ABSTRACT
Service in India in the eighteenth century was a palliative for embarrassed circumstances or poor prospects in Britain. Only a reversal of fortune drove the once rich and powerful Sir George Colebrooke, financier, MP and chairman of the East India Company, to seek colonial careers for his two younger sons and even for himself. Although he renounced going to Bengal, a step that in the judgement of a fellow MP would have been ‘as mortifying a situation to him as Lambert Simmel being made a turnspit, after the Duchess of Burgundy had proclaimed him heir to the Crown’ (Kirk 1897: 504–5), by sending his last-born, Henry Thomas (15 Jun. 1765–10 Mar. 1837), out to India, he initiated a process that shaped western Indology.
