The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

possession of regular grants, a long series of family succession, and fair purchase. That it
appears that Bengal has been under the dominion of the Mogul, and subject to a
Mahomedan government, for above two hundred years. That, while the Mogul government
was in its vigor, the property of zemindars was held sacred, and that, either by voluntary
grant from the said Mogul or by composition with him, the native Hindoos were left in the
free, quiet, and undisturbed possession of their lands, on the single condition of paying a
fixed, certain, and unalterable revenue, or quit-rent, to the Mogul government. That this
revenue, or quit-rent, was called the aussil jumma, or original ground-rent, of the
provinces, and was not increased from the time when it was first settled in 1573 to 1740,
when the regular and effective Mogul government ended. That, from that time to 1765,
invasions, usurpations, and various revolutions took place in the government of Bengal, in
consequence of which the country was considerably reduced and impoverished, when the
East India Company received from the present Mogul emperor, Shah Allum, a grant of the
dewanny, or collection of the revenues. That about the year 1770 the provinces of Bengal
and Bahar were visited with a dreadful famine and mortality, by which at least one third of
the inhabitants perished. That Warren Hastings, Esquire, has declared, "that he had always
heard the loss of inhabitants reckoned at a third, and in many places near one half of the
whole, and that he knew not by what means such a loss could be recruited in four or five
years, and believed it impossible." That, nevertheless, the revenue was violently kept up to
its former standard,—that is, in the two years immediately preceding the appointment of
the said Warren Hastings to the government of Fort William,—in consequence of which the
remaining two thirds of the inhabitants were obliged to pay for the lands now left without
cultivation; and that from the year 1770 to the year 1775 the country had languished, and
the evil continued enhancing every day. That the said Warren Hastings, in a letter to the

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