Presidencies and provinces of British India


The provinces of India, earlier presidencies of British India and still earlier, presidency towns, were the administrative divisions of British governance in Indian subcontinent. Collectively, they have been called British India. In one form or another, they existed between 1612 and 1947, conventionally divided into three historical periods:
  • Between 1612 and 1757, the East India Company set up "factories" in several locations, mostly in coastal India, with the consent of the Mughal emperors, Maratha Empire or local rulers. Its rivals were the merchant trading companies of Portugal, Denmark, the Netherlands, and France. By the mid-18th century three Presidency towns: Madras, Bombay and Calcutta, had grown in size.
  • During the period of Company rule in India, 1757–1858, the Company gradually acquired sovereignty over large parts of India, now called "Presidencies". However, it also increasingly came under British government oversight, in effect sharing sovereignty with the Crown. At the same time, it gradually lost its mercantile privileges.
  • Following the Indian Rebellion of 1857 the company's remaining powers were transferred to the Crown. Under the British Raj, administrative boundaries were extended to include a few other British-administered regions, such as Upper Burma. Increasingly, however, the unwieldy presidencies were broken up into "Provinces".
"British India" did not include the many princely states which continued to be ruled by Indian princes, though by the 19th century under British suzerainty—their defence, foreign relations, and communications relinquished to British authority and their internal rule closely monitored. At the time of Indian Independence, in 1947, there were officially 565 princely states, a few being very large although most were very small. They comprised a quarter of the population of the British Raj and two fifths of its land area, with the provinces comprising the remainders.

British in India (1608–1947)

In 1608, the Mughal Emperor Jahangir issued a royal farman to the East India Company to establish a small trading settlement at Surat, and this became the company's first headquarters town. It was followed in 1611 by a permanent factory at Machilipatnam on the Coromandel Coast, and in 1612 the company joined other already established European trading companies in Bengal in trade. The defeat of the company by 1690 in the Anglo-Mughal war resulted in temporary destabilization. However, the power of the Mughal Empire declined from 1707, first at the hands of the Marathas and later due to invasion from Persia and Afghanistan ; after the East India Company's victories at the Battle of Plassey, and Battle of Buxar —both within the Bengal Presidency established in 1765—and the abolition of local rule in Bengal in 1793, the company gradually began to formally expand its territories across India. By the mid-19th century, and after the three Anglo-Maratha Wars and the four Anglo-Mysore Wars, the East India Company had become the paramount political and military power in south Asia, its territory held in trust for the British Crown.
Company rule in Bengal was terminated by the Government of India Act 1858, following the events of the Bengal Rebellion of 1857. Henceforth known as British India, it was thereafter directly ruled as a colonial possession of the United Kingdom, and India was officially known after 1876 as the Indian Empire. India was divided into British India, regions that were directly administered by the British, with acts established and passed in the British parliament, and the princely states, ruled by local rulers of different ethnic backgrounds. These rulers were allowed a measure of internal autonomy in exchange for recognition of British suzerainty. British India constituted a significant portion of India both in area and population; in 1910, for example, it covered approximately 54% of the area and included over 77% of the population. In addition, there were Portuguese and French exclaves in India. Independence from British rule was achieved in 1947 with the formation of two nations, the Dominions of India and Pakistan, the latter including East Bengal, present-day Bangladesh.
The term British India also applied to Burma for a shorter time period: beginning in 1824, a small part of Burma, and by 1886, almost two thirds of Burma had been made part of British India. This arrangement lasted until 1937, when Burma was reorganized as a separate British colony. British India did not apply to other countries in the region, such as Sri Lanka, which was a British Crown colony, or the Maldive Islands, which were a British protectorate. At its greatest extent, in the early 20th century, the territory of British India extended as far as the frontiers of Persia in the west; Afghanistan in the northwest; Nepal in the north, Tibet in the northeast; and China, French Indochina and Siam in the east. It also included the Aden Province in the Arabian Peninsula.

