Everything about Company Rule In India totally explained
Company rule in India (sometimes,
Company Raj, "
raj," lit. "rule" in
Hindi) refers to the rule or dominion of the
British East India Company on the Indian subcontinent. This is variously taken to have commenced in 1757, after the
Battle of Plassey, when the
Nawab of Bengal surrendered his dominions to the Company, in 1765, when the Company was granted the
diwani, or the right to collect revenue, in
Bengal and
Bihar, or in 1772, when the Company established a capital in
Calcutta, appointed its first
Governor-General,
Warren Hastings, and became directly involved in governance. The rule lasted until 1858, when, consequent to the
Government of India Act 1858, the
British government assumed the task of directly administering India.
Expansion and territory
The
English East India Company (hereafter, the Company) was founded in 1600, as
The Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies. It gained footing in India in 1612, after
Mughal emperor
Jahangir granted it the rights to establish a
factory (a trading post) in
Surat. In 1640, consequent to receiving similar permission from the local
Vijayanagara ruler, a second factory was established in
Madras. Soon, in 1668, the Company leased
Bombay island, a former Portuguese outpost recently gifted to
England as part of the
dowry of
Catherine of Braganza for her marriage to
Charles II. Thereafter, in 1687, the company moved its headquarters from Surat to Bombay. Next, in 1690, a Company
settlement was established in
Calcutta, again after receiving such rights from of the
Mughal emperor, and the Company now began its lengthy presence on the
Indian subcontinent. During this time, other
companies, established by the
Portuguese,
Dutch,
French, and
Danish, were similarly expanding in the region.
Although the British had earlier ruled in the factory areas, the beginning of British rule is often dated from the 1757
Battle of Plassey.
Robert Clive's victory was consolidated in 1764 at the
Battle of Buxar (in
Bihar), where the emperor,
Shah Alam II, was defeated. As a result, Shah Alam was coerced to appoint the company to be the
diwan for the areas of
Bengal, Bihar, and
Orissa (this pretense of
Mughal control was abandoned in 1827). The company thus became the supreme, but not the titular, power in much of the
lower Gangetic plain. The Company also expanded from their bases at Bombay and Madras. The
Anglo-Mysore Wars of 1766 to 1799 and the
Anglo-Maratha Wars of 1772 to 1818 placed the Company dominant over much India south of the
Sutlej River.
The company's dominance of India took two major forms. The first was the use of
subsidiary alliances between the company and the local rulers, these agreements were essentially feudal in nature and under them the local rulers gave up much of their control on foreign affairs to the Company and in return had their independance guaranteed. This development created the
Native States, or
Princely States, of the Hindu
maharaja and the Muslim
nawabs. The second and least favoured method of control was the outright governance of areas; it's these parts of the subcontinent that are more properly called 'British India'.
At the turn of the 19th century, Governor-General
Wellesley began what became two decades of accelerated expansion of Company territories. Prominent among the princely states were:
Cochin (1791),
Jaipur (1794),
Travancore (1795),
Hyderabad (1798),
Mysore (1799),
Cis-Sutlej Hill States (1815),
Central India Agency (1819), Kutch and Gujarat Gaikwad territories (1819),
Rajputana (1818), and
Bahawalpur (1833).
The Governors-General
| Governor-General |
Period of Tenure |
Events |
| Warren Hastings |
20 October 1773–1 February 1785 |
Bengal famine of 1770 (1769–1773)
Rohilla War (1773–1774
First Anglo-Maratha War (1777–1783)
Second Anglo-Mysore War (1780–1784)
|
| John MacPherson (locum tenens) |
1 February 1785–12 September 1786 |
|
| Charles Cornwallis |
12 September 1786–28 October 1793 |
Permanent Settlement
Third Anglo-Mysore War (1789–1792) |
| John Shore |
28 October 1793–March 1798 |
|
| Alured Clarke (locum tenens) |
March 1798–18 May 1798 |
|
| Richard Wellesley |
18 May 1798–30 July 1805 |
Fourth Anglo-Mysore War (1798–1799)
Second Anglo-Maratha War (1803 - 1805) |
| Charles Cornwallis (second term) |
30 July 1805–5 October 1805 |
|
| George Hilario Barlow (locum tenens) |
10 October 1805–31 July 1807 |
Vellore Mutiny (July 10, 1806) |
| Lord Minto |
31 July 1807–4 October 1813 |
Invasion of Java
Occupation of Mauritius |
| Marquess of Hastings |
4 October 1813–9 January 1823 |
Anglo-Nepal War of 1814
Annexation of Kumaon, Garhwal, and east Sikkim.
