An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

India was ‘depleted’, ‘exhausted’ and ‘bled’ by this drain of resources, which made it vulnerable to famine, poverty and suffering.

Angus Maddison concluded clearly: ‘There can be no denial that there was a substantial outflow which lasted for 190 years. If these funds had been invested in India they could have made a significant contribution to raising income levels.’

Britain used the British Indian Army to complete its conquest of the Indian subcontinent in the Kandyan War of 1818 in Ceylon (Sri Lanka); and the Burmese War of 1824-26, in which six of every seven soldiers of the British Indian Army fell as casualties to sickness or war.

Every British soldier posted to India had to be paid, equipped and fed and eventually pensioned by the Government of India, not of Britain.

But India was denied any of the rewards or benefits of imperialism. The sacrifice that Indian troops made for the advancement of British interests, the results of which linger even today, was acknowledged neither in compensation to them nor the families they left behind, nor by any significant accretion to the well-being of India. (And

The assumption of responsibility by the Crown also witnessed the dawn of a new language of colonial justification—the pretence that Britain would govern for the welfare of the Indian people.

Indians paid, in other words, for the privilege of being conquered by the British.

‘The British empire in India was the creation of merchants and it was still at heart a commercial enterprise, which had to operate at profit and respond to the ups and downs of the market. Behind the epaulettes and the jingle of harness, the levees and the balls at Government House, lay the hard calculus of the City of London.’

‘the halcyon days of India are over; she has been drained of a large proportion of the wealth she once possessed, and her energies have been cramped by a sordid system of misrule to which the interests of millions have been sacrificed for the benefit of the few… The gradual impoverishment of the people and country, under the mode of rule established by the British Government, has hastened their fall.’

Before the British East India Company arrived, Bengal, Masulipatnam, Surat, and the Malabar ports of Calicut and Quilon had a thriving shipbuilding industry and Indian shipping plied the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.

The Bengal fleet in the early seventeenth century included 4,000 to 5,000 ships at 400 to 500 tonnes each, built in Bengal and employed there; these numbers increased till the mid-eighteenth century, given the huge popularity of the goods and products they carried.

Duties were imposed on Indian merchant ships moving to and from Indian ports, not just foreign ones. This strangled the native shipping industry to the point of irrelevance in everything but some minor coastal shipping of low-value ‘native’ goods to local consumers.

The experience of Indian shipping confirms that British authorities cynically and deliberately exploited Indian industries in their time of need and otherwise suppressed them.

Indian workmanship and the country’s long shipbuilding tradition were highly valued by British shipwrights, who found themselves adopting many Indian techniques of naval architecture in constructing their own vessels.

the average lifespan of a Bengal-built ship exceeded twenty years, whereas English-built vessels never lasted more than eleven or twelve, and often had to be rebuilt or repaired at Indian ports.

attractive was it for British entrepreneurs to build ships in India that by the second decade of the nineteenth century, there was rising unemployment in the shipbuilding industry at home—shipwrights, caulkers, sawyers and joiners in their hundreds were reported on the unemployment rolls in London.

The advantages for British companies of building ships in India and operating them from there, in other words, began to disappear as a result of policies of deliberate legislative discrimination. India’s once-thriving shipbuilding industry collapsed, and by 1850 was essentially extinct. This had nothing to do, as some have suggested, with changing technology that India could allegedly not keep up with: the collapse began well before steamships had begun to overtake sailing vessels,

One form of colonial discrimination that was almost ubiquitous and extremely effective was the use of currency to separate British businesses from Indian ones, and regulate the opportunities available to each. The division of businesses into ‘sterling’ (companies operating out of London) and ‘rupee’ (companies that operated out of India) created a commercial gulf that could not easily be bridged.

Sterling companies tended to focus on utilities, tea and jute; this meant that there were significant barriers to entry for Indians in these markets, which the British reserved for themselves.

Buffeted by global and imperial forces of demand and supply, India suffered severe price volatility of some 20–30 per cent a year. The

The manipulation of currency, throughout a feature of the colonial enterprise, reached its worst during the Great Depression of 1929-30, when Indian farmers (like those in the North American prairies) grew their grain but discovered no one could afford to buy

Agricultural prices collapsed, but British tax demands did not; and cruelly, the British decided to restrict India’s money supply, fearing that the devaluation of Indian currency would cause losses to the British from a corresponding decline

So Britain insisted that the Indian rupee stay fixed at 1 shilling sixpence, and obliged the Indian government to take notes and coins out of circulation to keep the exchange rate high. The total amount of cash in circulation in the Indian economy fell from some 5 billion rupees in 1929 to 4 billion in 1930 and as low as 3 billion in 1938. Indians sta...

At other times, the steady depreciation of the rupee was a deliberate part of British policy to strengthen the purchasing power of the pound sterling and weaken the economic c...

in the early days of British colonial expansion into India, Indian swords were so far superior to European ones that English troopers in battle would often dismount and swap their own swords for the equipment of the vanquished foe.

India was, in other words, forced to make and use steel that was surplus to its requirements, restricted in its ability to find overseas markets for it, and curbed in every attempt at expansion.

