The British Raj in India

The British Raj — the period of direct Crown rule in India from 1858 to 1947 — was the most consequential component of the British Empire, and arguably the most consequential European colonial regime of the modern period. At its peak the Raj governed perhaps 400 million people, three-quarters of a million square miles of territory, and an army larger than any in Europe. It transformed the Indian subcontinent in profound and often contradictory ways: it built railways and irrigation works, introduced English-language education, and produced the institutional framework of the modern Indian state; it also deindustrialised Indian textiles, sustained famines that killed millions, and ruled through a racial hierarchy of the kind that post-1945 Britain would repudiate in law if not in practice. The Raj was the central fact of British imperial history, and it is the central fact of the modern histories of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma.

The Establishment of the Raj

The British Raj was established by the Government of India Act of 1858, passed in the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The act dissolved the East India Company, which had governed India since the Battle of Plassey in 1757, and transferred the company’s powers to the British Crown. The new system was organised under a viceroy, who represented the British monarch in India, and an executive council in Calcutta. The act was proclaimed by Queen Victoria in November 1858, with a famous proclamation that promised equal treatment for Indians and the preservation of native states and customs. The proclamation was, in effect, a charter of British rule: it gave the new regime a constitutional legitimacy that the company had not possessed, and it set out the principles — equal access to office, non-interference in religion, respect for native rights — that the Raj would claim as its own.

The transfer of power from the company to the Crown was a major change. The new system brought a greater degree of parliamentary oversight to the Indian government, and it marked the beginning of a more regularised, bureaucratic form of colonial rule. The Indian Civil Service, which had been established by the Charter Act of 1853 and reformed after 1858, became the principal instrument of British governance, and the Indian Army was reorganised on a more centralised and balanced basis to prevent the kind of regional rebellion that had characterised 1857.

The Viceroys and the Government of India

The viceroy of India was the most senior representative of the British Crown in India. The position was held by some of the most distinguished British statesmen of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Lord Canning (the first viceroy, 1858–1862), Lord Curzon (1899–1905), Lord Irwin (later Lord Halifax, 1926–1931), and Lord Mountbatten (the last viceroy, 1947). The viceroy presided over the executive council and the Imperial Legislative Council, and he exercised enormous patronage over the Indian Civil Service, the Indian Army, and the Indian states.

The Government of India was supported by an elaborate administrative structure, including the provinces (Bengal, Bombay, Madras, the United Provinces, the Punjab, Burma, Assam, and the Central Provinces), each under a governor or chief commissioner, and the Indian Civil Service, which recruited through a competitive examination held in London. The ICS, as it was known, was a small but highly prestigious body that formed the principal instrument of British administration, and it became a model for colonial civil services elsewhere in the empire. At its peak, the ICS numbered perhaps 1,000 members for a population of 400 million — a ratio of one British administrator per 400,000 Indians. The system worked, when it did, through the collaboration of British officials with Indian subordinates and the indirect rule of Indian princes.

The Construction of the Indian Railway Network

The construction of the Indian railway network was one of the great achievements of the British Raj. The first railway in India, from Bombay to Thane, was opened in April 1853, and by 1947 the network extended to more than 40,000 miles. The Indian railways were built and operated by private companies under British management, with the government providing land and guarantees, and they became the principal means of long-distance transport in India. The railway network was essential to the development of the colonial economy, and it played a significant role in the great famines of the late nineteenth century by allowing the rapid movement of grain from surplus to deficit regions.

The Indian railways were also a powerful instrument of imperial integration. The railways tied the different regions of India into a single economic and political system, and they facilitated the movement of troops, officials, and merchants across the subcontinent. The railways became a symbol of British rule, and the railway timetables were among the most widely circulated publications in British India. The legacy of the Indian railway network is still visible today, and the system remains one of the largest in the world.

