Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T18:44:56.595Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Curzon and Indian Reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Robin J. Moore
Robin J. Moore
Affiliation:
The Flinders University of South Australia
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Lord Curzon was the imperial gatekeeper who opened the way to parliamentary government in India by composing Edwin Montagu's declaration of 20 August 1917. He defined British policy as ‘the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire’. Curzon himself acknowledged his authorship in an endorsement on his own printed copy of the declaration. On the eve of the War Cabinet's agreement to the declaration he included his proposed key words in a letter to Montagu, a document strangely overlooked in all of the many accounts of the matter. The only Cabinet departure from Curzon's key words was the substitution of ‘progressive’ for ‘fuller’. Montagu questioned the latter term and Curzon proposed the former. There was nothing impromptu about the drafting. For months variations on it had been floated in correspondence between the authorities in India and London. The use and meaning of ‘self-government’ had been widely canvassed. It is generally understood that ‘responsible government’ went beyond ‘self-government’, for in constitutional parlance it must mean a parliamentary system (with a responsible executive), whereas ‘self-government’ might be achievable in non-Westminster forms. The justification for dyarchy, the essence of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, lay in its apparent satisfaction of the declaration's espousal of the principle of responsiblity.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , October 1993 , pp. 719 - 740
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Included in Sec. of State to Viceroy, 16 August 1917. Endorsed by Curzon, ‘This the formula drawn up by me and accepted by the Cabinet…’. Curzon Collection, India Office Records, MS.Eur. FIII/438.

2. Curzon to Montagu, 13 August 1917, Montage Collection, Trinity College, Cambridge.

3. Rumbold, Algernon, Watershed in India, 1914–22 (London, 1979), 99, 322.Google Scholar

4. Ibid., 97.

5. Robb, Peter, ‘The British Cabinet and Indian Reform, 1917–1919’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 4.3 (1976), 318–34, p. 330.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Robb, Peter, The Government of India and Reform: Policies towards Politics and the Constitution, 1916–1921 (Oxford, 1976), esp. 77–8.Google Scholar

6. ‘British Cabinet’, 322.

7. Ibid., 324–5.

8. Ibid., 331.

9. Dodwell, H. H. in The Cambridge History of India, VI (Cambridge, 1932), vii.Google Scholar

10. Ronaldshay, , The Life of Lord Curzon, 3 vols (London, 1928), III, 166.Google Scholar

11. Ibid., 168.

12. Dilks, David, Curzon in India, 2 vols (London, 1969–1970), II, 259.Google Scholar See also Danzig, Richard, ‘The Announcement of August 20th, 1917’, Journal of Asian Studies, XXVIII.1 (1968), 19–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which argues that Curzon understood ‘responsible government’ to mean the responsibility of members legislatures to their electors (esp. pp.27–30).

13. Curzon to Lady Curzon, 17 May 1922, I.O.R. MS.Eur. F112/796.

14. Beaverbrook, Sunday Express, 23 September 1928.

15. Mosley, Leonard, Curzon: The End of an Epoch (London, 1960), 171–2.Google Scholar

16. Taylor, A. J. P., English History, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1965), 204.Google Scholar

17. Speech of 28 October 1898, Thomas, Raleigh (ed.), Lord Curzon in India: Being a Selection of his Speeches as Viceroy and Governor-General of India, 1898–1905, 2 vols (London, 1906), I, 4.Google Scholar Curzon noted in a memoir that Stephen's lecture ‘first seriously turned my thoughts towards that great dependency’, though the lecture was full of ‘school book commonplaces’ (n.d., I.O.R. MS.Eur. F112/363).

18. Stephen, James, ‘The Foundations of the Government of India’, Nineteenth Century, 10 1883, in Philips, C. H. (ed.), The Evolution of India and Pakistan, 1858–1947: Select Documents (London, 1962), 57–60.Google Scholar

19. The Place of India in the Empire….Address of 19 October 1909 (London, 1909), passim.Google Scholar

20. Curzon to Alfred Lyttleton, 28 June 1899, Chandos Collection, Churchill College, Cambridge, CHAN I/2/4.

21. Curzon to Lyttleton, 29 August 1900, ibid.

22. Curzon to St. John Brodrick, 17 April 1900, Midlenton Papers, British Library, Add.MS. 50073.

23. Curzon to Brodrick, 18 June 1900, ibid., 50074.

24. Curzon to Brodrick, 30 June 1902, ibid.

25. Curzon to Haldane, 18 May 1905, Haldane Papers, National Library of Scotland.

26. Curzon to Arthur Balfour, 11 December 1908, I.O.R. MS.Eur. F111/409.

27. Curzon's question in House of Lords, 21 February 1912, Philips, Documents, 91–2.

28. Curzon to Lord Hardinge, 18 August 1911, Hardinge Papers, Cambridge University Library.

29. Curzon's Cabinet Memo., ‘The New India Capital at Delhi’, 13 June 1916, copy in I.O.R. MS.Eur. F111/444.

30. Copy in I.O.R. MS.Eur. F112/125.

31. Ibid. See also ‘Memorandum by the Secretary of State for India on Indian Reforms’, 22 May 1917, I.O.R. MS.Eur. F111/438.

32. ‘Indian Self-Government’, copy in I.O.R. MS.Eur. F112/125.

