Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c3.37

c3.37

From 1750 onwards, more and more instructions from the British were conveyed through various channels to the E.I.Co. After the British domination of Bengal from 1757 onwards, Robert Clive—a ‘heaven born General’ according to Lord Chatham, virtual ruler of the British then—wrote to Britain that India could only be governed directly by the British state and not by any company. This and other similar advice was deliberated upon for some years leading to the Regulating Act of 1773 by which the British state appointed the Governor General and his Council, and 11 years later, to the 1784 Act, which established a Board of Commissioners for the Affairs of India, with a President and 6 members, one of whom in the early stages was none other than the British Prime Minister. The Commissioners then were made the rulers of India. All instructions of any kind to any department of state in India, or to its three Presidencies, were cleared by them in detail (word by word, comma by comma). Once these were final, the job of the Court of the E.I. Co. was to send these to India under the signature of their Chairman and members.