The impeachment trial of Warren Hastings dragged on for seven years from 1788 to 1795. Hastings was the first Governor-General of India and his trial had a formative impact on the British Empire. Chiara Rolli shows that in an age when British education consisted mainly of classical studies, it was antique views of rhetoric, colonialism and good imperial governance that permeated the trial. Prosecutor Edmund Burke was figured as a modern-day Cicero fighting corruption in the colonies, while Hastings was Verres, a corrupt first century Roman praetor of Sicily. In their prosecution, both Burke...