Dan Snow's History Hit - The 18th Century Precedent for Trump's Impeachment

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

As the impeachment trial of Donald Trump got underway in the USA the 18th-century case of Warren Hastings, the former Governor-General of Bengal was cited as a precedent for someone being impeached after they had left office. But what happened to bring about Hastings' impeachment and why does this case matter now? I'm joined by best selling author, an expert on the East India Company and a rock star of 18th-century history William Dalrymple to find out.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Breaking news here, breaking news featuring someone from the 18th century. It's my ideal episode of the podcast, this. Warren Hastings, the former governor general of Bengal

in the late 18th century, was cited in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump in front of all those senators. He was cited as a reason, as precedent for impeaching somebody high office holder after they had left office. In Britain, impeachment was quite rare. There had been a few attempts to impeach senior royal advisors in the turbulent 17th century, but it was quite rare. So Hastings was impeached after returning from India. It became the most celebrated political trial of the 18th century, very, very closely followed in the US itself, whilst the founders were writing the constitution. So that is why Hastings matters, continues to matter, and particularly matters in the trial of Donald

Trump. Who'd have thought it? Brilliant. Now, obviously, obviously the person I'm going to for this is the oracle, the world's great authority on the East India Company and the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings. He is the best-selling author. He is the rock star of 18th century history. He is William Dalrymple. His books sell throughout the world. He's won prizes left, right, and center. He is as excited as I am about Hastings popping up in this impeachment trial. It's an opportunity for us to go back, talk about the parallels, talk about why they do matter and why the House impeachment managers were correct to cite him. If you wish to watch documentaries about Indian history, about Britain's campaign to conquer India in the 17th, 18th and 19th

centuries, then please check out History Hit TV. We've got plenty of history on there. We've got back episodes featuring William Dalrymple exclusively available on there as well. It's the world's best history channel and it's available to you guys for a very, very small subscription. Head over to historyhit.tv. You're going to love it. But in the meantime, everybody, enjoy this special episode on the impeachment of Warren Hastings and what it tells us about the impeachment of Donald Trump. Hi, William. Great to talk to you. Hello, Dan. Do you love it as much as I do when you're relaxing, watching contemporary political drama unfold,

and then suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, an 18th century figure that you're so familiar with is thrown into the midst of it and sort of becomes quite central to people's arguments. Particularly when I have to say, despite having spent the last 20 years of my life writing about the East India Company, I hadn't actually made the connection between, which is such an obvious one when you think about it, between the impeachment of Warren Hastings and the impeachment of Donald Trump. It's such an unusual world impeachment. It's such a specific word. And of course, the two are intimately related, as we now know. Who was this Warren Hastings and how did he come to be in India? So Warren Hastings is a surprising figure in all sorts of ways. His mother died in childbirth. His father then ran off to the plantations in the West Indies.

Remember, this is the height of the age of slavery, leaving Warren in the village with his grandfather. So this guy was effectively orphaned. At some point, he was rescued by an uncle who sent him to Westminster, where he became quickly the top scholar, and began to play cricket with Edward Gibbon, to bring it back to another history hit favorite. And then the family ran out of money yet again, and he was packed off at the age of 15 to India to join the East India Company. This was very much the option taken by many families in Britain that were well-connected but short of funds.

You needed to be well-connected to get into the East India Company because it was the single easiest way of making a fortune in 18th century India. But on the other hand, you had to be quite callous and desperate because three quarters of the young men who went off to India never came back again. Most of them died in their first couple of monsoons of disease. And if they were in the army, there were innumerable other possibilities for dying in action. And so it was a very high risk, but quite gold-plated method of increasing a family fortune. So Warren Hastings, whose family had actually lost the big family estate at Daylesford and were in hard times, and Hastings himself an orphan, were absolutely typical East India Company fodder,

so to speak. Hastings reminds me of the sort of people in Priya Satya's recent excellent book about empire and history, in which she points out that these highly educated, erudite young men would go to places like India, hugely intelligent. They become fluent in local languages, able administrators in their own terms. And yet they end up presiding over corruption and criminality. Well, I'm a huge admirer of Priya Satya and her book, but I disagree with her on some important points. And Hastings, I suspect, is one of them.

