The Whites of British India, 1780–1830: A Failed Colonial Society?

Abstract

1788 Burke said of the British in India: 'The Company in India does not exist as a national colony ... The English in India are nothing but a seminary for the succession of officers. They are a nation of placemen ;they are a commonwealth without a people.51 This analysis held good some forty years later. The overwhelming mass of Europeans in India were still employed by the state, that is by the East India Company or the armed forces of the Crown. In 1830 there were 36,409 Whites in the King's and Company's armies in India.2 A statement for the Company's civil establishments, including its marine, for 1827 Put tne^r numbers at some 3,55O.3 By comparison 'private settlers' outside official employment were only estimated at 2,149/ At the end of the nineteenth century, less than one-quarter of the adult population of India, classified as 'European' by the 1901 census, had been born in India; British troops still constituted 36 per cent of the total European population.5 A community dominated by official employment, recruited in Britain and set on returning to Britain (Burke's hyperbole that 'the natives scarcely know what it is to see the grey head of an Englishman'6 still had some substance in 1901 when only 5 per cent of the European population was over fifty) 7 would probably have been largely immune from the radical impulses of the 'Age of Revolution' and can perhaps hardly be