Bureaucracy and Ideology - Britain and India in The Nineteenth Century (Transactions of The Royal Historical Society, Vol. 30) (1980)

Bureaucracy and Ideology: Britain and India in the Nineteenth Century
Author(s): E. T. Stokes
Source: Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 30 (1980), pp. 131-156
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Historical Society
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BUREAUCRACY AND IDEOLOGY:
BRITAIN AND INDIA IN THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY
By Professor E. T. Stokes, M.A., Ph.D.

READ AT THE SOCIETY'S CONFERENCE 14 SEPTEMBER 1979
HISTORI AN S love to sail under bare poles with the spares top-
hamper of theoretical disquisition. Yet in the last resort their differ-
ences resolve themselves largely into differences of methodology, and
nowhere more patently than in the history of bureaucracy where con-
tingency and a priori ideas have long contested for the key position
in historical explanation. This must be the excuse for an historian
of colonial rule who finds himself driven to study the richer historio-
graphy of bureaucracy in metropolitan Britain and to trace out its
movement with the simplicity of caricature before he can settle to
his satisfaction the mechanics of historical causation in government
house and secretariat.
Fifty years ago Namier seized the historical structure of politics
in his powerful grasp and so pulverized it as to leave it not senseless
but mindless. His admirers in the I95os turned to attack the last
stronghold where ideology was still seen to claim a causal historical
role, and seemingly took the mind out of bureaucracy. The long reign
of Dicey was brought to an abrupt close. For it was Dicey who had
proclaimed ideology as the historical demi-urge of the modern state.
Integral to this view was his conviction that the great currents of in-
formed public opinion which shaped the legislative process took their
source in the philosophic mind.' Free trade was for him in a literal
sense the brain-child of Adam Smith; the minimum state of nine-
teenth-century laisser-faire individualism was likewise the creation of
Bentham. Dicey envisaged the same causal role for ideas in the British
state beyond the seas. Empire was the creature of intellectual opinion.
Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham had both taught the inutility of
colonies; and between 1815 and 1870 their authority served to per-
suade the public mind to adopt a politically anti-growth and anti-
imperial stance. As a corollary it was the mysterious ideological sea-
change which set in after 1865 or so that reversed these attitudes, turn-
ing the British towards collectivism at home and imperialism abroad.2
This essentially simple picture of state contraction and growth
1A. V. Dicey, Law and Opinion in England (London, 2nd edn., 1914), pp. 22 ff
2 Ibid., p. 450 ff.
131
132 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY
vanished beneath the close analysis of scholars steeped in that

Namierian end-of-ideology mood of the 1950s, subtly supported as
it was by the currents of logical positivism and Oakeshottian pragma-
tism. They launched a twin-pronged attack. The first proof in refuta-
tion of the argument that 'the early modern state was essentially the
creature of applied ideas'3 consisted of a straightforward demonstra-
tion that official action had run exactly counter to the prevailing ideo-
logy. Oliver MacDonagh's detailed examination of the process of
government growth in the 1830s and 1840s purported to show that
time and time again it was the sheer intolerability of social evils that
prompted the abandonment of the deeply cherished principles of
laisser-faire and non-intervention. The 'felt need' overbore intellectual
conviction, so that nineteenth-century bureaucracy grew up as a series
of ad hoc exceptions to a general rule. The same revisionist feat was
accomplished for colonial policy by Ronald Robinson and John Gal-
lagher. They, too, saw official action departing on a number of
occasions under the pressure of circumstance from the strict rule of
political abstention. Hence the mid-Victorian period which had free-
trade anti-colonialism as its intellectual orthodoxy proved perversely
the great age of aggressive imperial expansion.4
Now it may seem relatively easy to dismiss these clever paradoxes
by denying any substantial divergence between ideology and official
action. The laisser-faire and non-interventionist corollaries of philo-
sophic radicalism never became the official credo, it may be said. Even
Dicey noted the authoritarian and statist strain in Bentham and saw
that the collectivist bureaucracy erected by Chadwick, Southwood
Smith and their colleagues could plausibly be deduced from Ben-
tham's riper thought embodied in his Constitutional Code.5 Similarly
Bentham may be defended as being far from anti-colonialist, as could
be seen in the sage's benediction of Gibbon Wakefield and the
Colonial Reformers, in the willingness of the two Mills to support
British absolutism in India, in the readiness of Charles Buller and
Joseph Hume to back the First Opium War,6 and the alacrity of Bow-
ring, Bentham's editor and governor of Hong Kong, to start the
Second. By redefining the governing orthodoxy in this way it is poss-
ible to save the historical role of ideas in the formation of political
and bureaucratic action, as a respectable line of historians from
30. MacDonagh, A Pattern of Government Growth: The Passenger Acts and their Enforce-
ment (London, 1961), p. 348.
4 R. Robinson and J. Gallagher, 'The Imperialism of Free Trade', Econ. H. R., 2nd
ser., vi (1) (i953).
5 See H. Parris, 'The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal
Reappraised', Historical Journal, iii (196o).
6 On the support of Buller, Hume and other Radicals for the Opium Wars, see B.
Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism (Cambridge, 1970), p. 153-
BUREAUCRACY AND IDEOLOGY 133
Halevy's and Redlich's time has long attempted to do.' There was
no necessary head-on collision in Victorian thinking. 'Extensive in-
stitutional reform', as Barry Supple has said, 'was perfectly compatible
with a commitment to individualism and market forces, and was in-
deed a prerequisite of a competitive society.'8
Yet the other prong of the attack was more subtle and deadly. Why
bother with the role of ideas at all? In the I950os the fashionable anti-
ideological weapon was Occam's razor. Entities are not to be
needlessly multiplied. There is no occasion to resort to the remote
and uncertain influence of ideas when the sufficient and necessary
cause of government growth, at home or in the imperial domain, is
to be found within the closed circle of official action. On this view
government growth was, as MacDonagh says, self-explanatory and
owed nothing either directly or indirectly to contemporary theory.
'The great body of such changes were natural answers to concrete
day-to-day problems, pressed eventually to the surface by the sheer
exigencies of the case.'9
'Without the slightest spur from doctrinaires or any other a priori
influence, experience and the brute facts of the situation forced
those who were concerned ... towards centralization, autonomy,
and the delegation of legislation, towards demands for discretionary
powers ... in a word towards the sort of state we recognize as
modern.'10
Once under way the administrative process tended to generate its own
pattern and momentum, and its salaried official custodians, especially
those below the level of the public gaze, came rapidly to constitute
a professional executive corps with their own 'presuppositions and
bearing'."1
In this way MacDonagh came to postulate the emergence of an
autonomous bureaucratic mentality, which under the designation of
the 'official mind' was given a much larger and more decisive role
by Robinson and Gallagher. They widened its embrace to encompass
the entire circle of official opinion, including that of ministers. The
7 See The Classical Economists and Economic Policy, ed. A. W. Coats (London, 197i);
Great Britain and the Colonies, ed. A. G. L. Shaw (London, 1970) ; E. Halevy, Laformation
du radicalisme philosophique (Paris, 1904); J. Redlich and F. W. Hirst, Local Government
in England (2 vols., London, 1903).
s B. Supple, 'Legislation and Virtue', Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought
and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb, ed. N. McKendrick (London, 1974), p. 212.
9 0. MacDonagh, 'The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government: A Reap-
praisal', Historical Journal, i (1958); reprinted in The Victorian Revolution, ed. P. Stansky
(New York, 1973), p. 23-
10 MacDonagh, Pattern of Government Growth, pp. I6-17.
"Ibid., pp. 327, 344-
'official mind' was now seen as one of the springs of political action,
and itself one of the 'causes' of the scramble for Africa;12 just as in
MacDonagh's model the phenomenon of 'multiplying, intensifying
and fermenting government' was produced by an executive corps of
officials as they sought constantly to promote new administrative and
legislative remedies in order to render the machinery for suppressing
a particular social evil more effective. Government growth was,
therefore, not a matter of mindless empiricism, as might at first seem
to be the argument when the concepts of 'intolerability' and an emo-
tive public response prompting blind action were first deployed.
Hence the shift away from Dicey did not mean that the element
of ideation has been done away with. Instead it is seen to consist not
in abstract and speculative theories fed in from outside the political
process, but rather in the structuralist character of the official mind.
For MacDonagh's expert official social facts came rapidly to be classi-
fied according to habitual criteria and by categories which were them-
selves shaped by earlier legislative remedies. Similarly for Robinson
and Gallagher official thinking involved 'a reading of the long-run
national interest which stayed much the same from ministry to
ministry regardless of the ideological stock-in-trade of the party in
power'.13 Such thinking represented more than a simple reflex action
to the competing pressures of opinions and interest groups; it worked
outside and above them. Overseas affairs were judged by statesmen
'through the distorting glass of inherited prejudice and preconception'
which preserved certain rules for national safety and prosperity, but
which also included 'beliefs about morals and politics, about the
duties of government, the ordering of society and international rela-
tions'.14
The question remains whether there was one self-contained official

