Indirect Rule in India

Indirect Rule in India PDF Author: Michael Herbert Fisher
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 556

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Book Description
More than any other imperial power, the British in India developed techniques of indirect rule. They used Residents who were posted to each major Indian state. This book concentrates on the origins, growth, and functioning of the Residency system on a pan-Indian scale between 1764 and 1857. Based on their experience in India, the British later deliberately deployed indirect rule in South East Asia and Africa. This study examines the Residency system as a whole, and in particular the composition and roles of three groups within it: British Residents, Indian rulers, and the Indian staff of the residencies. Out of the body of British civil servants and military officers of the East India Company, there gradually emerged a core of "politicals" men who specialized in creating the system of indirect rule. These were men like Charles Metcalfe, John Malcolm, and Thomas Munro. By studying the entire body of Residents and Political Agents - their backgrounds, careers, strategies and tactics - this book enables us to understand the men who carried out indirect rule over the major portion of India. As their states came under British influence, Indian rulers faced new conditions. While some rulers lost their thrones, hundreds of others managed (by policy or fortune) to preserve some measure of authority under indirect rule. As ambiguously sovereign rulers over states which ranged in size from a few square miles to regions the size of European nations, and over populations from a few thousand to over ten million, these Indian rulers gradually worked out their relations under indirect rule. The actions of these Indian rulers and their officials determined to a considerable degree the shape of the British empire. For the Indian service elite, the British presence presented a vast range of new challenges and opportunities. Some members of families with traditions of administration adjusted themselves to these new circumstances and rose in service to the Residents. Those courtiers and officials who threw their lot with the British form a particularly intriguing group. By studying Indians who worked in the residencies, this book examines indirect rule from the inside, from the perspective of those who implemented it, both serving and guiding the British Resident. Thus, this volume delves into the actual working of the Residency system and provides a comprehensive view of this essential element in the creation of the British empire in India. It will be essential reading for all who are interested in imperialism, Indian history, and the development and functioning of British colonialism.

Indirect Rule in India

Indirect Rule in India PDF Author: Michael Herbert Fisher
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 556

Get Book Here

Book Description
More than any other imperial power, the British in India developed techniques of indirect rule. They used Residents who were posted to each major Indian state. This book concentrates on the origins, growth, and functioning of the Residency system on a pan-Indian scale between 1764 and 1857. Based on their experience in India, the British later deliberately deployed indirect rule in South East Asia and Africa. This study examines the Residency system as a whole, and in particular the composition and roles of three groups within it: British Residents, Indian rulers, and the Indian staff of the residencies. Out of the body of British civil servants and military officers of the East India Company, there gradually emerged a core of "politicals" men who specialized in creating the system of indirect rule. These were men like Charles Metcalfe, John Malcolm, and Thomas Munro. By studying the entire body of Residents and Political Agents - their backgrounds, careers, strategies and tactics - this book enables us to understand the men who carried out indirect rule over the major portion of India. As their states came under British influence, Indian rulers faced new conditions. While some rulers lost their thrones, hundreds of others managed (by policy or fortune) to preserve some measure of authority under indirect rule. As ambiguously sovereign rulers over states which ranged in size from a few square miles to regions the size of European nations, and over populations from a few thousand to over ten million, these Indian rulers gradually worked out their relations under indirect rule. The actions of these Indian rulers and their officials determined to a considerable degree the shape of the British empire. For the Indian service elite, the British presence presented a vast range of new challenges and opportunities. Some members of families with traditions of administration adjusted themselves to these new circumstances and rose in service to the Residents. Those courtiers and officials who threw their lot with the British form a particularly intriguing group. By studying Indians who worked in the residencies, this book examines indirect rule from the inside, from the perspective of those who implemented it, both serving and guiding the British Resident. Thus, this volume delves into the actual working of the Residency system and provides a comprehensive view of this essential element in the creation of the British empire in India. It will be essential reading for all who are interested in imperialism, Indian history, and the development and functioning of British colonialism.

Colonial Institutions and Civil War

Colonial Institutions and Civil War PDF Author: Shivaji Mukherjee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108844995
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Shows how colonial indirect rule and land tenure institutions create state weakness, ethnic inequality and insurgency in India, and around the world.

Empire of Influence

Empire of Influence PDF Author: Callie Wilkinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009311697
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Indirect rule is widely considered as a defining feature of the nineteenth and twentieth century British Empire but its divisive earlier history remains largely unexplored. Empire of Influence traces the contentious process whereby the East India Company established a system of indirect rule in India in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In a series of thematic chapters covering intelligence gathering, violence, gift giving and the co-optation of the scribal and courtly elite, Callie Wilkinson foregrounds the disagreement surrounding the tactics of the political representatives of the Company and recaptures the experimental nature of early attempts to secure Company control. She demonstrates how these endeavours were reshaped, exploited and resisted by Indians as well as disputed within the Company itself. This important new account exposes the contested origins of these ambiguous relationships of 'protection' and coercion, while identifying the factors that enabled them to take hold and endure.

