BOLTS, William.

£1,250 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Considerations on India Affairs; Second edition, with considerable additions, of the first part of Bolts's critique of Company rule in Bengal, "by far the most damaging of the many tracts against the EIC to be published in 1772 … Bolts, who was of Anglo-Dutch origins, had actually been one of the Company's most unscrupulous operators" (Dalrymple, p, 226); the second part was published in 1775.Bolts (1739-1808) arrived in India in 1760. Having obtained a working knowledge of Bengali he developed his own illegal trading activities while employed by the EIC, and "acquired a reputation as an unscrupulous and untrustworthy figure … repeatedly censured by the Company for his misconduct" (ODNB). Having fallen foul of Harry Verelst, the new governor of Bengal who replaced Robert Clive, he was arrested and deported to Britain in late 1769, declared by the court of directors to be a "very unprofitable and unworthy servant".In London he "promptly set himself up as a whistleblower" and this book, first published in 1772, was his attempt to destroy Clive "by lifting the lid on the Company's most disreputable transactions in Bengal, many of which Bolts himself had actually had a direct hand in … The book was full of embittered half-truths and false accusations … But Considerations was nonetheless hugely influential. It anticipated many later criticisms of Empire, and it broke much new ground in confronting issues which were then novel problems, but later would become much more common: for

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