world or two-a world of humdrum routine where administration
ground on of its own accord and a world of high politics where issues
had weight purely in terms ofpersonal or group power.15 MacDonagh's
earlier studies were directed to exploring blind, amoeba-like,
self-generating growth, so that he deliberately chose a topic remote
from contemporary political or intellectual passion--the control of
emigration traffic on passenger ships. When he came to survey govern-
ment growth more largely some twenty years later, he acknowledged
12 R. Robinson and J. Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians (London, 1961), pp. 20o-.
131bid., p. I9.
'4 bid., p. 20.
1 Cf. J. Vincent, The Governing Passion: Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain,
1885-86 (London, 1974), pp. xiii-xiv: '...all our evidence tends to show the rarity
of contact between politicians and administrators, and the degree to which politicians
lost interest in questions once they had turned from matters of cabinet antagonism
into administrative grind.'
that for the most part it could not be sealed off from politics, and
that ideology in the shape of tutelary Benthamism and in the person
of Chadwick had made a limited but definite initial impact.'6 At all
events the relationship of ideas to political action must evidently be
viewed in a much subtler and more complex framework than the
simple relationship posited by S. E. Finer when in I959 he put the
question in his brilliant excursus on the transmission of Benthamite
ideas: 'At one end of the process we find Bentham scribbling away
in Queen's Square Place. At the other end we find civil servants and
judges busy executing his views. How did this come about?'"7
Modern historical accounts of the political processes separate off
not only the official mind but government itself as an interest group
in its own right. As such it has its own immediate priorities; first, the
high politics of personal and party political survival, and secondly,
the maintenance of the national power structure in terms of external
security, internal order and adequate financial means. Ideas or ideo-
logy stay instrumental or subservient to these concerns. 'The main
purpose of theory was to justify not originate measures,' Boyd Hilton
has concluded in his study of the economic policy of the Tories
between 1815 and 1830. 'Physiocratic doctrine was borrowed to
justify the Corn Law,' he tells us, 'Ricardian jargon later to denounce
it.'" The overriding objective was a plentiful supply of corn and low
bread prices. He nods agreement with Lucy Brown's aphorism that
for politicians in 183o 'the economic problem was basically one of
the maintenance of civil order'.19 The financial constraint was less
critical but more persistent. The ultimate conversion of Whig
ministers to free trade measures in 1841 came not through the logical
force of economic theory but through a series of budgetary deficits
which persuaded ministers that a higher revenue was obtainable
through lower tariffs.20
Yet the official or governing mind cannot be limited to realpolitik,
or 'high politics'. However cynically they manipulated the ideological
catch-cries of the day, ministers were not devoid of moral imperatives
deriving from their own value system or implicit ideology.21 Boyd
16O. MacDonagh, Early Victorian Government, 183o-1870 (London, i977), pp. 34 ff.
17 S. E. Finer, 'The Transmission of Benthamite Ideas', Studies in the Growth of Nine-
teenth-Century Government, ed. G. Sutherland (London, 1972), p. I2.
18 B. Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments, 1815-
1830 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 304-5-
19 L. Brown, The Board of Trade and the Free Trade Movement, 183o-42 (Oxford, 1958),
p. 4; Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce, p. 79.
20 Brown, Board of Trade, p. 220.
21 Even Vincent (Governing Passion, pp. Io, I8) allows that despite 'the inner nihilism'
of party managers, the main actors were not necessarily always playing false, their
'trades' of 'moral authority' (Gladstone) or 'intelligent traditionalism' (Salisbury) also
being 'to some extent their genuine private selves'.
Hilton found that the Liberal Tories moved towards freer trade and
mouthed the doctrines of political economy in pursuit of an objective
wholly different from the philosophy of economic growth these pre-
supposed. Their vision-Hilton boldly calls it an ethic---was of a
stabilized, steady-state economy and society. Gash's interpretation of
Peel is little different. The vision persisted. Maurice Cowling, the Dio-
genes of the Tory cynical school, reduces the high politics of the 1920S
and I930os to 'primarily a matter of rhetoric and manoeuvre ... a
struggle to decide which rhetoric to use and which group was to use
it'. Yet in the end he finds in both Chamberlain and Halifax 'a
recognition that the fundamental governing duties... were to exercise
power responsibility, subordinate words to their practical purpose
and ensure that careless, exuberant, heart-felt rhetoric was subordi-
nated to the primary task of reconciling all classes and all bodies of
potential alienation to the politico-social structure from which they
derived their authority'.22 If one had to sum up what appears to be
something of a consensus view among non-Marxist historians on the
action of ideas in the public sphere one would say that in modern
British history ordinary political action has been necessarily open-
ended, indeterminate, and prompted by the exigencies of the hour.
It does not concern itself with the immediate realization of ideologi-
cal goals, but in a narrow sense has to use ideological goals to justify
the satisfaction of personal and group interests, including among those
interests the priorities of government itself. Yet ultimately govern-
ment operated to establish or maintain a particular equilibrium among
the forces of the day, tilting the balance in a progressive or conservative
direction in accordance with ministers' own ideological predilections.
If the process of bureaucratic growth has to be accommodated
within a more complex historical framework than was earlier allowed,
the nature of that growth also deserves re-examination. From the
195os historians of bureaucracy have assumed as axiomatic the occur-
rence of a 'nineteenth century revolution in government'. The critical
period of development they locate in the mid-quarters of the century,
but in practice narrow it to the quarter century between I830 and
the Crimean War.23 The measure of government growth is gauged
in terms of the advance towards collectivism and centralization, the
two terminal positions being the ancien regime or night-watchman
state of the early nineteenth century and 'the current paraphernalia
of the collectivist state' in the twentieth. So extraordinary a contrast,
we are told, implies 'a revolution in the middle'. As such it was a
22 M. Cowling, The Impact of Hitler (Cambridge, 1975), p. 428.
23 Cf. MacDonagh, Early Victorian Government, p. 9: '... taking a broad view of the
period as a whole, we find that the initial waves of centralizing and administrative
bustle in 1830-5o are followed by two decades of relative indifference and inaction.'
double revolution-a change of 'both kind and quantity'.24 This is

