A Presidency as a Dowry- Bombay

Hunter, William Wilson, Sir, (1840-1900), Cotton, James Sutherland, (1847-1918) ed. Burn, Richard, Sir, (1871-1947) joint ed. Meyer, William Stevenson, Sir, (1860-1922). joint ed. New edition, published under the authority of His Majesty’s secretary of state for India in council. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1908-1931 [v. 1, 1909] – From the *Imperial Gazetteer of India*

It was not uncommon for the rich and grand to gift each other land, even when it wasn’t theirs to give. So it happened with Bombay. Both the Dutch and the English had been eyeing the island for some time, as far back as 1626, they both made attempts to gain possession of it and had even attempted to buy it from the Portuguese. However, the English would come out on top, so to speak – the Bombay Province was leased to the East India Company (EICo) via the Royal Charter of 1668 by King Charles II, for which the EICo paid an annual sum of £10. The king himself acquired the area through the dowry of Catherine Braganza as part of their marriage treaty in 1661. The EICo did not take it as lightly as the King and wasted no time in setting up a factory. As the powers of the island’s defences and general administration had also been conferred upon the EICo, they quickly enrolled a European regiment and erected fortifications which would prove invaluable when the Dutch came knocking in 1673.

In 1687, Bombay was made the headquarters of all EICo possessions in India, but in 1753, the erstwhile governor of Bombay was placed subordinate to that of Calcutta. The Bombay Presidency, at its greatest extent, covered not only the present-day state of Gujarat but the western two-thirds of Maharashtra, the northwestern state of Karnataka, the Sindh Province in today’s Pakistan and, oddly enough, Aden in Yemen. Although the districts and provinces were directly under British rule, the internal administration of the princely states was left to the local rulers. The presidency, however, took complete control of the defence of those princely states and managed relations with them through political agents.

Bounded on the north by Baluchistan, the Punjab and Rajputana, to the east by Indore, the Central Provinces and Hyderabad, to the south by the Madras Presidency and the Kingdom of Mysore and to the west by the Arabian Sea, it included within its limits the Portuguese settlements of Goa, Daman and Diu. The Princely State of Baroda also maintained relations with the British. Politically Bombay included Aden and had an area of 488,850 km². 318,530 km2 were under British rule while 65,761 km2 remained with the Princely States. The total population in 1901 was estimated at 25,468,209, of which only 6,908,648 resided in a princely state.