ABSTRACT
Indian delinquency is of no grovelling kind, it soars far all precedent of ancient or European turpitude. Faith, justice, and humanity were mere pretexts for rapine and violence. The compensation demanded for the West India interest always seemed to take forms involving great loss to the British Exchequer, the home consumer or the East Indies sugar-producer in Mauritius and elsewhere who was apparently to resign himself for ever, because able to produce cheaper, to a higher range of duties at the British ports. Meanwhile the continuance of West India slavery in the old forms had, since 1815, been becoming steadily more impossible. In the Wealth of Nations of 1776 Adam Smith had shown himself opposed both to the commercial monopoly and to the territorial government exercised by the East India Company. The chapter examines the “reforms” demanded in the Radicals’ Extraordinary Black Book issued early in 1831.