important because it appears to be assumed that a substantial measure
of centralization can be demonstrated only by means of a substantial
measure of central government growth.
Yet the historians of the governmental revolution have been
singularly coy about the quantitative aspect-as well they might.25
For the most remarkable feature over much of the century was the
secular fall in total government expenditure, the inflated war-time
figures for 1814 (,?123m) not being overtaken until 1890, and the
reduced figures of 1822 (69m) until the Crimean War. In terms of
expenditure per head of population the 1822 figure (?3.3) was not
regained until 188o; and in terms of government expenditure as a
percentage of Gross National Product the 1822 figure (19 per cent)
was not exceeded until after 1900. During the 1830s the Whigs
managed to reduce expenditure in a number of years, but the sum
devoted to Civil Government (as distinct from the heads of Defence
and Debt) rose after 1840. From ?5.4m in 1830 and ?5.6m in 1840,
it was ?7m in 1850, ?9.7m in 186o and ?i Im in 1870. Yet the actual
increase of salaries in the public departments was small and their
aggregate dimensions modest-?o.52m in 1830, under ?o.94m in
1850, ?I.64m in 1870.26
Much of the increased expenditure on Civil Government went to
Law and Justice, which underwent more than a tenfold increase
between 1830 and 1870 (1830, ?o.38m; 1840, ?I.32m; 850o,
?2.28m; 187y, ?4.25m). Even so, the number of civil servants looks
exiguous if one is seeking to found a theory of a revolutionary growth
in central government upon them. According to the imperfect stat-
istics we possess the number of non-industrial civil servants fell from
27,000 in 1821 to 21,000 in 1832, but then appeared to have risen
in the 1840s to some 39,000 by the 1851 Census.27 Compared with
the figures of 387,400 by 1939, or 697,600 by 1965, or even the 91,ooo
odd of 1891, the growth in the number of central government
employees in the early Victorian period seems trivial. Yet the heart
of the matter is the administrative machine itself. Here the numbers
remained tiny. 'Of the 40,000 odd civilian employees of the central
government ... the special Census return of I851 shows only 1,628
24 MacDonagh, Pattern of Government Growth, p. 320; 'Nineteenth-Century Revolu-
tion', Victorian Revolution, ed. Stansky, p. 6.
25See D. Roberts, Victorian Origins of the British Welfare State (Yale, i960), pp. 12 ff.;
W. C. Lubenov, The Politics of Government Growth (Newton Abbot, I971), p. 15.
26A. T. Peacock and J. Wiseman, The Growth of Public Expenditure in the United
Kingdom (London, 1967), Table 1, p. 37; B. R. Mitchell and P. Deane, Abstract of British
Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 396-7.
27 Parliamentary Papers, 1833, xxiii, 458-9; 1849, xxx, 163-6; 1854-5, xx, 439. The
figures are vitiated by the absence of a consistent scheme of classification.
persons engaged in the central departments.'28 Even up to the eve

of the First World War 'the British central government was still
mainly a government of soldiers and sailors, postal clerks and tax col-
lectors'.29
Because the physical growth of the central structure seemed to be
part and parcel of the notion of the nineteenth-century revolution
in government, MacDonagh and others have hesitated to come out
boldly with the proposition that the revolution at the centre was
limited purely to one of function, that it was more parliamentary than
bureaucratic, more legislative than administrative. It was defined by
the revolutionary use now made by government of the instrument
of parliamentary legislation for the purpose of providing a national
framework for matters, such as poor relief, public health, or factory
conditions, which had hitherto been left to private members' bills or
local acts. The enforcement of the new legislation was left for the most
part to the law courts and magistracy, and the funding and execution,
wherever possible, to the various local government authorities.
Government growth occurred, but it occurred in the localities and
was paid for by the rate-payer. In 1830 when the entire expenditure
on Civil Government (including the Civil List) amounted to f5.4m,
a sum of 8.Im was already being raised in the localities for poor
relief alone.30 Total local government expenditure, although imposs-
ible to calculate with any strict accuracy, was already double that
of central civil government expenditure (including that on the law
courts). By 1868 when proper local government figures first become
available, local government expenditure was nearly three times
greater than that for central civil government (30o.2m compared
with ?II.2m).31 This rough ratio was maintained until the First
World War, although the actual volume of spending increased prodi-
giously after 1900. Of even greater importance was the fact that dur-
ing the nineteenth century the greater part of local government ex-
penditure was met from financial sources under local control. In 1890
it was still true that '75% of all local current expenditures was met
by rate income', while the share of local authorities in total govern-
ment spending was 38.4 per cent. In contrast, by 1955 only 46% of
local government expenditure came from rate income, while the share
of local authorities in total government spending had fallen to 25
28 M. Abramovitz and V. F. Eliasberg, The Growth of Public Employment in Great Britain

(Princeton, 1957), P. 17.
29ibid., p. 39. Figures of non-industrial civil servants for 1900, 1939 and 1955 are
taken from E. N. Gladden, Civil Services of the U.K. 1853-1970 (London, 1967), Table
1, p. 4-
30 Mitchell and Deane, British Historical Statistics, pp. 396, 410.
31 Ibid., pp. 397, 4I6.
per cent.32 This is the real measure of the emergence of the centralized,
collectivist state. It is a twentieth- and not a nineteenth-century
phenomenon.
Once the larger picture is clear the critical middle quarters of the
nineteenth century fall more readily into place. When in December
1832 Nassau Senior put before the Political Economy Club his pro-
posal for a highly centralized administration of the Poor Law, there
was a general consensus against it. It is usual to suppose that this was
a rebuff for the full Benthamite model set out in Bentham's Con-
stitutional Code (published in part in I830). What seems surprising is
that Edwin Chadwick, the chief architect of the 1834 Poor Law Act,
and Bentham's closest disciple, should have readily given way, and
that in place of Senior's ideas for a central administration in London
and paid inspectors with magisterial authority, he should have substi-
tuted a scheme for leaving the execution and financing of a revised
system of poor relief in the hands of elected local bodies, merely regu-
lated and supervised by a small central Board of Control, aided by
an inspectorate. Whether, as Anthony Brundage has recently sug-
gested, Chadwick was trimming his sails to political realities and his
own personal advancement, or whether, as Chadwick subsequently
urged, he was recommending a novel device, later philosophized by
John Stuart Mill, as 'the combination of the principles of central con-
trol with local action' is of little moment.33 The important point is
that whatever the general sympathy of tutelary Benthamites with
French administrative centralization, Chadwick pursued a different
course from the outset.
The question of ideological influence-aut Bentham, aut nullus-is
'mal pose'. That a political culture gives excessive and unrepresenta-
tive prominence to a few great names and texts is nowadays a com-
monplace among students of political thought. Even S. E. Finer, who
has laid the most powerful claims for Benthamite influence, was care-
ful to point out in 1952 that Chadwick was unlikely to have been
influenced by any model that he found among Bentham's papers.MA
However much the formula of the 'less-eligibility' principle owed to
Bentham, the philosopher's scheme of a poor law system run by a
monopoly company on the lines of the East India Company was use-
less. Although subsequently in the Constitutional Code (1830) Bentham
had provided-without explanation-for an Indigence Relief Min-
ister with a separate department, centralization was in any event no
Benthamite monopoly. The only non-Benthamite plans in existence,
32 Peacock and Wiseman, Growth of Public Expenditure, pp. 101, 108.

33See A. Brundage, The Making of the New Poor Law (London, i978), pp. 25 if.;
S. Leon Levy, Nassau W. Senior, 179o-i864 (Newton Abbot, 1970), pp. 80 ff., 247, ff.
34S. E. Finer, The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (London, 1952), p. 43n.
such as those of Colquhoun and Weston, adopted this principle. As

the Webbs noted: 'In 1832 the only idea of drastic reform, apart
from the Benthamites and other than mere abolition [of poor relief],
seems to have taken the form of absolutely centralized administration
through officials, with nationalized finance.' 35 There seems no reason
to deny originality to Chadwick for hitting on a 'revolutionary pro-
posal for a fundamental change in the machinery of English Govern-
ment ... a new model, devised at the outset, only for the one service
of the relief of destitution, but destined to be adopted ... for other
nascent services, such as Public Health and Public Education'.36
Already in 1832 Chadwick appears to have come to the conclusion
that French-style administrative centralization was not for England.
In a letter to Lansdowne in April 1834 he observed that the business
of the central authority 'will be to enforce general regularities and
will differ from the French centralization in this, that they will avoid
its greatest inconvenience in that they will have nothing to do with
particular acts except where they are in contravention of the rules
prescribed.'"3 In the Edinburgh Review of 1836 Chadwick hotly
defended the new Poor Law; '... the phrase "Centralization" is used
against a measure by which strong local administrative bodies have
been created over the greater part of the country where nothing deserv-
ing the name of systematized local administration has heretofore
existed'.3s Chadwick claimed that unlike the continental system his
model did not destroy local administrative bodies and substitute itself
for them, nor did it direct such bodies in detail but regulated or con-
trolled them within broad limits.39 This was to enshrine the inspect-
ability principle which owes much to Bentham's thought but which
can hardly have been derived directly from it except in general terms.
The essence of the principle is to separate the work of control from
execution and to confide the two functions to separate authorities.
The motives behind such a method of government growth, in which
the expansion of executive machinery took place almost exclusively
in the locality and a form of supervisory control was vested in small
central boards with inspectorates, may seem largely political. Yet
there appear to have been powerful constraints acting on the ideo-
logues themselves. Senior, who started out with the strongest centra-
lizing instincts, saw at the same time the dangers, to which any centr-
ally administered and funded scheme for poor relief would be exposed,
of diminishing the sense of local responsibility, especially financial
3 S. and B. Webb, English Poor Law History. Part IIH: The Last Hundred Years, I (Lon-
don, I929), p. 3211n.
36 Ibid., p. 72.
37 Finer, Chadwick, pp. 9 1-2. On p. 18 he ascribes the statement to i1832 MSS'.
38 Edinburgh Review, xliii (1836), 520.
39 Finer, Chadwick, p. 91.
responsibility, and of placing the central commission under sinister

