; while other ‘Westminsters’ drank to potentially dangerous degrees of excess in a forbidding climate, the abstemious Hastings consumed only small quantities of diluted wine along with many glasses of water. Even in the most apparently convivial of circumstances, Hastings maintained self-control, the root of the considerable personal authority which he was to exercise from his days at Westminster on (he had been a serious boy, and became Captain of the school in 1749). Westminster connections were important to Hastings, in one case damningly so, and such small, familiarly masculine worlds would continue to reinforce the ethic of empire, both at its creation and in its dismantling. (Paul Scott’s fictional Chillingborough, the school which binds together so many of the characters in the Raj Quartet, much to the outsider Merrick’s disgust, was a typically perceptive creation.)

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[*] The quotations from the trial are taken from The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. India: The Hastings Trial 1789-94, edited by P.J. Marshall (Oxford, 728 pp., £75, 13 April 2000, 0 19 820809 x).

Vol. 23 No. 10 · 24 May 2001 » Brian Young » A Cheat, a Sharper and a Swindler (print version)
Pages 34-35 | 3813 words