By the later nineteenth century the Indian Empire covered a sub-continent of one and a half million square miles, inhabited in 1881 by some 256 million people. More than one-third of India was composed of native states, with a population of fifty-six millions. In the remainder, the British directly ruled almost two hundred million subjects. British India consisted of the three old Presidencies of Madras, Bengal, and Bombay, and the more recently organised administrations of the North-western Provinces and Oudh, the Punjab, the Central Provinces, Assam and Burma. Extending from Peshawar to Cape Comorin, the imperial sway covered some of the oldest civilisations of the world. It extended over deserts, vast regions of forest, and high mountains; and its peoples were in every stage of development from aborigines to sophisticated city dwellers. British dominion in India, which it has suited administrator and historian alike to regard as an entity, consisted in fact of different peoples inhabiting different regions, which had been pieced together at different times for different reasons.

All periods are periods of change, even in India. But colonial rule may well have accelerated the propensities towards change which had been forming in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century India. The impact of western government disturbed, and in some places upset, the traditional rankings of hierarchy and dominance in local society, thus increasing competitiveness between men of different communities and castes. Secondly, it produced a new unevenness of development between different regions, tilting the balance this time in favour of the three maritime provinces where British influence had first been felt and where its effects were most intensive.