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Agrarian Society and the Pax Britannica in Northern India in the Early Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Eric Stokes
Eric Stokes
Affiliation:
St. Catharine's College, Cambridge
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Extract

It has been customary to view the effects of the British annexation of the Ceded and Conquered Provinces (1801–3) in terms of an abrupt caesura. Upon the whirling anarchy of the North Indian scene there suddenly fell the Pax Britannica. A political revolution was worked almost overnight. The tide of Sikh expansion was checked and turned back, Jat power penned in Bharatpur, Sindhia driven across the Chambal to his matchless rock citadel at Gwalior, and the Oudh nawabi stripped of its Doab, Rohilkhand and eastern districts. The second line of the political elite could not long survive this dismantling of the superior political structure. Although, at first, expediency impelled the use of large-scale intermediaries, the assertiveness of British rule and its hunger for revenue could tolerate no more than could the Mughals the existence of tall poppies along the principal strategic highway of its power between Benares and Delhi; and on their part the number of magnates capable of keeping their footing and making the rapid adjustment from warlordism to estate management were few indeed. Within two decades of 1801 a large proportion of the established magnates had been swept from the scene, and the remainder were finding that the sun of official favour had gone down while it was yet day.

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Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , July 1975 , pp. 505 - 528
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

This paper was originally presented at the Director's study group on ‘India: Society in War, 1795–1808’, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, in 1974.

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41 The Dobhi Raghubansis numbered some 14,500 in a district population of 1,203,000, District Gaz. U.P., Vol. XXVIII, Jaunpur (1908), p. 80.Google Scholar The Lakhnesar Sengars were merely 8,538 in a pargana population of 52,733, Ballia S.R. 1882–85 (Allahabad, 1886), p. 71. These were the densely-settled communities; ordinary proprietary bodies were very much smaller.Google Scholar

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