Presiding over all of this was the governor-general of India, an executive appointed by the East India Company but, in effect, the monarch of all he surveyed. William Dalrymple quotes one contemporary observer as saying: ‘Of all human conditions, perhaps the most brilliant and at the same time the most anomalous, is that of the Governor-General of British India. A private English gentleman, and the servant of a joint-stock company, during the brief period of his government he is the deputed sovereign of the greatest empire in the world; the ruler of a hundred million men; while dependent kings
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