THE RAJ RECONSIDERED: BRITISH INDIA's INFORMAL EMPIRE AND SPHERES OF INFLUENCE IN ASIA AND AFRICA

Abstract

This provides a detailed explanation of how the Indian Empire was organised and run. But its main purpose is to argue that the British Indian Empire was in fact much larger than historians of the Raj normally realise because the Empire should be taken to include the Gulf Arab states, Bhutan, Nepal, Afghanistan, the Aden Protectorate and the British Somaliland protectorate.

Notes

Portions of this article appeared earlier in my book, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. They have appeared here with the kind permission of Oxford University Press.

W. W. Hunter et al. (eds), The Imperial Gazetteer of India, new edn. Volume 4: The Indian Empire, Administrative. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909, pp. 58–60; Hunter, The Indian Empire: Its Peoples, History, and Products, 3rd edn., London: W. H. Allen, 1893, pp. 76–79; ‘India’ chapter of the annual India Office List.

For a discussion of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ empire as defined here, see J. Onley, ‘Britain's Informal Empire in the Gulf, 1820–1971’, Journal of Social Affairs, 22, 87 (2005): 29–45; J. Onley, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth Century Gulf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, chap. 2.

See J. Onley, ‘The Politics of Protection in the Gulf: The Arab Rulers and the British Resident in the Nineteenth Century’, New Arabian Studies, 6 (2004): 30–92.

Lord Curzon, Frontiers, the 1907 Romanes Lecture, delivered at the University of Oxford on 2 November 1907, part 4.

Ibid., part 1.

For more about the IPS, see I. Copland, ‘The Other Guardians: Ideology and Performance in the Indian Political Service’, in J. Jeffrey (ed.), People, Princes and Paramount Power. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978, pp. 275–305; T. Creagh-Coen, The Indian Political Service. London: Chatto & Windus, 1971; M. Ruthnaswamy, ‘The Indian Political Service’, part 1, Indo–British Review, 6, 3–4 (1976): 53–64 and part 2, Indo–British Review, 7, 1–2 (1977): 47–58; C. C. Trench, Viceroy's Agent. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987; P. J. Rich, The Invasions of the Gulf: Radicalism, Ritualism and the Shaikhs. Cambridge: Allborough, 1991.

Surat was an Agency during 1613–15.

The Company also briefly maintained presidency headquarters at Bantam in Java (1617–21, 1634–52); Fort Marlborough in Bengkulu [Benkulen], Sumatra (1760–85); and Penang (1805–30), which oversaw the Company's factories in East and Southeast Asia.

The Indian Foreign Dept had various names over the years: Secret and Political Dept (1784–1843), Foreign Dept (1843–1914), Foreign and Political Dept (1914–37), and Indian Political Service/IPS (1937–47).

E. Satow, Satow's Guide to Diplomatic Practice, 5^th edn., ed. by Lord Gore-Booth. London: Longman, 1977, pp. 83–84, 87.

The British used ‘native’ to indicate that such agents were indigenous to the general region and were, therefore, non-European. Native agents represented the EIC and the British Govt. of India at the courts of hundreds of foreign states in South Asia and Southwest Asia from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. For more about native agents, see J. Onley, ‘Britain's Native Agents in Arabia and Persia in the Nineteenth Century’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 24, 1 (2004): 129–137; Onley, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj.

The Straits Settlements (Penang, Malacca, and Singapore) on the Malay Peninsula were transferred to the Colonial Office in 1867. Burma was separated from British India in 1937.

Southwest Asia includes Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Arabia.

Interpretation Act of 1889 and Indian General Clauses Act of 1897, cited in C. Ilbert, The Government of India: Being a Digest of the Statute Law Relating Thereto, 3rd edn. Oxford: Clarendon, 1915, pp. 291–292.

For details, see C. Aitchison's multi-volume Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads Relating to India and Neighbouring Countries (published numerous times between 1862 and 1933).

Aden Settlement (the port of Aden and its environs plus Perim Island – about 80 sq. miles in total) in Southwest Arabia was annexed in 1839 to the Presidency of Bombay in British India. It was made a province of British India in its own right in 1932 and was transferred to the Colonial Office as a crown colony in 1937.

