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colonies. Historians were certainly aware of its importance for India and North America in the eighteenth century. But for nineteenth-century India the princely states have been treated as examples of early “Indirect Rule” rather than the more dynamic and changing relationships that existed between princes and resident officials and which call for a political model. For the remainder of the dependent empire, made up of territories with crown colony status, the techniques of patronage have remained largely uninvestigated because of a prevailing assumption that bureaucratic rules applied to relationships between governors and their officials from the 1830s and that a measure of “Indirect Rule” could be held to explain the management of leaders within local societies. As I have argued elsewhere, the assumption is both questionable and anachronistic in those terms. In any case, a closer exploration of social and political structures is required to exemplify the nature of the relationship between rulers and ruled.
It is also clear that a governor's relationship with his European personnel, as well as with indigenous leaders, has to be taken into account, along with his position as an official intermediary subordinate to superiors in London. Not all governors, moreover, were sympathetic to treating chiefs as “co-ordinate” units in administration, preferring to relegate them to the role of low-status civil servants, or even to reinvent leadership roles and titles for them. But either way, a governor was required to fill a role as political broker and manager of his hierarchy of officials and other local hierarchies, whether represented or not within the colonial legislature.
Given these conclusions it became clear that a case study was called for. The detailed reasons for fixing on Sir Arthur Gordon are explained in the introduction. First among them is the need to revise his standard biography, written in 1964 by Professor J. K. Chapman. That said, the first of the acknowledgments here must be my debt to his careful scholarship, not least where I cannot accept many of his conclusions. It soon became clear, too, when writing a revision, that much more attention would have to be paid to the reasons for a governor's ability or inability to win the loyalty of official colleagues, as well as the confidence of leaders in unofficial