Lord Dalhousie

Lord Dalhousie annexed more of India than any other governor-general and left office fifteen months before the rising that his annexations helped produce. He was the youngest son of a Scottish earl, entered the Board of Trade under Peel during the railway mania, and went out to India in 1848 at thirty-five as the youngest governor-general there had been. He was a genuine and tireless moderniser: the first Indian railway, four thousand miles of telegraph, a cheap uniform postage, the Ganges canal, a public works department, an education despatch that founded the university system, and the legalisation of Hindu widow remarriage. He was also the author of the doctrine of lapse, under which a princely state without a natural heir passed to the Company rather than to an adopted son - Satara, Jhansi, Nagpur and others went that way - and in 1856 he annexed Awadh outright on grounds of misgovernment. Punjab was taken after the second Sikh war. Almost every one of those seizures produced a leader or a grievance in 1857. He went home broken in health and died at forty-eight, defending his record. He had opposed annexing Awadh earlier and changed his position, and the minute he wrote justifying it is a long document that reads as a man persuading himself. Jhansi was taken under lapse in 1853, which is the grievance that made Rani Lakshmibai a rebel. His successor Canning inherited the rising and the reputation for clemency. The Company itself was abolished the year after Dalhousie died and India passed to the Crown. Indian nationalist historiography has treated him as the architect of the revolt, and British administrative history as the founder of modern Indian infrastructure; both readings rest on the same list of acts.

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