Personifying the Rule of Law: Warren Hastings and the Cultural Trials of Corporate Sovereignty

Abstract

This commentary examines how the figure of Warren Hastings came to personify the contradictions of imperial rule of law under the British East India Company. At once a mercantile corporation and an imperial regime, the Company blurred the boundaries between corporate power and sovereign authority. Hastings, as its most notorious governor-general, became a symbolic figure mediating cultural debates over the legitimacy of Company rule. Constructions of his persona traveled across space and time, from 1780s London to post-revolutionary America and colonial Bengal, and across genres including courtroom rhetoric, political caricatures, novels, and poetry. Through the many cultural afterlives of Hastings’ character, the rule of law emerges as not only an ideal for governance but also an imaginative and affective construction through which moral and political legitimacy are negotiated and redefined.