THE CORNWALLISES: IMPOSING BRITISH RULE
Born in England in 1713, Edward Cornwallis was a prominent British politician and military general. After fighting as an officer in the war that crushed the Scottish independence movement in 1745–46, he was appointed governor of Nova Scotia, a post he held from 1749 to 1752. He founded the city of Halifax on traditional Mi’kmaw territory and soon came into armed conflict with the Mi’kmaq, who were allied with the French. He was credited with introducing courts of law for solving both civil and criminal cases in accordance with English laws in Nova Scotia. However, Cornwallis became infamous for offering a bounty on the heads of Mi’kmaw men, women, and children.
Another member of the family, Charles, 1st Marquess and 2nd Earl Cornwallis, became the Governor General of India from 1786 to 1793 and again in 1805. (He died the same year and was cremated in Ghazipur, India.) In 1793 he introduced land-taxing policies called Permanent Settlement, which squeezed money out of commoners in order to generate income for the East India Company (EIC) and to consolidate British power. Under these policies, Indian landowners paid an annual fixed tax to the EIC. Since failure to pay resulted in the forfeiture of their lands, landowners forcibly extracted revenue from the peasants and downtrodden poor in order to pay the tax to the company.
Under Cornwallis’s governorship, the EIC annexed half of the kingdom of Mysore after defeating its powerful ruler, Tipu Sultan, at the end of the Third Anglo-Mysore War in 1792.
One of the principal thoroughfares between north and south Calcutta was once named Cornwallis Street; however, it has been renamed Bidhan Sarani after West Bengal’s first chief minister, Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy. Similarly, Halifax’s Cornwallis Street has been renamed Nora Bernard Street after a Mi’kmaw activist who successfully demanded compensation for residential school survivors.