George Campbell (civil servant)

Sir George Campbell, KCSI, DCL (1824 – 18 February 1892) was a Scottish member of the Indian Civil Service, holding a variety of administrative positions, acting as a judge of the High Court, Calcutta, and rising at the end of his career to the position of Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal.

[1] He was appointed to the Bengal Civil Service from Haileybury in 1842, and, making the voyage round the Cape in a P. and O. Steamer, arrived in India on the 25th December 1842.

He served in Rohilkhand in subordinate revenue and judicial appointments from 1843 to 1846; was in charge of several districts and political Divisions of the Cis-Sutlej states from 1846 to 1851, and was mentioned with special praise by Lord Dalhousie.

While on furlough in 1868-70 he became a candidate for Dumbartonshire in the Liberal interest, but retired from his candidature before the general election: he then published his work on Irish Land Tenure, and was made a Doctor of Civil Law of the University of Oxford.

Campbell negotiated powers to appoint officers to make a settlement of land rights issues, to restore dispossessed tenants, to settle rents and to record the customs and usages of the people.

[7] Sandwiched between these two events, a punitive expedition was mounted to rescue British subjects captured by members of the Mizo people - called Lushais - and to convince the hill tribes of the region that they had nothing to gain and everything to lose by placing themselves in a hostile position towards the British Government.

With his proclamation on 4 July 1873 during the Pabna Peasant Uprisings, guaranteeing government support of peasants against excessive zamindar demands he ensured that the protest remained peaceful, at the same time antagonising the landlords and his namesake George Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll at that time Secretary of State for India.

Campbell's biographers in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography assert that "his failure as a politician was complete":[10] The retired proconsul's discordant tones and self-importance—the subject of covert mockery in official Bengal—incurred open derision at Westminster, where he spoke, or tried to speak, far too often.