33. Speech of 12 July 1917, discussed in Waley, S. D., Edwin Montagu (Bombay, 1964), 127–31.Google Scholar

34. Curzon to Lloyd George, n.d. [? 15–16 July 1917], Lloyd George Collection, House of Lords Record Office, F/11/8/13.

35. Curzon to Montagu, 3 August 1917, Montagu Coll. See also Banerjea (President, Joint Session of All India Congress Committee and Council Musilm League, 28–29 July 1917) to Montagu, 31 July 1917, I.O.R. MS.Eur. F111/438.

36. Cited in Rumblod, Watershed, 97.

37. Balfour's ‘A Note on Indian Reform’, 7 August 1917, copy in I.O.R. MS.Eur. F112/125.

38. Curzon to Austen Chamberlain, 25 August 1917, cited in Danzig, ‘Announcement’, 30, n. 43.

39. Chamberlain to Curzon, 5 August 1915, I.O.R. MS.Eur. F112/114.

40. For the ‘Heartland Theory’, see Parker, W. H., Mackinder: Geography as an Aid to Statecraft (Oxford, 1982), esp. Ch. 6.Google Scholar

41. Minutes of Imperial War Cabinet, 25 June 1918, copy in I.O.R. MS.Eur. F112/134.

42. Cited in Robb, ‘British Cabinet’, 326.

43. Curzon to Montagu, 13 September 1917, Montagu Collection.

44. Montagu to Curzon, 22 May 1918, ibid. See also Waley, Montagu, 164 ff.

45. Montagu to Curzon, 22 May 1918, loc.cit.

46. Montagu to Curzon, 15 February 1919, ibid.

47. Curzon to Montagu, 16 February 1919, ibid.

48. Montagu to Curzon, [?] June 1919, ibid.

49. Cited in Waley, Montagu, 215.

50. Curzon to Montagu, 5 December 1919, Montagu Collection. Rumblod has misread Curzon's handwriting (‘now’ for ‘not’) and misconstrued his attitude (Watershed, 169).

51. Curzon to Montagu, 23 May 1918, Montagu Collection.

52. ‘Mr Montagu's Report’, 3 June 1918, copy in I.O.R. Eur.MS. F111/444.

53. Curzon to Montagu, 25 July 1918, ibid.

54. Curzon to Montagu, 15 and 16 February 1919, ibid.

55. Curzon's speech in House of Lords, 30 June 1919.

56. Curzon's speech in House of Lords, 12 December 1919. See also Rumblod, Watershed, 157–70; Robb, Government of India, 105–16.

57. Curzon's speech in House of Lords, 31 July 1924.

58. Montagu was firm in reminding Curzon of the exact words that he had used in Cabinet: ‘…it was most important that he should go out [to India] with all the authority of the Secretary of State for India, although persons of high position and independent views should be associated with him. In that event, His Majesty's Government would be most unlikely to reject the decision at which he might arrive’. Cited in Montagu to Curzon, 30 July 1918, Montagu Collection. See also Waley, Montagu, 169.

59. Ronaldshay, , Curzon, 168–76.Google Scholar

60. Rumbold, , Watershed, 121–6.Google Scholar

61. Robb, , ‘British Cabinet’, 330.Google Scholar

62. Curzon, , British Government in India: The Story of the Viceroys and Government Houses, 2 vols (London, 1925), II, 109–12.Google Scholar

63. Dewey, , ‘The End of the Imperialism of Free Trade: The Eclipse of the Lancashire Lobby and the Concession of Fiscal Autonomy to India’, Clive, Dewey and Hopkins, A. G. (eds), The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India (London, 1978), 35–67, see pp. 35, 56.Google Scholar

64. Dewey, Clive, ‘The Government of India's “New Industrial Policy”, 1900–1925: Formation and Failure’, Chaudhuri, K. N. and Clive, Dewey (eds), Economy and Society: Essays in Indian Economic and Social History (Delhi, 1979), 215–57, esp. pp. 240–3.Google Scholar Partha Sarathi Gupta has challenged Dewey's views, arguing that ‘the designation of industrial development as a provincial transferred subject…did not eliminate all possibilities of central co-ordination, or at least guidance’ (‘State and Business in India in the Age of Discriminating Protection’, Dwijendra, Tripathi (ed.), State and Business in India: A Historical Perspective (New Delhi, 1987), 157–216, see pp. 179–80.Google Scholar

65. Tomlinson, B. R., The Political Economy of the Raj, 1914–1947: The Economics of Decolonizattion in India (London, 1979), 59, 166.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

66. Curzon, , British Government in India, II, 132–3.Google Scholar

67. Ibid., 133.

68. Linlithgow to Zetland, 21 February 1939, and Zetland to Linlithgow, 5 March 1939, cited in Ashton, S. R., British Policy towards the Indian States, 1905–1935 (London, 1982), 177.Google Scholar

69. Report of the Indian Statutory Commission, 2 vols (Cmd 3568–9, 1930), I, 215.

70. Ibid., II, 97.

71. Lord Birkenhead to Lord Reading, 30 November 1924, cited in Hyde, H. M., Lord Reading (London, 1967), 382.Google Scholar

72. Cf. Danzig, Richard, ‘The Many-Layered Cake: A Case Study in the Reform of The Indian Empire’, Modern Asian Studies, III.1 (1969), 57–74, esp. 69–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar