Dawning of the Raj: The Life and Trials of Warren Hastings. Este artículo no está disponible.Dawning of the Raj: The Life and Trials of Warren Hastings

The first new biography of Warren Hastings for 25 years Posterity has remembered Warren Hastings not for his career but for its aftermath. At the end of the eighteenth century he was indicated for "high crimes and misdemeanours", and subjected to the longest and most costly impeachment in British history. But he was also, more than anyone else, the founder of the extraordinary institution that was British India. How he worked his way up from the lowliest clerk in the British East India Company to become the first governor-general is a colourful story. It embraces constant conflict and military skirmishing with the French and with Afghan tribesmen on the North-West Frontier, the Black Hole of Calcutta, the trade in opium, cotton and diamonds, and the gradual consolidation of one small island nation's mastery of the subcontinent from the Indian Ocean to the Himalayas. But Hastings' brilliant but autocratic governance, associated with dubious financial "presents", brutally suppressed revolt and allegations of torture, also made him many enemies. In 1787, therefore, parliament voted to impeach him. His "trial of the century" was a courtroom epic, its protagonists including Edmund Burke and the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, with Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edward Gibbon and half the royal family among the throngs of spectators. It was seven years before Hastings was acquitted. But this book shows Warren Hastings as far more than merely a British imperialist. He sponsored the first English translation of the Bhagavadgita. He codified Indian law; he appointed native revenue officers; he unified the currency and created a postal service - in so doing establishing nothing less than the administrative, economic and mercantile foundations for British India. Recent years have seen landmark biographies of other figureheads of British India like Robert Clive and Lord Curzon, whose substantial sales have confirmed the enduring interest in the history of the Raj. Now the one major figure hitherto neglected receives a vivid and witty new biography.

Jeremy Bernstein was a staff writer for the New Yorker for over thirty years. His previous books about the Indian subcontinent are Mountain Passages and In the Himalayas.