parliamentary pressures inimical to economy. The 'evils' to which
'centralization' and 'local management' were equally liable could be
overcome only by some such flexible bridging apparatus as the
Commission and its Assistant Commissioners provided.40 Yet evi-
dently the 'brute facts' forcing and shaping governmental action were
those which touched the two vital priorities of government--public
order and financial economy. Melbourne's response to Ashley's warn-
ing that 'the people are desperate' was the Factory Act of I833,41 the
1830 labourers' riots in the southern counties likewise prompted the
grasping of the nettle of the Poor Law so long evaded. Chadwick saw
at once that the fatal flaw in Senior's National Rate Scheme was
expense.42 'The Reform of Parliament', as Charles Buller proclaimed,
'had been brought about for the lessening of taxation',43 and the radi-
cal Thatcherist dogma of retrenchment persisted as the most per-
manent and dominant motive of the 183os and I84os. To this motive
the Poor Law Inquiry Commissioners made deliberate appeal. They
offered the prospect of a reduction in the expenditure on poor relief
within a very short period of more than a third by means of 'a com-
paratively small and cheap agency'.44 When he defended his work
in 1836 it was on the savings already achieved by the Poor Law Unions
that Chadwick tested its efficacy. To the end of his life he constantly
recurred to the financial rewards of 'centralization for the people'.45
Doubtless with Senior and other ideologues he had initially much
wider purposes, principally, the freeing of the labour market by the
tutelary devices of the 'less eligibility principle' and the 'workhouse
test'.
Yet the argument of economy commanded the widest assent. When

Charles Trevelyan came to recommend civil service reform in the
later 1840s, his strongest motive was the desire to counter the rising
level of public expenditure by introducing a properly selected and
graded service.46. It is a sobering thought that the most creative ideas
40 Senior already appreciated these problems in January 1833, and re-emphasized

them in 1846 (Levy, Nassau W. Senior, pp. 260-1, 274 ff.). The arguments are repeated
in the Poor Law Report (1834), pp. 179-80, cited by B. and S. Webb, English Poor Law
History, I, pp. 74-5.
41 Cited by Finer, Chadwick, p. 51.
42 Ibid., p. 79.
4330 July 1833 (Hansard, XX, p. 176).
44 Poor Law Report (1834), pp. 296-7, 331; cited by B. and S. Webb, English Poor Law
History, I, pp. 78-9, 82.
45 E. Chadwick, On the Evils of Disunity in Central and Local Administration ... and also
on the New Centralization for the People ... (London, 1885).
46J. Hart, 'The Genesis of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report', Growth of Nineteenth-
Century Government, ed. Sutherland, p. 72.
in the evolution of the modern British state structure emerged in re-

sponse to a prolonged public economy drive.
Once the extent to which the reformers were committed to keeping
down central government expenditure is appreciated, the controversy
over centralization can be viewed in its proper proportions. It was
in nosense a controversy over government growth, which was accepted
as inevitable and a matter for the localities. The question was the
precise extent and nature of central regulation and supervision. Mac-
Donagh speaks of 'Chadwick's ill-fated independent Poor Law Board
where, in effect, French bureaucracy was torn away from its native
context of a division of powers',47 but there is no reason to believe
Chadwick to have been insincere in his repudiation of French central-
ization, which he repeated in similar terms fifty years later. 'I am
on principle for extensive decentralization-actually for decentraliza-
tion to the greatest extent by well-arranged local consolidation, for
superior self-government over that which now exists; and that is your
real choice-a true representation of the best local intelligence under
unity in the place of disunity and local ignorance ... The interest
of the central administration is really in the most complete well-
organized local self-government, and its smooth unjarring action,
which will give it the least trouble.'" Even Toulmin Smith recognized
that central government must retain ultimate responsibility for public
health despite all the fulmination of his Anti-Centralization Union.49
The conflict was a narrow although doubtless vital one. How far
should central government be limited to an enabling and advisory
role, and how far it should have powers of direction and intervention
in the working of local bodies. J. S. Mill's shift in the formulation
of the correct relationship indicates the subtle extent of the divide.
From the doctrine of'the combination of the principles of central con-
trol with local action' enunciated in The Principles of Political Economy
(1848), he changed to 'the centralization of knowledge, localization
of power'50 in Considerations on Representative Government (1861). In
speaking of the need for 'a compromise ... between the State and
the individual, and between central and local authority'51 Mill also
reflected the confusion of thinking which Dicey took over and passed
4 MacDonagh, 'Nineteenth-Century Revolution', cited in Victorian Revolution, ed.

Stansky, p. 24.
48 Chadwick, On the Evils of Disunity, pp. 78-9.
49J. Toulmin Smith, Considerations in Respect to the Public Health Act, 1848 (printed
for private use only, March 1853: Cambridge University Library); Centralization or
Representation (1848) ; Government by Commissions, Illegal and Pernicious (1849) ; Local Self-
Government and Centralization (185 I )
s J. S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Collected Works, ed. J.
M. Robson, XIX (Toronto and Buffalo, 1977), p. 544-
5s J. S. Mill, Centralisation (1862), Collected Works, XIX, pp. 6o9-Io.
on to the modern historians of government growth by defining the

state almost exclusively in terms of central government.
In sum, the erroneous identification of 'government growth' with
'centralization and collectivism' and the misconception that these
advanced 'in the teeth of a head-on gale'52 coming from the laisser-
faire ideology exaggerate the extent of that advance and assume that
ideology was overborne by 'brute facts'. Yet the strongest pressures
bearing down on central government stemmed not from outraged
public opinion demanding immediate national remedies to the 'brute
facts' of social ills but from the unpopularity of taxation and threats
to public order. Something as vague as laisser-faire ideology took on
an effective historical role only when translated into a concrete deter-
mination to keep central government activities within stringent
financial limits at a time when the arguments of cost effectiveness and
social order required central government to assume novel responsibili-
ties. It was in this double crisis of finance and order that the ideologue
found entrance and political 'inventors' like Chadwick were allowed
on to the historical stage. The essential innovatory principle was the
separation of control and execution, enabling central government
growth and expenditure to be kept to a minimum. The device of the
central commission and field inspectorate was not in itself new; colonial
conditions such as Ireland or India lent themselves to quasi-military
solution, so that there were precedents in plenty for police, prison,
factory, or poor-law reformers to draw upon from 1828 onwards.53 Yet
the device now took on the force of a philosophical 'invention' in
the hands of men who were imbued with broader ideological aims
of enforcing a free labour market and channelling human activity into
socially beneficial courses through the tutelary action of government
in education, sanitation and other fields of social reform. MacDonagh
has argued that tutelary Benthamism propounded instant and total
solutions and that it had no concept of proceeding pragmatically and
continuously into the kind of 'multiplying, intensifying and ferment-
ing government' which became established by mid-century. This is
to say, tutelary Benthamism may have supplied the initial impulse
to the setting-up of small central commissions, but the proliferation
and elaboration of governmental organization, termed generically
government growth and characterized as 'collectivism', proceeded
'without the slightest spur from doctrinaires or any other a priori influ-
ence'.54 'Collectivism' was thus 'a creeping enemy and one without
head or brain'. So that organic change was the product of inadver-
tence and deliberate double-think: '... the matter could be (and was
52 MacDonagh, Early Victorian Government, p. 20.
53Ibid., pp. 169, 178 ff.
5 MacDonagh, Pattern of Government Growth, pp. 348-9.
usually) explained away as an exception or an unusual necessity. Thus

