In the 1820s–30s, the question of “native education” generated sprawling debates involving all three Company presidencies. At issue now was not whether the Company could or should secure extensive territory but instead whether, having done so, it could or should govern it. Throughout the period, officials debated the balance to be struck in education policy between conciliation and mass education. This question was briefly conflated with issues of language, leading to the so-called Anglicist-Orientalist controversy. For a fleeting moment in the 1830s, English education appeared to have prevailed. The more lasting impact of the controversy, however, was the end of conciliation and the triumph of mass education in Company ideology.

This chapter rethinks the emergence of Madras, which has traditionally been depicted as an imperial acquisition developed as an English colony, apart from its turbulent Asian surroundings. Instead, as Company servants appropriated authority to themselves in the face of the collapsing corporate framework, they utilised their Asian networks, partnerships and patrons to establish a new settlement from which their interests could be protected and facilitated. Relying on Indian and Indo-Portuguese capital, Indian labour and materials, and in complete defiance of Company leadership, servants politically subordinated themselves to the Vijayanagara empire in exchange for a set of rights and privileges that would create the Company’s first substantial centre of power in Asia. In the face of metropolitan opposition, Company servants deepened their dependence on their Indian partners and masters, opening up new channels of credit, capital and demographic expansion. When the sultanate of Golconda annexed the Vijayanagara empire, Company servants learned to navigate the complex and shifting state formation process in southern India, adapting to their changing environment and ingratiating themselves with a new set of sovereign rulers and governing elites from whom they continued to acquire greater privileges to develop Madras into a transcultural commercial hub.

Following its incorporation as a permanent joint-stock in 1657, and the institutional and financial stability this brought to the Company, this chapter explores the corporate leadership’s attempts to re-centralise power in the Company and regain control over its servants and settlements in Asia. As the court of committees restructured the Company’s organisation, and sought to erect new regulatory frameworks in Asia that would more effectively realise metropolitan interests by dismissing refractory servants, disrupting transcultural networks and squeezing out private interests, the powerful confederacy of Anglo-Indian elites that controlled Madras violently rebelled against these centralising impulses and seized the city. Although the Company sent a powerful force to recapture Madras, nonetheless the coup de force exposed the reconstituted dynamic of the Company, in which the success of Madras was largely due to the integration of Company servants with surrounding economic and political constituents. The subsequent legalisation of private trade and the restoration of the rebels to their positions of power demonstrated the Company’s future willingness to accommodate the expansive transcultural networks of its servants and their Asian allies. The rebellion of Madras represented the complete decentralisation of the Company by the later seventeenth century, and the critical role played by Indian elites in driving the expansion of the Company.

In India, the Irish came late and as conquerors. Irish Catholics – mostly soldiers – were never a significant part of the Catholic population, which traced its origins to successive waves of evangelization dating back to the seventh century. In colonial India, the Irish clashed not only with the long-dominant Portuguese church but also with long-established French, Italian, and other missionary groups.