Warren Hastings
Warren Hastings was the first Governor-General of Bengal, from 1773 to 1785, the man who turned the East India Company's plunder of Bengal into a government, fought the Marathas and Mysore at once and survived, founded the Asiatic Society and the study of Sanskrit by Englishmen, and was impeached on his return by Burke and Sheridan in a trial that lasted seven years and acquitted him ruined. He went to India as a clerk at seventeen, was a prisoner of the nawab at Murshidabad in 1756, learned Persian and Bengali, and came home in 1764 with a modest fortune he then lost. Sent back as governor of Bengal in 1772 to reform a province the Company had bled and a famine had emptied, he took the revenue collection out of the hands of the nawab's officers, moved the treasury to Calcutta, set up civil and criminal courts, and had the Hindu and Muslim law codes compiled so that the Company's courts could apply them. Lord North's Regulating Act made him Governor-General in 1773 with a council of four, three of whom, led by Philip Francis, arrived from England determined to undo him and outvoted him for two years; the hanging of the Brahmin Nandakumar for forgery in 1775, after he had accused Hastings of bribery, was the act his enemies never forgave, and in 1780 he and Francis fought a duel and Francis went home wounded to pursue him in Parliament. The wars came together. The Bombay government's meddling in a Maratha succession brought a Maratha war in 1779, Haidar Ali of Mysore overran the Carnatic in 1780 and destroyed a Company army at Pollilur, and the French fleet came. Hastings sent Eyre Coote south, bought off the Marathas with the treaty of Salbai in 1782, and paid for it by fining the raja of Benares, who rebelled, and squeezing the begums of Oudh, which were the two charges at his trial. He resigned in 1785 and the impeachment opened in Westminster Hall in 1788 with Burke's four-day speech. The Lords acquitted him in 1795 on every charge; the Company paid his costs and a pension. He bought back his family's lost manor at Daylesford and died there in 1818, made a privy councillor at the end.
- Lived: 1732 CE – 1818 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: governor, colonial administrator
