Our emails are made to shine in your inbox, with something fresh every morning, afternoon, and weekend. What he may not have realised then is that he had managed to provide not just very succinct and persuasive arguments against the empire but also quantify the scale of its ills.
The speech, thus, evolved into Inglorious Empire , in which Tharoor dissects most of the arguments made by apologists for the empire with hard facts and deft writing. The East India Company was created in to cash in on trading with India, which at the time accounted for more than a quarter of all the trade in the world.
It soon realised, however, that its ambitions would be better served with a permanent presence in the country, and from then on the trade took off.
In some or so years, through a series of conquests and some clever politicking, the company created a rival empire on the subcontinent among the already warring ones such as the Maratha, Mughal, and Awadh regimes. Today, the argument goes that, had it not been for the British, those rival factions would not have coalesced into a single entity.
This argument stands on two pillars. First, that the British created the idea of a political union called India. Second, that they provided Indians the tools and institutions needed to hold the union together and run it.
The first one falls when you consider history. Even in reality, under emperor Ashoka, about BCE, large parts of the subcontinent enjoyed cultural and administrative unity. In their entire year rule, they made up no more than 0. And, yet, for most of that period, no Indian was allowed to join the Indian Civil Service, in part because the British could not bear to take orders from a brown man.
When they were finally admitted, more direct racism was in store. High scorers in the civil service examinations were accused of cheating, for how else could brown men do so well.
In fact, once some of the Indian troops did revolt, the rebellion against British rule spread rapidly and involved many local Indian leaders who had a wide range of complaints against British rule. The British preferred to think of the rebellion as a mutiny because this word disguised the huge scale of the rebellion. The word mutiny also covered up the involvement of ordinary Indians. The British preferred to keep this quiet as it suggested that British rule was not widely accepted in India.
Telegram alerting the British government to the outbreak of rebellion in India in By permission of the British Library. The rebellion lasted about 18 months. It was brutal and vicious. The rebels committed many atrocities. They were, however, disunited and badly organised. Gradually British troops, along with the forces of Indian rulers who sided with the British, overcame them. There is a lot of evidence that the great majority of ordinary Indian peasants tried as hard as they could to stay out of the rebellion.
They thought probably rightly that their lives would change little if they were ruled by the British or by the Indian leaders who were trying to get rid of the British. Eventually the British forces defeated the rebels. Their revenge was just as vicious as the rebels had been, and the British and their allies committed many atrocities.
After the rebellion the British government took direct control of India away from the East India Company. You can find out more about the rebellion by looking at case study 4 in this gallery. British rule - the Raj. Indian troops at Portsmouth in waiting to be shipped to Egypt to tackle a rebellion against British rule.
The British relied heavily on Indian troops to enforce their military power. But the key thing is that turning the railways around to benefit the Indians was only something that happened after the independence. One can go on, the English language is certainly beneficial to us today to take advantage of globalisation, but again when the British introduced it, they had explicitly no intention of teaching the masses.
They just needed to create a narrow class of interpreters between the governors and the governed. It was clear from their budgeting that they were not going to invest money in educating Indians. Will Durant, the American historian in the s, noted that the entire budget of British India for education amounted to less than half the high school budget of the state of New York in One year, they spent more on refurbishing military barracks than they spent on education.
They brought in just enough English to serve their purposes to give them a class of clerks. Listen to the event podcast here and view the Storify here. Please read our comments policy before posting. She tweets sonalijcampion.
Please write to southasia lse. Bad Behavior has blocked access attempts in the last 7 days. Search for:. Editor March 22nd, Credit: Sonali Campion. How is a presidential system more responsive to the Indian requirements? Are there any positive legacies in British rule?
About the author Editor. In , life expectancy in India stalled at just 27 years and the literacy rate was a mere 16 percent, with female literacy at a pitiable eight percent. The population was severely emaciated and diseased by the time the conquerors left. This, one can infer, did not happen by accident.
Indians were conquered at home but also shipped abroad as indentured servants; some three million Indians were forced to migrate to the West Indies and South Africa to work the plantations. If a parallel to the Indian experience exists, it might be found in the experience of the Africans who were transported in chains, many of them on British ships, to the New World. While indentured servitude was legally distinct from slavery, in the boats and the fields they were functionally the same.
Britain got rich as a vast redistribution of the wealth that flowed westward to London, fattening the British aristocracy and even trickling down to the working classes, whose lives, however difficult in their own right, directly benefited from the brown and black bodies conquered in Africa and India. In fact, the working classes had jobs precisely because of colonialism and slavery. In the 18th century, half of all shipping in the massive Liverpool port was engaged in the African slave trade.
Eric Williams, the first prime minister of independent Trinidad and Tobago, argued in his Oxford doctoral thesis, and later in a book called Capitalism and Slavery , that the slave trade laid the foundations for the Industrial Revolution, out of which came all of our economic progress in the last two centuries. To put this another way: There would have been no Industrial Revolution — and no rise of the West — without the colonial gains stolen from India and the bodies snatched from Africa.
The freedom of the West was purchased by its looting of the East and South. The conquered knew that this had happened and in their diaries, journals, and memoirs, whether written by slave or subject, they documented the shame it caused them — a primordial shame followed by an equally primordial anger. If a balance sheet of the colonial record is therefore to be constructed, the bodies and wealth stolen from the colonized should be the first accounts to be settled. Inglorious Empire reaches its polemical peak when addressing the famines that took place while the British ran India, what Tharoor terms the British Colonial Holocaust.
That label may be off-putting to some, but, considering the sheer number of preventable deaths, the term is appropriate. Between 30 and 35 million Indians perished in these manmade atrocities. In the Bengal famine alone, over four million Indians were needlessly sacrificed while the British government shipped food to Europe to be held in reserve.
Amartya Sen famously found that there had never been a famine in a democracy with a free press. Colonies may have been run by countries calling themselves democracies, but they were ruled — as Viceroy Mountbatten knew well — as dictatorships. Indians died by the millions simply because the British saw fit to keep them starving.
He was not just a moderately conservative politician, but a far-right reactionary, extreme even for his time, who fervently believed in the superiority of the white race and its right to dominate others a fact not lost upon Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who was advised by his cabinet not to appoint Churchill to any position. There is no controversy in calling Winston Churchill a white supremacist or in noting that the British Empire was predicated on racism.
Colonialism was undertaken for profit, but it was justified, legitimated, and reinforced by ideas about race and biological superiority.
Churchill and his ilk had plenty of reasons to believe that their race was superior.
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