Third Anglo-Maratha War (1817–1818) |
| John Adam (locum tenens) |
9 January 1823–1 August 1823 |
|
| Lord Amherst |
1 August 1823–13 March 1828 |
First Anglo–Burmese War (1823–1826)
Annexation of Assam, Manipur, Arakan, and Tenasserim from Burma |
| William Butterworth Bayley (locum tenens) |
13 March 1828–4 July 1828 |
|
| William Bentinck |
4 July 1828–20 March 1835 |
Abolition of Sati
Suppression of Thuggee |
| Charles Metcalfe (locum tenens) |
20 March 1835–4 March 1836 |
|
| Lord Auckland |
4 March 1836–28 February 1842 |
First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842)
Massacre of Elphinstone's army |
| Lord Ellenborough |
28 February 1842–June 1844 |
First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842)
Conquest of Sindh |
| William Wilberforce Bird (locum tenens) |
June 1844–23 July 1844 |
|
| Henry Hardinge |
23 July 1844–12 January 1848 |
First Anglo-Sikh War (1845–1846)
Annexation of Jullundur Doab |
| Marquess of Dalhousie |
12 January 1848–28 February 1856 |
Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848–1849)
Annexation of Punjab, NWFP, and Kashmir
Sale of Kashmir to Gulab Singh of Jammu
Second Anglo-Burmese War (1852–1853)
Annexation of Lower Burma
Annexation of Satara, Nagpur, and Jhansi under Doctrine of Lapse
Annexation of Berar and Awadh
Ganges Canal, Indian Railways, Telegraph in India |
| Charles Canning |
28 February 1856–1 November 1858 |
Indian Rebellion of 1857
Liquidation of the English East India Company under Government of India Act 1858 |
Regulation of Company rule
Until
Clive's victory at
Plassey, the East India Company territories in India, which consisted largely of the
presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, were governed by the mostly autonomous and sporadically unmanageable
town councils, composed of merchants; the councils barely had enough powers for the effective management of the local affairs, and the ensuing lack of oversight of the overall Company operations in India, led to some grave abuses by Company officers or their allies. Clive's victory, and the award of the
diwani of the rich region of Bengal, brought India into the public spotlight in Britain. By 1772, the Company needed British government loans to stay afloat, and there was fear in London that the Company's corrupt practices could soon seep into British business and public life. The rights and duties of the British government with regards the Company's new territories also came to be examined. The British parliament then held several inquiries and in 1773, during the premiership of
Lord North, enacted the
Regulating Act, "for the better management of the affairs of the East India Company as well in India as in Europe."
Image:Company rule calcutta from ftwilliam.jpg|A view of Calcutta from Fort William, 1807.
Image:Company rule government hse fort stgeorge2.jpg|Government House, Fort St. George, Madras, the headquarters of the Madras Presidency.
Image:Warren-Hasting.jpg|Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of Fort William (Bengal) who oversaw the Company's territories in India.
Image:Company rule trial warren hastings2.jpg|The trial of Warren Hastings in the Court of Westminster Hall, 1789.
