Abstract
This chapter leaves the Italian city-states and medieval Europe and leaps forwards in time, to the eighteenth century. I also want to move our geographical focus across the European continent and into the English Channel. It is 1785 and Warren Hastings is on board a ship bound for London. Hastings has just completed an eight-year stint as the Governor General of India. Over the course of his career, he has spent the better part of four decades in service of the East India Company and lost a wife and two children in that distant land. On his way home, Hastings is contemplating retirement and begins to write his memoirs, in which he plays the part of a benevolent imperialist:
I have … had the happiness to see one portion of India rise from the lowest state of degradation; another rescued from imminent subjection; and that which gives life to the whole, enjoying the blessings of peace and internal security, while every other part of the general empire was oppressed by war, or the calamities of intestine discord.1
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Notes
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Vigneswaran, D. (2013). Expansion of the British Empire. In: Territory, Migration and the Evolution of the International System. Palgrave Studies in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230391291_4
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