Abstract
The Memoir of Malwa heralded a new phase in Malcolm’s Indian writings. It responded to the emphasis on the administration of British India brought about by the Third Anglo-Maratha War. In the Sketch of the Political History of India of 1812, Malcolm had described the princes of India as potential enemies and allies in a complex system of state rivalry. With the British from 1818 on as unequivocally the paramount power in India, the Memoir had informed its readers that the native princes of central and western India were now to be viewed either as loyal dependents or possible rebel leaders.1 As Malcolm informed the governor general, Lord Hastings, that summer, “the very minds of the inhabitants are for the moment conquered; but neither its former history nor our experience warrants our expectation that these feelings will be permanent.”2 As he saw it, creating a lasting peace through good government was now the main challenge for the British administration of India and this became the central preoccupation of his writings until his death in 1833.
Keywords
- Permanent Settlement
- British Rule
- East India Company
- Governor General
- White Colonization
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Notes
Barbara N. Ramusack, The New Cambridge History of India; III.6: The Indian Princes and Their States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 6.
J. W. Kaye, The Life and Correspondence of Major-General Sir John Malcolm, G. C. B., Late Envoy to Persia, and Governor of Bombay: Late Envoy to Persia, and Governor of Bombay; from Unpublished Letters and Journals, II (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1856), p. 372.
Malcolm, Government of India (London: John Murray, 1833), p. 36.
Malcolm, A Memoir of Central India, Including Malwa and Adjoining Provinces. With the History and Copious Illustrations of the Past and Present Condition of that Country, II (London: Kingsbury, Parbury and Allen, 1824), p. 433.
Malcolm, The Political History of India, II (London: John Murray, 1826), p. 65.
Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 67;
Michael Dodson, Orientalism, Empire and National Culture(Basingstoke,: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 81.
Douglas M. Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in Early Nineteenth Century India (London: Taurus Press, 1995) p. 211;
W. Thomas, The Quarrel Between Macaulay and Croker: Politics and History in the Age of Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 70, 149;
Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir (eds.), The Great Indian Education Debate (Basingstoke: Routledge, 1999), pp. 9–11.
F. Jeffrey, “A Memoir of Central India, Including Malwa and Adjoining Provinces, with the History and Copious Illustrations of the Past and Present Condition of that Country. By Major-General Sir John Malcolm, G.C.B, K.L.S., 2 vols. 8vo. Kingsbury, Parbury & Allen. London 1823,” The Edinburgh Review No. XL (March 1824): 280.
John W. Burrow, Stephen, Collini, and Donald Winch, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 21.
Francis Jeffrey, “A Memoir of Central India, Including Malwa and Adjoining Provinces, with the History and Copious Illustrations of the Past and Present Condition of that Country. By Major-General Sir John Malcolm, G.C.B, K.L.S., 2 vols. 8vo. Kingsbury, Parbury & Allen. London 1823,” The Edinburgh Review XL (March 1824), p. 284.
J. Barrow, “Malcolm, A Memoir of Central India, Including Malwa and Adjoining Provinces; with the History, and Copious Illustrations, of the Past and Present Condition of that Country,” Quarterly Review 29; 58 (July 1823): 382–414.
Martha McLaren, British India and British Scotland, 1780–1830. Career Building, Empire Building, and a Scottish School of Thought on Indian Governance (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2001), pp. 138, 161.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Conor Cruise O’ Brien (ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) p. 175.
Martha McLaren, “From Analysis to Prescription: Scottish Concepts of Asian Despotism in Early Nineteenth-Century British India,” International History Review 15 (1993): 441–660;
Douglas M. Peers, “Soldiers, Scholars, and the Scottish Enlightenment: Militarism in Early Nineteenth-Century India,” International History Review 16; 3 (1994): 441–65.
Sir Cyril H. Philips, The East India Company, 1784–1833 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1941), p. 199.
The shift toward government through boards of administrators in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries coincided with the expansion of empire at this time and had a profound impact on how imperial government was formed and maintained. Christopher Bayly, Imperial Meridian: Britain and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989), pp. 116–18.
Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 103
Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir (eds.), The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843(Richmond: Curzon, 1999), p. 20.
John Clive, Thomas Babington Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian (New York: Knopf, 1973), pp. 375, 441.
Zastoupil and Moir (eds.), The Great Indian Education Debate, p. 20; Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952); The English Utilitarians, p. 324.
D. Eyles, “The Abolition of the East India Company’s Monopoly, 1833,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1955, p. 209.
Macaulay, “Speech on the Government of India, Delivered on 10 July, 1833,” in Lord Macaulay, The Works of Lord Macaulay, VIII (London, 1897), p. 122; Philips, East India Company, p. 266.
Burton Stein, Sir Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and his Vision of Empire (New Delhi, 1989), p. 198.
Mill felt that the assessment was too high for an impoverished economy like Bengal’s. James Mill, History of British India, 4th ed. III, (London: Peer, Stephenson and Spence, 1844), p. 256.
For a thorough analysis of this aspect of the permanent settlement, see Peter J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead: Eastern India 1740–1828 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 141–9, which concludes that the fixed rate was too high to be sustainable let alone to encourage agriculture.
Ibid., p. 252. In the long term, the British policy and legislation (most notably the Forest Act of 1878), went against Malcolm, making it easier to alienate wasteland and ultimately vesting ownership of abandoned land with the state; R. Guha and M. Gadgil, The Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 113, 126.
H. V. Bowen, Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 146.
Anon., “Memoir of the Later Major-General Sir John Malcolm, KCB and KLS,” United Service Journal IX (1832): 376.
Seema Alavi, “The Company Army and Rural Society: The Invalid Thana, 1770 to 1830,” Modern Asian Studies 27; 1 (1993): 147–78.
Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States, p. 88; for a good selection of these works, see M. Fisher, The Politics of British Annexation of India, 1757–1857 (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
B. S. Jones, Papers Rrelating to the Rise of British Power (London, 1832), p. 2.
For the most recent thinking on sati in particular, see Andrea Major, Pious Flames: European encounters with sati, 1500–1830 (Oxford: Oxford Universtiy Press, 2006), p. 122, and her forthcoming monograph on sati and the princely states.
Michael Fisher, Indirect Rule: Residents and the Residency System, 1764–1857(Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) p. 76;
M. E. Yapp, Strategies of British India: Britain, Iran and Afghanistan 1798–1850, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 49.
For this view of the Mills as imperial administrators, see T. Metcalfe, The New Cambridge History of Modern India Volume III.4: The Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 17.
Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), p. 278.
D. M. Peers, “Conquest Narratives: Romanticism, Orientalism and Intertextuality in the Indian Writings of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Orme,” in Michael J. Franklin (ed.), Romantic Representations of British India(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 247.
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© 2010 Jack Harrington
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Harrington, J. (2010). Sir John Malcolm and the Government of India after 1818. In: Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117501_6
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