A list of territories under direct and indirect control of British Indian in 1857
Answers
The British-administered territories in India were expanded in three successive waves. The first wave (A.D. 1757-66) brought under [direct] British rule Bengal, Bihar, and the Northern Circars along the north-west shore of the Bay of Bengal; the second (A.D. 1790-1818) brought the Carnatic, the Upper Ganges Basin, and the Western Deccan; the third (A.D. 1843-9) brought the Indus Basin. In the course of this expansion, all other parts of India were lassoed in an encircling belt of British-administered territories and were reduced to the status of client states; and, under Lord Dalhousie’s régime, the annexations of the client states of Satára in A.D. 1848, Jhansi in 1853, Nagpur in 1854, and Oudh in 1856 seemed to portend a rapid extension of direct British rule over the whole of the rest of the peninsula. On the other hand, after the mutiny of the Indian units in the British East India Company’s Army in A.D. 1857-8, it became the general policy of the British Government of India to keep the surviving client states intact; and, though this new rule was not invariably observed, nevertheless the annexation of the Kingdom of Oudh, which had been reminiscent of the Roman Emperor Tiberius’s annexation of the Kingdom of Cappadocia, was, after all, not followed up by the progressive extinction, more Romano, of the remaining Indian client states.
Dalhousie, in what is now the state of Himachal Pradesh, was established in 1854 by the East India Company as a summer retreat for its troops and bureaucrats.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954