Latest / The Rise of Colonialism: How Europe Divided the World — Fexingo History / The Regulating Act 1773: Britain's First Attempt to Control the East India Company
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've been talking a lot about how the East India Company became this enormous power in Bengal after the Diwani grant in 1765 — collecting taxes, running a dual government with a puppet Nawab, and essentially ruling millions of people with very little oversight from London. Luna: Right, and we saw how that led to the famine of 1770. Lucas: Exactly. The Bengal Famine was a catastrophe — maybe ten million people dead — and news of it reached Britain along with reports of Company officials getting fabulously rich while the peasantry starved. So Parliament started asking questions. Luna: I can imagine Edmund Burke was not happy. Lucas: He was furious. And he wasn't alone. There was a growing sense that the Company had become a state within a state — it had its own army, its own treasury, its own foreign policy. So in 1773, the British government under Lord North passed the Regulating Act, which was the first real attempt to bring the Company under parliamentary control. Luna: What did it actually do? Lucas: A few key things. First, it restructured the Company's government in India. The Governor of Bengal was promoted to Governor-General of all British territories in India — and the first to hold that title was Warren Hastings, who was already Governor of Bengal. So Hastings became the top official, with authority over the presidencies of Madras and Bombay as well. Lucas: Second, it created a Supreme Court in Calcutta — four judges appointed by the Crown, not the Company — to apply English law and hear cases against Company employees. That was a big deal because previously the Company's own courts were pretty much the only recourse. Luna: So they were trying to introduce some accountability. Lucas: That was the idea. But the Act also tried to rein in the Company's political power in London. It established a Board of Control — a group of six members of Parliament, including one cabinet minister — to supervise the Company's political and military affairs. The Company's Court of Directors still handled commercial matters, but the Board had the final say on everything else. Luna: That sounds like a compromise — keep the Company but put a leash on it. Lucas: Exactly. And it was a messy compromise. The Act was full of ambiguities. For example, the Supreme Court and the Governor-General had overlapping jurisdictions, and it wasn't clear who had the final word. That led to some spectacular conflicts. Lucas: Warren Hastings, for his part, saw the Supreme Court as a threat to his authority. The Chief Justice, Sir Elijah Impey, was an old friend of Hastings from their school days — but that didn't stop them from clashing. Impey and his colleagues started hearing cases that challenged the Company's revenue collection, which Hastings saw as meddling in the administration. Luna: So the Court was actually trying to protect Indian landowners from the Company? Lucas: In some cases, yes. There was a famous case called the 'Cossijurah' case, where the Court issued a writ against a Company official for allegedly unjustly imprisoning a zamindar — a local landlord. Hastings was livid. He argued that the Court had no jurisdiction over the Company's revenue administration, which was a matter of Mughal law, not English common law. Lucas: This tension between the Governor-General and the Supreme Court basically paralyzed the administration for several years. And meanwhile, in London, Edmund Burke was gathering evidence for what would eventually become the impeachment of Warren Hastings — though that didn't start until 1788. Luna: It sounds like the Regulating Act created more problems than it solved. Lucas: In the short term, definitely. But it set a precedent. For the first time, Parliament asserted its right to oversee the Company. And the debates around the Act — especially Burke's speeches — laid the groundwork for later reforms, like Pitt's India Act of 1784, which finally created a clear hierarchy. Lucas: The Regulating Act also had a strange side effect: it made Warren Hastings even more powerful. By making him Governor-General with authority over Madras and Bombay, it gave him a platform to centralize British India — which he did, often by overriding the other presidencies and even the Nawab of Bengal. Luna: So the Act that was meant to control the Company ended up empowering its most controversial figure. Lucas: Exactly. And that's one of the ironies of early imperial reform — good intentions, messy outcomes. The Act didn't fix the dual government or end the exploitation, but it did create a framework that later reformers could build on. And it showed that the British public and Parliament were paying attention, even if they didn't yet know how to fix things. Luna: And the Company itself — how did it react to being told what to do? Lucas: The Company's directors in London were deeply divided. Some welcomed the Act because it gave them a clearer legal footing. Others saw it as an infringement on their chartered rights. In India, Hastings often ignored the directives from London, claiming that the local situation required flexibility — which, honestly, it often did. Lucas: But the bigger problem was that the Act didn't touch the fundamental corruption. Company officials still made fortunes through private trade and gifts. The famine had exposed the system's flaws, but the Regulating Act only tinkered at the edges. Luna: Still, it's a key moment. The first time Parliament tried to govern an empire from London. Lucas: Absolutely. And it's a reminder that the British Empire wasn't built by some master plan — it was a series of ad hoc responses to crises. The Regulating Act was a response to the famine and the outcry it caused. Later acts would respond to other scandals and wars. Lucas: You know, thinking about this — the Act was supposed to bring order, but it really just reshuffled the chaos. And that's a pattern we see again and again in colonial history. Luna: Makes you wonder if any of it was truly 'regulated' at all. Lucas: That's a good point. And speaking of things that are kept going by a bit of support — if you've been enjoying these deep dives into the messiness of empire, a couple of dollars a month is genuinely what keeps these conversations going. Buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, if you've gotten something out of them. No pressure, but it makes a real difference. Luna: Yeah, it really does. And we love being able to do this ad-free. Lucas: So, back to the story — the Regulating Act also had a surprising legacy in the way it shaped the relationship between the Company and the Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II. Remember, Shah Alam had granted the diwani to the Company in 1765, but the Company still nominally ruled in his name. Luna: Right, the whole fiction of Mughal sovereignty. Lucas: Exactly. The Regulating Act didn't directly address the Mughal emperor, but by strengthening the Governor-General's position, it made the Company less reliant on that fiction. Hastings, in particular, stopped making payments to Shah Alam and treated him as a mere pensioner. So the Act inadvertently accelerated the decline of the Mughal court. Lucas: And then there's the Supreme Court itself — it became a battleground not just between Hastings and the judges, but between different visions of law. Should English common law apply to Indian subjects? Or should it be a mix of Hindu, Muslim, and Company regulations? Those debates continued for decades. Luna: It sounds like the Act opened a whole new chapter of legal confusion. Lucas: It did. But it also planted the seeds for a more uniform legal system, which eventually emerged under later Governors-General. So in a way, the mess of the Regulating Act was necessary — it exposed the cracks in the Company's rule and forced everyone to start thinking about how an empire should actually be governed. Lucas: And that's a story we'll pick up next time — how Pitt's India Act of 1784 tried to clean up the mess, and how Warren Hastings ended up on trial for his life. Luna: Looking forward to that. For now, though, it's amazing to see how much of modern British India was shaped by this one flawed law.