Comment by throwup238

> 1. The Colonial Service never administered India, the biggest colony.

And by that point the East India Company had one of the largest armies on earth.

It wasn’t that their administration was effective, it just didn’t care what happened as long as the plunder rolled in. It was backed by the largest Navy in the world and largest private army, which allowed it to devolve most functions to local puppets which implemented them brutally (and why the EIC was eventually nationalized). For example the Mughal bureaucracy alone was massive and they just coopted it, as long as they had the means to physically enforce their control.