And in fact, she makes a footnote in her book to the fact that I have defended Hastings. And my book, The Anarchy, is a full length, 500 page, eviscerating attack on East India Company corruption. But Warren Hastings, oddly enough, is not the villain. Warren Hastings was an austere, scholarly, clean living, thin young man, deeply scholarly, who read five Indian languages. His only method of relaxing was to go hawking and to play the guitar a little. And all his letters are full of requests for books. And as a young man, his letters read very much like a sort of guardian investigative reporter, because he investigates the deep corruption of the company and consistently and serially puts his career on the line to expose corruption. Company, which is a corporation that exists only to make profit, has through a whole series of chances ended up as the prime military force in North India at a time when North India is producing

close on a third of the world's domestic product, largely through its extraordinary textile industry. Imagine, I suppose, TikTok or some rising Chinese corporation takes over Silicon Valley, would be the modern equivalent, and seizes control of all of the most profitable businesses in the world. And this has happened in the 1750s. And it isn't the British government. This is a private corporation. The East India Company is run out of an office in the city of London, with at this stage fairly little connection to the British government. The British government creams off its profits and taxes and customs. But at the time when Warren Hastings is a young man and watches the East India Company gobble up

Bengal, the British government has no formal connection with it other than issuing the charter to allow it to operate. And Hastings' letters as a young man are very moving. And he repeatedly complains about his colleague's corruption. I mean, I'll read you just a line from one letter. He says that the oppressions of the East India Company agents are so scandalous that I can no longer put up with them without injury to my own character. I'm tired of complaining to people who are strangers to justice, remorse, or shame. So this is a young man who, in the early part of his career, has stuck his neck out to expose corruption.

So when the government is called in to rein in the East India Company after it goes bankrupt in one of the great scandals of its day. There's a Bengal famine, millions die. At the same time as the famine is going on, East India Company personnel are extracting from India vast sums. I think 15 million are sent home. You could add six noughts to that for modern currency. 15 million are sent back to London in order for retired East India Company personnel to buy big houses that are now in the care of the National Trust. And Hastings is the man that the government turns to, to regulate this mess. He's a man who has a proven record of anti-corruption. And from the early part of his career, Hastings is known as the only man

in Bengal that has not enriched himself, who has stood up for the ordinary Bengali, who speaks the language and really cares to see that this administration works and is not simply a looting operation. So what happens to Hastings? He goes back to Britain. He realizes he hasn't got enough cash. He then goes back to Bengal. And as governor, does he become corrupted then? Is it a middle-aged thing? No. This is the extraordinary story. And this is, in a sense, where I think Priyasati and I would part company. Once he's appointed governor of Bengal, he does do all the things that any good crusading reformer would want. His first job, for example, is to build a whole load of granaries, one of which in Patna is still one of the most famous monuments of the city. These vast, big domed granaries in order to

stock up with grain to make sure there's never going to be a famine again. He roots out corruption, he reforms the administration, he imports British courts from Britain in order that there is a proper legal system and there is a working legal administration as well as a looting operation going on in India. But the same parliamentary act called the Regulating Act, which had led him to become governor general and led the British government to bail out the East India Company on the pro-quid quo that the company would reform itself, sends out from London three regulators, as they're called, to oversee the work of the East India Company to make sure that this corruption ends. And they are the problem because the regulators are two old buffers, not very clever boys getting jobs at the end of their careers of a sort that we still see today in the

modern British system. But one of them is this young, vicious, brilliant, ambitious parliamentary secretary called Philip Francis, who's the son of a Protestant clergyman in Ireland, and who is very much aware that he's not the same class and hasn't had the same perks in life as most of the people he's working with in the parliament. And he is Clive's man. Robert Clive, the retired governor general who doesn't like Warren Hastings, has taken the young Philip Francis to be his protege. And Philip Francis comes out with the fixed idea that he's going to topple Warren Hastings, who he thinks is the source of corruption. And he comes out to India.

And there's this sort of almost comical first day when these regulators arrive. Hastings doesn't go out to meet them. He organizes a 17-gun salute, not a 21-gun salute. And then when he meets them for lunch after their arrival, he doesn't put on a ruffled shirt. Now, to you, Dan, or me here in Delhi, a ruffled shirt might not be a matter of great importance. But clearly, in the 18th century, this was considered a basic bit of plightness that you would do to receive a visitor for lunch.

And so the relationship between the regulators and the governor general goes immediately downhill. And for the next three years, Philip Francis does all he can to prove that Hastings is the source of all corruption, and to try and get him out of office and get Francis himself as the replacement. And he writes this stream of vindictive letters from Bengal to London, to all the company directors accusing Hastings of mismanagement and so on. And it culminates in a duel. There's this hysterical duel in the middle of a major political crisis in India, when Philip Francis and Hastings face each other at dawn. And it turns out that neither of them has any idea how to use the pistols because they're both very bookish, scholarly men. And Hastings has used it once because he was actually had to face Sirajudh Daula just after the black hole when he was up in Qasim Bazaar and was part of the defense.

