Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke defended the American colonists, prosecuted the governor-general of India for seven years, and wrote the book that founded modern conservatism by attacking the French Revolution before the Terror had begun. He was an Irish Protestant with a Catholic mother, which shaped a career-long concern with the penal laws, and he entered the Commons in 1766 as a Rockingham Whig. On America he argued consistently that the question was not whether Parliament had the right to tax the colonies but whether it was wise to, and that conciliation was cheaper than coercion. On India he spent from 1786 to 1795 impeaching Warren Hastings before the House of Lords, on the argument that arbitrary power over Indians was as intolerable as arbitrary power over Englishmen; Hastings was acquitted and the prosecution ruined Burke financially and politically, but the speeches are among the earliest sustained attacks on the conduct of empire. Reflections on the Revolution in France appeared in November 1790, when English opinion was still largely favourable, and argued that a society is an inheritance rather than a contract, that abstract rights are no guide to government, and that sweeping away institutions because they cannot be justified from first principles will end in military dictatorship. He predicted a popular general taking power, which is either prescience or a good guess. The book broke his friendship with Charles James Fox publicly on the floor of the House and produced Thomas Paine's Rights of Man in reply. He also supported free trade with Ireland and Catholic relief at cost to his own seat in Bristol. Both British parties have claimed him since, which is possible because his positions were arguments about circumstance rather than a system. He died in 1797 and asked to be buried secretly, fearing the French would dig him up if they reached England. His Bristol constituents rejected him at the next election for the positions he had taken against their trade.

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