Ceded and Conquered Provinces
Region of British India under Company rule (1805–34)
The Ceded and Conquered Provinces constituted a region in northern India that was ruled by the British East India Company from 1805 to 1834; it corresponded approximately—in present-day India—to all regions in Uttar Pradesh state with the exception of the Lucknow and Faizabad divisions of Awadh; in addition, it included the Delhi territory and, after 1816, the Kumaun division and a large part of the Garhwal division of present-day Uttarakhand state. In 1836, the region became the North-Western Provinces (under a Lieutenant-Governor), and in 1904, the Agra Province within the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh.
Ceded Provinces
At the start of the 19th century, only the Benares division and the fort of Allahabad in present-day Uttar Pradesh were under British rule. In 1801, the Nawab of Awadh, Saadat Ali, ceded some territory to the British in return for protection against a threat of attack from the north-west by Zaman Shah Durrani, the grandson of Ahmad Shah Durrani. The territory included the Gorakhpur and Rohilkhand divisions; the districts of Allahabad, Fatehpur, Cawnpore, Etawah, Mainpuri, Etah; the southern part of Mirzapur; and the terai parganas of Kumaun, and came to be known as the Ceded Provinces. A year later the Nawab of Farrukhabad ceded Farrukhabad district to the British.
Conquered Provinces
With the outbreak the Second Anglo-Maratha War, General Lake, took the Meerut division (including Aligarh, after the Battle of Ally Ghur), and soon, the rest of the Agra division (including Agra city), and the districts around Delhi. In addition, most of the trans-Jamuna districts of Banda and Hamirpur were added, as well as a small area in Jalaun district.
In 1816, under the Treaty of Sugauli signed at the conclusion of the Anglo-Nepalese War (1814–1816), the Kumaon division and Dehradun district of present-day Uttarakhand state were annexed as well.
Administration
The Ceded and Conquered Provinces were a part of the Bengal Presidency of British India under the administration of the Governor-General-in-Council.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Ceded and Conquered Provinces” as region of British India under Company rule (1805–34). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as region of British India under Company rule (1805–34). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4478340. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1805, 1834, 1816 and 1836.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Ceded and Conquered Provinces” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.