Regulating Act of 1773: Provisions of the Act, Establishment of Supreme Court at

In 1775 a court in Calcutta hanged a seventy-something-year-old Brahmin zamindar for forging a bond — using an English statute most of his own countrymen had never heard of, months after he had accused the most powerful Englishman in Bengal of taking bribes. Historians still call it a judicial murder. It happened because Parliament had just built, for the first time, a court powerful enough to do it: the Supreme Court at Calcutta, created under the Regulating Act of 1773. This topic is the most-asked single topic in the whole paper, and the cases are the reason why.

In two minutes

The Regulating Act of 1773 was Parliament's first direct intervention in Company government, creating the office of Governor-General and, through the Charter of 1774, the Supreme Court at Calcutta — whose clashes with the Company's own Council produced the most famous trials in Indian legal history.

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