Burke’s Critique of the East India Company: Advocating for Justice in India

When most people picture the British in 18th-century India, they imagine soldiers, merchants, and administrators acting in near-perfect agreement about the benefits of empire. Edmund Burke complicates that picture. An Irish-born member of the British Parliament, Burke spent the most demanding years of his political life prosecuting his own country’s most powerful corporation for its conduct in Bengal. His attack on the East India Company was not a footnote to his career. He himself believed it was the most important work he ever did, and it produced one of the longest and most dramatic trials in British history.

The East India Company as a state in disguise 🔗

To understand Burke’s anger, you first need to understand what the East India Company had become. It started as a trading firm chartered to do business in Asia. By the late 18th century, it had transformed into something stranger and far more dangerous: a private corporation that ruled territory. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and the grant of the Diwani (revenue rights) of Bengal in 1765, the Company collected taxes, maintained armies, and governed millions of people.

What alarmed Burke was that this enormous power answered to almost no one. As scholars have noted, the Company in Bengal was not effectively controlled by any positive law, whether Indian, British, or international. A trading company had become the sovereign of a region the size of France, yet it operated outside the legal restraints that bind ordinary governments. For Burke, who believed deeply in the rule of law and inherited institutions, this was a recipe for unchecked greed.

Exploitation, monopoly, and economic ruin 🔗

Burke’s critique was not only moral and emotional. It was also precise and economic. He served as the primary author of the Ninth Report of the Select Committee, a detailed parliamentary investigation into the Company’s behaviour. Through this work he documented how the Company disrupted the supply and demand of the local Indian economy and manipulated prices for its own benefit.

The Company held monopolies over essential goods such as opium, saltpetre, and salt. These monopolies allowed Company officials to squeeze ordinary producers and consumers, producing destructive social and economic consequences. Burke also objected to how the Company used revenue: it treated surplus extracted from Bengal as a tool to fund trade, rather than letting commerce naturally generate revenue. In his view, the natural relationship between trade and governance had been inverted, with extraction taking the place of genuine commerce.

A corporation that should return to commerce 🔗

Interestingly, Burke did not want to abolish the Company outright. This is a point that often surprises students. Unlike Adam Smith, who supported terminating the firm’s charter as part of his attack on the mercantile system, Burke wanted to preserve the Company’s legal existence while forcing it to change its nature. He argued that the corporation should go back to being a commercial institution rather than continue acting as a public administrator over a vast population. His proposed reform appeared in the famous Speech on Fox’s India Bill, one of his most celebrated parliamentary performances, in which he laid out a plan to bring the Company’s misgovernment under control.

Respect for India’s ancient civilization 🔗

What gives Burke’s critique its distinctive character is his genuine respect for Indian society. He did not see India as a blank space waiting to be improved by European rule. He saw an ancient and sophisticated civilization with its own laws, customs, and institutions that deserved protection.

This conviction came through powerfully during the trial. On the first day of the impeachment proceedings, Burke declared that the British should not pass judgment upon people who framed their laws and institutions long before Britain’s own origins. He argued that Indian institutions possessed two qualities that earned them respect: great force and stability, and beneficial moral and civil effects. In other words, the social order in India worked, had endured for centuries, and was not Britain’s to casually dismantle.

Governing people on their own principles 🔗

Burke’s respect translated into a clear principle of administration. He believed that Indians should be governed according to their own principles and maxims rather than forced into narrow British ideas. He went so far as to argue that the British should extend their own understanding to take in Indian customs, instead of compelling Indians to adopt foreign norms. For Burke, imposing alien laws on a settled society would produce only chaos and resentment. This was a remarkably early articulation of the idea that good governance must respect cultural difference, a theme that still resonates in debates about pluralism and federalism today.

The impeachment of Warren Hastings 🔗

Burke’s principles found their sharpest expression in his campaign against Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of Bengal. Burke became the most outspoken critic in Parliament of Company abuses and led the campaign to impeach Hastings on grounds of misrule and corruption. Hastings was formally charged with high crimes and misdemeanours in 1787, and his trial began in Westminster Hall in 1788.

