The Punjab Board of Administration
After annexation in 1849, the Punjab Board of Administration combined powers before departmental government replaced it; accounts differ on dates.
Punjab
History · A guide to the archive
Colonial records and public debate
Compare administrative reports, land records, railway accounts, census methods and competing arguments through their cited passages.
How to approach this subject
Choose one document and identify its author, date and purpose. Read the cited passage before moving from a district case to a wider claim. Ask whether it records a proposal, a rule, an action, a later memory or a researcher’s method. Compare conflicting dates without selecting one merely because it appears in an official volume. Follow inherited references when a later historian quotes an earlier letter or uses a statistical series. These entries offer several kinds of evidence to practise that distinction. Their notes show what was inspected and which original files, interviews or later outcomes were not independently checked.
An intentional selection
Begin with these entries
Land settlement under British rule
Follow two district settlements through river-affected assessments, official judgment and negotiations over payment dates, keeping each case in its own setting.
Muzaffargarh and Jhelum
The Chenab Colony
Read the Chenab Colony through its later reassessment and administrative ending, alongside an anonymous settler’s account of labour and irrigation difficulties.
Historical Chenab Colony
The Lower Bari Doab Colony
Examine dated Lower Bari Doab grant conditions and a later family account, distinguishing official obligations, conditional ownership and remembered settlement.
Lower Bari Doab; Chak 42/LBD
Railways and the transformation of Punjab
Punjab’s railways connected wheat traffic, Lahore’s urban development and debates over the conditions of third-class travel.
Punjab and the North Western network
Lahore as a colonial capital
Read Lahore’s colonial capital through adapted government premises, municipal institutions and an 1885 debate over who could speak for the city’s residents.
Lahore
Census categories and identity in Punjab
Follow Punjab census answers through copying, sorting and compilation, then examine how a later researcher made changing categories comparable across time.
Historical Punjab
The Punjab Land Alienation Act 1900
Read the 1900 Punjab land law through its commencement, permissions and legal categories, alongside a later study of mortgage credit and agricultural outcomes.
Historical Punjab
Agrarian protests of 1907
Read the 1907 Punjab protests through Rai’s own argument and named parliamentary speakers, separating agrarian grievances, political claims and detention.
Punjab and Commons debates