essay on imperialism in india

Illusions of empire: Amartya Sen on what British rule really did for India

It is true that before British rule, India was starting to fall behind other parts of the world – but many of the arguments defending the Raj are based on serious misconceptions about India’s past, imperialism and history itself

T he British empire in India was in effect established at the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757. The battle was swift, beginning at dawn and ending close to sunset. It was a normal monsoon day, with occasional rain in the mango groves at the town of Plassey, which is between Calcutta, where the British were based, and Murshidabad, the capital of the kingdom of Bengal. It was in those mango groves that the British forces faced the Nawab Siraj-ud-Doula’s army and convincingly defeated it.

British rule ended nearly 200 years later with Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous speech on India’s “tryst with destiny” at midnight on 14 August 1947. Two hundred years is a long time. What did the British achieve in India, and what did they fail to accomplish?

During my days as a student at a progressive school in West Bengal in the 1940s, these questions came into our discussion constantly. They remain important even today, not least because the British empire is often invoked in discussions about successful global governance. It has also been invoked to try to persuade the US to acknowledge its role as the pre-eminent imperial power in the world today: “Should the United States seek to shed – or to shoulder – the imperial load it has inherited?” the historian Niall Ferguson has asked . It is certainly an interesting question, and Ferguson is right to argue that it cannot be answered without an understanding of how the British empire rose and fell – and what it managed to do.

Arguing about all this at Santiniketan school, which had been established by Rabindranath Tagore some decades earlier, we were bothered by a difficult methodological question. How could we think about what India would have been like in the 1940s had British rule not occurred at all?

The frequent temptation to compare India in 1757 (when British rule was beginning) with India in 1947 (when the British were leaving ) would tell us very little, because in the absence of British rule, India would of course not have remained the same as it was at the time of Plassey. The country would not have stood still had the British conquest not occurred. But how do we answer the question about what difference was made by British rule?

To illustrate the relevance of such an “alternative history”, we may consider another case – one with a potential imperial conquest that did not in fact occur. Let’s think about Commodore Matthew Perry of the US navy, who steamed into the bay of Edo in Japan in 1853 with four warships. Now consider the possibility that Perry was not merely making a show of American strength (as was in fact the case), but was instead the advance guard of an American conquest of Japan, establishing a new American empire in the land of the rising sun, rather as Robert Clive did in India . If we were to assess the achievements of the supposed American rule of Japan through the simple device of comparing Japan before that imperial conquest in 1853 with Japan after the American domination ended, whenever that might be, and attribute all the differences to the effects of the American empire, we would miss all the contributions of the Meiji restoration from 1868 onwards, and of other globalising changes that were going on. Japan did not stand still; nor would India have done so.

While we can see what actually happened in Japan under Meiji rule, it is extremely hard to guess with any confidence what course the history of the Indian subcontinent would have taken had the British conquest not occurred. Would India have moved, like Japan, towards modernisation in an increasingly globalising world, or would it have remained resistant to change, like Afghanistan, or would it have hastened slowly, like Thailand?

These are impossibly difficult questions to answer. And yet, even without real alternative historical scenarios, there are some limited questions that can be answered, which may contribute to an intelligent understanding of the role that British rule played in India. We can ask: what were the challenges that India faced at the time of the British conquest, and what happened in those critical areas during the British rule?

T here was surely a need for major changes in a rather chaotic and institutionally backward India. To recognise the need for change in India in the mid-18th century does not require us to ignore – as many Indian super-nationalists fear – the great achievements in India’s past, with its extraordinary history of accomplishments in philosophy, mathematics, literature, arts, architecture, music, medicine, linguistics and astronomy. India had also achieved considerable success in building a thriving economy with flourishing trade and commerce well before the colonial period – the economic wealth of India was amply acknowledged by British observers such as Adam Smith.

The fact is, nevertheless, that even with those achievements, in the mid-18th century India had in many ways fallen well behind what was being achieved in Europe. The exact nature and significance of this backwardness were frequent subjects of lively debates in the evenings at my school.

An insightful essay on India by Karl Marx particularly engaged the attention of some of us. Writing in 1853, Marx pointed to the constructive role of British rule in India, on the grounds that India needed some radical re-examination and self-scrutiny. And Britain did indeed serve as India’s primary western contact, particularly in the course of the 19th century. The importance of this influence would be hard to neglect. The indigenous globalised culture that was slowly emerging in India was deeply indebted not only to British writing, but also to books and articles in other – that is non-English – European languages that became known in India through the British.

Figures such as the Calcutta philosopher Ram Mohan Roy, born in 1772, were influenced not only by traditional knowledge of Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian texts, but also by the growing familiarity with English writings. After Roy, in Bengal itself there were also Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Madhusudan Dutta and several generations of Tagores and their followers who were re-examining the India they had inherited in the light of what they saw happening in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Their main – often their only – source of information were the books (usually in English) circulating in India, thanks to British rule. That intellectual influence, covering a wide range of European cultures, survives strongly today, even as the military, political and economic power of the British has declined dramatically.

I was persuaded that Marx was basically right in his diagnosis of the need for some radical change in India, as its old order was crumbling as a result of not having been a part of the intellectual and economic globalisation that the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution had initiated across the world (along with, alas, colonialism).

There was arguably, however, a serious flaw in Marx’s thesis, in particular in his implicit presumption that the British conquest was the only window on the modern world that could have opened for India. What India needed at the time was more constructive globalisation, but that is not the same thing as imperialism. The distinction is important. Throughout India’s long history, it persistently enjoyed exchanges of ideas as well as of commodities with the outside world. Traders, settlers and scholars moved between India and further east – China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and elsewhere – for a great many centuries, beginning more than 2,000 years ago. The far-reaching influence of this movement – especially on language, literature and architecture – can be seen plentifully even today. There were also huge global influences by means of India’s open-frontier attitude in welcoming fugitives from its early days.

Jewish immigration into India began right after the fall of Jerusalem in the first century and continued for many hundreds of years. Baghdadi Jews, such as the highly successful Sassoons, came in large numbers even as late as the 18th century. Christians started coming at least from the fourth century, and possibly much earlier. There are colourful legends about this, including one that tells us that the first person St Thomas the Apostle met after coming to India in the first century was a Jewish girl playing the flute on the Malabar coast. We loved that evocative – and undoubtedly apocryphal – anecdote in our classroom discussions, because it illustrated the multicultural roots of Indian traditions.

The Parsis started arriving from the early eighth century – as soon as persecution began in their Iranian homeland. Later in that century, the Armenians began to leave their footprints from Kerala to Bengal. Muslim Arab traders had a substantial presence on the west coast of India from around that time – well before the arrival of Muslim conquerors many centuries later, through the arid terrain in the north-west of the subcontinent. Persecuted Bahá’ís from Iran came only in the 19th century.

At the time of the Battle of Plassey, there were already businessmen, traders and other professionals from a number of different European nations well settled near the mouth of the Ganges. Being subjected to imperial rule is thus not the only way of making connections with, or learning things from, foreign countries. When the Meiji Restoration established a new reformist government in Japan in 1868 (which was not unrelated to the internal political impact of Commodore Perry’s show of force a decade earlier), the Japanese went straight to learning from the west without being subjected to imperialism. They sent people for training in the US and Europe, and made institutional changes that were clearly inspired by western experience. They did not wait to be coercively globalised via imperialism.

O ne of the achievements to which British imperial theorists tended to give a good deal of emphasis was the role of the British in producing a united India. In this analysis, India was a collection of fragmented kingdoms until British rule made a country out of these diverse regimes. It was argued that India was previously not one country at all, but a thoroughly divided land mass. It was the British empire, so the claim goes, that welded India into a nation. Winston Churchill even remarked that before the British came, there was no Indian nation. “India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator,” he once said.

