Administrators

Abstract

During the heyday of the soldier most popular British representations of Britons in India were defined by conquest. Administration was represented as either being in the hands of the conquering military or was altogether ignored. In the ‘astonishing twenty years’, therefore, the administrator was a grey figure, by and large, a performer of routine tasks in the running of a trading post, and did not feature in popular accounts. Those administrators who did appear in print were soldiers who, having waged successful military campaigns, took on the ‘burden’ of ’ruling’ the provinces they had conquered or traders/members of the trading establishment who had moved on to administering the conquered regions. Once British power in India was confirmed all this changed and the administrator stepped out from the shadows and came into his own, to be transformed into a powerful and tireless servant of the British ‘civilizing’ nation in India. This powerful, normally ‘moral’ man faced two main problems — the difficulty of administering an unappreciative and ungrateful subject people, and struggling against the profit-seeking, immoral Company and Directors who opposed his civilizing activities on the grounds of cost-efficiency or simple profit.KeywordsCivil ServantBritish GovernmentMilitary OfficerTrading PostTrading EstablishmentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.