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administrative, and political systems as the colonial power. However, as history shows, the
aftermath of accession is still felt to this day in the case of Balochistan and Kashmir.
With the 1784 India Act, Britain established direct involvement in India, initially through
bringing EICs activities under the British Parliament’s direct supervision. The 1813 Charter
implemented full colonial administration and separate territorial and commercial jurisdictions for
the EIC (Baber, 1996; Chaudhary, 2009). In the meantime, the EIC appointed the British
ambassador, established permanent factories, and entrenched British settlements in India.
Britain’s colonial governments controlled 680 “princely states” or “native states” through
hereditary local kings that constituted about 45 percent of the total area of British India
(excluding Myanmar and Sindh) (Lyer, 2010, p. 610), with 23 percent of the total population
(Lyer, 2010, p. 694). By co-ordinating its economic and political objectives, Britain ruled
India—one of the largest colonies in terms of land and population (Stokes, 1973).
The British codified laws in India in terms of the rationalization of law in the Weberian
sense to ensure “order,” “certainty,” and “uniformity” (DeSousa, 2008, p. 68), as well as
Bentham’s liberal ideas of the rule of law and equality principles (Kolsky, 2010). These laws,
while giving a sense of uniformity to the rule of law, were also used against the local populace to
suppress uprisings. The British abolished the Mughal Court and removed three-quarters of the
warlord aristocracy. They eliminated many local feudal landowners and established a British-
styled bureaucracy whose new aristocrats tended to follow a British life style. The British
introduced the English language, its underlying culture, literature, and philosophy to strengthen
its power base, as well as an elite class who were biologically Indians but culturally English.
This article discusses British colonialism in India with a specific focus on three
interlocking areas: governance, education, and the law, as well as the legacy of British
colonialism in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, by applying Johan Galtung’s (1990) violence
triangle framework. In each section, some cases or examples are used. The elements of the
British colonial model applied by Britain to its former colonies include control over land, divide
and rule, apartheid laws, ethnocentrism, education and language, religious suppression, native
inferiority, depoliticization, and trauma and inward violence (Byrne, Clarke, & Rahman, 2018;
Rahman, Clarke, & Byrne, 2017). From the common elements of the British colonial model, this
article, however, focuses on three elements: divide and rule, colonial education, and draconian
law, since they are applicable to the colonization of the Indian subcontinent.