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India, under Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, accounts for 27 per cent of the world economy.
Sacking of Delhi by the Persian Nadir Shah and the loot of all its treasures.
British under Clive defeat Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula to become rulers of Bengal, the richest province of India.
Marathas recapture Delhi.
Warren Hastings appointed as first Governor General of India.
Tipu Sultan is killed in battle against 5,000 British soldiers who storm and raze his capital, Srirangapatna (Seringapatam).
British conquer the Sindh region (present-day Pakistan). British promulgate ‘doctrine of lapse’, under which a state is taken over by the British whenever a ruler dies without an heir.
1885: A group of middle-class intellectuals in India, some of them British, establish the Indian National Congress to be a voice of Indian opinion to the British government.
1896: Nationalist leader and Marathi scholar Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920) initiates Ganesha Visarjan and Shivaji festivals to fan Indian nationalism. He is the first to demand ‘purna swaraj’ or complete independence from Britain.
1906: The Muslim League political party is formed in India at British instigation.
1911: Final imperial durbar in Delhi; India’s capital changed from Calcutta to Delhi.
(it is striking that when slavery was abolished, the British government paid compensation, not to the men and women so inhumanely pressed into bondage, but to their former owners, for their ‘loss of property’!)
‘Tharoor might have won the debate—but moral victory eludes India’ wrote Shikha Dalmia in Time, arguing that the Indian government’s performance after Independence indicates that there is no evidence that any reparations paid to India would be spent well, or would reach the intended beneficiaries.
History, in any case, cannot be reduced to some sort of game of comparing misdeeds in different eras; each period must be judged in itself and for its own successes and transgressions.
When Willy Brandt was chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust.
Historian John Keay put it best: ‘The conduct of states, as of individuals, can only be assessed by the standards of their age, not by today’s litigious criteria. Otherwise, we’d all be down on the government of Italy for feeding Christians to the lions.’ Amusing, but indefensible.
Indeed, the best form of atonement by the British might be, as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has suggested, to start teaching unromanticized colonial history in British schools.
The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present.
One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge.
They displaced nawabs and maharajas for a price, emptied their treasuries as it pleased them, took over their states through various methods (including, from the 1840s, the cynical ‘doctrine of lapse’ whenever a ruler died without an heir), and stripped farmers of their ownership of the lands they had tilled for generations.
The India that the British East India Company conquered was no primitive or barren land, but the glittering jewel of the medieval world.
Nearly every kind of manufacture or product known to the civilized world—nearly every kind of creation of man’s brain and hand, existing anywhere, and prized either for its utility or beauty—had long been produced in India. India was a far greater industrial and manufacturing nation than any in Europe or any other in Asia. Her textile goods—the fine products of her looms, in cotton, wool, linen and silk—were famous over the civilized world; so were her exquisite jewellery and her precious stones cut in
every lovely form; so were her pottery, porcelains, ceramics of every kind, quality, color and beautiful shape; so were her fine works in metal—iron, steel, silver and gold. She had great architecture—equal in beauty to any in the world. She had great engineering works. She had great merchants, great businessmen, great bankers and financiers. Not only was she the greatest shipbuilding nation, but she had great commerce and trade by land and sea which extended to all known civilized countries. Such was the India which the British found when they came.
India’s share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent. The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India. It
It is said that when Nadir Shah and his forces returned home, they had stolen so much from India that all taxes were eliminated in Persia for the next three years.
In the eight years after he took over as the Company’s Governor General in 1847, Lord Dalhousie annexed a quarter of a million square miles of territory from Indian rulers.
‘What honour is left to us?’, the historian William Dalrymple quotes a Mughal official named Narayan Singh as asking after 1765, ‘when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms?’
the British systematically set about destroying India’s textile manufacturing and exports, substituting Indian textiles by British ones manufactured in England. Ironically, the British used Indian raw material and exported the finished products back to India and the rest of the world, the industrial equivalent of adding insult to injury.
Indian textiles were remarkably cheap—so much so that Britain’s cloth manufacturers, unable to compete, wanted them eliminated.
stark illustration of the devastation this caused could be seen in Dhaka, once the great centre of muslin production, whose population fell from several lakhs in 1760 to about 50,000 by the 1820s. (Fittingly, Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh, is once again a thriving centre of textile and garment production.)
Rural poverty was a direct result of British actions.
From the great manufacturing nation described by Sunderland, India became a mere exporter of raw materials and foodstuffs, raw cotton, as well as jute, silk, coal, opium, rice, spices and tea. With the collapse of its manufacturing and the elimination of manufactured goods from its export rosters, India’s share of world manufacturing exports fell from 27 per cent to 2 per cent under British rule.
Taxation (and theft labelled as taxation) became a favourite British form of exaction.
The British extracted from India approximately £18,000,000 each year between 1765 and 1815. ‘There are few kings in Europe’, wrote the Comte de Châtelet, French ambassador to London, ‘richer than the Directors of the English East India Company.’
The East India Company created, for the first time in Indian history, the landless peasant, deprived of his traditional source of sustenance.
The scale and extent of British theft in India can be gauged by the impact of Indian-acquired wealth upon England itself.
Nabobs were often Company officials who indulged in private trade on their own account while on the Company’s business.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the nabobs’ diamonds were not hailed as jewels in Britain’s imperial crown or prized imperial symbols, as the famed Kohinoor diamond would later be. Instead they were both envied and attacked as imports that pinched the purses of domestic Britons—and threatened to change British politics fundamentally.
other words, the nabobs and their money were changing British politics during the late eighteenth-century expansion of Britain’s Indian empire.
Macaulay added that whereas evil regimes could be overthrown by an oppressed people, the English were not so easily dislodged. Such an indictment, coming from a liberal Englishman and an architect of the Empire, with whom we will have other bones to pick later, is impossible to contradict.
The British ran three major types of revenue systems: zamindari, mostly in eastern India and a third of the Madras Presidency; raiyatwari or ryotwari in much of the south and parts of the north; and mahalwari in western India.
The English-educated Romesh Chunder Dutt, an early Indian voice of economic nationalism, acknowledging that some earlier Muslim rulers had also levied swingeing taxes, pointed out that ‘the difference was this, that what the Mahomedan rulers claimed they could never fully realize; what the British rulers claimed they realized with vigour’. The land tax imposed in India averaged between 80–90 per cent of the rental. Within thirty years, land revenue collected just in Bengal went up from £817,553 to £2,680,000.
In Bengal, the British ignored the hereditary rights of the zamindars and sold their estates by auction to enhance the Company’s revenues.
When its mismanagement and oppression culminated in the Revolt of 1857, called by many Indian historians the First War of Independence but trivialized by the British themselves as the
‘Sepoy Mutiny’, the Crown took over the administration of this ‘Jewel in the Crown’ of Her Britannic Majesty’s vast empire.
The drain of resources from India remained explicitly part of British policy.
By the end of the nineteenth century, India was Britain’s biggest source of revenue, the world’s biggest purchaser of British exports and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants and soldiers all at India’s own expense. We literally paid for our own oppression.
Ramsay MacDonald estimated in the late 1920s that some 7,500 Englishmen were receiving some twenty million pounds annually from India as pension.)
In 1922, for instance, 64 per cent of the total revenue of the Government of India was devoted to paying for British Indian troops despatched abroad. No other army in the world, as Durant observed at the time, consumed so large a proportion of public revenues.
per cent of India’s GNP was transferred to Britain each year.
