British India

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British India and the Indian Empire in 1909. British India is shown in reddish-pink (described as red in the map itself); the princely states are in yellow.
British India and the Indian Empire in 1909. British India is shown in reddish-pink (described as red in the map itself); the princely states are in yellow.
For the band, see British India (band).

British India was the parts of the Indian subcontinent directly administered by the British government's India Office between the Government of India Act 1858 and the Partition of India in 1947.[1]

The term also refers to the regions of India under the control of the Honourable East India Company, especially from 1765 to 1858[2][3][4] For that period, see Company rule in India.

Until 1937, British India included Aden and Burma. Its Provinces and territories now constitute parts of the independent countries of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Myanmar and Yemen.


Contents

Origins under the Honourable East India Company

Main article: Company rule in India

The Honourable East India Company was established in 1600 as 'The Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies'. In 1612, the emperor Jahangir granted it the right to maintain a trading post, or 'factory', in Surat, and in 1640, with permission from the Vijayanagara Empire, a second outpost was established in Madras. In 1668, the Company leased the island of Bombay, gained by England as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, and in 1687 the Company moved its headquarters from Surat to Bombay. In 1690, a Company settlement was established in Calcutta. After the Battle of Plassey (1757), the Nawab of Bengal surrendered his dominions to the Company, which gained the right to collect revenues in Bengal and Bihar, and in 1772 the Company established its capital in Calcutta and appointed its first Governor-General of India, Warren Hastings.

In 1858, as a result of the Government of India Act 1858, which followed the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (contemporaneosly called the Indian Mutiny), the task of administering the British possessions in India was transferred to the India Office, a department of the British government, thus creating a new statutory British India.

Definitions

Flag used by the Governors-General and other British officers in India from 1855 to 1947
Flag used by the Governors-General and other British officers in India from 1855 to 1947

Some Acts of the Governor-General of India of the 1860s began to define the term 'British India'. For instance, the Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act 1865 contained the following definition:

British India means the territories which are or shall be vested in Her Majesty or her successors by the Statute 21 and 22 Vic. cap 106, entitled "An Act for the Better Government of India".[5]

The British Parliament's Interpretation Act 1889 defines the term as follows:

The expression British India shall mean all territories and places within Her Majesty's dominions which are for the time being governed by Her Majesty through the Governor-General of India, or through any Governor or other officer subordinate to the Governor-General of India. The expression India shall mean British India together with any territories of an Native Prince or Chief under the suzerainty of Her Majesty, exercised through the Governor-General of India, or through any Governor or other officer subordinate to the Governor-General of India.[6][7]

The Government of India Act 1935 (26 Geo. V &1 Edw. VIII Ch. 2) says:

"British India" means all territories for the time being comprised within the Governors' Provinces and the Chief Commissioners' Provinces.[8]

It is important to notice that the definition of 'British India' excludes the Indian Princely States.[9][10]

In 1925, the Literary Digest's 1925 Atlas of the World and Gazetteer reported under 'India':

The term British India includes the districts subject to British law, the area of which is 1,093,074 square miles. The Indian States or Agencies having political relations with the Indian Government have an area of 709,555 square miles, thus making the total area of India and Dependencies 1,802,629 square miles.[11]

In 1945, the princely states made up two-fifths of the territory of the Indian Empire, but contained only one fifth of its population. British India, conversely, covered some three-fifths of the Empire's territory and held some eighty per cent of its population.[12]

System of government

The Honourable East India Company's Governors General held autocratic powers, being responsible only to a Court of Directors in London, itself answering to a Court of Proprietors (as shareholders) and to parliament through a Board of Control headed by the President of the Board of Control. The Board was created by Pitt's India Act of 1784 and was intended to bring the Company's administration under British government control.[13]

The Act of 1858, in transferring power from the Honourable East India Company to the Crown, established a new system of government. The Court of Directors, Court of Proprietors, and Board of Control were replaced by a Secretary of State for India (a cabinet minister of the British government), assisted by a Council, which he was required to consult, except in matters of urgency. Members of the Secretary of State's Council were at first appointed for life, later for ten years. A Viceroy & Governor General was to be appointed, normally for a five year term of office, and was to reside in India, and supreme authority in India was the Viceroy's. All executive orders and all legislation were made in the name of 'the Governor General in Council'.[14]

