The doctrine that had allowed the East India Company to annex states with empty thrones before 1857 was thereafter abjured by the British government. Among the crowds of political exiles, the ex-monarchs' situation was exceptional, in large part because of their royal status, one that both British monarchists and French republicans still allowed their prisoners. Colonialism, in Europe and conquered territories, embodied a certain type of statecraft in which the government, frequently of a monarchical sort, of one country imposed overrule on another country, commonly one also governed under hereditary principles. Though Europeans addressed those they dethroned with deference and attended solicitously to their needs, the colonisers had reduced the ousted monarchs to captives, prisoners of war or political prisoners, and wards of the state whose fate depended on decisions taken in London or Paris.