Let's go to the Thought Bubble. In most cases, Europeans ruled their colonies with the help of, and sometimes completely through, intermediaries and collaborators. For example, in the 1890s in India, there were fewer than 1,000 British administrators supposedly ruling over 300 million Indians. The vast majority of British troops at any given time in India, more than two-thirds, were in fact Indians under the command of British officers. Because of their small numbers relative to local populations, most European colonizers resorted to indirect rule, relying on the governments that were already there but exerting control over their leaders. Frederick Lugard, who was Britain's head honcho in Nigeria for a time, called this rule through and by the natives. This worked particularly well with British administrators, who were primarily middle-class men but had aristocratic pretensions and were often pleased to associate with the highest echelons of Indian or African society.