For details, see Ilbert, The Government of India, pp. 165–169; C. U. Aitchison (ed.), A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads Relating to India and Neighbouring Countries. Calcutta and Delhi: Superintendent Govt. Printing, 1862–1933; C. U. Aitchison, The Native States of India: An Attempt to Elucidate a Few of the Principles which Underlie Their Relations with the British Government. Calcutta: Superintendent Govt. Printing, 1881; W. Lee-Warner, The Protected Princes of India. London: Macmillan, 1894; W. Lee-Warner, The Native States of India. London: Macmillan, 1910; C. L. Tupper, Our Indian Protectorate: An Introduction to the Study of the Relations between the British Government and Its Indian Feudatories. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1893.

For Nepal, see F. O'Connor, On the Frontier and Beyond. London: John Murray, 1931; Asad Husain, British India's Relations with the Kingdom of Nepal, 1857–1947. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970; K. Mojumdar, Political Relations between India and Nepal, 1877–1923. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1973; B. D. Sanyal, Nepal and the East India Company, Bombay: Asian Publishing House, 1965. For Afghanistan, see L. Adamec, Afghanistan, 1900–1923. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967; A. Bilgrami, Afghanistan and British India, 1793–1907. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1972; S. Chakravarty, Afghanistan and the Great Game. Delhi: New Century, 2002; R. S. Rastogi, Indo–Afghan Relations. 1880–1900. Lucknow: Nav-Jyoti Press, 1965; D. P. Singhal, India and Afghanistan, 1876–1907. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1963; G. P. Tripathi, Indo–Afghan Relations, 1882–1907. New Delhi: Kumar Bros, 1973. For Bhutan, see M. Williamson, Memoirs of a Political Officer's Wife in Tibet, Sikkim and Bhutan, ed. J. Snelling. London: Wisdom, 1987; P. Collister, Bhutan and the British. London: Serindia with Belitha, 1987; S. Gupta, British Relations with Bhutan. Jaipur: Panchsheel Prakashan, 1974; A. B. Majumdar, Britain and the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhotan. Patna: Bharati Bhawan, 1984; A. K. J. Singh, Himalayan Triangle: A Historical Survey of British India's Relations with Tibet, Sikkim and Bhutan 1765–1950. London: British Library, 1988.

For the status of the Gulf Arab States, see C. U. Aitchison (ed.), A Collection of Treaties 11: Persian Gulf. Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1933; H. al-Baharna, The Legal Status of the Arabian Gulf States: A Study of Their Treaty Relations and Their International Problems. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968; al-Baharna, ‘The Consequences of Britain's Exclusive Treaties: A Gulf View’, in B. Pridham (ed.), The Arab Gulf and the West. London: Croom Helm, 1985; H. al-Baharna, British Extra-Territorial Jurisdiction in the Gulf, 1913–1971. Slough: Archive Editions, 1998; G. Balfour-Paul, The End of Empire in the Middle East: Britain's Relinquishment of Power in Her Last Three Arab Dependencies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; J. B. Kelly, ‘Sovereignty and Jurisdiction in Eastern Arabia’, International Affairs, 34, 1 (January 1958): 16–24; J. B. Kelly, ‘The Legal and Historical Basis of the British Position in the Persian Gulf’, St Antony's Papers, 4: Middle Eastern Affairs, 1. London: Chatto & Windus, 1958, pp. 119–140; J. B. Kelly, ‘The British Position in the Persian Gulf’, The World Today, 20, 6 (June 1964): 238–249; H. Liebesney, ‘International Relations of Arabia: The Dependent Areas’, Middle East Journal, 1 (1947): 148–168; H. Liebesney, ‘British Jurisdiction in the States of the Persian Gulf’, Middle East Journal, 3 (1949): 330–332; H. Liebesney, ‘Administration and Legal Development in Arabia: The Persian Gulf Principalities’, Middle East Journal, 10, 1 (1956): 33–42; R. V. Pillai and M. Kumar, ‘The Political and Legal Status of Kuwait’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 11, 1 (January 1962): 108–130; D. Roberts, ‘The Consequences of the Exclusive Treaties: A British View’, in Pridham (ed.), The Arab Gulf and the West, pp. 1–14; F. Ahmad, ‘A Note on the International Status of Kuwait before November 1914’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 24, 1 (February 1992): 181–185; R. Blyth, Empire of the Raj: India, Eastern Africa, and the Middle East, 1858–1947. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003, chaps. 2, 8; Onley, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj, chap. 2.

