Richard Burn (Indologist)

Sir Richard Burn CSI (1 February 1871 – 26 July 1947) was a civil servant in British India, historian of India and numismatist. He was the editor of Volume IV of The Cambridge History of India and contributed four chapters to Volume VI of that work on the Indian political situation after 1900.

Burn was born in Liverpool, educated at the Liverpool Institute, then at Christ Church College, University of Oxford.

Burn entered the Indian Civil Service in 1891. He became Under-Secretary to the Government of the United Provinces in 1897, Superintendent of the Census 1900, and of the Imperial Gazetteer in 1902, and editor in 1905.

He was Secretary to the Government of the United Provinces, and member of the Legislative Council, from 1910 (Chief Secretary, 1912). He became a Commissioner in 1918 and member of the Board of Revenue, United Provinces, in 1922. In 1926 he was Acting Finance Member. Burn retired in 1927.

Burn was awarded the Kaiser-i-Hind gold medal for famine services in India in 1907–08.

Burn was the third editor in India of the new edition of The Imperial Gazetteer of India, replacing Sir William Stevenson Meyer who had himself replaced Sir Herbert Risley, both of whom had been promoted to more senior positions. The Gazetteer was published in 26 volumes at Oxford from 1909. The first edition had been published in 1881 and the second in 1885–87.

In a paper read before the Indian Section of The Royal Society of Arts in 1908, Burn described the great efforts that had been made to improve on earlier editions of the Gazetteer, including a vastly expanded contents and the inclusion of a detailed atlas. He reported that it had taken years of discussion to settle the form of the work:

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