Presidencies and provinces

Main articles: Provinces of India, Presidencies of British India, and British Raj#Administrative Divisions of British India

The three longest established Provinces of British India were the Madras Presidency (established 1640), the Bombay Presidency (the Honourable East India Company's headquarters were at Bombay from 1687), and the Bengal Presidency (established 1690). To these were added: Ajmer-Merwara (ceded by Sindhia of Gwalior in 1818); Coorg (annexed 1834); the North-Western Provinces (established 1835 out of the Bengal Presidency, later renamed the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh; Punjab (established 1849); Nagpur Province (created 1853, merged into Central Provinces 1861); the Central Provinces (created 1861 from Nagpur Province and the Saugor and Nerbudda Territories, renamed the Central Provinces and Berar 1903); Burma (lower Burma annexed 1852, made a province 1862, upper Burma added 1886, separated from British India 1937); Assam (separated from Bengal 1874); Andaman and Nicobar Islands (established as a province 1875); Baluchistan (organized into a province 1887); North-West Frontier Province (created 1901 out of districts of the Punjab Province); East Bengal (separated from Bengal 1905, but reintegrated 1912); Bihar and Orissa (separated from Bengal 1912, renamed Bihar 1935; Orissa (separated from Bihar 1935); Delhi (separated from Punjab 1912, when it became the capital of British India); Aden (separated from Bombay Presidency as a province of India, 1932, became Crown Colony of Aden, 1937); Sindh (separated from Bombay 1935); Panth-Piploda (new province, 1942).

There were seventeen remaining Provinces of British India at the time of partition and independence: Ajmer-Merwara-Kekri, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Assam, Baluchistan, Bengal Province, Bihar, Bombay Province, Central Provinces and Berar, Coorg, Delhi Province, Madras Province, North-West Frontier Province, Panth-Piploda, Orissa, Punjab, Sindh, and the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh.

Of these, three, Baluchistan, the North-West Frontier, and Sindh became parts of Pakistan, while two more, Bengal and Punjab, were partitioned between India and Pakistan, and the remainder became provinces of the Union of India.

Legal framework

British India possessed a system of law (and thus a network of courts) which were not shared with the rest of India. An important distinction between the area of direct British rule and the princely states which were subject to British "suzerainty" was supplied by the jurisdiction of the courts: the law of British India rested on the laws enacted by the British Parliament and on the legislative powers which those laws vested in the local and central governments of British India, whereas the courts of the Princely States existed under the authority of their rulers.[15][16][17]

Governors-General and Viceroys of India

See Governor-General of India.

Indian Empire

Main article: British Raj
Indian one Rupee coin of George V, King Emperor
Indian one Rupee coin of George V, King Emperor

The British Indian Empire, usually referred to while it existed as the Indian Empire or just India and now commonly referred to as the British Raj, came into being when Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India on 1 May, 1876. This Empire consisted of British India together with the princely states. Suzerainty over several hundred such self-governing states, including some large ones such as Bahawalpur, Hyderabad, Mysore, Travancore, Jaipur and Kashmir and Jammu, was exercised in the name of the British Crown by the government of British India under the Viceroy of India, with many small princely states being dependent on the provincial governments of British India.[15]

End of British India

Main articles: Indian Independence Act 1947 and British Raj#Post-war developments: transfer of power

British India came to an end when the Indian Independence Act 1947 brought about the Partition of India, with effect from 15 August 1947, creating two fully independent successor states as dominions within the British Empire and Commonwealth of Nations, the Union of India and the Dominion of Pakistan. The Act received the Royal Assent on July 18, 1947. However, King George VI did not give up the title of Emperor of India until 22 June 1948. His delay was to do with the fact that he continued as King of India until that dominion became a republic on 26 January 1950 and as King of Pakistan until his death in 1952, when he was succeeded as Queen of Pakistan by his daughter Elizabeth II. She reigned until the creation of the Republic of Pakistan in 1956.

