Research for this article was conducted in London and India between 1975 and 1982. Support for this research from the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays, Western Washington University, and the American Philosophical Society is gratefully acknowledged. I am also grateful to the staffs of the British Museum, Commonwealth Relations Office, and National Archives of India. I would like to thank Evelyn Albrecht for her statistical and technical advice and Joy Dabney for her careful reproduction of my graphs. The statements made and conclusions drawn are of course the responsibility of the author alone.

My statistical analysis employed the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) program. I compiled biographies for 615 British officials, virtually all who held offices defined as part of the ‘political line.’ These biographies include every post each official is known to have had as well as other pertinent data. This information, once coded, has allowed me to perform quantitative analysis of virtually the entire political line from the 1760s until 1857. Among the sources drawn upon were the complete series of ‘Personal Records,’ and ‘The Madras Army Service Lists,’ the annual numbers of the The East-India Register and Directory, Hodson, V. C. P., List of the Officers of the Bengal Army 1758–1834, 4 vols (London: Constable, 1927–1928)Google Scholar, Prinsep, Charles C., Record of Services of the Honourable East India Company's Civil Servants in the Madras Presidency from 1J41 to 1858 (London: Trubner, 1885)Google Scholar and numerous other manuscript and published volumes and series.

¹ This proclamation sought to stabilize British relations with the princes, it was hoped, permanently. Subsequent to it, policies were formulated to bond the surviving princes of India to the British Queen-Empress, literally the ‘Kaiser of India’. See Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian England’, read at Symposium on Symbolism, Ritual and Political Power, Princeton University, March 14, 1981.

² See Low, D. A., Lion Rampant: Essays in the Study of British Imperialism (London: Frank Cass, 1973), pp. 86–95.Google Scholar

³ Of the other European powers, only the Dutch in Batavia developed a system of Residents comparable to that of the British and these Residents developed into magistrates rather than into agents for indirect rule. For standard surveys on Africa see Crowder, Michael, West Africa under Colonial Rule (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1968)Google Scholar and Oliver, Roland and Mathew, Gervase, History of East Africa, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963)Google Scholar. The relevant areas of Southeast Asia are discussed in Sadka, Emily, The Protected Malay States, 1834–1895 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1968)Google Scholar, Emerson, Rupert, Malaysia: A Study in Direct and Indirect Rule (New York: Macmillan, 1937)Google Scholar, and Chew, Earnest, ‘Swettenham and British Residential Rule in West Malaysia’, Journal of South East Asian Studies 5, 2 (09 1974), 166–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ Among the best of the recent works dealing with several princely states are Ramusack, Barbara, The Princes of India in the Twilight of Empire: The Dissolution of a Patron–Client System, 1914–1939 (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1978)Google Scholar, the several contributors to Jeffrey, Robin (ed.), People, Princes and Paramount Power (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar, and Copland, Ian, The British Raj and the Indian Princes: Paramountcy in Western India, 1857–1930 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1982).Google Scholar

⁵ One example of such work, discussing the ‘invisible, but nevertheless real, postwar empire[s]’, is Seidman, Ann and Makgetla, Neva, Outposts of Monopoly Capitalism: Southern Africa in the Changing Global Economy (Westport, Ct: Lawrence Hill, 1980).Google Scholar

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¹²Regani, Sarojini, Nizam-British Relations, 1724–1857 (Hyderabad: Booklovers Private Ltd, 1963)Google Scholar; Yazdani, Zubaida, Hyderabad During the Residency of Henry Russell, 1811–1820: A Case Study in the Subsidiary Alliance System (Oxford: The Author, 1976)Google Scholar; Wood, Peter, ‘A Vassel State in the Shadow of Empire: William Palmer's Bank in Hyderabad, 1810–1824’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1981Google Scholar. See also Khalidi, Omar, The British Residents at the Court of the Nizams of Haydarabad (Wichita, Kansas: Haydarabad Historical Society, n.d.) for a list of the Hyderabad Residents.Google Scholar

¹³Sutherland, J[ohn], Sketches of the Relations subsisting between the British Government in India and the Different Native States (Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann, 1837)Google Scholar; Lee-Warner, William, The Protected Princes of India (London: Macmillan, 1894)Google Scholar. Tupper, Charles Lewis, Our Indian Protectorate: An Introduction to the Study of the Relations between the British Government and Its Indian Feudatories (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1893).Google Scholar

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¹⁷ See Robinson, Ronald and Gallagher, John, Africa and the Victorians: The Oficial Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1961)Google Scholar, for a discussion of the motivation for imperialism.

¹⁸ Warren Hastings himself served as a Resident with primarily commercial but some political functions at Murshidabad from 1757 to 1760. See Glieg, George Robert, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Hon. Warren Hastings, 3 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1841), 1: 51–78.Google Scholar

¹⁹Satow, Ernest, A Guide to Diplomatic Practice, 4th edn, ed. Bland, Nevile (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1961), p. 165.Google Scholar

²⁰ E.g. Jahangir, , Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, trans. Alexander Rogers, ed. Beveridge, Henry (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1968).Google Scholar

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²² Browne to Macpherson, 20 April 1785, Bengal Secret Consultations 12 May 1785, No. 2 and Panikkar, p. 4.Google Scholar

²³ Lt Col Upton to Governor General 22 January 1777, Bengal Secret Consultations 26 February 1777, Eur Ms Addl 28987, British Museum.

