Company rule in India
Company rule in India was the rule of the British East India Company on the Indian subcontinent. This is variously taken to have commenced in 1757, after the Battle of Plassey, when the Nawab of Bengal Siraj ud-Daulah was defeated and replaced with Mir Jafar, who had the support of the East India Company; or in 1765, when the Company was granted the diwani, or the right to collect revenue, in Bengal and Bihar; or in 1773, when the Company abolished local rule in Bengal and established a capital in Calcutta, appointed its first Governor-General of Fort William, Warren Hastings, and became directly involved in governance.
The Company's rule lasted until 1858, when, after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Government of India Act 1858, the India Office of the British government assumed the task of directly administering India in the new British Raj.
Expansion and territory
The English East India Company was founded in 1600, as The Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies. It gained a foothold in India with the establishment of a factory in Masulipatnam on the Eastern coast of India in 1611 and the grant of the rights to establish a factory in Surat in 1612 by the Mughal Emperor Jahangir. In 1640, after receiving similar permission from the Vijayanagara ruler further south, a second factory was established in Madras on the southeastern coast. Bombay island, not far from Surat, a former Portuguese outpost gifted to England as dowry in the marriage of Catherine of Braganza to Charles II, was leased by the Company in 1668. Following the Anglo-Mughal War, the Company was allowed by Emperor Aurangzeb to establish a presence on the eastern coast as well; far up that coast, in the Ganges Delta, a factory was set up in Calcutta. Since, during this time other companies—established by the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and Danish—were similarly expanding in the region, the English Company's unremarkable beginnings on coastal India offered no clues to what would become a lengthy presence on the Indian subcontinent.The company's victory under Robert Clive in the 1757 Battle of Plassey and another victory in the 1764 Battle of Buxar consolidated the company's power and forced emperor Shah Alam II to appoint it the diwan, or revenue collector, of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. The Company thus became the de facto ruler of large areas of the lower Gangetic plain by 1773. It also proceeded by degrees to expand its dominions around Bombay and Madras. The Anglo-Mysore Wars and the Anglo-Maratha Wars left it in control of large areas of India south of the Sutlej River. With the defeat of the Marathas, no native power represented a threat for the Company any longer.
The expansion of the company's power chiefly took two forms. The first of these was the outright annexation of Indian states and subsequent direct governance of the underlying regions, which collectively came to comprise British India. The annexed regions included the North-Western Provinces , Delhi, Assam, and Sindh. Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir, were annexed after the Anglo-Sikh Wars in 1849-1856 ; however, Kashmir was immediately sold under the Treaty of Amritsar to the Dogra dynasty of Jammu, and thereby became a princely state. In 1854 Berar was annexed, and the state of Oudh two years later.
The second form of asserting power involved treaties in which Indian rulers acknowledged the company's hegemony in return for limited internal autonomy. Since the Company operated under financial constraints, it had to set up political underpinnings for its rule. The most important such support came from the subsidiary alliances with Indian princes during the first 75 years of Company rule. In the early 19th century, the territories of these princes accounted for two-third of India. When an Indian ruler, who was able to secure his territory, wanted to enter such an alliance, the Company welcomed it as an economical method of indirect rule, which did not involve the economic costs of direct administration or the political costs of gaining the support of alien subjects.
In return, the Company undertook the "defence of these subordinate allies and treated them with traditional respect and marks of honor." Subsidiary alliances created the princely states, of the Hindu maharajas and the Muslim nawabs. Prominent among the princely states were: Cochin, Jaipur, Travancore, Hyderabad, Mysore, Cis-Sutlej Hill States, Central India Agency, Cutch and Gujarat Gaikwad territories, Rajputana, and Bahawalpur.
The Governors-General
The Governors-General are not included in this table unless a major event occurred during their tenure.Governors-Generals of Fort William (Bengal) (1773–1834)
Governors-Generals of India (1834–1858)
Regulation of Company rule
Until Clive's victory at Plassey, the East India Company territories in India, which consisted largely of the presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, were governed by the mostly autonomous—and sporadically unmanageable—town councils, all composed of merchants. The councils barely had enough powers for the effective management of their local affairs, and the ensuing lack of oversight of the overall Company operations in India led to some grave abuses by Company officers or their allies. Clive's victory, and the award of the diwani of the rich region of Bengal, brought India into the public spotlight in Britain. The company's money management practices came to be questioned, especially as it began to post net losses even as some Company servants, the "Nabobs", returned to Britain with large fortunes, which—according to rumours then current—were acquired unscrupulously. By 1772, the Company needed British government loans to stay afloat, and there was fear in London that the company's corrupt practices could soon seep into British business and public life. The rights and duties of the British government with regards the company's new territories also came to be examined. The British parliament then held several inquiries and in 1773, during the premiership of Lord North, enacted the Regulating Act 1773, which established regulations, its long title stated, "for the better Management of the Affairs of the East India Company, as well in India as in Europe".Although Lord North himself wanted the company's territories to be taken over by the British state, he faced determined political opposition from many quarters, including some in the City of London and the Parliament of Great Britain. The result was a compromise in which the Regulating Act—although implying the ultimate sovereignty of the British Crown over these new territories—asserted that the company could act as a sovereign power on behalf of the Crown. It could do this while concurrently being subject to oversight and regulation by the British government and parliament. The Court of Directors of the company were required under the act to submit all communications regarding civil, military, and revenue matters in India for scrutiny by the British government. For the governance of the Indian territories, the act asserted the supremacy of the Presidency of Fort William over those of Fort St. George and Bombay. It also nominated a Governor-General and four councillors for administering the Bengal Presidency. "The subordinate Presidencies were forbidden to wage war or make treaties without the previous consent of the Governor-General of Bengal in Council, except in case of imminent necessity. The Governors of these Presidencies were directed in general terms to obey the orders of the Governor-General-in-Council, and to transmit to him intelligence of all important matters." However, the imprecise wording of the Act left it open to be variously interpreted; consequently, the administration in India continued to be hobbled by disunity between the provincial governors, between members of the council, and between the Governor-General himself and his Council. The Regulating Act also attempted to address the prevalent corruption in India: Company servants were henceforth forbidden to engage in private trade in India or to receive "presents" from Indian nationals.
