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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.
Mr. Montgomery Martin, after examining…the condition of some provinces of Bengal and Behar, said in 1835 in his Eastern India: ‘It is impossible to avoid remarking two facts as peculiarly striking, first the richness of the country surveyed, and second, the poverty of its inhabitants… The annual drain of £3,000,000 on British India has amounted in thirty years, at compound interest, to the enormous sum of £723,900,000. So constant and accumulating a drain, even in England, would soon impoverish her. How severe then must be its effects on India when the wage of a labourer is from two pence to
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Sir George Wingate has said (1859): ‘Taxes spent in the country from which they are raised are totally different in their effect from taxes raised in one country and spent in another. In the former case the taxes collected from the population…are again returned to the industrious classes… But the case is wholly different when the taxes are not spent in the country from which they are raised... They constitute [an] absolute loss and extinction of the whole amount withdrawn from the taxed country… [The money] might as well be thrown into the sea. Such is the nature of the tribute we have so long
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Lord Lawrence, Lord Cromer, Sir Auckland Colvin, Sir David Barbour, and others have declared the extreme poverty of India… Mr. F. J. Shore’s opinion: ‘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.’
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. This thriving shipping and shipbuilding culture would be drastically curbed by the British.
The experience of Indian shipping confirms that British authorities cynically and deliberately exploited Indian industries in their time of need and otherwise suppressed them.
(Morality and racism could always be used to dress up naked commercial interests.)
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 clout of those who earned only in local currency.
A currency which had once been among the strongest in the world in the seventeenth century was reduced to a fraction of its former value by the end of the nineteenth.
The British learned as much of the technology as possible and then shut down India’s metallurgical industries by the end of the eighteenth century. Attempts to revive it met with resistance and then with racist derision.
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.
If India’s GDP went down because it ‘missed the bus’ of industrialization, it was because the British threw Indians under the wheels.
