This book takes a closer look at colonial despotism in early nineteenth-century India and argues that it resulted from Indians’ forum shopping, the legal practice which resulted in jurisdictional jockeying between an executive, the East India Company, and a judiciary, the King’s Court. Focusing on the collisions that took place in Bombay during the 1820s, the book analyses how Indians of various descriptions—peasants, revenue defaulters, government employees, merchants, chiefs, and princes—used the court to challenge the government (and vice versa) and demonstrates the mechanism through which the lawcourt hindered the government’s indirect rule, which relied on local Indian rulers in newly conquered territories. The author concludes that existing political anxiety justified the East India Company’s attempt to curtail the power of the court and strengthen their own power to intervene in emergencies through the renewal of the company’s charter in 1834. An insightful read for those researching Indian history and judicial politics, this book engages with an understudied period of British rule in India, where the royal courts emerged as sites of conflict between the East India Company and a variety of Indian powers.

Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859), Lowland Scottish traveller, East India Company civil servant and educator, was one of the principal intellectual architects of British colonial rule in South Asia. Imbued with liberal views, such that Bombay's wealthy founded Elphinstone College in his memory, he pioneered the scholarly, scientific and administrative foundations of imperialism in India. Elphinstone's career was launched when he was picked to lead the inaugural British diplomatic mission to the Afghan court. His Account of the Kingdom of Caubul (1815) became the main source of British information about Afghanistan. He is best known for his periods as Resident at Poona and Governor of Bombay in the 1810s and 1820s, when he instituted innovative and lasting policies in administration and education while also conducting research for his extremely influential History of India (1841). This volume examines Mountstuart Elphinstone's intellectual contributions and administrative career in their own right, in relation to prominent contemporaries including Charles Metcalfe and William Moorcroft, and in the context of later historical study of India, Afghanistan, British imperialism and its imperial frontiers.

The Indian village council, or panchayat, has long held an iconic place in India. Ironies of Colonial Governance traces the history of that ideal and the attempts to adapt it to colonial governance. Beginning with an in-depth analysis of British attempts to introduce a system of panchayat governance during the early nineteenth century, it analyses the legacies of these actions within the structures of later colonial administrations as well as the early nationalist movement. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the ideologies of panchayat governance evolved during this period and to the transnational exchange and circulation of panchayat ideologies.

Beginning as a junior clerk in 1823, John Stuart Mill spent thirty-five years as an administrator in India House, the London headquarters of the East India Company, which dominated the Indian subcontinent. In his Autobiography, Mill paid scant attention to his long imperial career, and following his lead, later commentators have concluded that Indian administration was insignificant for Mill's intellectual development. Based upon extensive investigation of Mill's dispatches to India, this book rejects the long-accepted interpretation and suggests that important parallels exist between Mill's development as a thinker and his neglected India House career. It shows that at each step of Mill's intellectual maturation - rigorous early training at his father's side, youthful rebellion accompanied by a searching out of alternative opinions, and mature retreat from the extreme positions of his rebellious phase - Mill took up or abandoned administrative ideas that have much in common with the more abstract concepts that he was absorbing or shedding. For example, Mill's fascination with Romantic doctrines during the time of his mental crisis is shown to have had an Indian dimension. At the same time Mill concluded that Romantic doctrines were useful for amending Utilitarian ideas, he fell under the influences of key imperial administrators who advanced pragmatic policies for India that reinforced many Romantic ideas. Consequently, Mill modified his father's naive plans for reforming India, just as he altered Utilitarian doctrine in general, in favor of more complex notions about reform and progress. The author explores other parallels in Mill's evolving intellectual and administrative priorities and concludes that at his India House desk Mill found not only plenty of supporting evidence for his shifting intellectual positions but also ample opportunity to apply the abstract ideas that mattered most to him at different times of his life. In this way, the author challenges the picture of Mill's imperial career - as a dull and unimportant part of his life - that Mill painted for posterity in his Autobiography. He further suggests that Mill belittled his long India House experience because it did not fit the narrative structure he wanted to impose on his past. Since the essential story of Mill's Autobiography is one of a great mind being formed by interacting with other great minds, the banal concerns of Indian administration could hardly play a large role. The author also examines Mill's intellectual relationship with imperialism in the light of recent colonial discourse theory. He concludes that Mill altered his general social and political views as a result of the British experience in India and that his mature views of radical reform in Ireland and Great Britain owed much to the years that he spent as an imperial administrator.