The Britains in India before Victorias time — what were they like?
Initially, of course, they were just employees of the East India Company, so they were merely traders living quite a peripheral, sort of isolated existence. But from the mid-18th century onwards, we find people coming up who are both administrators and soldiers, people…who adopt a much more sort of real political attitude towards the Indian people, often very ruthlessly. They are involved in a conquest of large areas, and also they are sometimes prepared to take bribes, act quite corruptly on the side…as a means to…gain power and to enrich themselves. And they often got quite a bad reputation. That was in the years of actual conquest of India. But once quite large areas had been conquered, which is by about the 1780s, the British were faced with the problem of having to rule India. And they had to now get to understand the Indian people, so they really start to try to develop a knowledge about India, and this involved contacting learned Indians, meeting Indian scholars, religious