Although
Lord North himself wanted the Company's territories to be taken over by the British state, the result was a compromise in which the Regulating Act—although implying the ultimate sovereignty of the British Crown over these new territories—asserted that the Company could act as a sovereign power on behalf of the Crown, while being concurrently subject to oversight and regulation by the British government and parliament. The Court of Directors of the Company were required under the Act to submit all communications regarding civil, military, and revenue matters in India for scrutiny by the British government. For the governance of the Indian territories, the act asserted the supremacy of the
Presidency of Fort William (Bengal) over those of
Fort St. George (Madras) and
Bombay; it also nominated a
Governor-General (
Warren Hastings) and four councilors for administering the Bengal presidency (and for overseeing the Company's operations in India). "The subordinate Presidencies were forbidden to wage war or make treaties without the previous consent of the Governor-General of Bengal in Council, except in case of imminent necessity. The Governors of these Presidencies were directed in general terms to obey the orders of the Governor-General-in-Council, and to transmit to him intelligence of all important matters." The Board of Control consisted of six members, which included one Secretary of State from the British cabinet, as well as the
Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Mindful of the reports of abuse and corruption in Bengal by Company servants, the India Act itself noted numerous complaints that "'divers Rajahs, Zemindars, Polygars, Talookdars, and landholders"' had been unjustly deprived of 'their lands, jurisdictions, rights, and priviliges'." The India Act also created in each of the three presidencies a number of administrative and military posts, which included: a Governor and three Councilors, one of which was the Commander in Chief of the Presidency army. Although the supervisory powers of the Governor-General-in-Council in Bengal (over Madras and Bombay) were extended—as they were again in the Charter Act of 1793—the subordinate presidencies continued to exercise some autonomy until both the extension of British possessions into becoming contiguous and the advent of faster communications in the next century.
Still, the new Governor-General appointed in 1786, Lord Cornwallis, not only had more power than Hastings, but also had the support of a powerful British cabinet minister,
Henry Dundas, who, as
Secretary of state for the
Home Office, was in charge of the overall India policy. From 1784 onwards, the British government had the final word on all major appointments in India; a candidate's suitability for a senior position was often decided by the strength of his political connections rather than that of his administrative ability. Although this practice resulted in many Governor-General nominees being chosen from Britain's conservative landed gentry, there were some liberals as well, such as
Lord William Bentinck and Lord Dalhousie. Although the effort was chiefly coordinated by
Edmund Burke, it also drew support from within the British government. With increased British power in India supervision of Indian affairs by the
British Crown and
parliament increased as well; by the 1820s British nationals could transact business or engage in missionary work under the protection of the Crown in the three presidencies. In this system, the assortment of rights associated with land were not possessed by a "land owner," but rather shared by the several parties with stake in the land, including the peasant cultivator, the
zamindar, and the state. The
zamindar served as an intermediary who procured
economic rent from the cultivator, and after withholding a percentage for his own expenses, made available the rest, as
revenue to the state. However, the company provided little relief either through reduced taxation or by relief efforts, and the economic and cultural impact of the famine was felt decades later, even becoming, a century later, the subject of
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's novel
Anandamath.
In 1773, after
Oudh ceded the tributary state of
Benaras, the revenue collection system was extended to the territory with a Company
Resident in charge.
Image:Company rule riverside scene2 bengal1860.jpg|A riverside scene in rural east Bengal (present-day Bangladesh), 1860.
Image:Cornwallis.nationalgallery.jpg|Lord Cornwallis, the Governor-General who established the Permanent Settlement in Bengal.
Image:Company rule kochh mandai2 woman1860.jpg|A Kochh Mandai woman of east Bengal (present-day Bangladesh) shown with a broad-bladed agricultural knife and carrying a freshly harvested jackfruit. (1860)
Image:Company rule paddy fields madras2.jpg|Paddy fields in the Madras Presidency, ca. 1880. Two-thirds of the presidency fell under the Ryotwari system.
The Company inherited a revenue collection system from the Mughals in which the heaviest proportion of the tax burden fell on the cultivators, with one-third of the production reserved for imperial entitlement; this pre-colonial system became the Company revenue policy's baseline. However, there was vast variation across India in the methods by which the revenues were collected; with this complication in mind, a Committee of Circuit toured the districts of expanded Bengal presidency in order to make a five-year settlement, consisting of five-yearly inspections and temporary
tax farming. In their overall approach to revenue policy, Company officials were guided by two goals: first, preserving as much as possible the balance of rights and obligations that were traditionally claimed by the farmers who cultivated the land and the various intermediaries who collected tax on the state's behalf and who reserved a cut for themselves; and second, identifying those sectors of the rural economy that would maximize both revenue and security. According to one estimate, this was 20% higher than the revenue demand before 1757. Over the next century, partly as a result of land surveys, court rulings, and property sales, the change was given practical dimension. An influence on the development of this revenue policy were the economic theories then current, which regarded agriculture as the engine of economic development, and consequently stressed the fixing of revenue demands in order to encourage growth. The expectation behind the permanent settlement was that knowledge of a fixed government demand would encourage the zamindars to increase both their average outcrop and the land under cultivation, since they'd be able to retain the profits from the increased output; in addition, it was envisaged that land itself would become a marketable form of property that could be purchased, sold, or mortgaged.
