The Board of Control for India Affairs and the Makings of a Global British Empire, 1784–1800

In 1784, the Parliament of Great Britain established a Board of Control for India Affairs. Much of the historiography has presented this development as an example of the gradual and piecemeal reform of the English East India Company’s practices of governance in South Asia. By contrast, this paper demonstrates that the institution of this body marked a radical rupture. The new Board of Control formalized centralized ministerial control over governance in the subcontinent. Though the Company was not abolished, the institution of the Board fundamentally ended “Company rule.” The Board of Control led by the Tory minister Henry Dundas and the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, governed South Asia and the Indian ocean world through myriad inter-linked modalities. They appointed major office-holders such as the Governor General and issued orders directly to them. They examined, edited and redrafted all of the communications dispatched to the governments of each of the Presidencies. Importantly, the members of the Board of Control deployed their authority as parliamentarians and ministers to frame, remake and shape the governance of South Asia as part of a global British Empire. Indeed, the formation of the Board tightened the link between governance in South Asia and imperial administration elsewhere in the British Empire, including Ireland, Canada, the Caribbean and incipient settlements in Australia; thereby setting the stage for closely coordinated decision-making about multiple important subjects such as the slave trade, sugar production in both the Caribbean and Indian Ocean as well as commerce with China. Thus, this paper presents a history of the institutionalization of global imperial governance and by extension, the entrenchment of particular intra-imperial itineraries for the movement of commodities, currency, officials and laborers. The global and connected histories of empire and colonialism were, therefore, products of deliberate acts of state-making and institutional expansion.