the wooden horse [of collectivism] entered the gates of Troy, some-
times pulled by those who most loudly denounced the evil.'55 Mac-
Donagh, Lambert and others are doubtless right in their contention
that central government activity expanded most readily when ideo-
logical debate was absent.56 Yet their contention that the 'modern
collectivist state' had emerged in prototype by the 850os is the one
that will least stand scrutiny.57 If the notion of organic change is
abandoned then it is easy to see why government growth proceeded
without benefit of ideas. It had no need of them. The central issue of
principle had been resolved in the I830s. Once the nature and broad
limits ofcentral government action had been determined, the future lay
wholly in practical elaboration rather than further theoretical discus-
sion. This meant that quite apart from the Philosophical Radicals
dissolving as a group, the age of ideological remedy was necessarily
a short-lived affair.58 What was left to fight over was the detailed
demarcation of central and local government functions, a process
which by its nature evaded any final solution.
The close historical parallels with bureaucratic growth in the
formative phase of British rule in India are so striking as to suggest an
interconnection. Superficially the British Indian bureaucracy seemed
the pacemaker of the modern administrative state, the East India
Company coining the term 'civil servant' and pioneering the abolition
of patronage, recruitment by competitive examination (abortively
under Macaulay's scheme of 1833 and permanently under the
Macaulay-Trevelyan scheme of 1853), the establishment of a general
administrative service and a graded hierarchy of officials. Already by
the beginning of the nineteenth century British rule bore the outward
marks of the age of enlightened despotism--a standing army, a
centralized salaried* bureaucracy, and a form of codified law. While
in 1834 severing all direct connection with commerce, with the aboli-
tion of the East India Company's trading functions, it took on all the
features of the collectivist state, the government busying itself with
road-building, steam navigation, irrigation canals, railways, tele-
graphs, docks, education, the development of coal resources, experi-
mental tea plantations, the distribution of improved cotton seeds, and
55 MacDonagh, Early Victorian Government, p. 2 1.
56 R. Lambert, Sir John Simon, 1816-1904, and English Social Administration (London,
1963), p. 605 f.
57 MacDonagh, Pattern of Government Growth, pp. 347-8: 'The mere fact that (speaking
not loosely but exactly) a prototype of present-day government can be found in the
I85os is arresting.' Cf ibid., p. 345: 'The more or less conscious Fabianism, which had
growth up since 1842, was by then [the end of the 184os] working itself out in modes
of regulation which resemble, often astonishingly, our modern systems.'
51 See W. Thomas, The Philosophical Radicals (Oxford, 1979).
a host of interventionist activities. The unique character has con-

tinued to impress historians. For Eric Hobsbawm India's 'abnormal-
ity leaps to the eye ... It was ... the only part of the British empire
to which laisser-faire never applied. Its most enthusiastic champions
in Britain became bureaucratic planners when they went there.'59 To
Robinson and Gallagher it formed the very model of what they
termed free-trade imperialism, constructed as a system of deliberate
exceptions to the reigning ideology of trade without rule.60
Yet this image of a Weberian bureaucracy born out of due season
will not bear close inspection, even Weber discounting the European
East India Companies as torchbearers of capitalist modernity.61 So
far from the British in India striking out ahead of their homestaying
countrymen, there is every reason to think that they hung upon
English developments and took their time from them. The character
of the rise of the British power after Plassey meant a decisive shift
from commercial into political profits. The growth of bureaucracy
signified a reversion to more primitive mercantilist forms. The East
India Company's business was now government, and government was
its business. Hopes of a permanent surplus tribute from the territorial
revenues of the Bengal territories were rapidly frustrated by mount-
ing military and civil charges, a large portion of which represented
salaries. Before Plassey there were some eighty civilian servants in
Bengal earning no more than ?I 50 each. By 1783 there were 286 with
emoluments averaging ?2,26I each. The military service increased
even more spectacularly; a handful before Plassey, and o1069 by 1784-
The growth of the civil service stemmed from the pressure for jobs
rather than from the pressure of business. Warren Hastings wrote in
I78 I: 'In effect the civil offices of this government might be reduced
to a very scanty number were their exigency alone to determine the
list of your covenanted servants.' But it was, he said, 'a system charged
with expensive establishments and precluded by the multitude of
dependants and the curse of patronage from reformation'.62 Or in
Burke's colourful description of the Company: 'Its whole service is
a system of public offices in the disguise of a counting house.' The
English in India were 'a nation of placemen'.63
Reform of the structure was dictated by the need to gain control
over the Company's servants, and above all by the state of the
59 E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (London, 1968), p. 148.
so Robinson and Gallagher, 'The Imperialism of Free Trade', reprinted Great Britain
and the Colonies, ed. Shaw, p. I47-
61 M. Weber, General Economic History (New York, 196i ), pp. 221-4; J. C. van Leur,
Indonesian Trade and Society (The Hague, 1955).
62 Cited by P. J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes (Oxford, 1976), pp. 80o-1.
63 Speech on impeachment of Warren Hastings, 15 February 1788, cited by G. W.
Chapman, Edmund Burke: The Practical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 253.
finances. Cornwallis was dispatched to India in the wake of Pitt's

India Act of 1784, invested with a novel authority, and charged with
the task of retrenchment. Henry Roseveare has described the first stir-
rings towards administrative efficiency in Britain at this period with
the appointment of the Committee of Public Accounts, and Lucy
Sutherland has remarked a similar movement in East India affairs
with the rise to authority of Charles Jenkinson, John Robinson and
Henry Dundas at the time of the India bill debates.64 Cornwallis was
soon able to report home that 'under the head of economy' he had
'proceeded to the abolition of useless offices and the reduction of ex-
travagant establishments'.65 But the decline of the Bengal revenues
necessitated root and branch reform. Now in India the form of taxa-
tion decided the form of bureaucracy. Expediency demanded that
the experimental attempts to collect the land revenue directly or farm
it out to substantial landholders should be abandoned, and that in-
stead the revenue collecting right should be alienated to the land-
holders as private property and made subject to a high annual charge.
Security for payment of a regular revenue would be attained by
prompt public sale of the collecting right in the event of revenue
default. The only question at issue was whether the revenue demand
should be declared in perpetuity or for a term of years. Cornwallis
had already been ordered to consider the introduction of a per-
manent settlement, and doubtless for the sake of his own reputation
he wished to foreclose the future and put his measures beyond the
risk of upset by his successors. Why then did the Permanent Settle-
ment of 1793 generate so much ideological rhetoric from the time Phi-
lip Francis had first introduced it in his battle with Warren Hastings
over land revenue policy. Cornwallis was no ideologue and the battle
of ideas had been successfully fought out before he touched India's
shores. Alexander Dow, Philip Francis and Thomas Law had larded
their tracts and memoranda with copious references to the authority
of the philosophes and physiocrats. All agreed that property in land
was the mainstay of society and the spring of all improvement. Corn-
wallis now deployed this ideological rhetoric to fight the much nar-
rower issue of defeating John Shore's proposal for a settlement lasting
initially only ten years. Without perpetuity, urged Cornwallis, there
could be no effective property in land and no incentive for increased
cultivation. Yet significantly when Shore argued that a plenary prop-
erty right would leave the landholders free to deal with the peasantry
" H. Roseveare, The Treasury (London, 1969); L. Sutherland, The East India Company
and Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford, 1952), p. 57.
65 Selectionsfrom the State Papers of the Governors-General of India: Lord Cornwallis, ed.
G. Forrest (Oxford, 1926), II, pp. 174-5; A. Aspinall, Cornwallis in Bengal (Manchester,
1931), pp. 81-2.
as they chose, Cornwallis made clear that the title he was prepared
to grant would convey no right to evict or raise rents above their tradi-
tional level.66 There was to be no question, then or later, of the British
risking the stability of the social and political order for the sake of
an idea. What was ultimately determinant in Cornwallis' mind,
according to Ranajit Guha who has studied the role of ideology in
the Permanent Settlement, was his vision of an ordered and stable
society. A prerequisite seemed the re-establishment of an effective
landed aristocracy, so that-in Cornwallis' words-'a regular grada-
tion of ranks may be supported, which is nowhere more necessary
than in this country for preserving order in civil society'.67
That some such vision was uppermost may be conjectured from
the final restructuring of the Bengal bureaucracy carried out on Corn-
wallis' own initiative. On arrival he had complied with the orders
of the Court of Directors to reduce the number of Bengal collectors or
district officers from 36 to 23, and in the interests of'simplicity, energy,
justice and economy' to unite their office with that of district judge
and magistrate.68 Yet shortly before quitting India he reversed this
arrangement, effecting a division of executive and judicial powers and
setting up a distinct judge-magistrate for each district. The erection
of a functionally separate judiciary involved considerable additional
expense, and Cornwallis justified it squarely on the grounds of prin-
ciple. 'In this country, as in every other,' ran his dispatch, 'security
of property must be established by a system upheld by its inherent
principles, and not by the men who are to have the occasional conduct
of it.'69 Discretionary executive authority had to be contained.
Together with the introduction of high salaries in place of perquisites
and the prohibition of private trading, Cornwallis must have felt that
the beardless and plundering boys who had aroused Burke's invective
had been decisively tamed and transformed into an impersonal body
of public servants subject to the rule of law. That law was made the
subject of formal legislation and embodied in the Cornwallis Code
of 1793. To give its basic principles the fullest public expression, the
preambles to many of the Regulations, particularly Regulation II,
rehearsed the Cornwallis credo, dwelling particularly on the con-
stitutional virtues of landed property and on the necessity of making
the officers of Government answerable for their official actions before
the courts of law.70
66Selections from the State Papers, ed. Forrest, pp. 95, Io8.
67 Ranajit Guha, A Rule ofPropertyfor Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement
(Paris and The Hague, 1963), PP. 170-1.
68s Aspinall, Cornwallis in Bengal, p. 8i.
g Selections from the State Papers, ed. Forrest, I, p. I23.
70 Regulation II, i793 (cited by E. T. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India
(Oxford, 1959), p. 6).
Despite his original purpose the Cornwallis system proved costly

