Thomas Law (October 23, 1756 – 1834), was an important reformer of British policy in India and a major investor in early Washington, D.C. Born on October 23, 1756 in Cambridge, England, to an aristocratic British family, Thomas Law went to India as a “writer,” or clerk, in 1773, rose through the East India Company ranks, and became a revenue collector and judge in the province of Bihar. Like many other East India Company officials, Law made a small fortune in the process. Unlike many of his colleagues, however, Law was also something of an intellectual, a policy-maker who helped devise the so-called “Permanent Settlement” which transformed the basis of taxation and land tenure for the natives of India as well as attempted to establish a secure revenue base for the East India Company. After returning in 1791 to England he encountered personal and professional setbacks that led him to leave the country. In 1794, Law, along with two of his three illegitimate mixed-race sons, immigrated to the United States, where he invested large portions of his fortune in buying land and developing the nation’s new capital in Washington, D.C. In 1796, he married George Washington’s stepgranddaughter, Elizabeth Parke Custis. The couple had one child, Eliza,who survived infancy. They separated in 1804 and divorced on 15 January 1811. In 1817, Eliza Parke Law (1797–1822) married Nicholas Lloyd Rogers of Baltimore.
Over time, Law assumed a prominent role in the city’s social, political, and economic life, becoming known as an energetic, if somewhat eccentric, promoter of his adopted country. He published poetry, moral philosophy, and other literary productions. He helped found the first theater in the nation’s capital, a dancing society, and a learned society called the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences. After the War of 1812, he was one of the major leaders of the effort to keep the capital in Washington. He worked tirelessly to build a canal through the city to facilitate trade and publicly advocated the creation of a national paper currency to improve the country's economic development. Privately he supported the abolition of slavery and the colonization of free blacks outside the bounds of the United States. At the time of his death in 1834, he had earned the support and friendship of important national figures such as Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, John C. Calhoun, and Henry Clay as well as the esteem of many ordinary citizens. Law's life and career provides a concrete link between Britain's First Empire in North America with its Second Empire in India.[1][2][3][4]