But Francis has never used a pistol in his life before. And it's the worst duel in history. Hastings has to borrow both flints and gunpowder from the man he's attempting to shoot. He three times misfires. Hastings, the gentleman, is very keen for Francis to make the first shot. So he just stands there and allows this man to shoot three times. And each time has to sort of help him get his flints and gunpowder in order. And eventually, Francis fires and misses. And then it's Hastings' turn. Hastings actually hits Francis. It doesn't kill him. The ball misses all the vital organs and it escapes, leaving Francis on the ground, bleeding and very ill. And he resigns. He goes back to London, and his entire focus of his life

remains in London to impeach Warren Hastings. And three years later, after telling the whole of Parliament that Hastings is the source of all corruption in Bengal, which is not the case, the impeachment trial begins. So in a sense, while the East India Company undoubtedly is every bit the corrupt, looting, plundering force that people at the time accused it of being and that we know it to be, in a sense, they impeached the wrong guy. They should have impeached Clive, who was properly corrupt, not Hastings. benevolent force of Philip Francis that leads to the crosshairs being pointed at Hastings, the one man who'd actually acted to reform the company and to make sure that the famine was never repeated. That's so fascinating. Was there a debate at the time about whether the returning governor should be impeached after his term of office? So the background to this is the extraordinary wealth being generated by the East India Company from India, largely by

looting and plundering. And the fact that everyone in England was deeply suspicious of this wealth, rather like in the 1980s, everybody loved to hate the merchant bankers. And then 10 years later, everybody loved to hate the hedge fund managers, because these were people who seemed to be able to conjure wealth out of nowhere. Everyone else was struggling, working their jobs as teachers or NHS health workers, struggling to cover the costs of their daily living. And these pirates, the hedge fund managers or the merchant bankers, were ploughing Porsches into restaurants and letting off fire extinguishers and nightclubs and generally behaving very badly and yet becoming incredibly rich very quickly. This was the East India Company. These young men who'd gone out at 15 or 16, like Hastings, were coming back aged 35, 40, with the equivalent of hundreds of millions of pounds in their bank account and buying up old estates, buying up the nicer squares

in London. Clive, for example, had one side of Berkeley Square, which was the equivalent of owning Trump Tower today, I suppose. And Hastings, through the malevolence of Philip Francis, who did nothing in his life other than try to frame Hastings, became the focus of this envy for this ill-gotten wealth. And the principle was right. The East India Company was corrupt. It was looting India. It was plundering India. It badly needed absolutely top to bottom reformation and a major cleaning operation. The whole system needed to be changed. But the one person that actually tried to do this was Warren Hastings. And so when he gets put on trial, it's a case of mistaken identity. of the impeachment of Warren Hastings is that the prosecutors, in contrast to the prosecutors of Donald Trump, who have done an amazing job over the last few days at creating these video compilations of the attack on the Capitol and getting their facts straight about the historicity

of the impeachment and so on. In contrast to that, the managers in charge of Warren Hastings trial, none of them had ever been to India. None of them knew anything about it and had to rely entirely on Philip Francis's information. So you get these sort of hysterical mistakes whereby, for example, Hastings is accused of waging war on the Rahila Afghans, whose leader was a man called Hafez Rahmat Khan. Now, Hafez Rahmat Khan was a fantastic sort of piratical Afghan warlord. And the reason that Hastings collaborated in attacking him with the Nawab of Abad was he was threatening the company's ally, the Kingdom of Abad, from its western border with a whole series of sort of hit and run raids. And so it wasn't an unreasonable thing for the company to lend its soldiers in a defensive

operation against these people. But when Hastings is put on trial, Hafez Rahmat Khan is said at the trial to be the poet Hafez, the great 14th century Sufi poet of Persian love poetry. And so people start reading out couplets of Hafez, who's a completely different character, 400 years earlier, a Sufi poet from Persia rather than an Afghan warlord in 18th century India. And that's the kind of level of information. And one of the most interesting things about the impeachment trial, Warren Hastings, is it shows how little was known in metropolitan England about the India which was being plundered and looted by the East India Company, that people were very

happy to use the customs and the taxes that it brought in. And the economy was kept afloat and was prospering because of the sheer amount of Indian gold that was pouring into the country. But no one knew anything about this place. It was just regarded as a source of wealth. And the only people with the slightest clue what was going on were retired East India Company officials, most of whom, rather like the Republican Party, were not going to betray their own, however egregious, the crimes. going to betray their own, however egregious, the crimes. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I'm talking to William Dalrymple about the impeachment of the Governor General of Bengal, Warren Hastings, in the 18th century. More after this.