The charges were specific and damning. They included Hastings’s treatment of Raja Chait Singh of Benares, whom Burke accused him of driving to revolt through illegal exactions, and the confiscation of the wealth of the Begums of Oudh. The episode of the Begums became one of the most emotionally charged moments of the trial. As accounts of the period describe, the Nawab, supported by Company troops, laid siege to his own mother and grandmother and arrested their eunuchs to force them to surrender their treasure. Further charges covered corrupt contracts, the illegal receipt of presents from Indians, and the conduct of the Rohilla War.

Burke prosecuted with extraordinary intensity. He immersed himself in Company affairs and impressed the court with his deep knowledge of Indian events, making the Indian victims of Hastings into household names in Britain. His language was ferocious, accusing Hastings of crimes rooted in avarice, rapacity, cruelty, and pride.

Geographical morality and natural law 🔗

The intellectual core of the trial was a clash over the meaning of morality itself. Hastings defended his conduct using what Burke famously called “geographical morality”, the argument that actions in Asia did not carry the same moral weight as the same actions would in Europe, because they aligned with local despotic custom. Burke rejected this completely. He denied that the duties of men should be governed by climate, longitude, or latitude rather than by universal principles binding on all humanity.

To make this case, Burke appealed to natural law, the idea that there exists a higher moral order above the laws written by any particular state. By this logic, a British official could not escape moral judgment simply by pointing to Indian custom or by claiming that the rules were different east of the Cape. The principle that commerce aimed at profit and government aimed at the welfare of the people are fundamentally irreconcilable ran through his argument.

A trial that failed and yet succeeded 🔗

In the narrow legal sense, Burke lost. The proceedings dragged on for years, and Hastings was finally acquitted in 1795 after a trial lasting roughly eight years. During this time the membership of the House of Lords, who served as judges, changed dramatically, and public attention drifted toward events closer to home, including the French Revolution.

Yet the trial mattered enormously beyond its verdict. It was arguably the first major public event in Europe in which the legal and moral legitimacy of colonialism itself was placed on trial before the highest judicial body in Britain. Burke forced his nation to confront the reality of what its agents were doing abroad, and he insisted that holding power over others created responsibilities, not merely opportunities for profit.

Burke’s legacy and its limits 🔗

For students today, Burke offers a layered example worth examining carefully. He combined conservative instincts, including reverence for tradition and inherited institutions, with a forceful defence of subjugated peoples against the abuses of empire. His insistence on accountability, ethical governance, and respect for local custom anticipated many later arguments about responsible administration.

At the same time, Burke’s position has its critics. The post-colonial school has argued that Burke should have demanded that the British leave India altogether, rather than reform their rule and thereby prolong it. By trying to make empire more humane, the criticism goes, Burke helped justify its continued existence. His admiration for Indian institutions has also been read as a somewhat idealised, outsider’s image of India rather than an accurate account of its complex realities. These debates are precisely what make Burke valuable to study: he sits at the uncomfortable intersection of conscience and empire, where good intentions and structural injustice were tangled together.

What do you think? Was Burke a genuine champion of Indian rights, or did his project of reforming colonial rule ultimately strengthen the very empire he criticised? And can his idea that those who hold power must answer to a moral order higher than convenience still guide how we judge governments and corporations today?

References

1. https://portalrecerca.uab.cat/en/publications/the-rule-of-law-against-the-rule-of-greed-edmund-burke-against-th/
2. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/commerce-and-manners-in-edmund-burkes-political-economy/britains-east-india-company-indian-markets-and-monopoly/58BE5B3F273C1E3055F7DF59F2BCABFD
3. https://resolve.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-history-of-economic-thought/volume/9A073FEE1D16EEB5E4303FB94912D3A2?pageNum=2
4. https://isi.org/edmund-burke-and-the-politics-of-empire/
5. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/openindia/political-subjectivity-in-edmund-burkes-india-and-liberal-multiculturalism/
6. https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/legislativescrutiny/parliament-and-empire/parliament-and-the-american-colonies-before-1765/the-east-india-company-and-public-opinion/
7. https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/warren-hastings-the-british-governor-general-who-laid-the-foundations-of-modern-india/
8. https://enrouteindianhistory.com/the-trial-of-warren-hastings-european-corruption-and-illegalities-of-colonial-law/
9. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/15/1/53
10. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230306004_2
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