Many have told of the East India Company's extraordinary excesses
in eighteenth-century India, of the plunder that made its directors
fabulously wealthy and able to buy British land and titles, but
this is only a fraction of the story. When one of these men--Warren
Hastings--was put on trial by Edmund Burke, it brought the
Company's exploits to the attention of the public. Through the
trial and after, the British government transformed public
understanding of the Company's corrupt actions by creating an image
of a vulnerable India that needed British assistance. Intrusive
behavior was recast as a civilizing mission. In this fascinating,
and devastating, account of the scandal that laid the foundation of
the British Empire, Nicholas Dirks explains how this substitution
of imperial authority for Company rule helped erase the dirty
origins of empire and justify the British presence in India.
"The Scandal of Empire" reveals that the conquests and
exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England's
development in the eighteenth century and beyond. We see how
mercantile trade was inextricably linked with imperial venture and
scandalous excess and how these three things provided the
ideological basis for far-flung British expansion. In this
powerfully written and trenchant critique, Dirks shows how the
empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By
returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became
acceptable we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the
colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for
Britain, India, and the world.
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