THE EAST INDIA COMPANY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POLITICS

Abstract

PR F E S S O R L. B. NAMIE R, in considering the earlier years of the reign of George III, has drawn attention to the need for work in the further elucidation of the part played in their politics by the East India Company.2 The need exists to a greater or less extent throughout a great part of the century. For Professor Namier was going behind the great question of the significance in the development of British imperialism of the expansion of territorial control in India after the Seven Years War and the high issues raised in the greatest cause celebre of eighteenth-century England, the trial of Warren Hastings; he was drawing attention to the way in which a large financial, trading and territorial corporation, itself undergoing great administrative and political strain, could be affected by and itself affect the intricate workings of politicq at Westminster, and the unending struggle of the governments of the day to maintain the 'connexion' on which their survival depended.' His interest in this problem is an illustration of the difference of outlook between the modern historian and his predecessors. To the latter, the circumstances immediately surrounding an event, though they might be of high interest, were in the last resort no more than incidental to the great evolutionary trend in which they believed, a trend which under the heroic influence of great forces and ideas was leading the men who thought they controlled these events to ends greater and more distant than they knew. When historians actuated by this belief explained an event by the statement that the 'time was ripe for it' or that 'public opinion demanded it', they were giving an explanation which for them was more valid than a wealth of detail about the circumstances surrounding it. To the modern historian however, bereft of this underlying belief in purposive progress, these high-sounding phrases mean very little. To him every specific act has a specific cause and, though among these causes may be a Variety of social forces including those powerful forces which we call ideas, he is inclined to see these forces as conflicting and diverse, given coherence by the practical decisions of individuals, rather than all-pervasive and purposive. Hence what were to his predecessors the incidental circumstances surrounding an event are to him precisely the factors which give it unique significance. It is from the details which occasion events alone, from i A paper delivered at the Anglo-French Historical Conference, Paris, on 26 September I946. 2 L. B. Namier, Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (i929), ii, 352, n. I.