The last years of the eighteenth century have been seen as both a golden age of British Indological research and a period of intense political pressure on the East India Company. These were the years of the polymath William Jones's research in Sanskrit and Indo-Persian, the MP Edmund Burke's prosecution of former governor-general Warren Hastings, and the present governor-general Charles Cornwallis's overhaul of the Company's Bengal administration. The relations of these landmark developments with each other and with the politics of knowledge comprises the subject of this chapter.
