LINEAGES OF AN AETIOLOGY

The idea that the Company administration had, through its failings, produced conditions for a revolt was initially put forward by the Anglo-Indian military, anxious to underplay the mutiny and deflect attention to civilian resistance. The idea meshed well with long-standing parliamentary discomfort with a mercantile company acting as a state, leading eventually to the Charter Act of 1833 which ended the Company's right to trade, after some eighty years of acrimonious public and legislative wrangling stoked by a broad spectrum of interests. That this legislative fretting could work as cover for merchant lobbies and partisan interests, or to keep a jealous eye on audit and preferment in a monopolist corporation with de facto statehood in a faraway land, ought to be seen alongside normative criticism of overseas investments by a Whig oligarch such as Burke, by free-trade theorists and by the Radicals, philosophic and otherwise.