Presidencies and provinces of British India

"British India" redirects here. For the history of the British Empire on the Indian subcontinent, see British Raj. For the British East India Company's rule in India, see Company rule in India. For other uses, see British India (disambiguation).
For the modern states, see States and union territories of India.

The provinces of India, earlier 'presidencies of British India', and still earlier 'presidency towns', were the administrative divisions directly administered by the British authorities that formed part of the system of British governance on the Indian subcontinent. Collectively, they have been called British India. In one form or another, they existed between 1612 and 1947, conventionally divided into three historical periods:

  • Between 1612 and 1757, the East India Company ('Company' or 'EIC') set up "factories" (trading posts) in several locations, mostly in coastal India, with the consent of the Mughal emperors, Maratha Empire or other local rulers. EIC rivals at this time were the merchant trading companies of Portugal, Denmark, the Netherlands, and France. By the mid-18th century three presidency towns: Madras (Chennai), Bombay (Mumbai) and Calcutta (Kolkata), had grown in size.
  • During the period of Company rule in India (1757–1858), the Company gradually acquired sovereignty over large parts of India, typically thought of in terms of polities (political areas) called "presidencies". However, EIC itself had also increasingly come under British government oversight, in effect sharing its jurisdiction or control over the Indian presidencies with the British Crown (which itself was increasingly controlled by the Westminster Parliament and the Governments to which it gave majority support). During the same period, EIC also gradually lost its mercantile privileges.
  • Following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the EIC's remaining powers were transferred (back) to the Crown. Under the British Raj (1858–1947), administrative boundaries were extended to include a few other British-administered regions, such as Upper Burma. Increasingly, however, the unwieldy presidencies were broken up into 'provinces'.

"British India" did not include the many princely states which continued to be ruled by Indian princes, usually as vassals to the British. However, by the 19th century, such princely states were effectively under British suzerainty—their power over defence policies, foreign relations, and external communications had been relinquished to British authorities, which also closely monitored their internal governance. At the time of Indian Independence in 1947, there were officially 565 princely states: a few were very large, although most were very small. In total, princely states made up a quarter of the total population of the British Raj and represented two fifths of its total land area, with the provinces comprising the remainder in each case.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.