Chapter 5 investigates the Indian government’s anomalous accession to “paramountcy,” which led it to pursue the territorial annexation of princely states. Controversially, this process often necessitated the violation of Britain’s celebrated “rule of law” and brought the nation’s reputation for fair play into question. Seeking to check this expansionism, reformers amalgamated classical law of nations theories with the findings of contemporary international law treatises to defend the rights of native rulers in Awadh, Tanjore, the Carnatic, and Mysore. If India’s princely states were protected, reformers anticipated that their sovereigns would internalize constitutionalist values and provide employment for educated Indians who struggled to find positions in the exclusive colonial bureaucracy.

Between 1798 and 1818, a theory and practice of paramountcy was forged, with lasting consequences for the Company’s empire in India. Though the subsidiary alliance system first emerged in the mid-eighteenth century, and the first Residents were posted to Indian courts in the 1770s, British conceptions of their own role in the subcontinent were initially limited to maintaining the status quo. Governor General Richard Wellesley, however, replaced the older emphasis on the balance of powers with a new, more moralizing vision of tranquillity in the subcontinent, with the Company acting as the ultimate political and military arbiter. Though Wellesley’s ambitions were repudiated initially, his insidious legacy lived on through the Residents who matured under his influence. By 1818, the Company’s right to intervene in allied kingdoms had moved beyond the realm of debate, even if the appropriate degree of intervention was never conclusively settled. Precedents from 1798 to 1818 would be cited as late as 1929 to justify the British government’s sweeping powers relative to its Indian allies. While 1857 is usually presented as a point of rupture in the history of the princely states, the period 1798–1818 set the terms for debates that rumbled on until Indian independence.

White officers’ claim that they alone could wield that blade that “ruled” India became a dominant ideology within the colonial state in the early nineteenth century. This chapter argues that this “stratocracy” was the product of two entangled phenomena, rooted in the Company’s growing paramountcy over India’s military landscape. At the turn of the nineteenth century, sepoys, European soldiers, and officers faced a diminished military labor market with few opportunities for employment outside of the Company’s aegis. In 1806, frustrated at these limits and changes in the Company’s service, sepoys launched a violent, but brief mutiny at the garrison of Vellore, galvanizing a wave of colonial panic about further unrest. When in 1809 white officers launched their own mutiny in Madras, they warned that refusing their demands would shatter their control over their sepoys – leading to another Vellore. The gambit worked: The civilian governor of Madras was recalled in disgrace and the mutinying officers escaped without punishment. For decades to come, the rhetoric first articulated in 1809 remained a powerful tool through which military officials overruled civilians in Company affairs.