Land a Viking longship on island shores. scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. hit. There are new episodes every week.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. I mean, I always remember Edmund Burke, who during this trial establishes his reputation as one of the great orators in British history. What were the arguments that he and his other managers

deployed against tastings, but really against the company? The trial was very much focused on the wrongdoings of the East India Company, because there was very little they could actually prove against Hastings, personally. And there were enormities taking place. Many of them had been reformed by Hastings, and many of the worst crimes that were referred to in the trial were taking place under Clive. the worst crimes that were referred to in the trial were taking place under Clive. But we need to give an impression, I think, of the scale of the notoriety and the excitement generated by the impeachment trial. This was the biggest scandal in late 18th century England. Westminster Hall is cleared. A whole load of benches are put up like a grandstand around Westminster Hall,

and it becomes the hottest ticket in the same way that today people might be fighting for the ticket at the Central Court at Wimbledon or the latest rap star coming from America to appear in the arena. So at the trial of Warren Hastings, tickets were going for as much as £50 on the black market. Everyone wanted to see this trial. The Queen was there. Fannie Burney was there. Hastings' old cricket team mate, Edward Gibbon, was there watching. And at the centre of it all are this incredible team of prosecutors, some of the greatest speakers of the age, led by Burke, who absolutely had the right idea about the corruption of the company, but had been misled and focusing it on Hastings,

supported by none other than the playwright Richard Sheridan, another great articulate Irish retoretician. And the speeches laid on by Sheridan are as theatrical as anything that he ever wrote for the theatre. On the first day, he makes his great impassioned speech against Hastings and then faints into Burke's arms. And Gibbon records in his diary going round to Sheridan's house the next day because he's worried that Sheridan has got some serious illness. He's swooned so dramatically on the

floor of Westminster Hall. And he says Sheridan was fine, a good actor. That's what he writes in his diary. So there's this very sort of emotional, souped up rhetoric. All of society is there. Everyone is watching, but they've got the wrong guy. It's that amazing moment, isn't there, where Burke shouts, remember, remember. Neil obviously knows the quote far better than I do, but it's sort of always been held up as such a powerful justification of impeachment and of more generally interrogating the past. You know, we shouldn't remember history just because we're fans of history in the abstract, but because Burke knew that to make the future materially different from the past, you have to

study the past. Yes, I mean, this is the legal precedent in the minds of the framers of the American Constitution in 1787, when they are putting together the possibility of the impeachment of a president in the new America. Britain has just been defeated, the British Empire has retreated to the Caribbean, where it's busy at the very peak of the transatlantic slave trade. We haven't said the very important fact of how much everyone in America is looking at what's happening in India, worried that the East India Company might be let loose on them. We've got to remember that when the American Revolution takes place, it starts in Boston Harbour with the Boston Tea Party. Now, the tea which is being poured into Boston Harbor is East India Company tea.

It's come from China, where the East India Company has bought it by selling Indian opium in the largest narco operation in history. The Medellin cartel are nothing compared to the East India Company, who turned Bengal, which had been this cultured, prosperous textile center, they turn it into the Colombian coke fields of their day. Opium is replacing food crops all over Bengal. And the company's using this to sell illegally into China to generate the money to buy the tea, which it will then make its fortune from by selling within India, in Europe and in America. And this is the trigger for the American Revolution, the tea of the East India Company. And you have this rhetoric, which I think people in America today probably aren't aware of, which is behind so much of the rhetoric of the patriots on the run up to the revolution,

because they're terrified that the East India Company is going to be let loose in America. And I'll just read you a few lines from a patriot called Edward Dickinson. He writes, just as Hastings is going on trial, just as the constitution is being written, this is what he writes. He says he'd feared that the East India Company, having plundered India, was now casting their eyes on America as a new theater, whereon to exercise their talents of rapine, oppression, and cruelty. Dickinson described the East India Company tea as accursed trash and compared the prospect of oppression by the corrupt East India Company in America as being devoured by rats. This almost bankrupt company, he said,

having been occupied in corrupting their country and wreaking the most unparalleled barbarities, extortion and monopolies in Bengal, now wish to do the same in America. But thank God, he writes, we are not sepoys or marauders. The American watchmen on their rounds, he wrote, should be instructed to, quote, call out every night past 12 o'clock, beware the East India Company. So these Boston patriots are sitting in Boston, devouring English periodicals like The Gentleman's Magazine and The Spectator, which are arriving off the boats, full of news, first of the collapse of the company and its corruption and its bankruptcy, then of the various attempts Parliament makes to

