Description
Manohar Publishers and Distributors See You in Court Principle and Paralysis of Early British Rule The Upper Doab 1793-1830 by Dirk H A Kolff
Scholarship on the pre-Bentinck period of Indian history has taken little notice of the inevitable dilemmas of colonial rule as they became visible in the districts. This book argues that the disdain the eighteenth-century Westminster parliaments expressed both for Indians and the East India Company induced the Bengal civil service under the leadership of Lord Cornwallis to formulate for itself a corporate identity that, because of its distant and self-centered character, prevented it from acquiring an executive hold on most levels of the Indian administration. The core of the book consists of superbly-detailed studies of the ways in which, in the Ganga-Yamuna Doab, villagers, revenue farmers, Indian policemen and revenue officials, bankers and judges struggled to overcome or profit from this feature of the colonial administration.