If this is true, the empire clearly made an indirect contribution to the modernisation of India through its unifying role. However, is the grand claim about the big role of the Raj in bringing about a united India correct? Certainly, when Clive’s East India Company defeated the nawab of Bengal in 1757, there was no single power ruling over all of India. Yet it is a great leap from the proximate story of Britain imposing a single united regime on India (as did actually occur) to the huge claim that only the British could have created a united India out of a set of disparate states.

That way of looking at Indian history would go firmly against the reality of the large domestic empires that had characterised India throughout the millennia. The ambitious and energetic emperors from the third century BC did not accept that their regimes were complete until the bulk of what they took to be one country was united under their rule. There were major roles here for Ashoka Maurya, the Gupta emperors, Alauddin Khalji, the Mughals and others. Indian history shows a sequential alternation of large domestic empires with clusters of fragmented kingdoms. We should therefore not make the mistake of assuming that the fragmented governance of mid-18th century India was the state in which the country typically found itself throughout history, until the British helpfully came along to unite it.

Even though in history textbooks the British were often assumed to be the successors of the Mughals in India, it is important to note that the British did not in fact take on the Mughals when they were a force to be reckoned with. British rule began when the Mughals’ power had declined, though formally even the nawab of Bengal, whom the British defeated, was their subject. The nawab still swore allegiance to the Mughal emperor, without paying very much attention to his dictates. The imperial status of the Mughal authority over India continued to be widely acknowledged even though the powerful empire itself was missing.

When the so-called sepoy mutiny threatened the foundations of British India in 1857, the diverse anti-British forces participating in the joint rebellion could be aligned through their shared acceptance of the formal legitimacy of the Mughal emperor as the ruler of India. The emperor was, in fact, reluctant to lead the rebels, but this did not stop the rebels from declaring him the emperor of all India. The 82-year-old Mughal monarch, Bahadur Shah II, known as Zafar, was far more interested in reading and writing poetry than in fighting wars or ruling India. He could do little to help the 1,400 unarmed civilians of Delhi whom the British killed as the mutiny was brutally crushed and the city largely destroyed. The poet-emperor was banished to Burma, where he died.

As a child growing up in Burma in the 1930s, I was taken by my parents to see Zafar’s grave in Rangoon, which was close to the famous Shwedagon Pagoda. The grave was not allowed to be anything more than an undistinguished stone slab covered with corrugated iron. I remember discussing with my father how the British rulers of India and Burma must evidently have been afraid of the evocative power of the remains of the last Mughal emperor. The inscription on the grave noted only that “Bahadur Shah was ex-King of Delhi” – no mention of “empire” in the commemoration! It was only much later, in the 1990s, that Zafar would be honoured with something closer to what could decently serve as the grave of the last Mughal emperor.

I n the absence of the British Raj, the most likely successors to the Mughals would probably have been the newly emerging Hindu Maratha powers near Bombay, who periodically sacked the Mughal capital of Delhi and exercised their power to intervene across India. Already by 1742, the East India Company had built a huge “Maratha ditch” at the edge of Calcutta to slow down the lightning raids of the Maratha cavalry, which rode rapidly across 1,000 miles or more. But the Marathas were still quite far from putting together anything like the plan of an all-India empire.

The British, by contrast, were not satisfied until they were the dominant power across the bulk of the subcontinent, and in this they were not so much bringing a new vision of a united India from abroad as acting as the successor of previous domestic empires. British rule spread to the rest of the country from its imperial foundations in Calcutta, beginning almost immediately after Plassey. As the company’s power expanded across India, Calcutta became the capital of the newly emerging empire, a position it occupied from the mid-18th century until 1911 (when the capital was moved to Delhi). It was from Calcutta that the conquest of other parts of India was planned and directed. The profits made by the East India Company from its economic operations in Bengal financed, to a great extent, the wars that the British waged across India in the period of their colonial expansion.

What has been called “the financial bleeding of Bengal” began very soon after Plassey. With the nawabs under their control, the company made big money not only from territorial revenues, but also from the unique privilege of duty-free trade in the rich Bengal economy – even without counting the so-called gifts that the Company regularly extracted from local merchants. Those who wish to be inspired by the glory of the British empire would do well to avoid reading Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, including his discussion of the abuse of state power by a “mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies”. As the historian William Dalrymple has observed: “The economic figures speak for themselves. In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8% of the world’s GDP, while India was producing 22.5%. By the peak of the Raj, those figures had more or less been reversed: India was reduced from the world’s leading manufacturing nation to a symbol of famine and deprivation.”

While most of the loot from the financial bleeding accrued to British company officials in Bengal, there was widespread participation by the political and business leadership in Britain: nearly a quarter of the members of parliament in London owned stocks in the East India Company after Plassey. The commercial benefits from Britain’s Indian empire thus reached far into the British establishment.

The robber-ruler synthesis did eventually give way to what would eventually become classical colonialism, with the recognition of the need for law and order and a modicum of reasonable governance. But the early misuse of state power by the East India Company put the economy of Bengal under huge stress. What the cartographer John Thornton, in his famous chart of the region in 1703, had described as “the Rich Kingdom of Bengal” experienced a gigantic famine during 1769–70. Contemporary estimates suggested that about a third of the Bengal population died. This is almost certainly an overestimate. There was no doubt, however, that it was a huge catastrophe, with massive starvation and mortality – in a region that had seen no famine for a very long time.

This disaster had at least two significant effects. First, the inequity of early British rule in India became the subject of considerable political criticism in Britain itself. By the time Adam Smith roundly declared in The Wealth of Nations that the East India Company was “altogether unfit to govern its territorial possessions”, there were many British figures, such as Edmund Burke, making similar critiques. Second, the economic decline of Bengal did eventually ruin the company’s business as well, hurting British investors themselves, and giving the powers in London reason to change their business in India into more of a regular state-run operation.

By the late 18th century, the period of so-called “post-Plassey plunder”, with which British rule in India began, was giving way to the sort of colonial subjugation that would soon become the imperial standard, and with which the subcontinent would become more and more familiar in the following century and a half.

H ow successful was this long phase of classical imperialism in British India, which lasted from the late 18th century until independence in 1947? The British claimed a huge set of achievements, including democracy, the rule of law, railways, the joint stock company and cricket, but the gap between theory and practice – with the exception of cricket – remained wide throughout the history of imperial relations between the two countries. Putting the tally together in the years of pre-independence assessment, it was easy to see how far short the achievements were compared with the rhetoric of accomplishment.

Indeed, Rudyard Kipling caught the self-congratulatory note of the British imperial administrator admirably well in his famous poem on imperialism:

Take up the White Man’s burden – The savage wars of peace – Fill full the mouth of famine And bid the sickness cease

Alas, neither the stopping of famines nor the remedying of ill health was part of the high-performance achievements of British rule in India. Nothing could lead us away from the fact that life expectancy at birth in India as the empire ended was abysmally low: 32 years, at most.

The abstemiousness of colonial rule in neglecting basic education reflects the view taken by the dominant administrators of the needs of the subject nation. There was a huge asymmetry between the ruler and the ruled. The British government became increasingly determined in the 19th century to achieve universal literacy for the native British population. In contrast, the literacy rates in India under the Raj were very low. When the empire ended, the adult literacy rate in India was barely 15%. The only regions in India with comparatively high literacy were the “native kingdoms” of Travancore and Cochin (formally outside the British empire), which, since independence, have constituted the bulk of the state of Kerala. These kingdoms, though dependent on the British administration for foreign policy and defence, had remained technically outside the empire and had considerable freedom in domestic policy, which they exercised in favour of more school education and public health care.

