2009
560 Pages
ISBN: 0881353744
PDF



The world is governed by go-betweens.’ Tus wrote Edmund Burke in 1791. Te term ‘go-between’ had until then most commonly been used for those employed to mediate between the sexes: messengers or matchmakers, procurers or pimps. Go-betweens appeared as characters in conduct manuals and select letters, in salon comedies and witty gossip.1Burke now stretched the concept from privy to public afairs. He used it to make sense of the British response to the turmoil of revolutionary France. Te Anglo-Irish statesman sought to explain how some of his former political allies had been seduced into what he judged foreign sedition. He alleged that backstairs go-betweens had cunningly exploited relations between party elites and their supporters. Tere were good political, fnancial and colonial reasons to extend this notion globally. Burke was already familiar with government by go-betweens through his extensive experience of the business of the East India Company, especially in the wake of its seizure in the 1760s of military and fscal power in Bengal. For more than ffeen years he had been involved in scrutiny of the Company’s administration, culminating with the impeachment of its governor-general Warren Hastings.

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