²⁴Metcalf, Thomas, The Aftermath of Revolt: India, 1857–1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964).Google Scholar

²⁵ Since not every official held office for a full year, the numbers have been weighted so that they reflect the proportion of the year the office was actually held. An official holding an office for a full year thus counts as one; an official in office for only six months counts only one half, and so on.

²⁶ Personal Records, 15:583, Commonwealth Relations Office.

²⁷ The dual peak results from the summation of distinct patterns of military and civilian officials, to be explained later with reference to Chart 4.

²⁸ See Spangenberg, Bradford, British Bureaucracy in India: Status, Policy and the I.C.S., in the Late 19th Century (Delhi: Manohar, 1976), pp. 55–78 for a different approach to the measure of administrative efficiency.Google Scholar

²⁹ Mysore had an infant ruler at the beginning of the century and then was under the temporary administration of British from 1831 to 1864. For an account of one Resident at Mysore see Bell, Evans, Memoir of General John Briggs of the Madras Army (London: Chatto and Windus, 1885) pp. 158ffGoogle Scholar. See also Copland, British Raj, passim.

³⁰Cohn, Bernard S., ‘Recruitment and Training of British Civil Servants in India, 1600–1860’, in Braibanti, Ralph (ed.), Asian Bureaucratic Systems Emergent from the British Imperial Tradition (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Commonwealth-Studies Center, 1966), p. 103.Google Scholar

³¹ Pay scales caused major debate throughout the period under study. One of the more drawn out disputes concerned the pay of Major, later General, Walker, Resident at Baroda, which continued for at least nine years. Turning down a 30,000 Rupee settlement offer from the Court of Directors, Walker held out for the additional 1,000 Rupee per month back pay he felt due to him and eventually won his case, including 8% interest on the money. Public Letter to Bombay 17 April 1811, and passim, Eur Ms C.198, Commonwealth Relations Office.

³² Personal Records, 12:479, Commonwealth Relations Office. See also Political Letters to Bombay 31 August 1804 and 29 August 1810, Eur Ms C. 198, Commonwealth Relations Office. The same was true for the other lines, see Court of Directors to Bombay Revenue Department 10 January 1811, Eur Ms C. 198.

³³ Even though the total number of military in the service actually declined during his administration, Ellenborough regarded this as the major factor in his quarrel with the Directors, Ellenborough to Wellington 9 June 1842 cited in Broadfoot, W., The Career of Major George Broadfoot (London: John Murray, 1888), p. 195Google Scholar. See Ellenborough's letters to Claud Clerk dated 29 July 1842, 3 May 1843 and 16 April 1843 for n's frequent rewards of political posts for military officers, Claud Clerk Collection, Eur Ms D. 538/39, Commonwealth Relations Office.

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³⁶Glieg, G. R., The Life of Major-General Sir Thomas Munn, Bart, and K.C.B., etc., Late Governor of Madras with Extracts from his Correspondence and Private Papers, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830), 1: 142–3.Google Scholar

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³⁸ Private copy of Lt Col G. Le Grand Jacob's Memorial to the Court of Directors, 17 November 1855, Eur Ms E.304/7, Commonwealth Relations Office.

³⁹ For an analysis of the Indian Civil Service in the late nineteenth century see Spangenberg, British Bureaucracy, Cohn, ‘Recruitment’, and Woodruff, The Men Who Ruled.

⁴⁰ E.g. Bengal Secret Consultation, 18 April 1781, Eur Ms Addl 13612, Museum, British, and Hunter, William Wilson, Life of Brian Houghton Hodgson, British Resident at the Court of Nepal (London: John Murray, 1896).Google Scholar

⁴¹ Henry Torrens was better educated and older than almost all of the other officials at his level in the service. His devotion to poetry apparently further alienated him from his colleagues. After a series of rapid and unhappy postings, he was appointed Resident at Murshidabad. His editor wrote of this as ‘… an appointment in which he had little or nothing to do … an office which the most ordinary person might have filled … Mr Torrens was of the opinion that when he was sent to Murshidabad, it was a distinct declaration of the Government's intention to “shelve” him.’ Hume, James (ed.), A Selection from the Writings, Prose and Poetical, of the late Henry W. Torrens, Esq., B.A., Bengal Civil Service, and of the Inner Temple (Calcutta: R. C. Lepage, 1854), p. ci.Google Scholar

⁴² Wellesley appointed his protégé Josiah Webbe, to a series of posts in the political line explicitly in order to protect him from dismissal and disgrace at the hands of the next Governor General. Josiah Webbe to Thomas Munro, 9 November 1801 and 27 December 1801, Munro Collection, Eur Ms F. 151, file 5, Commonwealth Relations Office; M. Shawe to Malcolm, 27 February 1804, Eur Ms Addl 13602, British Museum.

