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British India was the parts of the Indian subcontinent directly administered by the British government's India Office during the period 1858 to 1947. Until 1937, it included Aden and Burma. After the Second World War, the territories were partitioned and, following some upheavals, now constitute parts of the independent countries of India, Pakistan, Bangla Desh, Myanmar and Yemen.

The term has also been used less formally for the holdings in India of the Honourable East India Company in the period up to 1857, but that period is dealt with in Company rule in India.

Origins under the Honourable East India Company

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 British India.

Definitions

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".

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.

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

System of government

The Honourable East India Company's Governors General had held autocratic powers, being responsible only to a Court of Directors far away, itself answering to a Court of Proprietors (as shareholders) and to parliament through a Board of Control. 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'.

Provinces

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.

Governors-General and Viceroys of India

• Viscount Canning, later 1st Earl Canning, 1 November 1858 – 21 March 1862, (previously Governor-General from 28 February 1856)
• James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin, 21 March 1862 – 20 November 1863
• Sir Robert Napier, 21 November 1863 – 2 December 1863 (provisional)
• Sir William Denison, 2 December 1863 – 12 January 1864 (provisional)
• Sir John Lawrence, 12 January 1864 – 12 January 1869
• Richard Southwell Bourke, 6th Earl of Mayo, 12 January 1869 – 8 February 1872
• Sir John Strachey, 9 February 1872 – 23 February 1872 (provisional)
• Francis Napier, 10th Lord Napier, 24 February 1872 – 3 May 1872 (provisional)
• Thomas Baring, 1st Earl of Northbrook, 3 May 1872 – 12 April 1876
• Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton, 12 April 1876 – 8 June 1880
• George Robinson, 1st Marquess of Ripon, 8 June 1880 – 13 December 1884
• The Earl of Dufferin, 13 December 1884 – 10 December 1888
• Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne, 10 December 1888 – 11 October 1894
• Victor Bruce, 9th Earl of Elgin, 11 October 1894 – 6 January 1899
• The Lord Curzon of Kedleston, 6 January 1899 – 18 November 1905
  • Oliver Russell, 2nd Baron Ampthill, 1904, acting for Lord Curzon of Kedleston
• Gilbert Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, 4th Earl of Minto, 18 November 1905 – 23 November 1910
• Charles Hardinge, 1st Baron Hardinge of Penshurst, 23 November 1910 – 4 April 1916
• The Lord Chelmsford, 4 April 1916 – 2 April 1921
• The Earl of Reading, 2 April 1921 – 3 April 1926
• Lord Irwin, 3 April 1926 – 18 April 1931
• The Earl of Willingdon, 18 April 1931 – 18 April 1936
• Victor Hope, 2nd Marquess of Linlithgow, 18 April 1936 – 1 October 1943
• Viscount Wavell, 1 October 1943 – 21 February 1947
• Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, 21 February 1947 – 15 August 1947

Indian Empire

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.

A distinction between "dominion" and "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 those laws vested in the local and central governments of British India, while the courts of the Princely States existed under the authority of the rulers.

End of British India

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

• 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: 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)
• 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

• Colonial India
• Company rule in India
• India Office
• List of Indian Princely States
• British Indian Army
• List of Regiments of the British Indian Army (1903)
• List of regiments of the British Indian Army (1922)
• Commander-in-Chief, India
• Indian Civil Service
• Partition of India
• British Empire
• British Raj
• Republic of India
• Pakistan
• Bangladesh

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. 1. Edney, M.E. (1997) Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843, University of Chicago Press. 480 pages. ISBN 9780226184883. 2. Hawes, C.J. (1996) Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773-1833. Routledge, 217 pages. ISBN 0700704256.
3. 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
4. 52 & 53 Vict. cap. 63, sec. 18)
5. Imperial Gazetteer of India, volume IV (1907 edition) pp. 59-60
6. Hunter, William Wilson, The Indian Empire (London: Trubner & Co., 1886) Chapter XVI online at books.google.co.uk, accessed 28 August 2008
7. ^ Imperial Gazetteer of India, volume IV (1907 edition) p. 60
8. Indian Princely States at uq.net.au
9. Public Health in British India at books.google.co.uk

• British rule in India
• British Empire
• History of Pakistan
• History of India