However, these expectations were not realized in practice, and in many regions of Bengal, the peasants bore the brunt of the increased demand, there being little protection for their traditional rights in the new legislation. The new owners were often
Brahmin and
Kayastha employees of the Company who had a good grasp of the new system, and, in many cases, had prospered under it.
Since the zamindars were never able to undertake costly improvements to the land envisaged under the Permanent Settlement, some of which required the removal of the existing farmers, they soon became rentiers who lived off the rent from their tenant farmers. In southern India,
Thomas Munro, who would later become Governor of
Madras, promoted the
ryotwari system, in which the government settled land-revenue directly with the peasant farmers, or
ryots. This was, in part, a consequence of the turmoil of the
Anglo-Mysore Wars, which had prevented the emergence of a class of large landowners; in addition, Munro and others felt that
ryotwari was closer to traditional practice in the region and ideologically more progressive, allowing the benefits of Company rule to reach the lowest levels of rural society. Another keystone of the new system of temporary settlements was the classification of agricultural fields according to soil type and produce, with average rent rates fixed for the period of the settlement. According to Mill, taxation of land rent would promote efficient agriculture and simultaneously prevent the emergence of a "parasitic landlord class." In the 1850s, a scandal erupted when it was discovered that some Indian revenue agents of the Company were using torture to meet the Company's revenue demands. In all areas other than the
Bengal Presidency, land settlement work involved a continually repetitive process of surveying and measuring plots, assessing their quality, and recording landed rights, and constituted a large proportion of the work of
Indian Civil Service officers working for the government. The most important such support came from the
subsidiary alliances with Indian princes during the first 75 years of Company rule. In return, the Company undertook the "defense of these subordinate allies and treated them with traditional respect and marks of honor." The
high caste rural Hindu
Rajputs and
Brahmans of this region (known as
purabias (
Hindi, lit. "easterners")) had earlier been recruited by
Mughal armies for two hundred years;
|-
! British troops !! colspan="3" | Indian troops
|-
! !! Bengal Presidency !! Madras Presidency !! Bombay Presidency
|-
| || align="center" | 24,000 || align="center" | 24,000 || align="center" | 9,000
|-
! 13,000 !! colspan="3" | Total Indian troops: 57,000
|-
! colspan="4" | Grand total, British and Indian troops: 70,000
|}
|}
The Bengal army was used in military campaigns in other parts of India and abroad: in
Java and
Ceylon, and also to provide crucial support to a weak
Madras army in the
Third Anglo-Mysore War in 1891.
| East India Company armies on the eve of the Vellore Mutiny of 1806 |
| Presidencies |
British troops |
Indian troops |
Total |
| Bengal |
7,000 |
57,000 |
64,000 |
| Madras |
11,000 |
53,000 |
64,000 |
| Bombay |
6,500 |
20,000 |
26,500 |
| Total |
24,500 |
130,000 |
154,500 |
|}
As the East India Company expanded its territories, it added irregular "local corps," which were not as well trained as the army. In 1846, after the
Second Anglo-Sikh War, a frontier brigade was raised in the
Cis-Sutlej Hill States mainly for police work; in addition, in 1849, the "Punjab Irregular Force" was added on the frontier.
