{"id":72259,"date":"2025-10-19T01:00:28","date_gmt":"2025-10-19T05:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=72259"},"modified":"2025-10-18T09:10:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T13:10:10","slug":"qotd-the-indian-civil-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/10\/19\/qotd-the-indian-civil-service\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The Indian Civil Service"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>There’s actually a great book called The Ruling Caste<\/em><\/a>. It’s a “collective biography”, for lack of a better term, of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), by Sir David Gilmour. You can of course find biographies of the individual Governors-General (Gilmour wrote one, also excellent, on Lord Curzon), but this is the only study I know of the lower levels \u2014 i.e. the guys who really ran the Raj. Gilmour is literally a gentleman amateur, so while he’s also<\/em> an excellent historian (and The Ruling Caste<\/em> conforms to all the canons of scholarship), he tells an engaging story, too.<\/p>\n

I think about The Ruling Caste<\/em> often when I think about the turds in the Apparat<\/em>. Looked at from the outside, the ICS were apparatchiks<\/em>, too. Indeed, even more so than actual apparatchiks<\/em>, since “apparatchik<\/em>” means something like “expert without portfolio” and while the ICS had two broad “tracks” (if I recall correctly), “civil” and “legal”, in practice most every ICS man was supposed to be able to do pretty much everything, including (again IIRC) assume military command of local forces if necessary.<\/p>\n

Given that there were never more than 200K Britons in the Raj at any one time, how could it be otherwise?<\/p>\n

And the ICS was as fully ideologized as the Soviet (or AINO) Apparat<\/em>. The French gave us the lovely phrase mission civilisatrice<\/em><\/a>, but that’s what the ICS was doing, too. Lord Macauley was the big mover behind the English Education Act of 1835, which explicitly designed to<\/p>\n