A ‘Tranquil Spectator’:1 Chief at Chittagong to Governor General and Council, 10 April 1777 (no. 3.22), Islam, BDR: Chittagong, I, 239. View all notes The District Official and the Practice of Local Government in Late Eighteenth-Century Bengal

摘要

There has been a tendency in the historiography covering the use of armed force in the East India Company's domestic governance to concentrate on the period after the 1810s, when ideas regarding the importance of fostering the colonial government's reputation within Indian society for absolute military rule, tempered by justice, were gaining prominence through the work of Sir John Malcolm and the adherents of the ‘Empire of Opinion’ school. However, the governmental practice of the previous generation of the Company's district administrators, operating before the establishment of a military hegemony, a professional bureaucracy or an accumulated body of Anglo-Indian governmental knowledge, has received comparatively little attention. As this article seeks to demonstrate through the example of the district of Chittagong in Bengal during the late eighteenth century, such a study reveals much about the priorities and limitations of local government in this formative period of British colonial rule.View full textDownload full textRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03086530903538145