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.