The 200 years of colonial rule were also a period of massive economic stagnation, with hardly any advance at all in real GNP per capita. These grim facts were much aired after independence in the newly liberated media, whose rich culture was in part – it must be acknowledged – an inheritance from British civil society. Even though the Indian media was very often muzzled during the Raj – mostly to prohibit criticism of imperial rule, for example at the time of the Bengal famine of 1943 – the tradition of a free press, carefully cultivated in Britain, provided a good model for India to follow as the country achieved independence.

Indeed, India received many constructive things from Britain that did not – could not – come into their own until after independence. Literature in the Indian languages took some inspiration and borrowed genres from English literature, including the flourishing tradition of writing in English. Under the Raj, there were restrictions on what could be published and propagated (even some of Tagore’s books were banned). These days the government of India has no such need, but alas – for altogether different reasons of domestic politics – the restrictions are sometimes no less intrusive than during the colonial rule.

Nothing is perhaps as important in this respect as the functioning of a multiparty democracy and a free press. But often enough these were not gifts that could be exercised under the British administration during imperial days. They became realisable only when the British left – they were the fruits of learning from Britain’s own experience, which India could use freely only after the period of empire had ended. Imperial rule tends to require some degree of tyranny: asymmetrical power is not usually associated with a free press or with a vote-counting democracy, since neither of them is compatible with the need to keep colonial subjects in check.

A similar scepticism is appropriate about the British claim that they had eliminated famine in dependent territories such as India. British governance of India began with the famine of 1769-70, and there were regular famines in India throughout the duration of British rule. The Raj also ended with the terrible famine of 1943. In contrast, there has been no famine in India since independence in 1947.

The irony again is that the institutions that ended famines in independent India – democracy and an independent media – came directly from Britain. The connection between these institutions and famine prevention is simple to understand. Famines are easy to prevent, since the distribution of a comparatively small amount of free food, or the offering of some public employment at comparatively modest wages (which gives the beneficiaries the ability to buy food), allows those threatened by famine the ability to escape extreme hunger. So any government should be able stop a threatening famine – large or small – and it is very much in the interest of a government in a functioning democracy, facing a free press, to do so. A free press makes the facts of a developing famine known to all, and a democratic vote makes it hard to win elections during – or after – a famine, hence giving a government the additional incentive to tackle the issue without delay.

India did not have this freedom from famine for as long as its people were without their democratic rights, even though it was being ruled by the foremost democracy in the world, with a famously free press in the metropolis – but not in the colonies. These freedom-oriented institutions were for the rulers but not for the imperial subjects.

In the powerful indictment of British rule in India that Tagore presented in 1941, he argued that India had gained a great deal from its association with Britain, for example, from “discussions centred upon Shakespeare’s drama and Byron’s poetry and above all … the large-hearted liberalism of 19th-century English politics”. The tragedy, he said, came from the fact that what “was truly best in their own civilisation, the upholding of dignity of human relationships, has no place in the British administration of this country”. Indeed, the British could not have allowed Indian subjects to avail themselves of these freedoms without threatening the empire itself.

The distinction between the role of Britain and that of British imperialism could not have been clearer. As the union jack was being lowered across India, it was a distinction of which we were profoundly aware.

Adapted from Home in the World: A Memoir by Amartya Sen, published by Allen Lane on 8 July and available at guardianbookshop.com

This article was amended on 29 June 2021. Owing to an editing error, an earlier version incorrectly referred to Karl Marx writing on India in 1953. The essay was written in 1853.

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The Impacts of British Imperialism in India: Research Paper

British imperialism in india: introduction, what was india’s response to european imperialism, negative and positive effects of british imperialism in india, how was india affected by imperialism, the effects of imperialism in india: indian national congress, rabindranath tagore, role of gandhi.

The British Imperialism in India had its roots in the 1600s. During that period, the East India Company had started setting up its trading offices at different port cities like Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras.

The main intention was to trade in spices. Moreover, owing to the worldwide industrial revolution, Britain had become the centre-stage of development. “As a blanket term the Industrial Revolution explains little about British expansion in general at the end of the eighteenth century.” (Marshal 1985). India was very important to Britain due to the fact that for the procurement of raw material for its industries, it had to depend on India.

India was considered as “a Jewel in the Crown’. Also, India was a huge end user of British products. “The most obvious grounds for doubting the significance of manufacturing as a force behind British imperialism are provided by the course of events in India, the main field of conquest during the period in question…” (Ward 1994)

The Mughal dynasty was at its peak during that era. As such, East India Company traders were under the vigil of the Mughal officials. However, by the initial years of the 1700s, the Mughal Empire started experiencing a downfall. Taking advantage of this situation, many erstwhile small states, breaking away from the Mughal rule, parted ways and formed their own rule.

The East India Company also took advantage of this state of affairs and started chalking out plans to invade India. The Indian rulers got the indication from its sources and asked for help from the French, who also had some base in India. Finally, it was in 1757 that Robert Clive defeated the Indian & French allied forces in the Battle of Plassey. Over the years, there was an increase in the regions controlled by East India Company.

The East India Company’s power was supreme until 1858. The British government had an authoritative control over the workings of the East India Company directly or indirectly. But the British government did not interfere in the daily functioning of the East India Company. The East India Company had its own army and controlled India until the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Several restrictions were imposed on the Indians. The Indian economy came under the British government. Indian farmers were forced to produce raw material for the British industries and the Indians were supposed to buy only British goods. The raw material included indigo (a dye), jute, coffee, cotton, and tea.

One of the major plantations done in India was that of opium. Opium was sold to china and tea was purchased that was further sold in Britain. No one could start a business that competed with the British goods. For instance, the Indian handloom industry suffered a major setback due to the introduction of readymade clothes collection from Britain that was good in quality as well as economical.

There were certain factors that made Indian goods crucial for Britain. The Crimean War of 1850 restricted the supply of jute from Russia to Scotland. As a result, Bengal jute was much in demand. Similarly, the American Civil War restricted the supply of cotton to Britain. In order to keep the British textile mills running Indian cotton became very precious for Britain.

In order to ease the transportation of raw material from the remote areas to the ports and finished goods from the ports to various destinations in India, the British government started the railway network.

By the year 1850, most of the Indian subcontinent was under the control of the British East India Company. During the years, a sense and feeling of disgruntlement started developing within various Indian factions. The people were frustrated because the British had controlled their lands. Moreover, the British were even trying to convert the natives to Christianity.

There was also a mass grudge against the racism that was being meted out towards them by the British. The situation became aggravated when word spread that the bullets/cartridges of the new Enfield rifles, which were being used by the sepoys, were lubricated with beef and pork fat.

The practical point behind this was that the religious beliefs of the two major sects in India, the Hindus and the Muslims, were impeded upon by the use of such cartridges. The Hindus consider cow sacred and the Muslims do not eat pork. The problem was that in order to use the cartridges, the sepoys had to cut off the ends with their teeth. This outraged both the communities.

In one of the instances, on 9 May 1857, 85 out of the 90 sepoys of a garrison refused to use the cartridges. Instead of dealing the matter in a diplomatic manner, the Garrison Commander jailed all the sepoys who had disobeyed. The next day i.e. 10 May 1857, when soldiers rebelled and marched to Delhi, proved to be a shot in the arm for the mutiny.

These soldiers connected with other Indian soldiers who were based in Delhi. The city of Delhi was captured and the upheaval further stretched to the northern and central parts of India. The fierce fighting continued for about a year after which the East India Company suppressed the mutiny with the help of British troops.

This mutiny is termed as the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ and it was a turning point in Indian and British history. There were some very significant results of this mutiny. Firstly, after this mutiny, the British Government took direct control of all the affairs in India. Secondly, there was a split between the Hindus and the Muslims. Thirdly, the Sikhs became the favourite of the British. And lastly, this mutiny stimulated the racist attitude of the British.