As I have demonstrated, deindustrialization was a deliberate British policy, not an accident. British industry flourished and Indian industry did not because of systematic destruction abetted by tariffs and regulatory measures that stacked the decks in favour of British industry conquering the Indian market, rather than the other way around. The economic exploitation of India was integral to the colonial enterprise. And the vast sums of Indian revenues and loot flowing to England, even if they were somewhat less than the billions of pounds Digby estimated, provided the capital for British industry and made possible the financing of the Industrial Revolution.

The British, however, failed to create such institutions; the foremost Indian research institution under the British empire, the Indian Institute of Science, was endowed by the legendary Jamsetji Tata, not by any British philanthropist,

It is preposterous to suggest that India’s inability to industrialize while the Western world did so was an Indian failure, the result of some sort of native deficiency, rather than the deliberate result of systematically planned policies by those who ruled India, the British.

If India’s GDP went down because it ‘missed the bus’ of industrialization, it was because the British threw Indians under the wheels.

Though Scots constituted barely 9 per cent of Britain’s people, they accounted for 25 per cent of those employed by the British in India.

Every period of disorder throughout Indian history has been followed by a centralizing impulse, and had the British not been the first to take advantage of India’s disorder with superior weaponry, it is entirely possible that an Indian ruler would have accomplished what the British did, and consolidated his rule over most of the subcontinent.

The vision of Indian unity was physically embodied by the Hindu sage Adi Shankara, who travelled from Kerala in the extreme south to Kashmir in the extreme north and from Dwarka in the west to Puri in the east, as far back as the seventh century after Christ, establishing temples in each of these places that endure to this day.

Starting from these incontrovertible facts, it is possible to construct an alternative scenario to British colonialism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the Marathas extending their conquests across the country, while finding it politically convenient to mask their power under a titular Mughal emperor, a process that had already begun.

The process would not have been painless; there may well have been revolutions and military struggles; there would have been disruption and conflict; but India’s resources would have stayed in India and its future would have been resolved by its own people. The onset of British colonialism interrupted this natural evolution and did not allow it to flower.

But to suggest that Indian political unity would not have happened without the British is absurd and unsupported by the evidence.

The facts point clearly to the dismantling of existing political institutions in India by the British, the fomenting of communal division and systematic political discrimination with a view to maintaining and extending British domination.

In the years after 1757, the British astutely fomented cleavages among the Indian princes, and steadily consolidated their dominion through a policy of ‘divide and rule’ that came to be dubbed, after 1858, ‘divide et impera’.

1757, as we have seen, Clive installed Mir Jafar on the throne of Bengal for a handsome sum, as a reward for having betrayed the previous nawab, Siraj-ud-Daula, at Plassey;

‘In India,’ wrote an eminent English civil servant, ‘the village system was the one organism that survived the long years of anarchy and invasion, and it was in full vigour when we conquered India.

Part of the problem was that the Indian social structures were unfamiliar to the British, whose own villages survived in a largely feudalistic relationship to their landlords.

The English tried to find similar structures in the traditional societies of their colonies, and when they could not, they invented an approximation of them. Thus was born the ‘indirect rule’ system of government that characterized much of the Empire, with power devolved to an entire hierarchy of greater and lesser imitation ‘gentlemen’, many given British-invented titles like ‘Rai Bahadur’ or even knighted (and, in a couple of cases, ennobled) for their pains.

India’s villages were not self-reliant republics that lived in blissful isolation. They were networked and connected, and it was the destruction of Indian industry that forced people to retreat and focus on farming, creating both a more agrarian society and the problem of peasant dispossession.

the early 1800s, India had been reduced from a land of artisans, traders, warriors and merchants, functioning in thriving and complex commercial networks, into an agrarian society of peasants and moneylenders.

The Company paid soldiers in exchange for their service and others for essential procurements, offering various benefits to ensure their support. Violence, to use today’s language, was contracted to non-state actors. Such methods accentuated the informal, non-institutionalized nature of the British conquest of India, stunting the prospect of the normal development of political institutions in the country.

The freelance warriors and mercenaries associated with the Company enjoyed the license to loot everything they could lay their hands on: hardly a British contribution to good governance in India.

The Crown, when it assumed responsibility for the Raj, through Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858, largely preferred to leave the traditional rulers of India in place, with their authority subordinate to the British.

The Maratha Peshwas, the Mysore rulers and the chess-playing Nawab of Oudh, to name three, were not accused of misgovernance: they were merely too powerful for colonial comfort or too rich to avoid attracting British avarice. (Indeed there were outstanding examples of good governance in India at the time, notably the Travancore kingdom, which in 1819 became the first government in the world to decree universal, compulsory and free primary education for both boys and girls.)

In large parts of India during the period of British colonial expansion, fairly decent governments, broadly accepted by the people, were removed and replaced by British rulers whose motives and methods were, on the whole, much more reprehensible than those they had overthrown.

In a country of princes, they deliberately used the mystique of monarchy as an instrument of dominion.’