Abstract
When Charles, Marquess Cornwallis, died in 1806, British politicians were not certain what his life should be commemorated for. He died within months of William Pitt and Admiral Nelson, and, like them, had once been celebrated in the idiom of martial heroism, when his troops defeated Tipu Sultan at Seringapatam in 1792.1 But in 1806, in his second term as Governor-General, dying on the way to negotiate peace with Maratha states, Cornwallis was seen more as an administrator and diplomat than a soldier. He was no longer a great military leader, nor was he a state-builder, an orator or a defender of the people.2 He had become, to use the word with which Britons criticised the practitioners of empire a century later, a bureaucrat.
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Notes
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© 2013 Jon Wilson
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Wilson, J. (2013). The Silence of Empire: Imperialism and India. In: Craig, D., Thompson, J. (eds) Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137312891_10
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