British Imperialism had a large impact on India during the nineteenth century because the British modernized and industrialized India, many economic declines were caused in India due to the lack of financial benefits from the British rule, and Indians gained a sense of nationalism after the British took control over India’s government and people.

There were both negative and positive impacts on India.

Negative impacts:

• The British government controlled most of the political and economic powers.
• The Indian industries faced restrictions. As a result, the local craft started to become extinct.
• The British laid more emphasis on cash crops such. As a result, the food production dropped and there were famines throughout the country.
• The British were against the religious beliefs and customs of Indian religions. They wanted to spread Christianity.
• Due to advent of new culture, Indian culture and morals started disappearing.

Positive impacts:

• One of the major achievements of the British government in India was the laying of the railway network. It was the world’s third largest railway network.
• The railway network helped India in developing a modern economy and connecting distant areas.
• Apart from the railway network, various important roads were constructed.
• Other developments include bridges, dams, and telephone.
• The water scarcity problem was solved by the construction of dams.
• As a result of new sanitization methods, there was an improvement in the health conditions of the people.
• The advent of new schools and colleges increased the literacy percentage.
• The British troops put an end to the bandits menace and wars between small rulers.

The British colonialism had great impacts on India. The British intended to make English as a local language in India. That’s the reason they built new schools and colleges. But educating people fared against the British government. There was an increase in the feeling of nationalism. A mass resentment was felt against the British rule, which ultimately resulted in the end of British rule in India.

Being a vast area, India had different languages being spoken in different regions. Due to lack of interpretation of each other’s languages, there was a communication gap. But the British government, by teaching English, finished this communication gap. The educated people all over India started communicating with each other and expressed their views.

This resulted in the unification of all the regions of India as far as the spirit of nationalism was concerned. The local educated people of different regions started spreading this feeling in their local languages.

People like Ram Mohan Roy started campaigns that demanded more modernization and a greater role in the government. Education had given new ideas to people. Ram Mohan Roy, called the Father of modern India, tried to abolish the practise of child marriage. He also tried to finish the caste system prevailing within the society.

Indians started feeling a sense of nationalism due to the fact that they were considered to be second class citizens of their own country. Top Indian Civil Services were reserved for the British only. Also, if an Indian and a British were in the same category of job, the Indian was paid less. For instance, in East India Railway, a British engineer got about twenty times more salary than his Indian counterpart.

The cultures of India & Britain were totally different. Indian culture had male supremacy. There was inequality among the two genders. “The British used the particular form which gender divisions took in India as a vehicle for proving their liberality, as a demonstration of their superiority, and as a legitimation of their rule.” (Liddle et al. 1985). The British wanted to change this culture and prove that there rule was legitimate. But this was not possible since the roots of Indian culture were too deep.

Such instances and many more of them led the way to the foundation of the Indian National Congress (1885) and the Muslim League (1906). The initial years of the 1900s witnessed demands from these groups for a self-government. In 1905, a partition was made and Bengal was separated from India. This infuriated the nationalists. It is notable that Bengal was a Muslim dominated region. The British wanted to separate the Muslims from the Hindus.

This resulted in terrorist activities. “The railway, which had previously been a secure means of transportations for women travelling alone, became a particularly unsafe environment. As moving targets, trains attracted random acts of violence.” (Procida 2002). In order to deal with this menace, the British government had to revoke its decision in the year 1911.

The Indian National Congress is one of the oldest and leading political parties of India. It was founded in the year 1885 by Allan Octavian Hume, Dadabhai Naoroji, Dinshaw Wacha, Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee, Surendranath Banerjee, Monomohun Ghose, Mahadev Govind Ranade and William Wedderburn.

Indian National Congress became the torch bearer of the Indian Independence Movement. During the years of struggle for independence, it enrolled up to 15 million members. Once India gained independence in 1947, the party became India’s dominant Democratic Party with Jawaharlal Nehru as its mentor.

Rabindranath Tagore was born on 7 May 1861 in West Bengal and died on 8 August 1941. His father’s name was Debendranath Tagore and that of his mother was Sharada Devi. His father was the honorary Secretary of the British Indian Association. Rabindranath Tagore was of an exceptional and huge personality.

His other qualities were that he was a renowned scholar, a freedom fighter, and a painter. But beyond all these, he was a modest human being. Indian Literature has colossal input of his works. He being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913 for Gitanjali, a collection of his poems, is enough proof of his wisdom. The Indian National Anthem was penned by him. He had to travel across the region to collect rent.

During these trips, he used to meet people and listen to their plights. Gradually, he started depicting the British immorality in his poems. He wrote most of his works in Bengali, his mother tongue. In order to reach the mass public, he later translated his works.

The poems were read by a majority of people and this helped in spreading the awareness of nationalism. He mentioned the intentions of the British in his works. Being a renowned scholar, his poems and other works were read worldwide. This made other nations aware of the British atrocities and in return they started putting pressure on the British government to account for such acts.

In appreciation for his works, the Calcutta University offered him honorary Doctorate of Literature and the British government presented him with a knighthood. In 1919, the infamous Jallianwala Bagh Massacre happened where General Dyer ordered firing of innocent people. As a protest to this brutal massacre, Rabindranath Tagore surrendered the knighthood. In the ensuing years, Rabindranath visited countries like Japan and America as a devout ambassador.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is and will always be the forerunner in contributing towards the independence of India. He is also known as the ‘Father of the Nation’. Apart from his struggle for independence, Gandhi’s thoughts changed the scenario of the country and its people. The Indian National Congress will always be indebted to Gandhi because when he took over the reins of the party, he had his millions of followers behind him to support the cause. Gandhi’s path to independence was of non-violence or ‘Ahimsa’.

Come what may, Gandhi never deviated from his ideologies and the path of non-violence. This always helped him to succeed. Gandhi’s main weapon was ‘Satyagraha’. Satyagraha means submissive resistance. One of his main contributions to the India society and which helped in unifying the country was the motto of ‘Sarva Dharma Sambhava’.

It meant that all people of different religions should practice equal respect for all the religions. Gandhi was also against the industrialization being done by the British. He wanted the Indians to do their chores by their own hands instead of taking help of machines.

In the year 1942, Gandhi rejected the British offer of granting India independence if it helped Britain in World War II. Instead, Gandhi started the Quit India Movement. After the war, Gandhi held conferences with the viceroy Lord Mountbatten and Muhammed Ali Jinnah, leader of Muslim League, and it was decide to carve out a separate state for the Muslims.

Although Gandhi was against this decision yet he had to agree in the larger interest of the nation. When the news spread, violence started all over the country, especially the northern part. Gandhi started fasting and toured the riot affected areas in order to bring back peace and harmony among the people. During one such meeting, he was shot dead by a person named Godse.

Even today, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is remembered as the pioneer of Indian independence. For some people, his ideologies might have lost with the passage of time, but still there are people who follow his thoughts and ideologies. But one thing is certain that if Gandhi would not have been involved in the struggle for freedom, India would have attained independence much later.

Liddle, Joanna, and Rama Joshi. “ Gender and Imperialism in British Rule .” Economic and Political Weekly. 20. no. 43 (1985): 72. Web.

Marshal, Peter. “ Early British Imperialism in India .” Past & Present. 1. no. 106 (1985): 169. Web.

Procida, Mary. Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883 – 1947 . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Web.

Ward, Jessica. “ The Industrial Revolution and British Imperialism, 1750-1850 .” Economic History Review. 47. no. 1 (1994): 44-65. Web.

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The british impact on india, 1700–1900.

