British administration takes shape: courts, police, and services

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the East India Company had built an administration that looked like a state. Lord Cornwallis, Governor-General from 1786 to 1793, separated revenue collection from judicial power through the Cornwallis Code of 1793, created a system of courts with district judges, and reserved the higher posts for Europeans, a policy that excluded Indians from senior office for decades. The Supreme Court at Calcutta, established in 1774, and the Sadar courts that followed, introduced a system of law based on written codes and precedent.

The Charter Act of 1833 marked a further change. It ended the Company's trading monopoly, made the Governor-General of Bengal into the Governor-General of India, and declared that no Indian should be barred from office by reason of religion, place of birth, or colour, a promise that was rarely honoured in practice. The Charter Act of 1853 introduced open competition for the civil service, though the examination was held in London, in English, and at an age that made it very hard for Indians to compete, and the first Indian to enter the service, Satyendranath Tagore, did so only in 1863.

The Company also built a police force and an army. The police, organised on the model of the Irish constabulary in many districts, served the revenue and order needs of the state rather than the protection of the village, and the army, largely recruited from Indian soldiers called sepoys, became the largest standing force in Asia. The codification of law, begun under Thomas Macaulay with the draft Indian Penal Code of 1837, replaced varied local customs with a single criminal law for the whole of British India in due course.

This administration was both modern and colonial. It brought written law, a bureaucracy, and a professional army, but it served the Company's revenue and control, and it kept Indians out of the posts that mattered. The contradiction between the promise of equal treatment in the Charter Act of 1833 and the reality of exclusion became one of the central grievances of the educated Indians who later built the national movement.