The gap between profession and performance, between intention and achievement, is so wide in the first phase of conscious modernisation that historians have traditionally sought to explain it away. The British were deflected from their initial purposes, they argue, because of insistent problems of external and internal security which beset them between 1836 and 1860. Outside the ring fence, the Afghan war, the annexation of Sind, the Sikh wars, the Burmese war, the Persian expedition; within, the Gwalior rebellion, the Bundela rising, the Sonthal disturbances, and finally the crisis of the Mutiny – these, we are told, absorbed the attention and financial resources that might have been devoted to economic development and administrative reform. Hence the twenty to thirty year delay between Bentinck's education resolution of 1835 and its translation into effective action, between Macaulay's published draft of 1837 and the passing of the Indian Penal Code 1860 in, between Bentinck's paper plans and the actuality of rapid steam and rail communication in the 1870s. Today we look more cynically at statements of grandiose planning objectives. In the absence of capital investment from overseas what prospects of success were truly within the reach of a colonial government which, with the abolition of the East India Company's commercial functions in 1834, was finally stripped of those direct powers of intervention in the economy which it had previously wielded through bulk government purchasing of commodities?