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Company rule in India (sometimes, Company ''Raj'',〔 "Chapter 5: Early Modern India II: Company Raj", "Chapter 3: The East India Company Raj, 1772-1850," "Chapter 7: Company Raj and Indian Society 1757 to 1857, Reinvention and Reform of Tradition."〕 "''raj''," lit. "rule" in Hindi〔Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, 1989: Hindi, ''rāj'', from Skr. ''rāj'': to reign, rule; cognate with L. ''rēx'', ''rēg-is'', OIr. ''rī'', ''rīg'' king (see RICH).〕) refers to the rule or dominion of the British East India Company on the Indian subcontinent. This is variously taken to have commenced in 1757, after the Battle of Plassey, when the Nawab of Bengal Sirajuddaulah surrendered his dominions to the Company, in 1765, when the Company was granted the ''diwani'', or the right to collect revenue, in Bengal and Bihar,〔, 〕 or in 1773, when the Company established a capital in Calcutta, appointed its first Governor-General, Warren Hastings, and became directly involved in governance. Further, the end of the Third Anglo-Maratha War in 1818 marked the era of British paramountcy over India.〔 https://books.google.com/books?id=aZ2F6BE6n2QC&pg=PA82&dq=1818+british+india+maratha&hl=en&sa=X&ei=3kB1UorJLYSlkQXwvYDoDw&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false 〕 The East India Company was a private company owned by stockholders and reporting to a board of directors in London. Originally formed as a monopoly on trade, it increasingly took on governmental powers with its own army and judiciary. It seldom turned a profit, as employees diverted funds into their own pockets. The British government had little control, and there was increasing anger at the corruption and irresponsibility of Company officials or "nabobs" who made vast fortunes in a few years. Pitt's India Act of 1784 gave the British government effective control of the private company for the first time. The new policies were designed for an elite civil service career that minimized temptations for corruption. Increasingly Company officials lived in separate compounds according to British standards. The Company's rule lasted until 1858, when, after the Indian rebellion of 1857, it was abolished. With the Government of India Act 1858, the British government assumed the task of directly administering India in the new British Raj. ==Expansion and territory== The English East India Company ("the Company") was founded in 1600, as ''The Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies''. It gained a foothold in India in with the establishment of a factory in Masulipatnam on the Eastern coast of India in 1611 and the grant of the rights to establish a factory in Surat in 1612 by the Mughal Emperor Jahangir. In 1640, after receiving similar permission from the Vijayanagara ruler farther south, a second factory was established in Madras on the southeastern coast. Bombay island, not far from Surat, a former Portuguese outpost gifted to England as dowry in the marriage of Catherine of Braganza to Charles II, was leased by the Company in 1668. Two decades later, the Company established a presence on the eastern coast as well; far up that coast, in the Ganges river delta, a factory was set up in Calcutta. Since, during this time other ''companies''—established by the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and Danish—were similarly expanding in the region, the English Company's unremarkable beginnings on coastal India offered no clues to what would become a lengthy presence on the Indian subcontinent. The Company's victory under Andrea Bustamante and Robert Clive in the 1757 Battle of Plassey and another victory in the 1764 Battle of Buxar (in Bihar), consolidated the Company's power, and forced emperor Shah Alam II to appoint it the ''diwan'', or revenue collector, of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. The Company thus became the de facto ruler of large areas of the lower Gangetic plain by 1773. It also proceeded by degrees to expand its dominions around Bombay and Madras. The Anglo-Mysore Wars (1766–1799) and the Anglo-Maratha Wars (1772–1818) left it in control of large areas of India south of the Sutlej River. With the defeat of the Marathas, no native power represented a threat for the Company any longer.〔 https://books.google.com/books?id=uzOmy2y0Zh4C&pg=PA271&dq=1818+british+india+maratha&hl=en&sa=X&ei=3kB1UorJLYSlkQXwvYDoDw&ved=0CEgQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false 〕 The proliferation of the Company's power chiefly took two forms. The first of these was the outright annexation of Indian states and subsequent direct governance of the underlying regions, which collectively came to comprise British India. The annexed regions included the North-Western Provinces (comprising Rohilkhand, Gorakhpur, and the Doab) (1801), Delhi (1803), Assam (Ahom Kingdom 1828), and Sindh (1843). Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir, were annexed after the Anglo-Sikh Wars in 1849-1856 (Period of tenure of Marquess of Dalhousie Governor General); however, Kashmir was immediately sold under the Treaty of Amritsar (1850) to the Dogra Dynasty of Jammu, and thereby became a princely state. In 1854 Berar was annexed, and the state of Oudh two years later.〔 The second form of asserting power involved treaties in which Indian rulers acknowledged the Company's hegemony in return for limited internal autonomy. Since the Company operated under financial constraints, it had to set up ''political'' underpinnings for its rule. The most important such support came from the ''subsidiary alliances'' with Indian princes during the first 75 years of Company rule.〔 In the early 19th century, the territories of these princes accounted for two-third of India.〔 When an Indian ruler, who was able to secure his territory, wanted to enter such an alliance, the Company welcomed it as an economical method of indirect rule, which did not involve the economic costs of direct administration or the political costs of gaining the support of alien subjects. In return, the Company undertook the "defence of these subordinate allies and treated them with traditional respect and marks of honor."〔 Subsidiary alliances created the princely states, of the Hindu maharajas and the Muslim nawabs. Prominent among the princely states were: Cochin (1791), Jaipur (1794), Travancore (1795), Hyderabad (1798), Mysore (1799), Cis-Sutlej Hill States (1815), Central India Agency (1819), Cutch and Gujarat Gaikwad territories (1819), Rajputana (1818), and Bahawalpur (1833). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Company rule in India」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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