Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power by Niall Ferguson Page B

collapse. Nor could Hastings any longer rely on military operations to replenish the company’s coffers. In 1773 he accepted the offer of 40 million rupees from the Nawab of Oudh to fight the Rohillas, an Afghan people who had settled in Rohilkund, but the costs of this mercenary operation were not much less than the fee, which was in any case never paid. In 1779 the Marathas defeated a British army sent to challenge their dominance of Western India. A year later Haider Ali of Mysore and his son Tipu Sultan attacked Madras. As revenue imploded and costs exploded, the company had to rely on bond sales and short-term borrowing to remain afloat. Finally, the directors were forced not only to reduce the annual dividend but to turn to the government for assistance – to the disgust of the free market economist, Adam Smith. As Smith noted contemptuously in The Wealth of Nations (1776):
    Their debts, instead of being reduced, were augmented by an arrear to the treasury ... of ... four hundred thousand pounds, by another to the custom-house for duties unpaid, by a large debt to the bank for money borrowed, and by a fourth for bills drawn upon them from India, and wantonly accepted, to the amount of upwards of twelve hundred thousand pounds.
     
    By 1784 the company’s debt stood at £8.4 million and Hastings’s critics now included a powerful array of politicians, among them Henry Dundas and Edmund Burke – the former a hard-nosed Scottish power-broker, the latter a tremendous Irish orator. When Hastings resigned as Governor-General and returned home in 1785, they secured his impeachment.
    Hastings’s trial, which ended up lasting an exhausting seven years, was more than the public humiliation of a chief executive before a meeting of disgruntled shareholders. In truth, it was the whole basis of the company’s rule in India that was on trial. The original grounds of impeachment debated in the Commons charged Hastings
    With gross injustice, cruelty and treachery against the faith of nations, in hiring British soldiers for the purpose of extirpating the innocent and helpless people ... the Rohillas ...
    With various instances of extortion and other deeds of maladministration against the Rajah of Benares ...
    [With] The numerous and insupportable hardships to which the Royal Family of Oude [Oudh] had been reduced ...
    With impoverishing and depopulating the whole country of Oude [Oudh], rendering that country, which was once a garden, an uninhabited desert ...
    With a wanton, and unjust, and pernicious exercise of his powers, and the great situation of trust which he occupied in India, in overturning the ancient establishments of the country, and extending an undue influence by conniving extravagant contracts, and appointing inordinate salaries ...
    With receiving money against the orders of the Company, the Act of Parliament and his own sacred engagements; and applying the money to purposes totally improper and unauthorized [and with] enormous extravagances and bribery in various contracts with a view to enrich his dependants and favourites.
     
    Though not all the charges were approved, the list was enough to get Hastings arrested and charged with ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’. On 13 February 1788 the most celebrated – and certainly the most protracted – trial in the history of the British Empire began in an atmosphere like that of a West End opening night. Before a glittering audience, Burke and the playwright Richard Sheridan opened the prosecution with virtuoso hyperbole:
    BURKE: I impeach him in the name of the English nation, whose ancient honour he has sullied. I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose rights he has trodden under foot, and whose country he has turned into a desert. Lastly, in the name of human nature itself, in the name of both sexes, in the name of every age, in the name of every rank, I impeach the common enemy and oppressor of all.
     
     
    SHERIDAN: In his mind all is