For a contemporary discussion of Britain's de jure and de facto position in the Gulf, see J. A. Saldanha (ed.), Précis of … International Rivalry and British Policy in the Persian Gulf, 1872–1905. Calcutta: Superintendent of Govt. Printing, 1906, pp. 34–5.

In 1937, the protectorates East of Aden were named the ‘Eastern Aden Protectorate’, while those neighbouring Aden were renamed the ‘Western Aden Protectorate’. For details, see C. U. Aitchison (ed.), A Collection of Treaties 11: Aden and the South-Western Coast of Arabia. Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1933; R. Robbins, ‘The Legal Status of Aden Colony and the Aden Protectorate’, The American Journal of International Law, 33, 4 (October 1939): 700–715; B. Reilly, ‘The Aden Protectorate’, Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, 28 (1941): 132–145.

C. U. Aitchison, A Collection of Treaties 13: The Treaties, Etc., Relating to Turkish Arabia, Aden, and South Coast of Arabia, Somaliland, R. Shoa, and Zanzibar. Calcutta: Superintendent of Govt. Printing, 1909, pp. 189–224. For more about India's rule of Somaliland, see A. M. Brockett, ‘The British Somaliland Protectorate to 1905’, D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1970; Blyth, Empire of the Raj, chap. 4.

Estimated sizes of the Indian Empire vary from publication to publication. These sizes are from G. Chesney, Indian Polity: A View of the System of Administration in India, 3^rd edn., London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1894, main map. Ceylon was governed by the Colonial Office and did not belong to the Indian Empire.

Bhutan (18, 200 sq. miles) became a British-protected state in 1910.

Kuwait became a British-protected state in 1899.

The British Somaliland Protectorate was transferred to the Foreign Office in 1898.

A minority period is a period during which a ruler of a state is a minor, unable to govern on his own.

Balfour-Paul, The End of Empire in the Middle East, p. 101.

The British Government issued an order-in-council for each country to regulate the laws and procedures British agents and consuls were to apply to legal cases under their jurisdiction.

Ilbert, Government of India, p. 166.

M. Fisher, Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System, 1764–1858. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Ibid., p. 463.

D. A. Low, ‘Lion Rampant’, Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies, 2, 3 (November 1964): 237–239. Also see D. A. Low, Lion Rampant: Essays in the Study of British Imperialism. London: Frank Cass, 1973; D. A. Low, ‘Laissez-Faire and Traditional Rulership in Princely India’, in Jeffrey (ed.), People, Princes and Paramount Power, pp. 372–387.

J. A. Saldanha (ed.), Précis of Bahrein Affairs, 1854–1904. Calcutta, Superintendent of Govt. Printing, 1904, preface, pp. 1–2.

Meade (Gulf Resident) to Sec. of Indian For. Dept, 13 June 1898, reg. no. 1044/1898, L/P&S/7/108, London: India Office Records, British Library.

Curzon to Sec. of Indian For. Dept, 21 Nov. 1903, Mss. Eur. F111/162, London: India Office Records, British Library, p. 411.

Ilbert, Government of India, p. 292.

Key works on India's native states include I. Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes: Paramountcy in Western India, 1857–1930. London: Orient Longman, 1982; I. Copland, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917–1947. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Fisher, Indirect Rule in India; Robin Jeffrey, ‘The Politics of “Indirect Rule”: Types of Relationships among Rulers, Ministers and Residents in a “Native State”‘, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 13, 3 (November 1975): 261–281; Jeffrey (ed.), People, Princes and Paramount Power; Low, ‘Laissez-Faire and Traditional Rulership in Princely India’; B. Ramusack, The Princes of India: In the Twilight of Empire: Dissolution of a Patron-Client System, 1914–1939. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978; Ramusack, The Indian Princes and their States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Studies of India's tribal territories include H. Beattie, Imperial Frontier: Tribe and State in Waziristan. Richmond: Curzon, 2001; M. Bose, British Policy in the North-East Frontier Agency. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1979; F. Scholz, Nomadism & Colonialism: A Hundred Years of Baluchistan, 1872–1972. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Also see note 18 above.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Onley

Dr James Onley is Director of Gulf Studies and Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. He holds a DPhil from Oxford, where he studied at St Antony's College, and is the author of The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf (Oxford University Press, 2007) and numerous articles and chapters on the history of the Gulf Arab States.