⁴³ This story may be colored by the subject's later success in this line. Glieg, John William, The Life and Correspondence of Major-General John Malcolm, G.C.B., Late Envoy to Persia, and Governor of Bombay, 2 vols (London: Smith, Elder, 1854), 1: 23, 63.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Interestingly, despite the suggestion that there might be an affinity between the British nobility and the political line, no evidence of a higher proportion of nobility, or sons of the nobility, within the political line can be found during this period.

⁴⁵ Letters requesting or using influence are found throughout the Residents' correspondence. E.g. David Octerlony, Resident at Delhi to Secretary to Government, 21 December 1804, Bengal Secret and Political Consultations 18 July 1805, Commonwealth Relations Office.

⁴⁶ Richard Jenkins to Bayley, 10 January 1815, Nagpur Residency Private Letter Book, Eur Ms E. 111, Commonwealth Relations Office.

⁴⁷ Letter of Ellenborough to Sir William Nott, 21 September 1842, quoted in Stocqueler, J. H. (ed.), Memoirs and Correspondence of Major-General Sir William Nott, GCB, 2 vols (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1854), 2: 169.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ When the Resident at Gwalior withdrew from his post due to health problems, his younger brother, the commander of the escort, was appointed by the Governor General to act in his place. Minute of the Governor General, 19 September 1783, Eur Ms Addl 29006, British Museum.

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⁵¹ Governor General to Barry Close, 4 September 1799, Mysore Residency Records, In Letter Book, Commonwealth Relations Office.

⁵² Richard Jenkins, Resident at Nagpur to Sydenham, 12 May 1810, Nagpur Residency Private Letter Book, Eur Ms E. 111, Commonwealth Relations Office.

⁵³ Richard Strachey to Ricketts, 6 June 1816, Richard Strachey Letters, 1813–1817, Eur Ms D. 585, Commonwealth Relations Office. Richard Jenkins describes a career in the political line to an unknown relative who apparently considered pursuing it. Richard Jenkins to [?], 17 September 1815, Nagpur Residency Private Letter Book, Eur Ms E. 111, Commonwealth Relations Office.

⁵⁴ Governor General to Governor Bombay, 7 January 1773, Bengal Secret Consultations 7 January 1773, No. 2, and Governor General to Resident Poona, 13 October 1773, Bengal Secret Consultations 13 October 1773, No. 9, Commonwealth Relations Office.

⁵⁵ Governor General to Governor Bombay, 8 February 1779, Bengal Secret Consultations 8 February 1779, Commonwealth Relations Office.

⁵⁶ Governor General's Minute, 26 November 1784, Bengal Secret Consultations 14 December 1784 and Resident Poona to Boddam, 8 February 1786, Malet Collection, Eur Ms F. 149, Commonwealth Relations Office.

⁵⁷ Governor General to Select Committee Fort St George, 1 November 1779, Bengal Secret Consultations 1 November 1779, Commonwealth Relations Office.

⁵⁸ Fort St George to Governor General, 13 March 1780, Bengal Secret Consultations 15 May 1780, Fort St George to Governor General, 19 May 1780, Bengal Secret Consultations 12 June 1780, and Governor General to Fort St George, 29 June 1780, Bengal Secret Consultations, Eur Ms Addl 28994 and Hollond to Governor General, 9 June 1780, Bengal Secret Consultation 17 July 1780, Eur Ms Addl 28995, and James Grant to Governor General, 31 January 1783, Eur Ms Addl 28999, British Museum.

⁵⁹ Fort St George to Court of Directors, 8 March 1805, Bengal Political Consultations 2 May 1805, No. 5, Commonwealth Relations Office.

⁶⁰ Governor General to Select Committee Fort St George, 1 November 1779, Bengal Secret Consultations 1 November 1779.

⁶¹ Resident Poona to Messrs Porcher, Redhead and Gardiner, 4 September 1789, Malet Collection, Eur Ms F. 149, Commonwealth Relations Office.

⁶² The full text of the letter, some 500 words, is quoted in full in Tupper, Charles L. (comp), Indian Political Practice: A Collection of the Decisions of the Government of India in Political Cases, 4 vols (Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1974 reprint), 3: 156.Google Scholar

⁶³Tupper, , Indian Political Practice, 3: 156–7.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Printed in full in his A Memoir of Central India, 2 vols (London: Kingsbury, Parbury and Allen, 1823), Appendix 18, pp. 433–75.Google Scholar

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⁶⁷ Indeed, the officers of the Madras army comprised the largest group within the political line in India as well, as we have seen. Mills, L. A., British Malaya, 1824–1867 (Singapore: Methodist Publishing House, 1925), p. 95.Google Scholar

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⁷⁶ Cited in Perham, Margery, Lugard: The Years of Authority 1898–1945 (Hamden, Ct.: Archon Press, 1968), p. 148.Google Scholar

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