Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

146 Legal History in the Making
and run independently of each other. This local autonomy of government
was complemented (or aggravated) by separate systems of law, each made
up of a mind-numbing jumble of Hindu or Muslim law generously overlaid
with a mixture of English law and East India Company administrative
'regulations'. Since the late eighteenth century a London-based system of
supervisory government existed entailing 'dual control' shared between the
British government appointed Board of Control (to which Macaulay was
briefly Secretary) and the Court of Directors of the East India Company.
The Board of Control was responsible for the general supervision (with
the power of veto) of the political and administrative activities of the East
India Company; a peculiar set up persisting until the momentous political
jolt delivered by the 1857 Indian Mutiny, which finally terminated residual
attempts at a working compromise between Indian and European notions in
matters of law and government.
The 1833 Charter Act functioned as the legislative foundation for the
British government's policy of transforming the subcontinent from being
a source of land rent revenues and some trade into a huge market of
traders and consumers, capable of absorbing much of the vast manufacturing
capacity generated by Britain's accelerating Industrial Revolution. Such a
transformation was seen as contingent upon the government of the whole
of India being placed on a centralized and unified basis. The natural,
if not inevitable, corollary of this objective was a uniform structure of
administrative institutions and laws. 2 However, considerable uncertainty
persisted as to the proper pace or extent of this process of the Anglicizing
or Europeanization of India. Right through to the Indian Mutiny nothing
resembling a consensus view emerged on the degree to which Indian culture
and institutions could and should be retained and accommodated within a
modernized India. Opposite poles of opinion were represented by what
might be termed the 'Burkean' or 'Romantic' concept of trusteeship and
preservation of Indian institutions on the one side, and on the other, the
out and out Anglicists, often fuelled by a heady blend of Evangelicalism and
Utilitarianism; 3 probably the best known of nineteenth-century propellants
2 For the system of 'dual control' of Indian government, see J. Fitzjames Stephen, History of the
Criminal Law (1883) (hereafter 'H.C.L.'), iii, ch.xxxiii and E. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and
India (1959), ch.l.
James Mill's extensive (115 full paragraphs) administrative 'Despatch' (10 December 1834) to the
Governor-General's Council on the implementation of the Charter Act cites the problem of protecting
the native population as being an important factor in introducing a uniform system of sound law to which
all were subject. This became a pressing need with the 1833 Act allowing the 'free ingress of Europeans'
into the country's 'interior' to hold land. Protection for natives was needed 'from insult and outrage in
their persons, properties, religions and opinions' (para. 40); 'Eagerness of some temporary advantage,
the consequences of power, pride of a fanciful superiority of race, the absence of any adequate check
from public opinion' might lead to 'misbehaviour' (para. 41). Despatch reprinted in C.P. Ilbert's The
Government of India (Oxford, London and New York, 1898), 492-532.
3 See J.L. Clive, Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian (1973), ch.xi-xiii; and R.D. Altick, Victorian
People and Ideas (New York, 1973), ch.iv.