It's from the India Office Records at the British Library.

The point, I think, is to stress that its status under EIC rule — before the British Raj — was slightly more complex than that.

The sale of Alaska only a few years later was a clear admission of the government’s colonial overstretch. By setting foot there, Vladimir Putin stands before a monument to both the reach of Russian overseas colonialism and the scale of its failure. end/

If anything, Alaska was a laboratory for Russia’s legal colonial vocabulary — the only place in the empire where Russian settlers and their descendants were officially classified as “Creoles” or “colonial citizens” inhabiting in a “colonial territory.” 5/

The plan was to place Alaska under the Chief Ruler of the Colonies, appointed by the emperor, and to create a Colonial Council composed of both government officials and RAC representatives. 4/

After the Indian Rebellion of 1857, as company rule came under fire and Britain imposed direct crown administration, similar debates were unfolding in the tsar’s halls of power. By 1865, the RAC’s inefficiency prompted the government to take control of the colony. 3/

Administered by the joint-stock chartered Russian-American Company, which created its own system of governance, exploitation, and resource extraction, Russian America emulated the practices of St. Petersburg’s Western colonial rivals, with British India as the prime example. 2/

From Pavel Svin'in's Kartiny Rossii (1839).