Administration under the East India Company (1793–1858)

The East India Company, which was incorporated on 31 December 1600, established trade relations with Indian rulers in Masulipatam on the east coast in 1611 and Surat on the west coast in 1612. The company rented a small trading outpost in Madras in 1639. Bombay, which was ceded to the British Crown by Portugal as part of the wedding dowry of Catherine of Braganza in 1661, was in turn granted to the East India Company to be held in trust for the Crown.
Meanwhile, in eastern India, after obtaining permission from the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan to trade with Bengal, the company established its first factory at Hoogly in 1640. Almost a half-century later, after Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb forced the company out of Hooghly for its tax evasion, Job Charnock was a tenant of three small villages, later renamed Calcutta, in 1686, making it the company's new headquarters. By the mid-18th century, the three principal trading settlements including factories and forts, were then called the Madras Presidency, the Bombay Presidency, and the Bengal Presidency —each administered by a governor.

The presidencies

  • Madras Presidency: established 1640.
  • Bombay Presidency: East India Company's headquarters moved from Surat to Bombay in 1687.
  • Bengal Presidency: established 1690.
After Robert Clive's victory in the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the puppet government of a new Nawab of Bengal, was maintained by the East India Company. However, after the invasion of Bengal by the Nawab of Oudh in 1764 and his subsequent defeat in the Battle of Buxar, the Company obtained the Diwani of Bengal, which included the right to administer and collect land-revenue in Bengal, the region of present-day Bangladesh, West Bengal, Jharkhand and Bihar beginning from 1772 as per the treaty signed in 1765. By 1773, the Company obtained the Nizāmat of Bengal and thereby full sovereignty of the expanded Bengal Presidency. During the period, 1773 to 1785, very little changed; the only exceptions were the addition of the dominions of the Raja of Banares to the western boundary of the Bengal Presidency, and the addition of Salsette Island to the Bombay Presidency.
Portions of the Kingdom of Mysore were annexed to the Madras Presidency after the Third Anglo-Mysore War ended in 1792. Next, in 1799, after the defeat of Tipu Sultan in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War more of his territory was annexed to the Madras Presidency. In 1801, Carnatic, which had been under the suzerainty of the company, began to be directly administered by it as a part of the Madras Presidency.

The new provinces

By 1851, the East India Company's vast and growing holdings across the sub-continent were still grouped into just four main territories:
By the time of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and the end of Company rule, the developments could be summarised as follows:
  • Bombay Presidency: expanded after the Anglo-Maratha Wars.
  • Madras Presidency: expanded in the mid-to-late 18th century Carnatic Wars and Anglo-Mysore Wars.
  • Bengal Presidency: expanded after the battles of Plassey and Buxar, and after the Second and Third Anglo-Maratha Wars.
  • Penang: became a residency within the Bengal Presidency in 1786, the fourth presidency of India in 1805, part of the presidency of the Straits Settlements until 1830, again part of a residency within the Bengal Presidency when the Straits Settlements became so, and finally separated from British India in 1867.
  • Ceded and Conquered Provinces: established in 1802 within the Bengal Presidency. Proposed to be renamed the Presidency of Agra under a governor in 1835, but the proposal was not implemented.
  • Ajmer-Merwara: ceded by Sindhia of Gwalior in 1818 at the conclusion of the Third Anglo-Maratha War.
  • Coorg Province: Annexed in 1834.
  • North-Western Provinces: established as a lieutenant-governorship in 1836 from the erstwhile Ceded and Conquered Provinces.
  • Sind: annexed to the Bombay Presidency in 1843.
  • Punjab Province: Established in 1849 from territories captured in the First and Second Anglo-Sikh Wars.
  • Nagpur Province: Created in 1853 from the princely state of Nagpur, seized by the doctrine of lapse. Merged into the Central Provinces in 1861.
  • Oudh State annexed in 1856 and governed thereafter until 1905 as a chief commissionership, as a part of North-Western Provinces and Oudh.