3 - The Making of Patchwork Authority

Summary

This chapter surveys the histories behind differentiation in colonial governance, rooted in the politics of colonial conquest from the middle of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century. It begins with an explanation of the East India Company as a mercantile enterprise with few commitments in the governance of India. Challenges to the Company’s trading prerogatives led to the conquest of eastern and northern India, yet the illegibility of indigenous society and fears of peasant rebellion fashioned governance arrangements which empowered proprietary elites, who served as key intermediares between the colonial state and society. In much of southern, central and western India, however, threats to the colonial enterprise from indigenous state-building projects, like Mysore and the Maratha confederacy, led to significant conflict and a variety of different arrangements: significant state intervention into rural society and relations with cultivators, as well as the affirmation of different types of princely states. The chapter concludes with the extremes of state presence and absence: in metropolizes and in political agencies on the frontier of state authority.