Warren Hastings (governor of Bengal from 1772 and governor-general of the British territories in India from 1774 to 1785) stands not least among those ‘imperial icons’ that dominated old pro-consular histories, and his dramatic career has launched a large shelf-full of biographies. Hastings' particular genius, in some old versions, was for seeing beyond the vacillations and hesitations of his colleagues, and masterfully grasping Britain's historic destiny as an imperial power. For others, following the famous attacks on his character by Edmund Burke and Lord Macaulay, Hastings' career stood as a horrifying example of the dangers of imperial hubris and brutality. Another durable and more sympathetic tradition has cast Hastings as an enlightened cosmopolitan and ‘orientalist’ in the non-pejorative, pre-Saidian sense of that word – a notable patron of Indian arts and scholarship.

This chapter tries to understand Hastings' governorship against the swirling backdrop of Company politics in the 1760s and early 1770s. It argues that Warren Hastings' attempts to reform the Bengal government in the early 1770s did indeed constitute a critical moment in the refashioning of the English East India Company as a branch of empire. This was not, however, because Hastings had visions, as if through a crystal ball, of the later history of British India. Hastings' reforms were part of a wider pattern of crisis management, as the East India Company confronted the aftermath of the Bengal famine and growing financial and political problems in Britain.