because of its large-scale employment of Europeans and because
of the prospective sacrifice of revenue through the permanent
assessment. From the early I8oos it was challenged by a simple form
of military rule devised by army officers for the territories conquered
from Mysore. Thomas Munro's ryotwar system avoided an inter-
mediary landlord class and settled direct with the cultivating peasant
through a chain of low-paid Indian subordinates reaching down to
the village level. Given the structure of agrarian society in southern
India this seemed later to Baden-Powell, the great authority on Indian
land systems, the only workable answer. Why then did it generate
so fierce an ideological debate? Undoubtedly it was Wellesley's
attempt after 1798 to extend the Cornwallis Bengal settlement to the
Madras presidency that had administrators reaching for first prin-
ciples. Yet even before this Munro was conscious of a departure from
accepted orthodoxy.7 He did not quarrel with the ideal of private
property in land instituted through a permanent limitation of the
government demand; but he believed that a peasant proprietary
under a simple, paternalist rule would be desirable in itself and more
in consonance with Indian institutions than an artificially created
landlord class governed under a complicated European-style govern-
ment. As with Cornwallis, talk of unfettered freehold property rights
was pious rhetoric, for in the south the weight of the government
demand precluded the emergence of saleable titles or an effective per-
manent assessment. Munro railed against Voltaire and the Enligh-
tenment, communed with Nature, and admired Wordsworth; but
there is no need to look for determining ideological influences in his
work beyond the kindly ethic of the officer of sepoys, just as in Corn-
wallis it is doubtful if we need look further than the Whig seigneur.
Both Cornwallis and Munro in their separate ways were preserva-
tionist in mentality, seeking to stabilize and protect a society in
danger of being ripped apart by European intrusion. After 1807 the
East India Company in London swung towards Munro's ideas
because they held out the promise of being more remunerative, more
economical and more just. Intellectuals like James Mill curiously lent
them support because they were anti-aristocratic and accepted the
responsibility of government to make direct contact with the peasant,
but the bulk of European mercantile opinion which flaunted the free
trade banner stood behind the Cornwallis system with its limitation
of state taxation, its promise of capitalist relations in land tenures,
and its assertion of the supremacy of the judiciary over the executive.
71 For Munro, see T. H. Beaglehole, Thomas Munro and the Development of Administrative
Policy in Madras, 1792-1818 (Cambridge, 1966), p. 28. See also B. H. Baden-Powell,
The Indian Village Community (London, 1896), pp. 430 f.
In practice the two systems tended to converge. In Bengal judicial

arrears forced the appointment of more low-paid Indian subordinates
and the delegation of quasi-judicial powers to the collector; in
Madras a separate system of district judges had to be introduced and
the use of the traditional village courts, revived by Munro, left
optional.72 After 1818 in the vastly expanded Bombay Presidency
Mountstuart Elphinstone sought to get the best of both worlds by in-
troducing the ryotwar form of land settlement and administration
while attempting to sustain the old Maratha aristocracy with
generous grants of revenue-free land. Nevertheless, although adminis-
trative forms proved pliable, the ideological controversy that had
raged between the Munro and Cornwallis systems lent them each the
strength of rival political traditions, which later administrative
growth had to accommodate rather than displace.
By the I820S the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy was again ripe for
reform, constant warfare and expansion having left the territorial
accounts heavily in the red and dependent on the profits of the China
tea trade for making up the deficit. With the almost certain loss of
its commercial functions when its Charter expired in 1833, the Com-
pany accepted Lord William Bentinck as Governor-General and
'Clipping Dutchman' to set their finances in order.'" Bentinck's attack
on the Indian administration was as sharp as Hume's on the home:
as he wrote to Charles Grant, President of the India Board on 21
December 1832, '... our system of civil government is miserably in-
efficient ... in every branch of it, revenue, judicial and police, it has
sadly failed ... and is not the cause obvious? is it not owing to the
monstrous absurdity of committing the government to 60o millions of
people to less than 400 strangers, and to the still more monstrous
rapacity of seizing for the benefit of this incapable few all the honours
and emoluments of the administration to the exclusion of all the natural
and native agency of the country? If this monopoly service were con-
stituted from the best talent and matured experience of England they
would simply be unequal to the task. What then must be the compe-
tency of those selected by no regard for qualification, possessing
appointments like an estate, as a matter of right; secure of promotion,
because there are no competitors, and secured in their possession by
the powerful patrocinium with which they are supported. ....'74
The 459 resident covenanted civil servants in the Bengal presidency
72 For the history of administrative developments, see B. B. Misra, The Central Adminis-
tration of the East India Company 1773-1834 (Manchester, 1959), especially pp. 267 if.
73 In 1827 the Court of Directors sent out orders to reduce expenditure to the 1823-
4 standard (viz., pre-Burmese War). In two years Bentinck slashed expenditure from
?i8m to ?I6m (Chas. Grant, 13 June 1833 (Hansard, XVIII, p. 725)).
74 The Correspondence of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck, ed. C. H. Philips (Oxford,
1977), II, p. 977.
cost a million sterling, earning on average something over ?2,00ooo