In 1783, the Fox–North coalition tried to reform colonial policy again with a bill introduced by Edmund Burke which would have transferred political power over India from the East India Company to a parliamentary commission. The bill passed the House of Commons with the enthusiastic support of Foreign Secretary Charles James Fox, but was vetoed by the House of Lords under pressure from King George III, who then dismissed the government and formed a new ministry under Fox's rival William Pitt the Younger. Pitt's India Act left the East India Company in political control of India but established a Board of Control in England both to supervise the East India Company's affairs and to prevent the company's shareholders from interfering in the governance of India. The Board of Control consisted of six members, which included one Secretary of State from the British cabinet, as well as the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Around this time, there was also extensive debate in the British Parliament on the issue of landed rights in Bengal, with a consensus developing in support of the view advocated by Philip Francis, a member of the Bengal council and political adversary of Warren Hastings, that all lands in Bengal should be considered the "estate and inheritance of native land-holders and families".
Mindful of the reports of abuse and corruption in Bengal by Company servants, the India Act itself noted numerous complaints that divers Rajahs, Zamindars, Talukdars, and landholders' had been unjustly deprived of 'their lands, jurisdictions, rights, and privileges. At the same time the company's directors were now leaning towards Francis's view that the land-tax in Bengal should be made fixed and permanent, setting the stage for the Permanent Settlement. The India Act also created in each of the three presidencies a number of administrative and military posts, which included: a Governor and three Councilors, one of which was the Commander in Chief of the Presidency army. Although the supervisory powers of the Governor-General-in-Council in Bengal were extended—as they were again in the Charter Act 1793—the subordinate presidencies continued to exercise some autonomy until both the extension of British territories into becoming contiguous and the advent of faster communications in the next century.
Still, the new Governor-General appointed in 1786, Lord Cornwallis, not only had more power than Hastings, but also had the support of a powerful British cabinet minister, Henry Dundas, who, as Secretary of State for the Home Office, was in charge of the overall India policy. From 1784 onwards, the British government had the final word on all major appointments in India; a candidate's suitability for a senior position was often decided by the strength of his political connections rather than that of his administrative ability. Although this practice resulted in many Governor-General nominees being chosen from Britain's conservative landed gentry, there were some liberals as well, such as Lord William Bentinck and Lord Dalhousie.
British political opinion was also shaped by the attempted Impeachment of Warren Hastings; the trial, whose proceedings began in 1788, ended with Hastings' acquittal, in 1795. Although the effort was chiefly coordinated by Edmund Burke, it also drew support from within the British government. Burke accused Hastings not only of corruption, but—appealing to universal standards of justice—also of acting solely upon his own discretion, without concern for law, and of wilfully causing distress to others in India. Hastings' defenders countered that his actions were consistent with Indian customs and traditions. Although Burke's speeches at the trial drew applause and focused attention on India, Hastings was eventually acquitted, due in part to the revival of nationalism in Britain in the wake of the French Revolution. Nonetheless, Burke's effort had the effect of creating a sense of responsibility in British public life for the company's dominion in India.
Soon rumblings appeared amongst merchants in London that the monopoly granted to the East India Company in 1600, intended to facilitate its competition against Dutch and French in a distant region, was no longer needed. In response, in the Charter Act 1813, the British Parliament renewed the company's charter but terminated its monopoly except with regard to tea and trade with China, opening India both to private investment and missionaries. With increased British power in India, supervision of Indian affairs by the British Crown and Parliament increased as well. By the 1820s British nationals could transact business or engage in missionary work under the protection of the Crown in the three presidencies. Finally, under the terms of the Saint Helena Act 1833, the British Parliament revoked the company's monopoly in the China trade and made it an agent for the administration of British India. The Governor-General of Bengal was redesignated as the Governor-General of India. The Governor-General and his executive council were given exclusive legislative powers for the whole of British India. Since the British territories in north India had now extended up to Delhi, the act also sanctioned the creation of a Presidency of Agra. With the annexation of Oudh in 1856, this territory was extended and eventually became the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. In addition, in 1854, a lieutenant-governor was appointed for the region of Bengal, Bihar and Odisha, leaving the Governor-General to concentrate on the governance of India as a whole.