English Education and the Indian Renaissance

The introduction of English-language education was a central feature of the British Raj. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1835 “Minute on Indian Education” is the most famous statement of the educational ideology, calling for the creation of “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” The Minute led to the establishment of English-language education as the principal means of higher learning in India, and it produced a generation of Indian intellectuals who were steeped in the English language and English ideas.

The founding of the universities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras in 1857, and the further development of the Indian university system in the later nineteenth century, produced a remarkable community of Indian scholars and writers, often known as the Bengal Renaissance. The Bengal Renaissance included figures like Raja Rammohan Roy, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, and Rabindranath Tagore, who combined Indian and Western learning in new and creative ways. The Indian universities, and the English-educated class they produced, became the principal base of the Indian independence movement. As the literary historian Gauri Viswanathan has argued in Masks of Conquest (1989), English literary education was, from the start, an instrument of British rule, and the Indian response to it was also the principal mode of resistance to that rule.

The Indian Army

The Indian Army, reorganised after 1858 along the lines laid down by the Peel Commission of 1859, was one of the largest standing forces in the world. At the outbreak of the First World War the Indian Army numbered some 160,000 men, of whom perhaps 60,000 were deployed overseas during the war. By the end of the Second World War the army numbered more than 2 million, and it had fought in every theatre of the war — in France, in East Africa, in the Middle East, in Burma, in Malaya, and in Italy. The Indian Army was, in the words of David French, “the largest volunteer force in history.”

The army was recruited from specific “martial races” — Sikhs, Gurkhas, Pathans, Punjabis, and others — and its composition was carefully managed to prevent the kind of regional rebellion that had characterised 1857. The Indian Army was the principal instrument of British power in India, and it was the principal instrument of British power projection in Asia. The loyalty of the army to the British Crown during the First and Second World Wars was, in this respect, a major achievement of the Raj. Its subsequent loyalty to the new dominions of India and Pakistan in 1947 was less certain, and the partition of the army was one of the more difficult tasks of the 1947 settlement.

The End of the British Raj

The British Raj ended with the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. The decision to partition British India into two new states, one Hindu-majority and one Muslim-majority, produced one of the largest migrations in human history — between 10 and 15 million people crossed the new boundaries — and a devastating communal violence in which perhaps a million people died. The partition was accompanied by the accession of the former princely states to one or the other dominion, and the Kashmir dispute, which emerged from the accession of the state of Jammu and Kashmir to India, has remained a source of tension in the region ever since.

The end of the British Raj was a turning point in decolonisation. The British withdrawal from India was the first major step in the dismantling of the British Empire in Asia, and it was followed within a decade by the independence of Ceylon, Burma, and Malaya, and by the recognition of the independence of Egypt and Iraq. The British withdrawal from India was achieved, in the end, by negotiation rather than by force, and it set the model for many of the subsequent British withdrawals from its other colonial possessions. As the post-colonial historian Ayesha Jalal has argued, however, the negotiation was conducted in conditions of near-civil war, and the British decision to partition was, in the end, a decision taken in London as much as in Delhi.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the British Raj has been, in many respects, a history of the writing of the history of India itself. The older British tradition, of which the work of Vincent Smith, the Cambridge History of India (the British planning of which began in 1910), and the early volumes of the Oxford History of India are representative, treated the Raj as, on balance, a period of modernisation and reform. The nationalist tradition, of which R. C. Majumdar and the contributors to the History of the Freedom Movement in India are representative, treated it as a period of exploitation and injustice. The post-independence Indian historiography, of which the work of Sumit Sarkar, Partha Chatterjee, and Ranajit Guha at the Subaltern Studies group has been the most influential representative, has tried to recover the experience of the Indian peasant, the Indian worker, and the Indian woman from the colonial archive. The current generation of historians, of whom C. A. Bayly, David Arnold, and the contributors to the Oxford History of the British Empire are the most distinguished representatives, has produced a much more nuanced picture in which the British Raj is treated as a complex and contradictory regime whose effects on India were neither uniformly bad nor uniformly good.

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