|-
! Presidencies !! colspan="4" | British troops !! colspan="5" | Indian troops
|-
! !! Cavalry !! Artillery !! Infantry !! Total !! Cavalry !! Artillery !! Sappers
&
Miners !! Infantry !! Total
|-
| align="center" | Bengal || align="center" | 1,366 || align="center" | 3,063 || align="center" | 17,003 || align="center" | 21,432 || align="center" | 19,288 || align="center" | 4,734 || align="center" | 1,497 || align="center" | 112,052 || align="center" | 137,571
|-
| align="center" | Madras || align="center" | 639 || align="center" | 2,128 || align="center" | 5,941 || align="center" | 8,708 || align="center" | 3,202 || align="center" | 2,407 || align="center" | 1,270 || align="center" | 42,373 || align="center" | 49,252
|-
| align="center" | Bombay || align="center" | 681 || align="center" | 1,578 || align="center" | 7,101 || align="center" | 9,360 || align="center" | 8,433 || align="center" | 1,997 || align="center" | 637 || align="center" | 33,861 || align="center" | 44,928
|-
| align="center" | Local forces
&
contingents || || || || || align="center" | 6,796 || align="center" | 2,118 || || align="center" | 23,640 || align="center" | 32,554
|-
| align="center" | " "
(unclassified) || || || || || || || || || align="center" | 7,756
|-
|Military police || || || || || || || || || align="center" | 38,977
|-
|align="center" |
Total || align="center" | 2,686 || align="center" | 6,769 || align="center" | 30,045 || align="center" | 39,500 || align="center" | 37,719 || align="center" | 11,256 || align="center" | 3,404 || align="center" | 211,926 || align="center" | 311,038
|-
! colspan="9" |
Grand Total, British and Indian troops !! 350,538
|}
|}
In the
Indian Rebellion of 1857 almost the entire Bengal army, both regular and irregular, revolted. With British victories in wars or with annexation, as the extent of British jurisdiction expanded, the soldiers were now not only expected to serve in less familiar regions (such as in
Burma in the
Anglo-Burmese Wars in 1856), but also make do without the "foreign service," remuneration that had previously been their due, and this caused resentment in the ranks. The Bombay and Madras armies, and the Hyderabad contingent, however, remained loyal. The Punjab Irregular Force, not only didn't revolt, but also played an active role in suppressing the mutiny.}}
After gaining the right to collect revenue in Bengal in 1765, the Company largely ceased importing
gold and silver, which it had hitherto used to pay for goods shipped back to Britain. In addition, as under
Mughal rule, land revenue collected in the
Bengal Presidency helped finance the Company's wars in other part of India. Also, from the late 18th century British cotton mill industry began to lobby the government to both tax Indian imports and allow them access to markets in India. The
American Civil War too would have a major impact on India's cotton economy: with the outbreak of the war, American cotton was no longer available to British manufacturers; consequently, demand for Indian cotton soared, and the prices soon quadrupled. This led many farmers in India to switch to cultivating cotton as a quick cash crop; however, with the end of the war in 1865, the demand plummeted again, creating another downturn in the agricultural economy. However, since the Chinese authorities had banned the importation and consumption of opium, the Company engaged them in the
First Opium War, and at its conclusion, under the
Treaty of Nanjing, gained access to five Chinese ports,
Guangzhou,
Xiamen,
Fuzhou,
Shanghai, and
Ningbo; in addition,
Hong Kong was ceded to the
British Crown.
Image:East india company factory sonargaon2.jpg|Photograph of East India Company factory in Painam, Sonargaon, Bangladesh, a major producer of the celebrated Dhaka muslins.
Image:West view mellor muslin mill2.jpg|"Mellor Mill" in Marple, Geater Manchester, England, was constructed in 1790-93 for manufacturing muslin cloth.
Image:Opium godown store patna2.jpg|Opium Godown (Storehouse) in Patna, Bihar (c. 1814). Patna was the centre of the Company opium industry.
Image:Indigo factory bengal2.jpg|Indigo dye factory in Bengal. Bengal was the world's largest producer of natural indigo in the 19th century.