The period 1700 to 1900 saw the beginnings, and the development, of the British Empire in India. Empire was not planned, at least not in the early stages. In a sense, it just happened. The first British in India came for trade, not territory; they were businessmen, not conquerors. It can be argued that they came from a culture that was inferior, and a political entity that was weaker, than that into which they ventured, and they came hat-in-hand. They would not have been viewed as a threat by the Indians—who most certainly would not have thought of themselves as “Indian,” at least in any political sense. National identity was to be established much later, during the Independence Movement (which, indeed, was also known as the Nationalist Movement). Identity was in terms of region and caste, which, to a considerable extent, it still is today. The British and the Indians would go on to affect each other in profound ways that still are important today. In what follows, because of limited space, the impact of Imperial Britain on India is addressed. Hopefully, a future useful essay on the impact of India on Great Britain will also be published in EAA.

The Roots of Empire

While there is no 1492-type date for the commencement of empire, 1757, the date of the Battle of Plassey, is often used. The date of the British take-over of Delhi, 1803, is symbolic: the British occupied the Mughul capital and were not to leave. The empire was neither uniform—different policies responding to different events in different parts of India—nor static. It was upon the British and the Indians almost before they realized it. Its effects were ambiguous and ambivalent. A recent catalog advertising DVDs said about a presentation entitled “The British Empire in Color,”

The British Empire brought education, technology, law and democracy to the four corners of the globe. It also brought prejudice, discrimination, cultural bigotry and racism.  

The blurb goes on to state that the video “examines the complexities, contradictions, and legacies of empire, both positive and negative.” 1 To a degree, such is the intent of this article. Only to a degree, for an article this brief on a topic as complex and intricate as the British impact on India cannot be complete and faces the danger of becoming simply an inventory.

Trade and Power

In 1600, a group of English merchants secured a royal charter for purposes of trading in the East Indies. The Dutch, however, had fairly well sealed off trade in what is now Indonesia, and the merchants’ company, which was to become known as the East India Company (the Company), turned its attention to the vast expanse of India, with its cotton and spices (e.g., “pepper” and “ginger” are from south Indian words), as well as other commodities. Other powers, especially the French and Portuguese, were to become competitors. The Portuguese secured enclaves on the west coast, the most important of which was Goa, which they controlled until 1961, and which preserves a Portuguese flavor to this day. The French secured influence in the southeast, where Puducherry, formerly Pondicherry, is sometimes referred to as “The French Riviera of the East,” and was transferred to Indian jurisdiction in 1954.

The dominant power in India was the Mughal Empire. British adventurers had preceded the Company into India, including at the Mughal court. It needs to be emphasized that the purpose of the Company was trade. But a combination of factors and events were to draw the Company into Indian politics, especially with the decline of the Mughal Empire and the concurrent and resulting rise of regional powers, including that of the British, who had become ensconced at what is now Chennai (Madras), Mumbai (Bombay), and Kolkata (Calcutta). 2 It is noteworthy that these three cities were founded (or at least developed) by the British, and in recent years have each had their names de-Anglicized.

Mughal Decline

Two events, fifty years apart, had important consequences. The first was the death in 1707 of the last of the “Great Mughals,” Aurangzeb, who was followed by “lesser Mughals.” 3 In various ways, Aurangzeb’s own policies may have contributed significantly to the Mughal decline, but the importance of his demise is that it was followed by incapable successors and considerable instability.

The British took advantage of the instability and the resulting regional tensions, especially in 1757 at the Battle of Plassey in Bengal. Through machinations and intrigues, a force of eight hundred Europeans and 2,200 Indian troops under Robert Clive defeated an army of 50,000 belonging to the ruler of Bengal. Clive was able to wrest concessions from the Mughals, most importantly the right of land revenue, and, in retrospect, it appears that an empire was underway.

Other challenges arose for the Mughals, including the rise of regional and ethnic powers such as the Marathas, Sikhs, and Rajputs, and the sack of Delhi in 1739 by the Persian invader Nadir Shah. Meanwhile, the British were to win out in south India over the French, largely because of the Anglo-French wars in Europe and North America in the 1740s.

The Company

The Company’s increase in power and territory did not go unnoticed in London. In 1792, the Company applied for a loan from the government, which Parliament provided, but with strings attached: The Regulating Act of 1793, the first of a series of acts reining in the Company through parliamentary supervision. Nevertheless, Arthur Wellesley, as governor-general (1797–1805), exercised his intention to make the Company the paramount power in India. He was able to suppress what French influence remained (except for some small enclaves, such as Pondicherry), and to remove powerful Indian forces in both the north and the south. The British (that is the Company; in India the two were now to be almost synonymous until 1858) were paramount, and they developed a bureaucratic infrastructure, employing cooperating Indians, who came to constitute a new, urban class.

The title of Governor-General had been bestowed upon the governor of the Bengal presidency (Calcutta), who had been granted power and rank over the governors of the Bombay and Madras presidencies. This arrangement, provided in the Regulating Act, was felt to be necessary because of the long distance between London and India (the Suez canal did not yet exist) and the convenience of dealing with one governor rather than three: an administrative step toward unity which certainly aided the arrangement for empire.

The series of acts passed by Parliament banned private trading on the part of Company employees and separated judicial and administrative functions of the Company from commercial ones. The attempt was to regulate taxation, justice, rule, and bribery (the last being viewed by Company servants as an indispensable feature of doing business in India). The Company had acquired considerable political power (although consisting of only a fraction of one percent of the population of the subcontinent), over more people than there were in England. Parliament was concerned, and was to remain so. Empire may not have been, at this early stage, a governmental declaration, but the wheels were in motion and Parliament became a core part of it all. The India Act of 1784 created a council of six commissioners, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a newly-created Secretary of State for India. This group was constituted above the Company directors in London.

With the transition of the Company to the role of ruler, the British attitude toward Indians degenerated. Previously, there had been some limited social mixing between the British and Indians, with no sense of superiority or inferiority. That changed. What earlier Englishmen had viewed with interest in Indian culture became abomination; thus, the parliamentary leader against the slave trade, William Wilberforce (1759–1833) felt Hinduism to be a greater evil than slavery. The opening of the Suez Canal (1869) allowed greater access to India by English women—who, of course, had to be “protected” from the hostile culture and barbarous Indian men. Biased concepts regarding non-Western cultures and non-white peoples, arising from so-called social Darwinism and evangelicalism, provided rationale for imperial rule. It is not coincidence that the heyday of imperialism was the Victorian age.

Although the foundation was provided by the Battle of Plassey (1757), 1803 is a good symbolic date for the start of empire. General Gerard Lake defeated the Marathas, perhaps the most important Indian power, and entered Delhi, the Mughal capital. By this time the emperor was mostly a figurehead, but symbolically important. He now became a pensioner of the British, with his realm reduced to the Red Fort. A British official, referred to as the Resident, became de facto ruler of Delhi. Company soldiers protected the city and commercial interests. Things were never to be the same. In a sense, the taking of Delhi was but part of a process, for, as Dilip Hiro, in his chronology of Indian history has asserted, “By the late 18th century it had become commonplace among the British, irrespective of class, to despise Indians.” This characterization has been affirmed by other observers. 4

Racism and Rebellion

Racism is a core characteristic of the British Empire in India, or, as it came to be known, the Raj (from a Sanskrit word, which found its way into vernacular languages, meaning to rule over, or the sovereign who does so). Historically, the term was applied to Hindu kings (as raja, or maharaja, great king). While implying political superiority, it did not have racial implications. Cultural and political factors were to add racial distinction to the concept under the British: Christian proselytizing and the great uprising, or rebellion, or mutiny, of 1857. This historic rebellion was not an insurrection, for it was not organized, and therein may have been its failure. 5

The rebellion was a bloody mess, involving Indian soldiers ( sepoys ), native rulers of “subsidiary” or “princely” states that were quasi-independent but in thrall to the Company (and in fear of loss of their principalities), and the Company armies, in vicious retaliation. In essence, it was an explosion of deep frustration and fear that had been building up for decades. It is significant that it was largely confined to north central India, where Company rule and British oppression were strongest and most obvious.

