Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

by Shashi Tharoor

(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’!)

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, 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.

Britain’s Industrial Revolution was built on the destruction of India’s thriving manufacturing industries.

The British monopoly of industrial production drove Indians to agriculture beyond levels the land could sustain. This in turn had a knock-on effect on the peasants who worked the land, by causing an influx of newly disenfranchised people, formerly artisans, who drove down rural wages. In many rural families, women had spun and woven at home while their men tilled the fields; suddenly both were affected, and if weather or drought reduced their agricultural work, there was no back-up source of income from cloth. Rural poverty was a direct result of British actions.

The British extracted from India approximately £18,000,000 each year between 1765 and 1815.

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. Indians literally paid for their own oppression.

When an Englishman wants something, George Bernard Shaw observed, he never publicly admits to his wanting it; instead, his want is expressed as ‘a burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who possess the thing he wants’.

It was estimated at the time that the value of India’s contribution in cash and kind amounted to £146.2 million, worth some £50 billion in today’s money. (Some estimates place the value of India’s contribution much higher.)

They were ignored in constituting the British Indian Army, in which Muslims accounted for 50 per cent of the Indians serving in uniform despite being only 20 per cent of the population.

As a result of what one can only call the British Colonial Holocaust, thanks to economic policies ruthlessly enforced by Britain, between 30 and 35 million Indians needlessly died of starvation during the Raj.

As we have seen, by the time it ended, nearly 4 million Bengalis starved to death in the 1943 famine. Nothing can excuse the odious behaviour of Winston Churchill, who deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles in Greece and elsewhere. ‘The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious’ than that of ‘sturdy Greeks’, he argued. Grain for the Tommies, bread for home consumption in Britain (27 million tonnes of imported grains, a wildly excessive amount), and generous buffer stocks in Europe (for yet-to-be-liberated Greeks and Yugoslavs) were Churchill’s priorities, not the life or death of his Indian subjects. When reminded of the suffering of his victims his response was typically Churchillian: The famine was their own fault, he said, for ‘breeding like rabbits’. When officers of conscience pointed out in a telegram to the prime minister the scale of the tragedy caused by his decisions, Churchill’s only reaction was to ask peevishly: ‘why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?’

Alex von Tunzelmann’s clever start to her book Indian Summer made my point most tellingly: In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semi-feudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England.

As a result each mile of Indian railway construction in the 1850s and 1860s cost an average of £18,000, as against the dollar equivalent of £2,000 at the same time in the United States.

When the British came, there was, throughout India, a system of communal schools, managed by the village communities. The agents of the East India Company destroyed these village communities, and took no steps to replace the schools; even today [1930] … they stand at only 66 per cent of their number a hundred years ago.