regulate it, which involves appointing Hastings and sending Philip Francis out. And then a few years later, they read of the trial of Warren Hastings. And Warren Hastings is depicted in the British press, being read in Boston, as this monster of corruption, as the embodiment of all which is worst about the East India Company. And the speeches are quite something. I mean, I'll just read you a little bit of what Burke says about what Hastings stands the trial of. Hastings is accused of the rape of India, of injustice and treachery against the faith of nations, with various instances of extortion and other deeds of maladministration, with impoverishing and depopulating the whole

country, with wanton and unjust and pernicious exercise of his powers, in overturning the ancient establishments of the country with cruelties unheard of and devastations almost without name. Crimes which have their rise in the wicked dispositions of men, in avarice, rapacity, pride, cruelty, malignity, haughtiness, insolence, ferocity, treachery, cruelty, malignity of temper. In short, nothing that does not argue for the total extinction of all moral principle, that does not manifest in the inveterate blackness of heart, a heart blackened to the very blackest, a heart corrupted, gangrened to the core. We have brought before you, he says, the head, the captain general of iniquity, the one in who all the frauds, the peculations, the violence and the tyranny of India are embedded. He goes on to call him a rat,

a weasel, the keeper of the pigsty wallowing in corruption like a wild beast. He groans in corners over the dead and dying. I mean, you know, it's the full 18th century rhetorical Monty, so to speak. It's such powerful stuff. It's such powerful stuff. I hope the House impeachment managers are listening to this podcast. I'm sure they are. I guess not unlike some of the concerns you hear at some of the senior Democrats in the House and Senate now,

there's a sense that the longer the trial drags on, the less it matters. It loses its impact. And you see that, of course, with the Hastings trial that goes on for years. Well, yes, exactly. It goes on for nearly 20 years. And in the end, Hastings is cleared of everything, partly because everyone just got so bored of it just running on. And it's driven from beginning to end by Philip Francis just pushing and pushing and pushing. from beginning to end by Philip Francis just pushing and pushing and pushing. And in the meantime, you know, governments have come and gone. A whole generation of peers have died. The people that heard the opening speeches are not alive, half of them at the end. And so the whole thing turns into a bit of a farce and it's a notorious mess. And I think all the signs we've seen, though, from the Trump impeachment so far have been

incredible. The case that the Democrats are putting forward and the video evidence they're amassing is strikingly strong in contrast to the very weak performance of Trump's dodgy mafia supporting lawyers. There's such a powerful parallel there, isn't there? Hastings was also, like Trump, impeached after leaving office. But clearly what's motivating the Whigs, Burke in the 18th century, and the Democrats now is not simply to remove someone from office, but to root out, to sort of confront something very malign in politics itself.

Yes, I mean, this is why Hastings was brought up. It was in the first day of the impeachment. And the issue was, is it constitutional to impeach a man out of office? And the defense for Trump was saying, no, you can't do this. He's no longer president. Let's dismiss the entire case straight away. And the Democrat managers of the impeachment, and incidentally, these terms, managers of the impeachment, are exactly those which were used at Hastings' impeachment. The Democrat impeachment managers used the impeachment department are exactly those which were used at Hastings' impeachment. The Democrat impeachment managers used the precedent of Hastings to show that it is possible

to impeach someone that has left office, because obviously Hastings was not impeached until a year after he got back from India and was living in London. And so that was how the name was first brought up, the fact that Trump is out of office, but the Democrats showed that the very case on which the writers of the American Constitution framed this provision for an impeachment was based on the impeachment of a man who'd already left office. Thank you so much for coming on, William. Tell me about your wonderful new set of books that's being published. They look very smart. Yes. So The Anarchy is going to reappear in a new form in a couple of months as the first volume of The Company Quartet. And The Company Quartet is the four books which I've been writing over the last 20 years on the East India Company. The first is The Anarchy. The second is called White Moguls, which is about a single love affair, which is incredibly telling about the East India Company, between a British resident, the ambassador to Hyderabad of the company, who falls in love with the Persian princess and converts to Islam and becomes a double-edged

working against the company. The third volume is Return of a King, about the Anglo-Afghan war of 1839-42, which has incredible parallels with the war that put President Karzai into office, because he is the descendant of the very man that the British put into power in 1839. He's the direct lineal descendant of Shah Shujrul Mulk. And then the final volume is The Last Mogul, which tells the story of what the British still call the Indian Mutiny, what the Indians call the First War of Independence, the great sort of Stalingrad, if you like, of the East India Company, which leads to the rolling up both of the company and of the moguls and its replacement by the Raj. Well, I'm sure everyone will grab their copies of those

or bring their wheelbarrow to the bookshop to load it up with those books. Thank you very much for coming on. Thank you, Dan. It's been a great favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams'

The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.