Define and Rule

Define and Rule PDF Author: Mahmood Mamdani
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674071271
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
Define and Rule focuses on the turn in late nineteenth-century colonial statecraft when Britain abandoned the attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance, as the definition and management of difference. Mahmood Mamdani explores how lines were drawn between settler and native as distinct political identities, and between natives according to tribe. Out of that colonial experience issued a modern language of pluralism and difference. A mid-nineteenth-century crisis of empire attracted the attention of British intellectuals and led to a reconception of the colonial mission, and to reforms in India, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The new politics, inspired by Sir Henry Maine, established that natives were bound by geography and custom, rather than history and law, and made this the basis of administrative practice. Maine’s theories were later translated into “native administration” in the African colonies. Mamdani takes the case of Sudan to demonstrate how colonial law established tribal identity as the basis for determining access to land and political power, and follows this law’s legacy to contemporary Darfur. He considers the intellectual and political dimensions of African movements toward decolonization by focusing on two key figures: the Nigerian historian Yusuf Bala Usman, who argued for an alternative to colonial historiography, and Tanzania’s first president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who realized that colonialism’s political logic was legal and administrative, not military, and could be dismantled through nonviolent reforms.

The Indian Princes and their States

The Indian Princes and their States PDF Author: Barbara N. Ramusack
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139449087
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Although the princes of India have been caricatured as oriental despots and British stooges, Barbara Ramusack's study argues that the British did not create the princes. On the contrary, many were consummate politicians who exercised considerable degrees of autonomy until the disintegration of the princely states after independence. Ramusack's synthesis has a broad temporal span, tracing the evolution of the Indian kings from their pre-colonial origins to their roles as clients in the British colonial system. The book breaks ground in its integration of political and economic developments in the major princely states with the shifting relationships between the princes and the British. It represents a major contribution, both to British imperial history in its analysis of the theory and practice of indirect rule, and to modern South Asian history, as a portrait of the princes as politicians and patrons of the arts.

The Indian Political Service

The Indian Political Service PDF Author: Sir Terence Creagh Coen
Publisher: London : Chatto & Windus
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Tells The Story Of The Indian Political Service (Indian Civil Service) Founded In 1783 And Wound Up In 1947-A Small Body Of About 150 British Officers-Whose Varied Functions Were Little To Known Even To Their Collegues In India.

The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa

The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa PDF Author:
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 0714616907
Category : Africa
Languages : en
Pages : 696

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Book Description
First Published in 1965. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Rule of Law and Emergency in Colonial India

The Rule of Law and Emergency in Colonial India PDF Author: Haruki Inagaki
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9783030736651
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book takes a closer look at colonial despotism in early nineteenth-century India and argues that it resulted from Indians’ forum shopping, the legal practice which resulted in jurisdictional jockeying between an executive, the East India Company, and a judiciary, the King’s Court. Focusing on the collisions that took place in Bombay during the 1820s, the book analyses how Indians of various descriptions—peasants, revenue defaulters, government employees, merchants, chiefs, and princes—used the court to challenge the government (and vice versa) and demonstrates the mechanism through which the lawcourt hindered the government’s indirect rule, which relied on local Indian rulers in newly conquered territories. The author concludes that existing political anxiety justified the East India Company’s attempt to curtail the power of the court and strengthen their own power to intervene in emergencies through the renewal of the company’s charter in 1834. An insightful read for those researching Indian history and judicial politics, this book engages with an understudied period of British rule in India, where the royal courts emerged as sites of conflict between the East India Company and a variety of Indian powers.

Edge of Empire

Edge of Empire PDF Author: Christian Tripodi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317146026
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Britain's often rather ad hoc approach to colonial expansion in the nineteenth century resulted in a variety of imaginative solutions designed to exert control over an increasingly diverse number of territories. One such instrument of government was the political officer. Created initially by the East India Company to manage relations with the princely rulers of the Indian States, political offers developed into a mechanism by which the government could manage its remoter territories through relations with local power brokers; the policy of 'indirect rule'. By the beginning of the twentieth century, political officers were providing a low-key, affordable method of exercising British control over 'native' populations throughout the empire, from India to Africa, Asia to Middle East. In this study, the role of the political officer on the Western Frontier of India between 1877-1947 is examined in detail, providing an account of the personalities and mechanisms of colonial influence/tribal control in what remains one of the most unstable regions in the world today. It charts the successes, failures, dangers and attractions of a system of power by proxy and examines how, working alone in one of the most dangerous and lawless corners of the Empire, political officers strove to implement the Crown's policies across the North-West Frontier and Baluchistan through a mixture of conflict and collaboration with indigenous tribal society. In charting their progress, the book provides a degree of historical context for those engaging in ambitious military operations in the same region, seeking to increasingly rely on the support of tribal chiefs, warlords and former enemies in order for new administrations to function. As such this book provides not only a fascinating account of key historical events in Anglo-Indian colonial history, but also provides a telling insight and background into an increasingly seductive aspect of contemporary political and military strategy.

The Indian Political Service

The Indian Political Service PDF Author: Sir Terence Creagh Coen
Publisher: London : Chatto & Windus
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Tells The Story Of The Indian Political Service (Indian Civil Service) Founded In 1783 And Wound Up In 1947-A Small Body Of About 150 British Officers-Whose Varied Functions Were Little To Known Even To Their Collegues In India.