Burke’s fascination with France was rather fleeting when compared to the time he spent on Indian affairs. Almost a decade and a half of his parliamentary career was dedicated to the affairs of Warren Hastings, the re-chartering of the East India Company, and in general the subject of what is just in politics. It is from Burke’s speech on Fox’s East India Bill (1783) that we get this familiar and wrenching description of the East India Company’s affairs of a region that Burke defines in a manner not dissimilar to Gibbon’s opening salvo describing the spread of the Roman Empire:

“… an oppressive, irregular, capricious, unsteady, rapacious, and peculating despotism, with a direct disavowal of obedience to any authority at home, and without any fixed maxim, principle, or rule of proceeding ….”.¹

Burke’s speech is important because it affirmed, more prominently than others have before him, and in practical application as much as abstracted nuance, that the principles of government are universal, and empire can only be justified on grounds of being a net positive, not in terms of mere exploitation. Burke refused to surrender to the false idea that tyranny in South Asia was somehow different from tyrannical governance in Europe, or generally to that ridiculous notion that justice was some sort of ‘social construct’ or tempered by strong notions of anything except one’s membership in the imperium mundi: “These assertions are universal. I say in the full sense universal.”²

Justice, for Burke, included a denouncement of the ‘double cabinet’ and wanton spending of King George III’s administration and a rousing defence of natural hierarchy and established religion, and generally of English common law and customs elsewhere. For the man who elevated party from the depths of faction to a respectable term in politics, Burke did not seem to be much of a party man, for he despised expediency and preferred the much harder path of virtue.

Burke — ruined by the poor scholarship and sentimentalism of Russell Kirk for American audiences — is due for a re-examination, and in my opinion, his speech on Fox’s East India Bill, which Bromwich notes was “actually Burke’s in all but name,”³ is primed for such a reconsideration. It is but only a fleeting moment of what would be a decade and a half’s labours, but the bill itself ended tabled and defeated in the House of Lords “once the king gave the lords to understand that he would look on its supporters as his enemies.”⁴ I am almost sure that Edward Gibbon, then in the early years of his monumental history, and simultaneously Burke’s Whig friend and colleague as the Right Honourable Member of Parliament for Lymington, heard this speech, delivered with Burke’s usual oratorical presence and cadence, though I would like to stay away from the brand of speculation on the question of influence that I have previously written about here.

Burke reminds the House that “the situation of man is the preceptor of his duty,”⁵ and consequently, that man must respond not to the whims and fancies of what one may find desirable, agreeable, and simple, but to the situation one finds oneself in. If the British have, with some sleight of hand, or by the will of “the Sovereign Disposer,” found themselves despite all their reservations, engaged in the governance of India, it is their duty to “do the best we can in our situation.”⁶ Burke is unsparing and unrelenting in his broadsides, with little motivation to temperance or political pragmatism of any sort. He lays out with the meticulous research of a historian, the nuance of a philosopher, and the fierceness of an eloquent, well-rounded man, why the act of governance was not merely the guarantee of private benefit and profit: “The total silence of these gentlemen concerning the interest and well-being of the people of India, and concerning the interest which this nation has in the commerce and revenues of that country, is a strong indication of the value which they set upon these objects.”⁷ The House of Commons is reduced to worship at the false altar of Mammon, while Burke valiantly rises above from the dark depths of expediency to the eternal light of ius naturae in the heavens. For a man who ostensibly ought to keep diatribes against all his fellow MPs to a minimum to secure votes, he surely has a fiery passion and a waggling tail, but at least here this does not affect him in any substantial manner. The vote, he wins, the passage of the bill, he loses, with no less the enmity of King George III bundled with it.

The principle, Burke informs the House, of the Company’s rule in India, is pure evil, rapine and licentiousness, all excused and even extolled in the name of the charter. Burke points out that “when money has been thought to be heaped up any where, its owners are universally accused of rebellion, until they are acquitted of their money and their treasons at once. The money once taken, all accusation, trial, and punishment ends.”⁸ With the advent of the East India Company in Bengal, the state has been reduced to privation: “No other commerce has an existence …. The transport of its plunder is the only traffic of the country.”⁹ Burke, however, whilst making note of the excesses and tinpot dictatorships the EIC is itself or controls through its network of agents, does not pity the Indians as someone who need the English to interfere in their affairs: “When the countries, of which it is composed, came into our possession, they were all eminently peopled, and eminently productive; though at that time considerably declined from their ancient prosperity.”¹⁰

Burke recognised that India had its own existence, and spoke with a marked degree of respect and even, dare I say, appreciation, for that ‘ancient land’ which I spent much of my early years in but did not appreciate as much as he did.

However, in my opinion, the most important paragraphs in this entire speech — which is prolix as speeches go —  are the ones that lay out Burke’s concept of power as a trust:

“… all political power which is set over men, and that all privilege claimed or exercised in exclusion of them, being wholly artificial, and for so much a derogation from the natural equality of mankind at large, ought to be some way or other exercised ultimately for their benefit.

“If this is true with regard to every species of political dominion, and every description of commercial privilege, none of which can be original self-deriving rights, or grants for the mere private benefit of the holders, then such rights, or privileges, or whatever else you choose to call them, are all in the strictest sense a trust; and it is of the very essence of every trust to be rendered accountable; and even totally to cease, when it substantially varies from the purposes for which alone it could have a lawful existence.”¹¹

Burke, in using the word ‘trust’ to emphasise the nature of political activity, lays the roots for a benevolent paternalism which should be recognised as one of Burke’s more important principles in politics. In this, too, he shares significant commonality with Marcus Tullius Cicero, the statesman, philosopher, and orator par extraordinaire.

Burke reasons that power is intended to be exercised only for the benefit of the beneficiary. This is in stark contrast to the notion of the ‘social contract’, with all its problems and the general degradation of government and of the polis that it implies. The ‘social contract’ is a figment of the modern imagination that adopts rather viciously and then fulfils to its extremity a sordid greed and a disposition to tyrannical rule with only expedience and no room for morality; alternatively, if I am to borrow from A. P. d’Entrèves:

“How did it come about … that political theory borrowed from the lawyers the notion of contract, ‘that greediest of legal categories’, and made it the basis of the State?”¹²

Burke seemed to restore the power and the might of the state to a higher station, but with that it entailed the adoption and performance of responsibilities that would render it a task not in totalising governmental power and consequently the train to despotism, but rather in the highest station of legal contract, of the trust: where there is the acknowledgement of transaction, but also of higher being, where the better guides and provides for those who are not in his station.

Burke’s concept of trusteeship means that the peoples of a nation are inexorably bound to the nation, that they have obligations to society and culture, and they do not consider the object of their lives to be the acquisition of more wealth but the betterment of society as a whole, if it were possible. The contemplative life is married to the practical one, for without the former one cannot know what is just and therefore good for the beneficiary; however, the contemplative life is not enough, for the beneficiary must act, either to conserve or to modify, such that the beneficiary is better off, and he is better disposed than he would have been without. It is a morally scrupulous one: the rules are defined, both by the ius naturae and common law, and it respects the beneficiary whilst using the ever-so-visible hand of the law and the government in general to do good.