Another major, though erratic, export item was
indigo dye, which was extracted from
natural indigo, and which came to be grown in Bengal and northern
Bihar. In late 17th and early 18th century Europe, blue apparel was favored as a fashion, and blue uniforms were common in the military; consequently, the demand for the dye was high. In 1788, the East India Company offered advances to ten British planters to grow indigo; however, since the new (landed) property rights defined in the
Permanent Settlement, didn't allow them, as Europeans, to buy agricultural land, they'd to in turn offer cash advances to local peasants, and sometimes coerce them, to grow the crop. The European demand for the dye, however, proved to be unstable, and both creditors and cultivators bore the risk of the market crashes in 1827 and 1847. In
Bihar, however, indigo production continued well into the 20th century; the centre of indigo production there,
Champaran district, became the staging ground, in 1917, for
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's first experiment in
non-violent resistance against the
British Raj.
[
]Law
Beginning with the Mayor's Court, established in 1727 for civil litigation in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, justice in the interior came under the company's jurisdiction. In 1772 an elaborate judicial system, known as adalat, established civil and criminal jurisdictions along with a complex set of codes or rules of procedure and evidence. Both Hindu pandits and Muslim qazis (sharia court judges) were recruited to aid the presiding judges in interpreting their customary laws, but in other instances, British common and statutory laws became applicable. In extraordinary situations where none of these systems was applicable, the judges were enjoined to adjudicate on the basis of "justice, equity, and good conscience." The legal profession provided numerous opportunities for educated and talented Indians who were unable to secure positions in the company, and, as a result, Indian lawyers later dominated nationalist politics and reform movements.
Education
Education for the most part was left to the charge of Indians or to private agents who imparted instruction in the vernaculars. But in 1813, the British became convinced of their "duty" to awaken the Indians from intellectual slumber by exposing them to British literary traditions, earmarking a paltry sum for the cause. Controversy between two groups of Europeans - the "Orientalists" and "Anglicists" - over how the money was to be spent prevented them from formulating any consistent policy until 1835 when William Cavendish Bentinck, the governor-general from 1828 to 1835, finally broke the impasse by resolving to introduce the English language as the medium of instruction. English replaced Persian in public administration and education.
Social Reform
The company's education policies in the 1830s tended to reinforce existing lines of socioeconomic division in society rather than bringing general liberation from ignorance and superstition. Whereas the Hindu English-educated minority spearheaded many social and religious reforms either in direct response to government policies or in reaction to them, Muslims as a group initially failed to do so, a position they endeavored to reverse. Western-educated Hindu elites sought to rid Hinduism of its much criticized social evils: the caste system, child marriage, and sati. Religious and social activist Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833), who founded the Brahmo Samaj (Society of Brahma) in 1828, displayed a readiness to synthesize themes taken from Christianity, Deism, and Indian monism, while other individuals in Bombay and Madras initiated literary and debating societies that gave them a forum for open discourse. The exemplary educational attainments and skillful use of the press by these early reformers enhanced the possibility of effecting broad reforms without compromising societal values or religious practices.
Infrastructure Development
The 1850s witnessed the introduction of the three "engines of social improvement" that heightened the British illusion of permanence in India. They were the railroads, the telegraph, and the uniform postal service, inaugurated during the tenure of Dalhousie as governor-general. The first railroad lines were built in 1850 from Howrah (Haora, across the Hughli River from Calcutta) inland to the coalfields at Raniganj, Bihar, a distance of 240 kilometers. In 1851 the first electric telegraph line was laid in Bengal and soon linked Agra, Bombay, Calcutta, Lahore, Varanasi, and other cities. The three different presidency or regional postal systems merged in 1854 to facilitate uniform methods of communication at an all-India level. With uniform postal rates for letters and newspapers - one-half anna and one anna, respectively (sixteen annas equalled one rupee) - communication between the rural and the metropolitan areas became easier and faster. The increased ease of communication and the opening of highways and waterways accelerated the movement of troops, the transportation of raw materials and goods to and from the interior, and the exchange of commercial information.
The railroads didn't break down the social or cultural distances between various groups but tended to create new categories in travel. Separate compartments in the trains were reserved exclusively for the ruling class, separating the educated and wealthy from ordinary people. Similarly, when the Sepoy Rebellion was quelled in 1858, a British official exclaimed that "the telegraph saved India." He envisaged, of course, that British interests in India would continue indefinitely.
Features of Company Rule
Further Information
Get more info on 'Company Rule In India'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://company_rule_in_india.totallyexplained.com">Company rule in India Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
