The political vicissitudes through which this tract of country passed in earlier times are described under INDIA : History. It will be sufficient here to trace the steps by which it passed under British rule. In 1765, after the battle of Buxar, when the nawab of Oudh had been decisively defeated and Shah Alam, the Mogul emperor, was a suppliant in the British camp, Lord Clive was con tent to claim no acquisition of territory. The whole of Oudh was restored to the Nawab, and Shah Alam received as an imperial apanage the province of Allahabad and Kora in the lower Doab, with a British garrison in the fort of Allahabad. Warren Hastings augmented the territory of Oudh by lending the nawab a British army to conquer Rohilkhand, and by making over to him Allaha bad and Kora on the ground that Shah Alam had placed himself in the power of the Mahrattas. At the same time he received from Oudh the sovereignty over the province of Benares. Lord Welles ley in 18o1 obtained from the nawab of Oudh the cession of Rohil khand, the lower Doab, and the Gorakhpur division, thus enclosing Oudh on all sides except the north. In 5804, as the result of Lord Lake's victories in the Mahratta War, the rest of the Doab and part of Bundelkhand, together with Agra, were secured from Sindia. In 1815 the Kumaon division was acquired after the Gurkha War, and a further portion of Bundelkhand from the peshwa in 1817. These new acquisitions, known as the ceded and
conquered provinces, continued to be administered by the gov ernor-general as part of Bengal. In 1835 an act of parliament authorized the appointment of a lieutenant-governor for the North-Western Provinces, as they were then styled. They included the Delhi territory, transferred after the Mutiny to the Punjab; and also (after 1853) the Saugor and Nerbudda territories, which in 1861 became part of the Central Provinces. Meanwhile Oudh remained under its nawab, who was permitted to assume the title of king in 1819, until it was annexed in 1856 and constituted a separate chief commissionership. Then followed the Mutiny, when all signs of British rule were for a time swept away through out the greater part of the two provinces. The lieutenant-governor died when shut up in the fort at Agra, and Oudh was only recon quered after several campaigns lasting for eighteen months.
In 1877 the offices of lieutenant-governor of the North-Western Provinces and chief commissioner of Oudh were combined in the same person ; and in 1902, when the new name of United Provinces was introduced, the title of chief commissioner was dropped, though Oudh still retains some marks of its former independence. In 1920 the tract was created a governor's province under the new constitution.