The Cornwallis Code is a body of legislation enacted in 1793 by the East India Company to improve the governance of its territories in India. The Code was developed under the guidance of Charles, Marquess Cornwallis, who served as Governor of Bengal from 1786 to 1793.
The code contained significant provisions governing, policing and judicial and civil administration. Its best known provision was the Permanent Settlement [1] (or the zamindari system), which established a revenue collection scheme that lasted until the 20th century. Beginning with Bengal, the system spread over all of northern India by means of the issue of a series of regulations dated 1 May 1793. On these the government of British India virtually rested until the Charter Act of 1833.
The system, as codified in these regulations, provided that the East India Company's service personnel be divided into three branches:
Private trade was forbidden to the members of the first two branches, and they were instead compensated by a new and generous scale of pay. The land revenue assessment (the major source of revenue) was fixed permanently with zamindars, or hereditary revenue collectors. These native Indians, provided they paid their land taxes punctually, were treated as landowners, but they were deprived of magisterial and police functions, which were discharged by a newly organized government police.
This “permanent settlement” provided the British with an Indian landed class interested in supporting British authority. The local administration was placed in the hands of the revenue collectors of districts. The judiciary was reorganized; there were district judges with magisterial powers responsible to provincial courts in civil cases and to courts of circuit in criminal cases. The law administered was Hindu and Muslim personal law and a modified Muslim criminal code. The higher ranks of the services were restricted to the British, thus depriving the Indians of any responsible office.
As a whole, the system gave social and political stability to Bengal at the price of neglecting the rights of the lesser landholders and undertenants and of excluding Indians from any responsible share in the administration.
Company rule in India was the rule 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 Siraj ud-Daulah was defeated and replaced with Mir Jafar, who had the support of the East India Company; or 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 abolished local rule (Nizamat) in Bengal and established a capital in Calcutta, appointed its first Governor-General of Fort William, Warren Hastings, and became directly involved in governance. The East India Company significantly expanded its influence throughout the Indian subcontinent after the Anglo-Mysore Wars, Anglo-Maratha Wars, and Anglo-Sikh Wars. Lord William Bentinck became the first Governor General of India in 1834 under the Government of India Act 1833. The Company India ruled until 1858, when, after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Government of India Act 1858, the India Office of the British government assumed the task of directly administering India in the new British Raj.
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The Permanent Settlement, also known as the Permanent Settlement of Bengal, was an agreement between the East India Company and landlords of Bengal to fix revenues to be raised from land that had far-reaching consequences for both agricultural methods and productivity in the entire British Empire and the political realities of the Indian countryside. It was concluded in 1793 by the Company administration headed by Charles, Earl Cornwallis. It formed one part of a larger body of legislation, known as the Cornwallis Code. The Cornwallis Code of 1793 divided the East India Company's service personnel into three branches: revenue, judicial, and commercial. Revenues were collected by zamindars, native Indians who were treated as landowners. This division created an Indian landed class that supported British authority.
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