Describe characteristics of administration during british period
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Answer:
Explanation:
When the officials of the East India Company acquired control over Bengal in 1765, they had little intention of making any innovations in its administration. They only desired to carry on their profitable trade and collect taxes for remission to England.
The East India Company was at this time a commercial body designed to trade with the East. Moreover, its higher authority was situated in England, many thousands of kilometers away from India. Yet, it had come to wield political power over millions of people. This anomalous state of affairs posed many problems for the British government.
The first of these problems was the most pressing as well as the most important. It was also closely interwoven with party and parliamentary rivalries in Britain, the political ambitions of English statesmen, and the commercial greed of English merchants.
Merchants kept out of the East by the monopoly of the Company, the growing class of manufacturers and, in general, the rising forces of free enterprise in Britain wanted to share in the profitable Indian trade and the riches of India which the Company and its servants alone were enjoying.
These officials were given the derisive title of ‘nabobs’ and were ridiculed in the press and on the stage. They were boycotted by the aristocracy and were condemned as the exploiters and oppressors of the Indian people. Their two main targets were Clive and Warren Hastings. By condemning the ‘nabobs’, the opponents of the Company hoped to make the Company unpopular and then to displace it.
Thus, reorganization of the relations between the British state and the Company’s authorities became necessary and the occasion arose when the Company had to ask the government for a loan of £1,000,000. But, while the Company’s enemies were many and powerful, it was not without powerful friends in the Parliament; moreover, the king, George III, was its patron. The Company, therefore, fought back.
In the end, the Parliament worked out a compromise by which the interests of the Company and of the various influential sections of British society were delicately balanced. It was decided that the British government would control the basic policies of the Company’s Indian administration so that British rule in India was carried on in the interests of the British upper classes as a whole.
At the same time the Company would retain its monopoly of Eastern trade and the valuable right of appointing its officials in India. The details of Indian administration were also left to the directors of the Company.
The first important parliamentary act regarding the Company’s affairs was the Regulating Act of 1773. This Act made changes in the constitution of the Court of Directors of the Company and subjected their actions to the supervision of the British Government. The Regulating Act soon broke down in practice. It had not given the British government effective and decisive control over the Company.
The Act had also failed to resolve the conflict between the Company and its opponents in England who were daily growing stronger and more vocal. Moreover, the Company remained extremely vulnerable to the attacks of its enemies as the administration of its Indian possessions continued to be corrupt, oppressive, and economically disastrous.
The defects of the Regulating Act and the exigencies of British politics necessitated the passing in 1784 of another important act known as the Pitt’s India Act. This Act gave the British government supreme control over the company’s affairs and its administration in India. It established six commissioners for the affairs of India, popularly known as the Board of Control, including two Cabinet Ministers.
The Board of Control was to guide and control the work of the Court of Directors and the Government of India. The Act placed the Government of India in the hands of the Governor-General and a Council of three, so that if the Governor-General could get the support of even one member, he could have his way.
The Company, having saved its monopoly of the Indian and Chinese trade, was satisfied. Its directors retained the profitable right of appointing and dismissing its British officials in India. Moreover, the Government of India was to be carried out through their agency.
The chief aim of the British was to enable them to exploit India economically to the maximum advantage of various British interests, ranging from the Company to the Lancashire manufacturers.
In 1793, Lord Cornwallis, the Governor-General, defined two primary objectives for the Bengal government. It must ‘ensure its political safety and it must render the possession of the country as advantageous as possible to the East India Company and the British nation’.