It was the Board of Control, however, that was directing the Company’s management of India. The first symbol of this shift was Dundas’s decision to appoint Charles, Lord Cornwallis, as Governor-General of Bengal in 1785. He could not have been more different than his predecessor, Hastings. He was a soldier - defeated at Yorktown - and a landed aristocrat with extensive estates in Suffolk. But he was free from the taint of corruption, describing what he found in India as ‘a system of the dirtiest jobbing’.
He separated the Company’s civil and commercial branches to put a stop to the structural embezzlement of corporate revenues. More profoundly still, Cornwallis decided to insulate the Company’s administrative machine from India by reserving all senior posts for Europeans. Unlike generations of Company merchants who had intermingled with local society, Cornwallis had a deep disdain for trade and particularly trade with Indians, famously declaring that ’every native of India, I verily believe, is corrupt'.
“The Skulking Power”, p137
