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Henry (ed) Dodwell and Rapson, Edward James and Sir Wolseley Haig and Sir Richard Burn

The Cambridge History of India: v.5 : British India, 1497-1858

Dodwell, Henry (ed); Rapson, Edward James; Sir Wolseley Haig; Sir Richard Burn;

The Cambridge History of India: v.5 : British India, 1497-1858

The University Press, 1858, 683 pages

topics: |  history | india | british-raj |

	 
Richard Barwell, the only one of the new councillors already 
resident in India, was the regular type of the Indian official of those 
days. His family had been connected with the East for some generations. His
father had been governor of Bengal and a director of the  
Company.  He himself had been in India since 1758.  He was a man 
of many merits and considerable, though not pre-eminent, ability. 

He made a great fortune in India, and, as Sir James Stephen says, this fact
of itself raises a presumption against his official purity.  ... his standard
was low.  We find him, for instance, writing to his sister in 1769: "I would
spend 5,000 to secure to myself the chiefship of Dacca, and to supervise. the
collection of the revenues of that province".  

In another letter he states that he considers himself justified in evading
the law which prohibited the Company's servants from trading, by engaging in
salt contracts under the names of native Indians.

---

from Tillman W. Nechtman (2010): Nabobs: Empire and Identity in
	Eighteenth-Century Britain, p.13

List of eleven EIC employees and their private fortunes. 

Warren Hastings  : £ 200,000
Richard Barwell  : £ 150,000
Thomas Rumbold   : £ 300,000
		- Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, May 1786 

Rumbold and Barwell (and 27 others from India) became members of Parliament. 

The following month, The London Chronicle and The General Evening Post
published a list of 31 Company retirees and their supposed net worths. 

---
from The Worlds of the East India Company, H. V. Bowen, Margarette (ed);

Johan Mathias Ross - VOC director 1776-81) - had good relations with
Hastings.  His daughter married orientalist Nathaniel Brassey Halsed. 
Also accepted huge bills to be raised in Europe, 
EIC employees mentioned as transferring money in VOC documents; 

William Aldersey  : £ 327,880 [over two yers]
Nathaniel Halsed  : £ 466,237 [seveal transfers]
Richard Barwell   :    [no amt mentioned]
James Wiss        : £ 47K + other amounts £ 80K

total transfers from the British on Bengal bills by VOC: 
1773: 350K (guilders) / 315K / 376K / 872K / 1.8M / 3.3M / 1.26M
1780: 1.4M / 0 / 0 / 0 / 382K / 1.6M / 1.1M / 326K ...


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This review by Amit Mukerjee was last updated on : 2015 Jul 13