Free Trade and a Reformed Parliament

Abstract

As the 1820s wore on, James Silk Buckingham’s personal campaign against the East India Company increasingly became a crusade for free trade. He did not abandon his compensation claims or cease reminding readers that freedom of the press at home and in India were linked. In 1828, for instance, Buckingham opined that the 1799 censorship regulation of Governor-General Wellesley was part of a larger conspiracy. The “deep-laid scheme” was “to familiarize the mind to restraint in the colonies, and to serve as a precedent, which might afterwards be applied, in due season, at home.” Proof of this came at the time of the “odious” Six Acts, when the Tories considered reintroducing censorship in Britain.¹