The causes were numerous, and included forcing the use of Western technologies—the railroad and telegraph—upon a highly traditional society, imposition of English as the language for courts and government schools, opening the country to missionaries (with the resulting fear of forced conversions), Company takeover of subsidiary states when a prince died without direct heir, increasing haughtiness and distance on the part of the rulers, and policies beneficial to the Company’s profits, but even inimical to the people, and so on. The spark was the introduction of the Enfield rifle to the sepoy ranks, which necessitated handling of cartridges packed in animal grease, anathema for both Hindus and Muslims, and considered as an attempt to Christianize the sepoys. Atrocities became commonplace on both sides, and were to be repeated by the British in the Amritsar Massacre of 1919.

The rebellion and the gruesome reaction to it were atrocious enough, but, as Maria Misra has observed, “The after-shock of the Rebellion was if anything even more influential than the event itself.” 6 A curtain had fallen, and the two sides would never trust each other again. British disdain increased, and for the Indians, resentment festered. Yet oddly enough, Western influence was eclectically accepted by many upper class urban Indians (to a large extent in imitation, but also as a means to, and result of, upward mobility). The apparent anomaly of interest in things Western is best illustrated by Calcutta, one of the three early centers of Company presence. The others were Madras and Bombay— cities that built up around the Company’s commercial establishment.

Indian Culture

Bengal historically has been marked by cultural pride, most justly so. Its position in Indian culture has been compared with that of Italy in European culture. Given different historical situations, the comparison might have gone the other way. Western impact was central to Calcutta (particularly noticeable in its architecture), the capital of British India, and provided the impetus for what is known as the Bengal Renaissance. As in Florence, it was business that made revival of the arts possible. In the case of Bengal, the revival involved religion as well. An almost perfect paradigm is that of the Tagore family. The modern founder was Dwarkanath Tagore (1794–1846), an entrepreneur with British partners and British friends, including women. His association with the relative freedom of English women, in contrast to the rigidly orthodox outlook of the women in his household, resulted in part with his becoming “a strong advocate of female education.” 7 The fortune he accumulated enabled his heirs to pursue other interests.

Dwarkanath’s son Debendranath (1817–1905) was active in social and religious reform, especially the revitalization of Hinduism, largely in response to missionary activity resulting in conversions of Hindus to Christianity. He was also active in the 1850s in forming the British Indian Association, a forerunner of the Indian National Congress.

Debendranath was father of the famed Rabindranath (1861– 1941), an artistic genius and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Several other Tagores were active in the arts and influential in the revitalization of Bengali culture.

A fascinating example of this revitalization is a style of painting dating from about 1800. Kalighat painting originated around a temple dedicated to the goddess Kali in a neighborhood near the Hooghly River. The subject matter was in part religious, but in a sensual manner, and it also focused on daily life. A favorite topic was the babu, who in this context was a quasi-Westernized dandy obsessed with shady women. (The term babu has many connotations.) As a form, the art anticipated some Western developments, but received little recognition from Westerners, the general attitude being reflected by John Ruskin’s dismissal of all Indian art as that of “heathen people.” Missionaries showed a negative interest, viewing the paintings as childish and evil at the same time. The art was an urban twist upon folk tradition, yet with its own freshness and uniqueness.

There were decisive changes as a result of 1857. The Mughal dynasty was terminated, as was the Company. The British government took over direct rule, replacing the Company’s administrative apparatus with an Indian Civil Service (which became the Indian Administrative Service after independence). In 1877, Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India, a symbolic exclamation point.

Governor-Generals, popularly referred to as Viceroys (after 1858), came and went, but the direction remained clear: Imperial rule for the profit of Britain, not for the welfare of the people of India—this was shown even in the governmental response to famines, and India became represented as the Jewel in the Crown. With the formation of the Indian National Congress (or, simply, Congress), some halfhearted concessions to change and inclusion occurred, albeit always seeming to be too little too late. This organization (curiously, initiated by a retired British official) might have seemed impotent at first, but it did demand that “the Government should be widened and that the people should have their proper and legitimate share in it.” 8 Perhaps most significantly, the initial meeting, held in Bombay in 1885, involved about seventy-two delegates, from various regions, and consisted mostly of upper class Hindus and Parsis (many of them lawyers) with only two Muslims in attendance. It was through this organization, under the leadership of lawyers such as Motilal Nehru and his son Jawaharlal (India’s first prime minister), and M. K. Gandhi, that India achieved independence.

Such a meeting, let alone the organization itself (or, for that matter, the nationalist/independence movement), would not have been possible had it not been for the English language as a lingua franca, which stemmed from the 1835 decision by the Governor-General to make English the official language of instruction. That decision opened a can of worms: men educated in English law saw the possibilities of constitutional democracy. No one Indian language could claim the majority of speakers, and English provided the bridge that made communication possible between the educated from different parts of India. The importance of this development cannot be overemphasized. Related developments included the establishment of universities (oddly, in 1857) in Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta; a vibrant (if often censored) press, and Indian literature in English. These all are evident and thriving yet today, and strongly so. The most important development might well have been that of nationalism, an attempt to override the British policy of divide-and-rule (which played on Hindu-Muslim antipathy). Of course, the creation of Pakistan showed that the dream was not completely successful—yet India today is a successful democracy. And the nationalist movement did bring the diverse cultures and languages, the religious sects and castes, into a new identity: Indian.

The date 1900 makes a good closing point. In 1899, Lord Curzon, the most imperial of the Viceroys, became Governor-General, and in 1901 the Queen-Empress, Victoria, died. The post-1857 developments were, of course, designed to keep empire supreme, but British tradition opened doors within the empire, and did so in spite of empire (e.g., the use of the Magna Carta by an Indian teacher in the classroom ). 9 Further, they really did not develop a coherent approach toward rule. The late Raghavan Iyer found it to be a mix of Trusteeship, Utilitarianism, Platonic Guardianship, and Evangelicalism. 10 The focus was on administration, not development, and that by as small a cadre as possible. Stalin is said to have observed that it was ridiculous . . . that a few hundred Englishmen should dominate India. Actually, the “few hundred” numbered just over a thousand, of whom one-fifth were at any time either sick or on leave. This, over a population of about 300 million in what is now India, Pakistan, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. 11 Although certainly not as cruel as the Belgians in the Congo, the servants of the Raj and their compatriots (families, businessmen, missionaries, etc.)— about 100,000 in 1900 12 —were viewed as “lofty and contemptuous.” 13 And they had their moments of cruelty as well.

