After a discussion regarding the absurdity of EIC (a private company) controlling India versus the British rule, I realized that I might incorrectly assume that the EIC rule somehow was more brutal and corrupt than the British rule.

I realise that my assumption regarding a company being more ruthless than a country probably comes from common tropes in modern media. I think that the intention by private people to conquer and benefit from colonizing a country is somehow worse than a country doing so (I don’t know why I think this but I do), obviously the intention of the colonizer doesn’t really matter for the local population. Also I assume a country has more resources to control and brutalize a population than a private company could.

I looked up some material on this and could find that the British state siezed control in 1857 after the first Indian war of independence that was brutally defeated by the EIC, after sentiment in Britain was that the EIC was too brutal (this might be propaganda at the time I guess). But I couldn’t find many details regarding the differences in their attitude to the people of India, the Indian state and the rule of them.

So is it correct to assume that the British rule was less brutal than the EIC? I wonder about how the local populace was affected by the different rulers (I mean the difference in rule between EIC and the British state, I obviously know that the colonization of India was brutal and the exploitation was so severe that one of the richest countries in the world before colonization became one of the poorest). For example was racism as widespread throughout EIC as it later was for the British empire? Was the population more positive towards the British state or EIC? Did the British state just usurp EICs position or did the evolve on it?