a year apiece. Bentinck colourfully declared that this was 'the great
cause of our great expenditure' and prevented tax reduction, the
abolition of internal transit dues, road-building, and educational de-
velopment.75 Ideally he would have ended the covenanted service
and allowed local governments to employ military officers on
secondment, these being cheaper and more efficient as well as possess-
ing a better knowledge of the people. Yet it was already a common-
place that European agency would have to be kept to a minimum
and confined to the work of controlling Indian public servants who
would undertake the vast bulk of the administration. Although the
largest immediate savings came from a reduction in the army, the
fear that the costly European element was totally inadequate for
security against mutiny in the native army prevented root and branch
economies. The general feeling, shared by Ellenborough and others,
was that there had been large and unjustified increases in civil expendi-
ture which needed a sharp pruning knife to be brought to them.76
In imitation of the British Parliament in 1828 Bentinck set up
his own civil and military finance committees. The former was
dominated by Holt Mackenzie, the counterpart of Chadwick in Eng-
land. Suspected of Benthamite opinions and cautioned against citing
Bentham as an authority, Mackenzie too never made open avowal
of his ideological loyalties.77 Economical reform likewise gave the
principle of control by centralization the opportunity to break
through. The Civil Finance Committee proposed centralizing all
legislative and executive authority in the hands of a new Supreme
Government divested of responsibility for the government of the
Bengal presidency. Only with such a Supreme Government in full
control of the subordinate governments of Bengal, Madras, Bombay
and Agra would the growth of public establishments be checked and
waste eliminated.'" Mackenzie coupled this proposal with that of
everywhere substituting single individuals for collective agencies,
whether these were revenue boards, benches ofjudges, or governors'
councils, and establishing a clear chain of command. Benthamite or
no, here were the principles of single-seatedness and inspectability
emerging as armed doctrine.
In the Bengal territories Bentinck consented to most of Mackenzie's
proposals, the most striking of these being the abolition of the pro-
vincial revenue boards and the introduction of provincial commis-
75 The Correspondence of Lord William Bentinck, II, p. 1288.
76 See Ellenborough to Bentinck, 2 January 1830 (Correspondence ofBentinck, ed. Philips
I, p. 38o).
77 On Mackenzie's influence at the Board of Control, see Letters of T. B. Macaulay,
ed. T. Pinney, II (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 266, 272, 274.
78 P.P., 831-2, X, pt i, p. I8.
sioners placed above the collectors, whose office was now firmly united
with that of magistrate. Bentinck was a sounding board for every
fashionable opinion, being in turns nationalist, evangelical, democrat
and utilitarian, and had told James Mill that the latter would be the
real governor-general of British India. His consent to the institution
of provincial commissioners and collector-magistrates was grounded
on his own earlier experience of the system of principal collectors and
collectors in Madras. Mackenzie politely demurred at the analogy
since a principal collector performed the executive duties of collector
in part of his charge as well as supervising the work of other collectors.
'If we would really establish an efficient system of control', Mackenzie
chided, 'the controlling and executive authorities should be kept dis-
tinct.'79 When it came later to the question of abolishing boards and
governors' councils at the seats of government, Bentinck was resolute
in opposition.80 The provincial commissioner and the collector-magi-
strate proved permanent, outlasting British rule, but the critical assent
of the Governor-General to their institution was obtained by virtue
of a private set of values and traditions.
Although economy provided the initial opening and motive, it is
noticeable how rapidly bureaucratic reform passed over to a concern
for efficiency in its own right. (One recalls the cry of Edward Romilly,
chairman of the Board of Audit in London in 1848: 'Our establish-
ments should first be made efficient and then they may be reduced,
or rather they will reduce themselves.')81 Mackenzie made no pretence
that in proposing the commissioner system he had any other aim than
improved control, and his arrangements simply were meant to ensure
that there would be no additional expense.82 His larger scheme of
Indian government offered, however, savings of an estimated
100oo,ooo a year, and won the approval of James Mill, the chief Exa-
miner in the Company's Leadenhall Street secretariat.83 Yet it was
more than Parliament or the Court of Directors were prepared to sto-
mach. The Whig Commissioners of the Board of Control-Charles
Grant, Hyde Villiers, Macaulay, and now joined by Holt Mack-
enzie-appeared to be aiming at gaining a total control of Indian
affairs by the centralization of all power in the ministry's nominee,
the governor-general. The scheme had to be modified before the
attack of Tories like Wellington and Ellenborough, who criticized it
for proceeding 'on crude and fanciful theories', and of Radicals like
79 Cited by Stokes, English Utilitarians and India, p. 152.

s0lbid., p. i74; J. Rosselli, Lord William Bentinck (London, 1974), p. 323-
"1 Cited by E. Hughes, 'Civil Service Reform 1853-5', History, n.s. xxvii (1942),
62.
82 Correspondence of Bentinck, ed. Philips, I, pp. i iIff.

83 Evidence of James Mill, 21 February 1832 (P.P., 1831-2, X, pp. 42 ff.).
James Silk Buckingham and Joseph Hume.84 Both the latter were too
committted to representative forms of government to contemplate dis-
pensing with governors' councils, and wanted a large central legisla-
tive council on which both European and Indian unofficials would
have seats instead of the tiny expert body successfully advocated by
Mill. This split in the ranks of Radical opinion meant that the Charter
Act of 1833 stopped short of full centralization and had to await the
reforms of twenty years later to move nearer to the original idea.
It may seem strange that from Bentinck's time there should have
been little dispute about the extent to which government involved
itself in public works, the feature that strikes most modern historians
as such a glaring contradiction of laisser-faire. Yet this is again to mis-
read the contemporary mentality. Economists and public men were
remarkably open-minded about governmental intervention; what
worried them was the cost. In Ireland the authorities undertook
public works on a scale unthinkable in Britain, but as in India they
were largely starved of finance.85 Bentinck, like Cornwallis, looked
on the country as an unimproved estate, and carried with him his fen-
land enthusiasm for irrigation and drainage schemes. Ellenborough at
the Board of Control nursed pipe dreams of the Indus being opened
to steam navigation and merchants proceeding up it to the upper
Ganges by a great interior waterway joining the two rivers to be
named Bentinck.86 In practice government had to limit itself to its
immediate interests of security and finance. Bentinck felt the need
to justify his interests in road-building and steam navigation by the
prospects these afforded of moving troops rapidly and so reducing
the crushing military burden.87 Canal-building was prompted by
famine, which took not only an appalling toll of life but rendered the
land revenue, the chief stay of the Indian exchequer, uncertain. The
great Ganges Canal, the largest work of its kind in the world at the
time of its opening in 1854, was designed not to bring the arable waste
into cultivation but to secure fertile heavily populated tracts against
monsoon failure and ensure a rapid repayment of capital costs from
canal dues. The Canal proceeded at a snail's pace because it depended
on capital savings from annual income until, in I848, Bright and the
Manchester lobby raised a brouhaha in the Commons that they would
not vote for the Charter renewal if more was not done for cotton cul-
84 Hansard, XX, pp. 308 if; XIX, pp. 667-71. Charles Buller cited Holt Mackenzie
as a weighty authority for the abolition of councils at the subordinate presidencies.
8 See R. D. Collison Black, Economic Thought and the Irish Question 1817-70 (Cam-
bridge, 196o).
s6 Ellenborough to Bentinck, 12 January 1830 (Correspondence of Bentinck, ed. Philips,
I, p. 382).
s7Bentinck's minute on steam navigation, i6 August 1830 (ibid., I, pp. 487-8). On
the value of roads, see Bentinck to Loch, 12 August 1828 (ibid., I, pp. 6o-i).
tivation by way of public works.88 In this atmosphere Dalhousie was

able for once to breach the exchequer rules and raise capital by a
special public loan. Yet he too looked narrow-eyed on public works.
The Bari Doab Canal in the Punjab, whose construction he pressed
ahead immediately after annexation in 1849, was again a canal driven
through a fertile populated zone not so much as an instrument of de-
velopment as of pacification, the labour for its construction offering
important employment opportunities for the discharged and defeated
Sikh soldiery.89
Constant financial strain was a product of constant warfare from
1839 until the outbreak of the Mutiny in 1857. It produced endless
homilies from London on the need for the strictest economies in the
civil establishment, although as Hardinge freely acknowledged in
1847 the army charges at ?I million were eating up half the revenues
of the Indian empire.90 One temptation offering a way out of the
financial morass was to annex profitable revenue-bearing territory,
and at the end of his administration Dalhousie took pride in having
added ?4 million to the annual Indian revenues.91 Despite the acqui-
sition of Lower Burma, the Punjab, Oudh, Nagpur, Berar and Satara,
what is remarkable is that the number of covenanted servants actually
fell rather than increased, dropping from a total strength of 793 in
1834 to 775 in 1852. The additional administrative staff required were
drawn from seconded army officers whose numbers rose from 261 in
1846 to 475 in I856, while the total in civil employ was something
above a thousand. Between 1834 and I851 the number of un-
covenanted civil servants who were almost entirely Indian and
Eurasian roughly doubled, from i,500 to 3,oo000.92 Hence, despite the
capacity for resistance shown by Thoby Prinsep and others against
any reduction in the scale and emoluments of the covenanted civil ser-
vice,93 the harsh financial climate ensured over the years that the
principle of diminishing the relative size of this corps d'elite and restrict-
ing its function largely to supervision and control won through.
The thirty years from Bentinck's appointment in 1827 until the
Mutiny in 1857 formed the period of 'sacred fertility' on which later
88 R. J. Moore, 'Imperialism and "Free Trade" in India, 1835-4', Econ. H. R., 2nd
ser., xvii (1964), 135-45, and Sir Charles Wood's Indian Policy 1853-66 (London, 1966),
ch. 7.
9 See D. J. Howlett, 'Policy and Practice between Bentinck and Dalhousie: Public
Works Policy' (unpublished paper in School of Oriental and African Studies Study
Group on 'Policy and Practice under Bentinck and Dalhousie', July 1978).
90 Cited P.P., 1852, X, p. 448.
91 Private Letters of the Marquess ofDalhousie, ed. J. G. A. Baird (Edinburgh and London,
1910), pp. 284, 369; P.P. 1856, XLV, p. I13.
92P.P., 1851-3, LXIX, p. 64; House of Lords Papers, 1857 (138); 1852 (io5(e)).
93 Minute of H. T. Prinsep, Io November 1842 (House of Lords Papers, 1852 (Io5(b));
Rosselli, Bentinck, p. 202.
generations were to live. It was a period mainly of paper planning-

