The Trial of Warren Hastings av Chiara (University of Parma Italy) Rolli

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The impeachment trial of Warren Hastings lasted from 1788 until 1795. Hastings was the first Governor-General of Bengal and his trial had a formative impact on the British Empire. Chiara Rolli shows that in an age when British education consisted mainly of classical studies, it was antique views of rhetoric and imperial governance that permeated the trial. Prosecutor Edmund Burke was figured as a modern-day Cicero fighting corruption in the colonies, while Hastings was Verres, the corrupt propraetor of Sicily in the first century BC. In their prosecution, both Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan employed certain coups de th¿re - such as fainting for emphasis - advised by Cicero and the later Roman rhetorician Quintilian, whose style of spectacular justice played particularly well amid the eighteenth-century vogue for sentimental drama. Burke''s defence of natural rights and passion for extirpating vice in the colonies similarly reflected an admiration for Cicero, just as Hastings'' pre