Centralisation.
Henceforth all legislative authority and financial control were centred in the government of India; and the governments of Madras and Bombay were stripped of all power to enact laws, and prohibited from creating any new office or making any grant of money, without the consent of the Governor-General of India in Council, or the sanction of the Court of Directors.
Stagnation at Madras and Bombay.
The charter of 1833 was not an unmixed good. It stopped all progress in Madras and Bombay by bringing those Presidencies too closely under the control of Bengal. For twenty years they had no representatives in the Council at Calcutta. They had framed their own systems of land revenue. They were relieved of the cares of trade, which had been a worry to Governors and Governors-General from the days of the Marquis of Wellesley to those of Lord William Bentinck. But after the year 1833 they were more or less paralysed by the loss of all discretion and responsibility in matters of legislation and expenditure. Great events were about to agitate Northern India, but for twenty years Madras and Bombay were without a history, and the work of administration was as lifeless and monotonous as the working of a machine.
Popular administration of Bentinck.
Lord William Bentinck left India in 1835. His administration had been eminently popular with all classes of the community; and his memory is preserved to this day as that of a just and able ruler, who paid due regard to the rights and claims of Asiatics as well as of Europeans.
Sir Charles Metcalfe, 1835-6: coming collisions with Asiatic powers.
Sir Charles Metcalfe, the Bengal civilian, who was sent on a mission to Runjeet Singh in 1808, and since then had filled some of the most responsible posts in the Anglo-Indian empire, acted as Governor-General between the departure of Lord William Bentinck in 1835 and the arrival of Lord Auckland in 1836. A new era was beginning to dawn upon India. Great Britain was about to appear, not only as mistress of an Anglo-Indian empire, but as an Asiatic power coming more or less into collision with four other Asiatic powers—Persia, Russia, Afghanistan and China.