oflaw codes, educational schemes, scientific land revenue systems, rail-
ways, irrigation projects, and the like-only a skeleton form of which
took shape at the time because of the chronic shortage of funds. The
'commercial revolution' of the I860s enlarged the public revenue, but
the weight of the Mutiny debt, the increased costs of the European
garrison, and the pressure for public works of all kinds combined to
keep up the sense of intense financial strain. While the motives for
economical reform remained as strong as ever, there was an important
shift in emphasis best illustrated by the changing views of Sir Charles
Trevelyan. As late as 1853 he still cherished the ideals of the old utili-
tarian programme and continued to advocate the cause of central-
ization as the chief weapon in the fight for economy.94 But when James
Wilson imposed a form of income-tax in I86o, Trevelyan, now gov-
ernor of Madras, revolted against what he believed was central
government failure to curb expenditure. After the restoration of
legislative powers to the provinces by the Indian Councils Act of 1861,
financial devolution was in the air, but as Finance Minister from 1863
to 1865 Trevelyan was accused of returning to the old unreformed
centralization.95 Trevelyan claimed consistency. The ideal to which
he pointed was the familiar one which secured economy by separating
control from execution. The examplar he held up for the correct
relationship between the central and provincial governments in India
was that obtaining between the Treasury and the Government
departments under 'our English system of finance, by estimate
and budget and Appropriation Act ... a very perfect and beautiful
system'.96
But his experience as Finance Minister had chastened him, as he
acknowledged when he appeared before Fawcett's Committee on
Indian Finance in 1873. Annual estimates and budgetary control
from the centre had proved inadequate. Hence he finally declared
himself the whole-hearted champion of representative government
and Indian political advancement. Only a representative central
government, fireed of connection with Bengal and the built-in pre-
ference for expenditure in the North, would act with true economy.
Only a proper system of local self-government could carry this prin-
ciple throughout the subcontinent: 'The real virtue of the principle
of local administration consists in the circumstance that whatever can
be saved by economy, by avoiding unnecessary expenditure, by doing
94 Cited by Stokes, English Utilitarians and India, pp. 253-4-

95 P. J. Thomas, The Growth of Federal Finance in India (Madras, 1939), pp. 141 ff.;
Moore, Sir Charles Wood's Indian Policy, ch. Ii.
"9Trevelyan's evidence, 7 July 1852 (P.P., 1852-3, XXVIII, p. 490). See Minute
of Trevelyan, 13 July 1859 (ibid., x86o, XLIX, p. 316).
things as cheaply as possible, should go to the local community ...

The real administration of India is vested in the local governments;
for all practical purposes they are the major, and the Supreme
Government is the minor quality.'97
Belatedly the principle of local action and central supervision was
being introduced into India. By I900oo a quarter of gross revenue was
entrusted to provincial governments.98 Yet this was hardly the same
as the expenditure of local government in Britain and was more in
the nature of a re-allocation within a quasi-federal structure. The
counterpart in India of municipalities and district boards, relying on
rate income, remained comparatively tiny. Not until after 192o did
provincial government expenditure begin to exceed that of central
government.99 Even if the movement towards administrative decen-
tralization and financial devolution made only limited gains, the
demands of economy and politics, ensured a continued restriction in
the growth of the white civil service. With 793 covenanted civil serv-
ants on this establishment in 1834, there were still no more than 939
in 1887 (part of the increase being necessitated by more frequent
leave), and I,o62 by 1902. Thus by the beginning of the present cen-
tury, if we include seconded military officers, there were only some
1,200 Britons in civil employ, notwithstanding a six-fold increase in
expenditure since 1834, a large increase in population, the rise of
major cities, and a vast extension of government services.1'0
Despite obvious disparities Indian bureaucratic development
observed certain remarkable parallels with the British, finding its law
of motion in financial stringency and its organizing principle in
devices of centralized control. It enjoyed the same brief period of crea-
tive ideas which, when looked at closely, narrows itself to the years
ofBentinck's governor-generalship between 1828 and 1835. Once the
attempt to analyse practical reality in terms of general principle is
given a less restrictive interpretation than is connoted by the term
tutelary Benthamism, it is arguable that the ultimate structure owed
everything to this initial mentality, even though the men who were
responsible for the subsequent elaboration of the structure were con-
scious pragmatists largely innocent of theory. It is only the undue sim-
plification of historical action by the habit of personification and of
97P.P., 1873, XII, p. 98.
98 Sir John Strachey, India (1903 edn.), p. I15.
99 See B. B. Misra, The Administrative History of India, 1834-1947 (New Delhi, i970),
PP. 389-90.
100Strachey, India (1894 edn.), p. 63; ibid. (1903 edn.), p. 82. The Government
of India laid down as official policy that the strength of the covenanted service was
to be restricted to the numbers 'absolutely necessary to fill the supervising and control-
ling offices for which Europeans are required' (Memo. of Government of India to Secre-
tary of State, I November 1892, para. 3 (P.P., 1894, LX, p. 71)).
separating thought from its practical integument that has discredited

the role of ideas. Bentham's boast that he would be the dead legislative
of British India was properly a boast on behalf of a creative historical
moment and not of himself.

Bureaucracy and Ideology - Britain and India in The Nineteenth Century (Transactions of The Royal Historical Society, Vol. 30) (1980)

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Bureaucracy and Ideology - Britain and India in The Nineteenth Century (Transactions of The Royal Historical Society, Vol. 30) (1980)

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Bureaucracy and Ideology: Britain and India in the Nineteenth Century

By Professor E. T. Stokes, M.A., Ph.D.

vanished beneath the close analysis of scholars steeped in that

The question remains whether there was one self-contained official

double revolution-a change of 'both kind and quantity'.24 This is

persons engaged in the central departments.'28 Even up to the eve

28 M. Abramovitz and V. F. Eliasberg, The Growth of Public Employment in Great Britain

32 Peacock and Wiseman, Growth of Public Expenditure, pp. 101, 108.

such as those of Colquhoun and Weston, adopted this principle. As

responsibility, and of placing the central commission under sinister

Yet the argument of economy commanded the widest assent. When

40 Senior already appreciated these problems in January 1833, and re-emphasized

in the evolution of the modern British state structure emerged in re-

4 MacDonagh, 'Nineteenth-Century Revolution', cited in Victorian Revolution, ed.

on to the modern historians of government growth by defining the

usually) explained away as an exception or an unusual necessity. Thus

a host of interventionist activities. The unique character has con-

finances. Cornwallis was dispatched to India in the wake of Pitt's

Despite his original purpose the Cornwallis system proved costly

In practice the two systems tended to converge. In Bengal judicial

cost a million sterling, earning on average something over ?2,00ooo

79 Cited by Stokes, English Utilitarians and India, p. 152.

82 Correspondence of Bentinck, ed. Philips, I, pp. i iIff.

tivation by way of public works.88 In this atmosphere Dalhousie was

generations were to live. It was a period mainly of paper planning-

94 Cited by Stokes, English Utilitarians and India, pp. 253-4-

things as cheaply as possible, should go to the local community ...

separating thought from its practical integument that has discredited

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