Warren Hastings was a British colonial administrator, who served as the first Governor of the Presidency of Fort William (Bengal), the head of the Supreme Council of Bengal, and so the first Governor-General of Bengal in 1772–1785. He and Robert Clive are credited with laying the foundation of the British Empire in India. He was an energetic organizer and reformer. In 1779–1784 he led forces of the East India Company against a coalition of native states and the French. Finally, the well-organized British side held its own, while France lost influence in India. In 1787, he was accused of corruption and impeached, but after a long trial acquitted in 1795. He was made a Privy Councillor in 1814.
Sir Elijah Impey was a British judge, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal, Chief Justice of the Sadr Diwani Adalat and MP for New Romney.
Maharaja Nandakumar was an Indian tax collector for various regions in what is modern-day West Bengal. Nanda Kumar was born at Bhadrapur, which is now in Birbhum. He was the first Indian to be executed by hanging. Nandakumar was appointed by the East India Company to be the Dewan for Burdwan, Nadia and Hooghly in 1764, following the removal of Warren Hastings from the post.
Sir Philip Francis GCB was an Irish-born British politician and pamphleteer, thought to be the author of the Letters of Junius, and the chief antagonist of Warren Hastings. His accusations against the latter led to the impeachment of Warren Hastings and Elijah Impey by Parliament. He belonged to the Whig party.
John Shore, 1st Baron Teignmouth was a British official of the East India Company who served as Governor-General of Bengal from 1793 to 1798. In 1798 he was created Baron Teignmouth in the Peerage of Ireland. Shore was the first president of the British and Foreign Bible Society. A close friend of the orientalist Sir William Jones (1746–1794), Shore edited a memoir of Jones's life in 1804, containing many of Jones's letters.
Nathaniel Brassey Halhed was an English Orientalist and philologist.
The First Anglo-Maratha War (1775–1782) was the first of three Anglo-Maratha Wars fought between the British East India Company and Maratha Confederacy in India. The war began with the Treaty of Surat and ended with the Treaty of Salbai. The war, fought in between Surat and Poona, saw British defeat and restoration of positions of both the parties before the war. Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of Bengal decided not to attack Pune directly.
Hicky's Bengal Gazette or the Original Calcutta General Advertiser was an English-language weekly newspaper published in Kolkata, the capital of British India. It was the first newspaper printed in Asia, and was published for two years, between 1780 and 1782, before the East India Company seized the newspaper's types and printing press. Founded by James Augustus Hicky, a highly eccentric Irishman who had previously spent two years in jail for debt, the newspaper was a strong critic of the administration of Governor General Warren Hastings. The newspaper was important for its provocative journalism and its fight for free expression in India.
Kolkata (Calcutta) was a colonial city. The British East India Company developed Calcutta as a city by establishing an artificial riverine port in the 18th century CE. Kolkata was the capital of the British India until 1911, when the capital was relocated to Delhi. Kolkata grew rapidly in the 19th century to become the second most important city of the British Empire after London and was declared as the financial (commercial) capital of the British India. This was accompanied by the development of a culture that fused Indian philosophies with European tradition.
Sir John Hadley D'Oyly, 6th Baronet was a politician in Great Britain. He primarily inherited debt when his father died when he was ten, but through family connections had a successful career with the East India Company. Returning to Ipswich a wealthy man, he settled his fathers debts and aligned himself with the Ipswich Yellow Party. He served as the MP for the town for several years in the 1790s. He returned to India in 1803 where he lived until his death in 1818.
James Atkinson was a surgeon, artist and Persian scholar — "a Renaissance man among Anglo-Indians".
Vernacular comes from the Latin word vernaculus, which means "native" or "indigenous." Ideally, vernacular is the way ordinary people communicate with each other. In British India, the Vernacular Press Act (1878) was enacted to curtail the freedom of the Indian press and prevent the expression of criticism toward British policies—notably, the opposition that had grown with the outset of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80). The government adopted the Vernacular Press Act 1878 to regulate the indigenous press in order to manage strong public opinion and seditious writing producing unhappiness among the people of native region with the government. The Act was proposed by Lytton, then Viceroy of India, and was unanimously passed by the Viceroy's Council on 14 March 1878. The act excluded English-language publications as it was meant to control seditious writing in 'publications in Oriental languages' everywhere in the country, except for the South. Thus the British totally discriminated against the Indian Press.
In the last quarter of the 18th century, Calcutta grew into the first major centre of commercial and government printing. For the first time in the context of South Asia it becomes possible to talk of a nascent book trade which was full-fledged and included the operations of printers, binders, subscription publishing and libraries.
The impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of the Bengal Presidency, was attempted between 1787 and 1795 in the Parliament of Great Britain. Hastings was accused of misconduct during his time in Calcutta, particularly relating to mismanagement and personal corruption. The impeachment prosecution was led by Edmund Burke and became a wider debate about the role of the East India Company and the expanding empire in India. According to historian Mithi Mukherjee, the impeachment trial became the site of a debate between two radically opposed visions of empire—one represented by Hastings, based on ideas of absolute power and conquest in pursuit of the exclusive national interests of the colonizer, versus one represented by Burke, of sovereignty based on a recognition of the rights of the colonized.
Richard Barwell was an early trader with the East India Company and amassed one of the largest fortunes in early British India.
The Supreme Council of Bengal was the highest level of executive government in British India from 1774 until 1833: the period in which the East India Company, a private company, exercised political control of British colonies in India. It was formally subordinate to both the East India Company's Court of Directors (board) and to the British Crown.
John Zachariah Kiernander, also known as Johann Zacharias Kiernander, was a Swedish Lutheran missionary in British India.
The Calcutta Chronicle and General Advertiser was a weekly English-language newspaper published in Kolkata, the capital of British India. It was one of the earliest newspapers in colonial India and was published for four years until it stopped its publication under pressure from the East India Company. Two Englishmen, Daniel Stuart and Joseph Cooper, founded the newspaper and also set up the Chronicle Printing Press. A large portion of the newspaper was dedicated to advertisements, and therefore was also called the 'General Advertiser'.
The India Gazette; or, Calcutta Public Advertiser was an English language weekly newspaper published in Calcutta, then capital of British India. It was the second newspaper printed in India.
Freedom of the press in British India or freedom of the press in pre-independence India refers to the censorship on print media during the period of British rule by the British Crown on the Indian subcontinent from 1858 to 1947. The British Indian press was legally protected by the set of laws such as Vernacular Press Act, Censorship of Press Act, 1799, Metcalfe Act and Indian Press Act, 1910, while the media outlets were regulated by the Licensing Regulations, 1823, Licensing Act, 1857 and Registration Act, 1867. The British administrators in the India subcontinent brought a set of rules and regulations into effect designed to prevent circulating claimed inaccurate, media bias and disinformation across the subcontinent.
