An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

The drain of resources from India remained explicitly part of British policy. The Marquess of Salisbury, using a colourful metaphor as Secretary of State for India in the 1860s and 1870s, said: ‘As India is to be bled, the lancet should be directed to those parts where the blood is congested… [rather than] to those which are already feeble for the want of it.’ The ‘blood’, of course, was money, and its ‘congestion’ offered greater sources of revenue than the ‘feeble areas’. (Salisbury went on to become prime minister.) Cecil Rhodes openly avowed that imperialism was an essential solution to the cries for bread among the unemployed working-class of England, since it was the responsibility of colonial statesmen to acquire lands to settle the surplus population and create markets for goods from British factories.