The empire was a mix of the White Man’s Burden and Ma-Bap (“We are your mother and father”). Mix is a good word to describe the Raj. The British engaged in racism and exploitation, and they also provided the doors that would lead to Indian democracy and nationhood. Paul Scott, in the opening to The Jewel in the Crown , the initial novel of the Raj Quartet, wrote of two nations in violent opposition

. . . locked in an imperial embrace of such long standing and subtlety it was no longer possible for them to know whether they hated or loved one another, or what it was that held them together and seemed to have confused the image of their separate destinies. 14

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• Video Collectables: The Very Best of British Entertainment , Summer 2008, 30. Web site: www.collectablesdirect.com.
• The favored concept of the decay of the Mughal Empire as resulting in anarchy and a power vacuum that the British stepped into and righted with stability is not without challenge; e.g., Archie Baron, An Indian Affair (London: Channel 4 Books, 2001), 19. Be that as it may, Mughal power withered and British power grew, although not necessarily by design, even though regional or local economies may have prospered.
• A very useful annotated chronology, to which I am indebted, is Dilip Hiro’s The Rough Guide Chronicle: India (London: Rough Guides Ltd, 2002).
• Hiro, 227–233; quote from 227. This attitude is reflected in other works (e.g., Zareer Masani, Tales of the Raj —see notes 9 and 12 below—and Paul Scott’s “The Raj Quartet”) far too numerous to list.
• There are problems with what to call this event—or series of events. Originally, the British referred to it as the Sepoy Mutiny. A sepoy, from the Hindi sipahi , or soldier, was an Indian, Hindu or Muslim, serving in the East India Company army. After independence, nationalists began to refer to it as the First War of Independence. Variations abound, trying to avoid either extreme. Perhaps the best is that of “the Great Rebellion,” as in the subtitle of an outstanding new study by Maria Misra, Vishnu’s Temple: India Since the Great Rebellion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
• Misra, page 7; see 6–17 for an account.
• Blair B. King, Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 183. An informative article, “Jorasanko and the Thakur Family,” by Chitra Deb, appears in a rich collection of articles on historical Calcutta edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri, Calcutta: The Living City, Volume I: The Past (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1990/1995), 64– 67. Jorsanko is the particular branch of the Tagore family, and Thakur is the literal transliteration of Tagore from Bengali.
• As quoted by Hiro, 259.
• Zareer Masani, Indian Tales of the Raj (London: BBC Books, 1987), 90. This a remarkable book for insight into the nationalist-independence struggle beyond the political level. The author is the son of nationalist leaders, who were neither Hindu nor Muslim, but Parsi. In his introduction, he provides a very apt observation: “the Indians who have been the most enduring legacy of the Raj—the Western-educated middle class whom the British fostered to serve their interests, but which eventually threw them out. ” (5)
• Raghavan Iyer, Utilitarianism and All That: The Political Theory of British Imperialism (Santa Barbara: Concord Press, 1983).
• David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005), xiii.
• Maria Misra, “The New Statesman Essay—Before the Pith Helmets,” published 8 October 2001, available at www.newstatemen.com/200110080018. This small, concise article is highly worthwhile.
• The Raj Quartet has gone through several publishings. The quote appears on page nine (the initial page of the work) of The Jewel in the Crown , Avon paperback edition of 1970 (first published 1966).
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• Imperialism in India

Throughout history, many nations have implemented imperialism to enforce their will over others for money, protection, and civilization.  India was no exception. Since its discovery, Europeans were trying to get a piece of India’s action. In many cases, England was the imperial, or mother country.  Since India was put under imperialism, a great deal of things changed, some for the good, mostly though for the bad.  Between 1640 and 1949, India was ruled by two periods of imperialism, both of which affected India in a very profound and permanent manner.

The first period of European control was between 1740 and 1858.  During this period the British East India Company controlled the Indian sub-continent under the guise of economic imperialism, when in fact the manipulation of Indian affairs was much more political than let on.  When it was founded in 1600 by Queen Elizabeth I, the East India Company’s main purpose was “to break into the Indonesian spice trade which was dominated by the Dutch.”

But after colonizing a post a Madras in 1640, the company was re-chartered to include such rights as coining money and act as a government to British subjects at the East India Company’s posts.  As well, the British government also gave the company the right to make was or peaceful arrangements with powers who were non-Christian.  This control expanded with the founding of a port at Bombay in 1668, and the founding of Calcutta in 1690. 

Then in 1756, a young employee named Robert Clive, who had been named lieutenant-governor in 1755, was sent to take back Calcutta from the Bengal nawab.  He accomplished this in January of 1757.  Then later that year, Clive lead a group of  950 European and 2,000 Indian soldiers(sepoys) against a group of 50,000 Indians lead by a degenerate nawab at Plassey.  The victory of the English forces over the local resistance brought Bengal under the effective political control of the East India Company. 

Although a “puppet nawab” was left in control of the area, Clive was granted the right to extract land revenue from most of eastern India.  Throughout this whole period, the company slowly found it’s privileges being revoked, until in 1858, the Sepoy Rebellion, or the Indian Revolution, finally brought an end to the rule of the East India Company in India when it was revealed the cause of the rebellion was the use of beef and pork fat to grease rifle cartridges, which are taboo to the Muslims and Hindus.  This Revolution brought the rule of the East India Company to an end.

The second period of English imperialism started in August of 1858 when the British monarchy assumed direct control of India from the East India Company.  This established a full colonial government, where British officials run the countries affairs, in India.  This is known as colonial imperialism. 

This period was one of the major changes in Indian life and culture.  While the East India Company tried to respect local customs and learn local languages, the colonial government “tried to impose British culture on India. . . encouraged the Indian people to abandon their traditions and learn to speak, dress and live like Europeans.” This came to a head in 1877, when Queen Victoria was recognized as the Empress of India. 

The colonial government felt it was their duty to civilize the people of India, feeling “I am a little bit better than you, therefore my presence is necessary.”  This all began to end in 1885 with the formation of the Indian National Congress, made up of middle-class Indians who were known as the congress.  This congress campaigned for free education for both sexes, more Indian representation in government, and other reforms. 

But then in the early 1900’s, nationalists began to reject British rule and petition for its end in India by boycotting British goods and publishing books which “restored peoples pride in India’s ancient heritage.” The nationalist leader, Mohandas Gandhi, is perhaps best known for his method of passive resistance to help the struggle of India.  Then finally in 1947, the partitioning of the British-controlled lands into the independent countries of Pakistan and India brought an end to English rule in the Indian subcontinent.

Throughout the rule of the British in India, the effect of colonial and economic imperialism impacted the sub-continent in the form of many economic and social changes.  On the economic side, many Indian goods were sold overseas by the East India Company, but the government of England saw India as a large base for British goods, as well as a source of raw materials. 

This lead to British officials discouraging Indian industry, as well as encouraging the production of export crops rather than food crops.  In this way, cotton was produced in India, processed in England, and then sold back to the Indians.  This change in food supplies killed millions of Indians from famine in the 1800’s.  Then when the British government took direct control, the construction of railways, canals, and roads, especially the opening of the Suez canal in 1869 opened the interior of India for trade throughout Europe and Asia. 

With the construction of the telegraph lines in India, exports from India jumped tremendously.  However, all of the profit went to the colonialists, plunging most Indians into poverty.  The social changes included the introduction of health care and hospitals, which, while curing diseases and improving the general health of Indians, created such a tremendous population explosion that famine resulted in some regions. 

As well, the creation of British educated professionals and business people created a new upper-class in India changing the rule of class in India forever.  All of these changes, while under the guise of helping the natives, only served to help the colonists and leave the Indians feeling inferior, as though Indians are only “hewers of wood, and drawers of water”

All of these changes in Indian culture and economy forever changed the destiny of the Land of India.  While many changes may have been good in retrospect, they were only meant to help the colonizing British.  Overall, the colonization of India had nothing but a negative effect on its people and culture.  Perhaps one-day people will realize that imposing one culture on another is not only wrong, but it is destructive to the natural course of a countries history.

Bibliography

“India” Groiler Electronic Encyclopedia, 1994

“India” article found on Internet, 1996

“India, a history of,” Groiler New Book of Knowledge, 1979

In class speech by Mr. Seqera, 1996

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• The Spread of Imperialism
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Author:  William Anderson (Schoolworkhelper Editorial Team)

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What was India’s imperial state compared to Europe’s

it was worse than the europe as they implemented more scrict rules in india

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• Imperialism Essays

Economic Impact of Imperialism in India Essay

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Portuguese, the first Europeans, led by Vasco da Gama landed at Calicut in the year. The Portuguese held India under their spell till the nineteenth century that is 1961. This essay examines the economical impact which Imperialism had in India during the 19th century.

