District Officers in Decline

The Erosion of British Authority in the Bombay Countryside, 1919 to 1947

Bibliographic Data

ID3606447
AuthorsSimon Epstein (Newcastle University, corresponding author)
Year1982
Volume16
Issue3
Pages493-518
Publication date1982-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueModern Asian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0026-749X • E-ISSN: 1469-8099
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0026749x00015286
OpenAlexW2019069315
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited12

The paradox of the authoritarian rule of the Indian Raj at the heart of Britain's liberal empire was one that ran continuously through the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialism. Both as the unpaid arsenal of Eastern expansion and defence, and as the essential stop-gap to Britain's multilateral pattern of trade, India was the necessary if incongruous adjunct of Liberal England, supporting the doctrines of progress at home on the basis of the autocratic control of its British-born hierophants over the numberless 'contented masses' of the Indian countryside. The resulting contrast between the increasingly self-governing white dominions, and the Indian maverick upholding in chains the very fabric of the empire, was also reflected in the political thinking of the motherland itself, by way of the stresses and contradictions which the conditions of the Raj's existence served to create within the liberal framework of the Victorian intellectual world. At the core of the Victorian liberal empire stood the strictly paternalistic government of the Raj in India; at the centre of the 'benevolent despotism' that British rule in the subcontinent adopted stood the steel frame of the Indian Civil Service, 'much more of a government corporation than of a purely civil service' and the creator as much as the executor of British policy there

Authoritarianism · Autocracy · British Empire · Democracy · Economic history · Empire · Indirect rule · Paternalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · History · Law · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East · Social and Economic Development in India