Fourth Period—Continued.
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A.D. A.TI. Governors of Bengal. Emperors of Hindustan. Kings of England. 1608 1017 Shaikh Islam Kluiu jJahjingir James I. 1613 1022 Kasim Khan DO. Do. 1618 1028 Ibrahim Khan Do. Do. 16221032 Shah Jahan Do. Do. 1625 1033 Khanazad Khan Do. Charles I. 1626 1035 Mukarram Khan Do. Do. 1627 1036 Fidai Khan Do. Do. 1628 1037 Kasim Khan Jabuni Shah Jahan Do. 1632 1042 Azim Khan Do. Do. 1637 1047 Islam Khan Mushedi Do. Do. 1639 1049 Sultan Shuja Do. Do. 1660 1070 Mir Jumla Aurangzcb Charles II. 1664 1074 Shaista Khan Do. Do. 1677 1087 Fidai Khan Do. Do. 1678 1088 Sultan Muhammad Azim Do. Do. 1680 1090 Shaista Khan Do. Do. 1689 1099 Ibrahim Khan II. Do. William III. 1697 1108 Azim Ushan Do. Anne 1704 1116 Murshid Kuli Do. George II. 1725 1139 Shuja Uddin Khan Muhammad Shah Do. 1739 1151 Sarfaraz Khan Do. Do. 17401153 All Vardi Khan Do. Do. 17561170 Siraj Ud Daula Alamgir Do.
The above chronology is taken from Stewart s History of Bengal.
Fifth Period.
Governors of Bengal and Governors-General of India under the East India Company, 17G5-1854.
1765, Lord Clive ; 1767, Harry Verelst ; 1769, John Cartier ; 1772, Warren Hastings ; 1785, Sir John Macpherson ; 1786, Marquis Cornwallis; 1793, Sir John Shore (Lord Teignmonth) ; 1798, Sir Alured Clarke (pro. ton.) ; 1798, Marquis Wellesley ; 1805, Marquis Cornwallis ; 1806, Earl of Minto ; 1813, Marquis of Hastings ; 1823, John Adam (pro. tern.) ; 1823, Earl Amherst : 1828, Lord William Cavendish Bentinck ; 1835, Sir Charles Metealf ; 1836, Earl Auckland; 1842, Karl of Ellenborough ; 1844, Viscount Hardinge ; 1S48, Marquis of Dalhousie.
Sixth Period.
Bengal under Lieutenant-Governors, 1854-1874.
Sir Frederic Halliday ; Sir John Peter Grant ; Sir Cecil Beadon ; Sir William Grey ; Sir George Campbell ; Sir Richard Temple.
English connection with Bengal.—The East India Com pany formed its earliest settlements in Bengal in the first half of the 1 7th century. These settlements were of a purely commercial character. In 1G20 one of the Company s factors dates from Patna ; in 1624-36 the Company estab lished itself, by the favour of the emperor, on the ruins of the ancient Portuguese settlement of Pippli, in the north of Orissa ; in 1640-42 the patriotism of an English sur geon, Mr Gabriel Boughton, obtained for us establishments at Balasor, also in Orissa, and at Hiigli, some miles above Calcutta. The vexations and extortions to which the Company s early agents were subjected more than once almost induced them to abandon the trade, and in 1677-78 they threatened to withdraw from Bengal altogether. In 1685, the Bengal factors, driven to extremity by the oppression of the Mughul governors, threw down tho gauntlet; and after various successes and hair-breadth escapes, purchased from the grandson of Aurangzeb in 1696, the villages which have since grown up into Calcutta, the metropolis of India During the next fifty years the English had a long and hazardous struggle alike with the Mughul governors of the province and the Marhatta armies which invaded it. In 1756 this struggle culminated in the great outrage known as the Black Hole of Calcutta, followed by dive s battle of Plassey and capture of Cal cutta, which avenged it. That battle, and the subse quent years of confused fighting, established our military supremacy in Bengal, and procured the treaties of 1765, by which the provinces of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa passed under our administration. To Warren Hastings (1772-85) belongs the glory of consolidating our power, and convert ing a military occupation into a stable civil government. To another member of the civil service, John Shore, after wards Lord Teignmonth (1786-93), is due the formation of a regular system of Anglo-Indian legislation. Acting through Lord Cornwallis, then Governor-General, he ascer tained and defined the rights of the landholders in the soil. These landholders under the native system had, for the most part, started as collectors of the revenues, and gradu ally acquired certain prescriptive rights as quasi-proprietors of the estates entrusted to them by the Government. In 1793 Lord Cornwallis declared their rights perpetual, and made over the land of Bengal to the previous quasi-proprie tors or zaminddrs, on condition of the payment of a fixed land tax. This great piece of legislation is known as the Permanent Settlement of the Land Revenue. But the Cornwallis code, while defining the rights of the proprie tors, failed to give adequate recognition to the rights of the under-tenants and the cultivators. His Regulations formally reserved the latter class of rights, but did not legally define them, or enable the husbandmen to enforce them in the courts. After half a century of rural disquiet, the rights of the cultivators were at length carefully formulated by Act X. of 1859. This measure, now known as the land law of Bengal, effected for the rights of the under-holders and cultivators what the Cornwallis code in 1793 had effected for those of the superior landholders. The status of each class of person interested in the soil, from the Government as suzerain, through the zaminddrs or superior landholders, the intermediate tenure-holders, and the under tenants, down to the actual cultivator, is now clearly defined. The Act dates from the first year after the transfer of India from the Company to the Crown ; for, meanwhile, the mutiny had burst out in 1857. The trans actions of that revolt chiefly took place in Northern India, and will be found under the article on the North-Western Provinces ; the uprising, although fierce and for a time perilous to our supremacy, was quickly put down. In Bengal it began at Barrackpur (q.v.}, was communicated to Dacca in Eastern Bengal, and for a time raged in Behar, producing the memorable defence of the billiard-room at Arrah by a handful of civilians and Sikhs, one of the most splendid pieces of gallantry in the history of the British arms. Since 1858, when the country passed to the Crown, the history of Bengal has been one of steady and peaceful progress. The two great lines of railway, the East Indian and the Eastern Bengal, have been completed; and a third, the Northern Bengal Railway, is now in progress. Trade has enormously expanded ; new centres of commerce have sprung up in spots which not long ago were -silent jungles; new staples of trade, such as tea and jute, have rapidly attained importance ; and the coal-fields and iron ores are beginning to open up prospects of a new and splendid era in the internal development of the country.
These reports are of an official character, and embody the results of the census of 1872. Among non-oflicial works Colonel Dalton s great volume on TJie Ethnology of Bengal holds a conspicuous place. This splendid quarto condenses the personal observations of a long carer-r spent among the people. Stewart s History of Bengal, a work which was admirable when first published, is now fifty years out of date, and stands in much need of re-editing. The journals of the Asiatic societies in London, Paris, and especially Calcutta, are still the great storehouses for original research. The Calcutta Review contains many valuable articles, which the index to its first fifty volumes renders easily available. The present writer has endea voured in his Annals of Rural Bengal, and in his two volumes on Orissa; or, the Vicissitudes of an Indian Province under Native and British Rule., to present to the general reader the result of his re searches with regard to this part of India.
