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
Continue reading “In Praise of Edmund Burke’s Speech on Fox’s East India Bill”
- Edmund Burke, ‘Speech on Fox’s East India Bill,’ in On Empire, Liberty, and Reform, ed. David Bromwich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 282–370, 345. ↩