{"title":"A New Language of Rule: Alwar's Administrative Experiment, c. 1838–58","authors":"Elizabeth M. Thelen","doi":"10.1017/S0738248022000657","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Many rulers of newly formed Indian Princely States enacted substantial administrative reforms in the first half of the nineteenth century as they sought to reinforce their power and secure revenue in the wake of British colonial conquest. In one such case, the ruler of Alwar, Banni Singh, recruited Aminullah Khan, a former record-keeper in Delhi's colonial courts, to serve as diwan (chief minister) and undertake administrative reforms starting in 1838. These reforms focused on agrarian taxation, the civil courts, and the military, and included changes to the roles of local officials, methods of record-keeping, and the language of governance. The reforms were encoded in seven slim volumes of regulations and model forms, handwritten in Persian. Through a study of these regulations, I situate the reforms of Alwar's administration within Banni Singh's broader self-fashioning as a modern ruler in a Mughal mode and show how the reforms drew from both Mughal and colonial ideas of statecraft. The regulations represented a shift toward a legalistic conception of that state as seen in the ideals of good governance that they espoused, and they constructed contractual relationships among villagers, low-level officials in the districts, and the central state through the extensive bureaucratic procedures that they encoded.","PeriodicalId":17960,"journal":{"name":"Law and History Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8000,"publicationDate":"2023-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Law and History Review","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248022000657","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract Many rulers of newly formed Indian Princely States enacted substantial administrative reforms in the first half of the nineteenth century as they sought to reinforce their power and secure revenue in the wake of British colonial conquest. In one such case, the ruler of Alwar, Banni Singh, recruited Aminullah Khan, a former record-keeper in Delhi's colonial courts, to serve as diwan (chief minister) and undertake administrative reforms starting in 1838. These reforms focused on agrarian taxation, the civil courts, and the military, and included changes to the roles of local officials, methods of record-keeping, and the language of governance. The reforms were encoded in seven slim volumes of regulations and model forms, handwritten in Persian. Through a study of these regulations, I situate the reforms of Alwar's administration within Banni Singh's broader self-fashioning as a modern ruler in a Mughal mode and show how the reforms drew from both Mughal and colonial ideas of statecraft. The regulations represented a shift toward a legalistic conception of that state as seen in the ideals of good governance that they espoused, and they constructed contractual relationships among villagers, low-level officials in the districts, and the central state through the extensive bureaucratic procedures that they encoded.
期刊介绍:
Law and History Review (LHR), America"s leading legal history journal, encompasses American, European, and ancient legal history issues. The journal"s purpose is to further research in the fields of the social history of law and the history of legal ideas and institutions. LHR features articles, essays, commentaries by international authorities, and reviews of important books on legal history. American Society for Legal History