The administration set up after 1849 under John and Henry Lawrence was built on a district officer with very wide personal powers who was expected to be in the saddle, to know the villages and to settle disputes himself.
It produced the settlement reports, district by district, which recorded landholding, tenure, custom, castes, wells, crops and rents in enormous detail. Those reports remain the single richest documentary source on nineteenth-century Punjab villages and almost nobody reads them.
It also produced the customary law compilations, which froze fluid local practice into written rules on inheritance and land, and made caste and tribe into legal categories they had not previously been.
The system cut the land revenue demand from what the Sikh state had taken, which bought consent, and it built the canal network, which changed the province permanently.
It was paternalist and it was authoritarian, and it was admired in Britain precisely because it dispensed with the legal apparatus that governed the older provinces. Jallianwala Bagh in 1919 was the same doctrine applied in a city.
The Punjab School of administration was a style rather than an institution: paternalist, personal, suspicious of formal law, and built around district officers who toured constantly.
John Lawrence and the men around him after 1849 set it, and the province was held by summary powers and by a very small number of Europeans.
Its consequences run through everything: the settlement system, the recruitment of the peasantry into the army, the alienation act, and the belief that Punjab was best governed by men on horseback rather than by courts.