Burke and India: The Failure of the

Edmund Burke’s involvement in Indian politics forced him to reconsider one of the central concepts of his political thought: his theory of trusteeship. During the course of the debate over India, Burke came to realize that the theory could not work there because the Indians shared few political values with their English rulers and were unable to call those rulers to account. He, therefore, revised his approach to appeal to a natural law standard and to make the English Parliament and people surrogates for the Indians. However, these devices also failed, for the former proved unenforceable and the latter was undermined by the House of Lords’ acquittal of Hastings. The theory of trusteeship thus proved to be critically defective, for, without greater popular accountability than Bruke was willing to permit, it failed to provide government which was both effective and responsible. When, in the Appeal From the New to the Old Whigs, Edmund Burke responded to those critics who had accused him of inconsistency, he cited his famous speech to the electors of Bristol as one of the definitive statements of his creed: &dquo;let it be considered whether the language of his book, printed in 1790, differs from his speech at Bristol in 1774&dquo; (Burke 1889: IV, 99). Burke’s choice is an interesting one. Delivered just after the close of the polls, the Bristol speech was primarily a statement of his theory of trusteeship. i In it, Burke argued that, while a representative must be close to his district and seek to serve it to the best of his ability, it is up to him to determine how to do so. Politics, he insisted, is a matter of judgment, not of will, and, as the man on the scene, the representative is better placed to judge correctly than is his more remote constituent. As Burke put it, &dquo;your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion&dquo; (1889: II, 95). In this essay, I propose 1 For a discussion of Burke’s theory of representation as it was expressed at Bristol, se