This letter contains a perfect plan of policy, both of compulsion and encouragement, which must in a very considerable degree operate destructively to the manufactures of Bengal.
Edmund Burke
The Public Record
Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician who is widely credited as the founder of the cultural and political philosophy of conservatism. Regarded as one of the most influential conservative thinkers and political writers of the 18th century, Burke spent the majority of his career in Great Britain and was elected as a member of Parliament (MP) from 1766 to 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. His writings played a significant role in influencing public views and opinions in both Great Britain and France following the French Revolution in 1789, and he remains a major figure in modern conservative circles.
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Its effect must be (so far as it could operate without being eluded) to change the whole face of that industrious country, in order to render it a field for the produce of crude materials subservient to the manufactures of Great Britain.
Whatsoever by bounties or immunities is encouraged out of a landed revenue has certainly some tendency to lessen the net amount of that revenue, and to forward a produce which does not yield to the gross collection, rather than one that…
This very instructive paragraph lays open the true origin of the internal decay of Bengal.
This system must have an immediate tendency towards disordering the trade of India, and must finally end in great detriment to the Company itself.
The authority given to the servants to buy at an advanced price did of necessity furnish means and excuses for every sort of fraud in their purchases.
The instant the servant of a merchant is admitted on his own judgment to overbid the market, or to send goods to his master which shall sell at loss, there is no longer any standard upon which his unfair practices can be estimated, or any…
The means of letting the natives into the benefit of the improved system of produce was likely to be counteracted by the general ill conduct of the Company's concerns abroad.
The whole of this history will serve to demonstrate that all attempts, which in their original system or in their necessary consequences tend to the distress of India, must, and in a very short time will, make themselves felt even by those…
On pretence of securing an advantage for this fourth part for their masters, they exerted a most violent and arbitrary power over the whole.
Their inability to keep accounts left them at the discretion of the agents of the supreme power to make their balances what they pleased, and they recovered them, not by legal process, but by seizure of their goods and arbitrary…
But it appears very extraordinary that nothing but the actual proof of a general abuse could affect a practice the very principle of which tends to make the coercion as general as the trade.
Hurst's reflection concerning the abuse of authority is just, but in this case it is altogether inapplicable; because the complaint was not of the abuse, but of the use of authority in matters of trade, which ought to have been free.
In such cases of mutual assertion and denial, your Committee are led irresistibly to attach abuse to power, and to presume that suffering and hardship are more likely to attend on weakness than that any combination of unprotected…
The complaints of the native merchants ought not to have been treated in any of those modes in which they were then treated.
And when men are in the situation of complainants against unbounded power, their abandoning their suit is far from a full and clear proof of their complaints being groundless.
It is not because redress has been rendered impracticable that oppression does not exist; nor is the despair of sufferers any alleviation of their afflictions.
Among other acts of a similar nature he is charged with having ordered the appraiser of the Company's cloths, who was an old man, and who asserts that he had faithfully served the Company above sixteen years without the least censure on…
It was no slight aggravation of this severity, that the objects were not young, nor of the lowest of the people, who might, by the vigor of their constitutions, or by the habits of hardship, be enabled to bear up against treatment so full…
But the public injury is not in the least repaired by the acquiescence of individuals, as it touched the honor of the very highest parts of government.
Where there is not a vigorous rivalship, not only tolerated, but encouraged, it is impossible ever to redeem the manufacturers from the servitude induced by those unpaid balances.
It appears in evidence that natives can hardly trade to the best advantage, (your Committee doubt whether they can trade to any advantage at all,) if not joined with or countenanced by British subjects.
The effect which so long continued a monopoly, followed by a preëmption, and then by partial preferences supported by power, must necessarily have in weakening the mercantile capital, and disabling the merchants from all undertakings of…
To make a sudden change, therefore, might destroy the few advantages which attend any trade, without securing those which must flow from one established upon sound mercantile principles, whenever such a trade can be established.
The fact is, that the forcible direction which the trade of India has had towards Europe, to the neglect, or rather to the total abandoning, of the Asiatic, has of itself tended to carry even the internal business from the native merchant.
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