Bibliography

  • Mills, Arthur, India in 1858: A Summary of the Existing Administration, Political, Fiscal and Judicial, of British India; Together with Laws and Public Documents Relating Thereto, from the Earliest to the Present Time (London: John Murray, 2nd edition, 1858)
  • Bedwell, C. E. A., The Legislation of the Empire 1898-1907 (London: Butterworth, 1909, four volumes)
  • Smith, Vincent A., India in the British Period [Oxford History of India, Part III] (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2nd edition, 1921)
  • Majumdar, R. C., et al., An Advanced History of India (London: Macmillan, 2nd edition 1950)
  • Bayly, C. A., Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire in 'The New Cambridge History of India' (Cambridge University Press 1990, ISBN 0521386500)
  • Low, D. A., Eclipse of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1993, ISBN 0521457548)
  • Harrison, Mark, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1994, ISBN 978-0521466882)[18]
  • Porter, Andrew (ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire: Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0199246785)
  • Copland, Ian, India 1885-1947: The Unmaking of an Empire (Pearson Longmans, 2001, ISBN 0582381738)
  • Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar, From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India (Orient Longmans, 2004, ISBN 8125025960)
  • Wolpert, Stanley, Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India (Oxford University Press, 2006, ISBN 0195151984)

See also

References

  1. ^ 1. Kakar, S. (1996) "Leprosy in British India, 1860-1940: colonial politics and missionary medicine", Medical History. 40 (2): 215–230. 2. Blunt, Alison. (2002) ‘Land of our Mothers’: Home, Identity, and Nationality for Anglo-Indians in British India, 1919–1947, History Workshop Journal 54(1):49-72
  2. ^ Edney, M.E. (1997) Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843, University of Chicago Press. 480 pages. ISBN 9780226184883
  3. ^ Hawes, C.J. (1996) Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773-1833. Routledge, 217 pages. ISBN 0700704256.
  4. ^ Drayton, Robert Harry, The Statutes: From the Twentieth Year of King Henry the Third to the Tenth Chapter of the Twelfth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Years of King George the Sixth AD 1235-1948, Statutes of the Realm - Law - 1770 Page 211 (3): "Save as otherwise expressly provided in this Act, the law of British India and of the several parts thereof existing immediately before the appointed..."
  5. ^ Karaka, Dosabhai Framji, History of the Parsis Including Their Manners, Customs, Religion and Present Position , Appendix B, page 299 online at books.google.co.uk, accessed 28 August 2008
  6. ^ 52 & 53 Vict. cap. 63, sec. 18)
  7. ^ Imperial Gazetteer of India, volume IV (1907 edition) pp. 59-60
  8. ^ Government of India Act 1935 (extracts) online at nic.in, accessed 3 September 2008
  9. ^ Chaudry, Mahinder D., 'National Income Statistics of India', in Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. 13, No. 1, Part 1 (Oct., 1964), pp. 107-114: Footnote (2) on p. 107: "The term "British India" did not include the areas of the Indian Princes but referred only to the provinces directly under British administration."
  10. ^ Chandrasekhar, S., India's Population: Fact and Policy (The John Day Company, 1946, 120 pgs), Introduction: "In all the statistical source material the term "British India" is used. This refers only to the eleven provinces, as distinguished from the five hundred and more states which constitute the State-India or the Princely India".
  11. ^ 1925 World Atlas and Gazetteer published by Funk & Wagnalls, online at scribd.com, accessed 4 September 2008
  12. ^ Whitaker's Almanac for 1945, quoted at British Rule in India at flagspot.net, accessed 4 September 2008
  13. ^ Pitt's Act at indhistory.com, accessed 4 September 2008
  14. ^ Hunter, William Wilson, The Indian Empire (London: Trubner & Co., 1886) Chapter XVI online at books.google.co.uk, accessed 28 August 2008
  15. ^ a b Imperial Gazetteer of India, volume IV (1907 edition) p. 60
  16. ^ Indian Princely States at uq.net.au
  17. ^ Mills, Arthur, India in 1858: A Summary of the Existing Administration, Political, Fiscal and Judicial, of British India; Together with Laws and Public Documents Relating Thereto, from the Earliest to the Present Time at books.google.co.uk, accessed 4 September 2008
  18. ^ Public Health in British India at books.google.co.uk

External links


Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_India"

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