The Indian constitution was poised to create a new map of power, transforming the relationship between existing state agencies and new authorities. This chapter demonstrates how the individuals staffing the state apparatus were not mere spectators, passively following the constitution-making process, but actors who actively sought to influence, change, or resist the emerging constitutional order through both public and private channels. The success of the future constitution of India required a smooth transition of the organs of the colonial state to the postcolonial order. Turning their loyalty and ambitions to the new state and its constitutional order was not an obvious outcome in 1947. The chapter examines how provincial legislators sought to guard their autonomy; how the higher judiciary endeavoured to protect their judicial independence; the contested constitutional status of Delhi; and finally, how the ‘neutral’ bureaucracy who were managing the process of constitution making actively sought to defend their own jurisdiction and interests at the time. This process, which paralleled the integration of territories, led to the functional integration of the units of the state.

A brief overview of the themes of the study shows that the quest for land upon which to erect defensible settlements and from which to raise necessary revenue determined much of the course of Company endeavour. Without land there was nowhere to erect Company factories and accommodation, without land there was no security from the predations of indigenous and rival European forces, without land there was no settlement of indigenous artisans and traders generating revenue, without land there was no revenue from tenant peasants and without land there was no empire. This legitimacy of this quest and the sovereign authority the Company sought depended in part on the administration of justice. Following haphazard attempts to impose English law, the unification of jurisdiction after 1726 provided a degree of coherence across the three presidencies. Accompanied by all the trappings and pageantry of court proceedings, and the assimilation into its ranks of leading figures from the various communities, the mayor’s courts commanded legitimacy and thus a broad acceptance; this despite the persistence of corruption and a failure to render the courts wholly independent from Company influence.

Although Surat and its satellite ports had provided the Company with the necessary means of trade and communication, the resistance of Mughal authorities stifled any prospects for expansion. The Coromandel coast seemed to offer opportunities. Here were important trading centres beyond Mughal authority where local chiefs, anxious to consolidate their rule in the febrile political climate that prevailed, viewed the activities of European merchants as a means of generating revenue. From the time Francis Day was first appointed as a factor in 1632, he had applied himself to the task of finding a new site to further English trade. In 1637, he set a course southward from Masulipatnam to Pondicherry with the hope of negotiating the establishment of a factory. The voyage achieved little, but Day noted in passing a small fishing village which clearly attracted his attention, not least because overtures were made by local Telegu nayaks who were keen to attract English trade. A kaul, probably drafted by Day, was speedily granted for the ‘tradeing and fortificing at Medraspatam’. So were laid the foundations for the settlement of Madras.

In Perspectives, I lay out the broad historical concerns of the study. Historians viewing the transformation of the East India Company from a trading corporation to an imperial power have tended to focus on the eighteenth century, rightly seeing this as the moment when large swathes of land in the Indian subcontinent were annexed. What I offer as an alternative is an argument that the ideological, legal, political and economic requisites for the acquisition of land were laid in the seventeenth century. The founding charter empowered the Company to annex lands in non-Christian countries, and from the outset the Company embarked on a determined quest to realize that ambition. It met, however, determined resistance from Mughal authorities and rival imperial powers, and only with the passage of time and migration to the Coromandel Coast beyond Mughal control did it first gain the rights to a permanent settlement at Madras, later to be followed under very different circumstances by Bombay and Calcutta.

Like Bombay and Calcutta later, Madras had an improbable start. Unprepossessing the site may have been, but by the time Francis Day resolved this was to be the first permanent settlement of the Company, he found receptive audiences in London and Bantam. Despite costs which troubled the court, work began immediately to fortify the town, and when population levels soared through the migration and settlement of native artisans and their families, it was surveyed, ordered, segregated and taxed. Importantly also, the experience of Madras threw into sharp relief the urgent need for a legitimacy grounded in jurisdictional power. Madras thus provided the means of addressing the manifold complexities associated with imposing a foreign administration of justice on a population which for the most part inhabited indigenous systems. The process was messy, pragmatic and incomplete, but by the early years of the eighteenth century, a court system was installed. Although based exclusively on an English model of municipal and legal reform, this was a system that helped to assert the sovereign authority of the Company and shaped the experiences of Bombay and Calcutta.

In the 1820s–30s, the question of “native education” generated sprawling debates involving all three Company presidencies. At issue now was not whether the Company could or should secure extensive territory but instead whether, having done so, it could or should govern it. Throughout the period, officials debated the balance to be struck in education policy between conciliation and mass education. This question was briefly conflated with issues of language, leading to the so-called Anglicist-Orientalist controversy. For a fleeting moment in the 1830s, English education appeared to have prevailed. The more lasting impact of the controversy, however, was the end of conciliation and the triumph of mass education in Company ideology.

This chapter rethinks the emergence of Madras, which has traditionally been depicted as an imperial acquisition developed as an English colony, apart from its turbulent Asian surroundings. Instead, as Company servants appropriated authority to themselves in the face of the collapsing corporate framework, they utilised their Asian networks, partnerships and patrons to establish a new settlement from which their interests could be protected and facilitated. Relying on Indian and Indo-Portuguese capital, Indian labour and materials, and in complete defiance of Company leadership, servants politically subordinated themselves to the Vijayanagara empire in exchange for a set of rights and privileges that would create the Company’s first substantial centre of power in Asia. In the face of metropolitan opposition, Company servants deepened their dependence on their Indian partners and masters, opening up new channels of credit, capital and demographic expansion. When the sultanate of Golconda annexed the Vijayanagara empire, Company servants learned to navigate the complex and shifting state formation process in southern India, adapting to their changing environment and ingratiating themselves with a new set of sovereign rulers and governing elites from whom they continued to acquire greater privileges to develop Madras into a transcultural commercial hub.

Following its incorporation as a permanent joint-stock in 1657, and the institutional and financial stability this brought to the Company, this chapter explores the corporate leadership’s attempts to re-centralise power in the Company and regain control over its servants and settlements in Asia. As the court of committees restructured the Company’s organisation, and sought to erect new regulatory frameworks in Asia that would more effectively realise metropolitan interests by dismissing refractory servants, disrupting transcultural networks and squeezing out private interests, the powerful confederacy of Anglo-Indian elites that controlled Madras violently rebelled against these centralising impulses and seized the city. Although the Company sent a powerful force to recapture Madras, nonetheless the coup de force exposed the reconstituted dynamic of the Company, in which the success of Madras was largely due to the integration of Company servants with surrounding economic and political constituents. The subsequent legalisation of private trade and the restoration of the rebels to their positions of power demonstrated the Company’s future willingness to accommodate the expansive transcultural networks of its servants and their Asian allies. The rebellion of Madras represented the complete decentralisation of the Company by the later seventeenth century, and the critical role played by Indian elites in driving the expansion of the Company.

In India, the Irish came late and as conquerors. Irish Catholics – mostly soldiers – were never a significant part of the Catholic population, which traced its origins to successive waves of evangelization dating back to the seventh century. In colonial India, the Irish clashed not only with the long-dominant Portuguese church but also with long-established French, Italian, and other missionary groups.