Changes introduced by the Charter of 1753, Warren Hastings Plan of 1772, Reforms

Madras was occupied by the French in 1746 and handed back to the British in 1749. That three-year gap sounds like a footnote, but Company lawyers seized on it to argue that the Charter of 1726 had lapsed entirely — and used that argument to strip the Mayor's Court of powers it had held for a generation. That is how the Charter of 1753 was born, and it sets up everything Warren Hastings tried to fix twenty years later.

In two minutes

The Charter of 1753 curbed the independence the 1726 Mayor's Courts had enjoyed, and Warren Hastings' Plan of 1772 then replaced the old Adalat-less mofussil with a structured system of civil and criminal courts — the first real attempt to administer justice systematically outside the presidency towns.

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