Period from 1600–1726, Establishment of Mayor's Court (1726)

Imagine a mayor of Mumbai who is also its chief magistrate, who took the job not because he trained for it but because he was a senior merchant, and whose court answers not to Parliament but to a trading company headquartered on the other side of the world. That is close to what Madras got in 1688, and what all three presidency towns got, formally and on a much sounder footing, in 1726. This is the single most examined event in this whole paper.

In two minutes

The Charter of 1726 created Mayor's Courts in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta drawing authority directly from the Crown rather than the Company, and is remembered as the first real attempt to set up a uniform, appealable court system in British India — and as a case study in how quickly that attempt broke down.

The rest of this chapter

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