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 on a national basis. The one feature which distinguished the British negotiations with the Princes during this period from those which preceded the Great Rebellion, is, the larger attention given to matters of common interest such as communications, currencies, tariff and other fiscal policies, rights and sources of irrigation, extradition, extra-territorial jurisdiction etc. In many of these matters, co-ordination of development policy as between British India and the States was secured either by the execution of formal documents or informal exchange of assurances. It was during this period that on the basis of usage, sufferance and conventions, the edifice of political practice was built up. Paramountcy provided British power an elastic instrument for regulating the relations with the Princes and between British India and the States. It was through paramountcy that the British brought about some kind of working arrangement between the two parts of India and enforced a measure of administrative and economic unity over the country.

15. Paramountcy of the British Crown, as British ingenuity developed it, was the coping stone of the imperial edifice in India. It constituted at once a link and a barrier. On the one hand, it provided a nexus between British India and States and thereby integrated the economic and administrative life of the country. On the obverse side, it drove a wedge between the two parts of India. The policy of "Hands off the Indian States" in British India with its reciprocal implication of "Hands off British Indian concerns" for States, which reared up high walls of isolationism around the States, could be made effective only by the operation of paramountcy.

 

16. The growing impact of modern conditions oi life was breaking down the isolation of States from one another and from the rest of India and the States began to be drawn into the vortex of questions, mainly economic, which concerned India as whole. The influences which were working to increase the range of matters in which there was need for a common policy and common action between the Provinces and States gathered momentum during the first World War. The war necessitated the mobilisation of the resources of the entire country; the organisation of the country's war-effort involved closer co-ordination of administrative activity in States a well as Provinces. During the stress of the War, the emphasis was on unity, unity of the British Empire, as a whole, on the one hand, and unity between British India and Indian States, on the other. The War, therefore, greatly accelerated the imperceptible process