ADMINISTRATION AND FINANCE OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY 29
commercial accounts till 1813 and when they were separated by the Parliamentary mandate they were hardly made intelligible.
These serious handicaps consequently compel us to leave aside this important phase of our study. Certain detached statements if grouped together may convey to us some idea regarding the pressure of the Revenue. Speaking about the Land Tax alone, Mr. R: C. Dutt, besides whom there is no better authority on the subject, says, “The Land Tax levied by the British Government is not only excessive, but, what is worse, it is fluctuating and uncertain in many provinces. In England, the Land Tax was between one shilling and four shillings in the pound, i.e. between five and twenty percent of the rental, during a hundred years before 1798, when it was made perpetual and redeemable by William Pitt. In Bengal the Land Tax was fixed at over ninety percent of the rental, and in Northern India at over eighty percent of the rental, between
1793 and 1822. It is true that the British Government only followed the precedent of the previous Mohamedan rulers who also claimed an enormous Land Tax. But the difference was this, that what the Mohamedan rulers claimed they could never fully realize : what the British rulers claimed they realized with rigor. The last Mohamedan ruler of Bengal, in the last year of his administration (1764) realized a land revenue of £817,553 : within thirty years the British rulers realized a land revenue of £ 2,680,000 in the same Province. In 1802 the Nawab of Oudh ceded Allahabad and some other rich districts in Northern India to the British Government. The land revenue which was claimed by the British rulers within three years of the cessation was £ 1,682,306. In Madras, the Land Tax first imposed by the East India Company was one-half the gross produce of the land. In Bombay, the land revenue of the territory conquered from the Marattas in 1817 was 800,000 in the year of the conquest: it was raised to 1,500,000 within a few days of the British rule : and it has been continuously raised since. “No native prince demands the rent which we do,” wrote Bishop Heber in 1826, after travelling all through India, and visiting British and native states. “A Land Tax which now exists in India,” wrote Colonel Briggs in 1830, “professing to absorb the whole of the landlord’s rent, was never known under any government in Europe or Asia.”