Indian civil servants played a vital role in British imperial administration in South Asia during the eighteenth century, but were ultimately removed from positions of authority as part of the Permanent Settlement of 1793. Why, after decades of direct rule in Bengal, were Indian civil servants largely removed from the East India Company? Scholars have generally attributed the removal to real or perceived Indian corruption and incompetence, a desire to expand patronage, or British racism. However, newspapers, pamphlet material, Company correspondence, and India Office manuscript material call these explanations into question. Existing scholarship fails to explain the timing of the removal and does not account for broader metropolitan and imperial developments. Instead, this paper argues that the removal of Indian civil servants, and the Permanent Settlement in general, need to be understood as part of a broader political shift at the end of the eighteenth century towards a more autocratic and exclusive system of British imperial governance. Prompted by metropolitan political developments and fueled by imperial competition during the American and French Revolutions, this shift occurred not only in India but across the British Empire. Earlier Whiggish principles were overcome by a reactionary vision of empire which sought to consolidate control by imposing an anglicized imperial bureaucracy that excluded non-British from positions of authority. Though the actions of actors on the ground were important, imperial policy changes were also shaped by ideological contestation in Britain. Further, British racial condescension and domination did not land on Indian shores fully formed, but instead developed over time. While the removal of Indian civil servants established a racial hierarchy that undergirded British rule in the following century, the creation of this hierarchy was not the goal of the removal, but rather a consequence.