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Introduction:

All through history, many nations have enforced imperialism to implement
their force over other nations for money, protection and civilization. India was no
exception. Since it’s unearthing, Europeans were attempting to get a piece of India’s
action. England was the major nation for establishing its rule in India. Since India
came under imperialism, many things altered, some for the good, and the majority of them for the bad. Between 1640 and 1949, India came under the rule of two
periods of imperialism and both of the periods affected India in a very philosophical and
lasting manner.

The main motive behind the British who established political control in India was economic and commercial. The only intend of the British government was to institute a colonial market for the British goods. Notwithstanding the British affect on the economical aspects on the life of India was destructive and damaging. Britain applied the most complex methods to abuse India’s vast rich economic reserves. 200 years later of the British control India’s economic set up was completely shattered. India in 1947 was a picture of economic underdevelopment with hunger, poverty; low national income etc. 

 Indian agriculture had been cared for under the east India Company. This was chiefly because the major generators of state income were land revenue. Apart from this the British government wanted to make India as its agricultural base. Since agricultural produces from India could make available cheap raw materials to industrial England. The Company tried a variety of experiments to make the most of the land revenue by falling back to the technique of domination and suppression of the peasants. The system of farming and collecting land revenue became obsolete. Cornwallis introduced the ‘Permanent Settlement’ which is nothing but a system of collecting land Revenue in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in the year 1793. Following decision makers brought in the Ryotwari system in the Bombay Presidency and it was introduced in most parts of the Madras Presidency. The Mahalwari system showed exceedingly ravaging in the part of Uttar Pradesh. The Zamindary system promoted absentee landlordism. It finally produced a host of mediators between the state and the cultivator. This complex system of land revenue created a group of moneylenders. These money lenders in turn oppressed the poor peasants by lending them at high interests. The poor cultivators could not repay those high interests and finally submitted their lands to those moneylenders. As a result famine was the common feature of the time.

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Indian industries bore maximum atrocities under the British domination. The authority and wide-ranging sale of the Indian handicraft in Europe was aimed at the commercial interests of the Company. The Whig governments during the early years of the 18th century enforced heavy duties on Indians textiles imports in Britain. At the end of the Napoleonic wars the Indian markets were opened to the British for free trade. The British government was now allowed for British machine made goods to be poured in India duty free or at minimum cost only. A policy of one-way free trade was also introduced in India which made the Indian handicrafts lose its market. This brought about a great wretchedness to a key section of Indian population.

The effect of British rule made capitalism and bourgeoisie commerce attain a flourishing prosperity. But the capitalist mode of production and middle class trends in the commercial dealings shattered the handicraft industries in the European countries also. The evil impacts of the industrial revolution in England had to be bore by India. India could not start industrial regeneration due to British imperialism. Hence India was subject to an enduring and lasting economic stagnation. 
 The imperial rulers never wanted to plan for the industrial developments in India; instead they wanted to de-industrialize India. Britain’s principal concentration was to constitute India as an agricultural nation supplying raw materials for industrialized Britain. This made the British rulers to carry on with the policy of ruralization and peasantization of the Indian Economy. Due to the growth of heavy industries like iron and steel, metallurgical etc, conventional industries like textile, cement, jute, paper, sugar, pig iron etc suffered a great deal. 
 The sole undertaking of the Europeans in India was to exploit India economically. The British rulers made new economic structure which was made of and by the colonial institutions. The British thus established in India a colonial economy, colonial society and even colonial ideology.

The main trouble of foreign rule was due to the fact that the British raj was an administration of expatriates. Under an Indian administration, income accrued from the government service accrues to the local population and not to foreigners. The distraction of upper-class income went into the hands of foreigners. This subdued the growth of local industry because the purchasing power was now in the hands of people who had a taste for foreign goods. This enhanced imports and was mainly damaging to the luxury handicraft industries.

Another crucial result of foreign rule on the long-run growth prospective of the economy was the fact that large parts of its potential savings were siphoned abroad. This ‘drain’ of funds from India to the UK became a point of key argument between Indian nationalist historians and the defenders of the British raj. But the only real base for argument is statistical. It cannot be denied that there was a considerable outflow which endured for 190 years. If these funds were allowed to be retained in India it could have made a noteworthy input to raise income levels.

The first genesis of the British rulers was predatory. Clive carried quarter of a million pounds for himself along with a jagir worth £27,000 a year. But the British did not loot like

Nadir Shah, who almost certainly took as much from India in one year as the East India Company took in 20 years following the battle of Plassey.

Throughout the period of direct British rule from 1858 to 1947, official carry-overs of funds to the UK by the colonial government went under the guise of “Home Charges”. They mainly constituted debt service, purchases of military items and railway equipment, pension, India Office expenses in the UK, Government procurement of national goods, arms and shipping carried out almost completely in the UK. During the 1930s these home bills was in the range of £40 to £50 million a year. Some government expenses were on imports which an independent government could have purchased from local manufacturers. Of these official payments, we can legally mull over service charges on non-productive debt, pensions and unpaid leave payments as a balance of payment drain due to colonialism.

During the last half century of British rule the yield of factory industry increased by more than six-fold (that is about 4.2 per cent a year) while the productivity of small-scale industry declined. Their joint output increased about two-thirds. Actually the yield in the modern factory sector was zero during 1850. It is assumed that small ventures productivity increased in parallel with population from 1850 to 1900, then total industrial output would have grown by 0.8 per cent a year in this period, or about 0.3 per cent a year per head of population. (Courtesy: http://www.ggdc.net/Maddison/articles/moghul_3.pdf).

Some increase seems possible in this period with regard to the railways development along with the expansion of the international trade. Thus it is possible that in the last century of British rule, per capita output of industrial goods increased by a third. But in the first century of British rule, i.e. 1757-1857, industrial productivity fell per head of population because (a) the home and domestic market for luxury goods was cut so drastically; (b) the home market for yarn and cheap cloth was invaded by foreign competition. Over the whole period of British rule it therefore seems likely that industrial output per head of the population was not significantly changed. (Courtesy: http://www.ggdc.net/Maddison/articles/moghul_3.pdf).

Conclusion:

There is a great deal of disagreement between statisticians with regard to the rate of growth of income in India during the colonial period. The disagreement is politically colored and the statistics are poor. For the last fifty years of British rule there is sufficient statistical information to make uneven estimates of the growth of national income.

The social pyramid was condensed because the British severed off most of the top three layers of the Moghul hierarchy, i.e. the Mogul court, the Mogul aristocracy and quasi-autonomous prices and the local chieftain. In place of this system the British established a modern bureaucracy which took little share of national income. The British had a simpler life-style than the Moguls, but they also siphoned a large part of their savings out of the country and furnished no markets for India’s luxury handicrafts. The modern factory created by the British could produce only 7.5 per cent of national income at the end of British rule. Very little inducement was given for investment and almost nothing was done to encourage technical change in agriculture.

Thus the main benefits from the British regime other than the British were the supposed ‘middle’ class of Indian capitalists and professionals, and of course the village landed gentry. Most of these were high caste Hindus and the Parsis and Sikhs who did fairly well. The main losers were the Muslims who had formed the major part of the Mogul aristocracy, officer corps, lawyers, and artisans in the luxury handicrafts (Courtesy: http://www.ggdc.net/Maddison/articles/moghul_3.pdf).

“British Imperialism in India.” 123HelpMe.com. 02 Mar 2009 
    .

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