When was british imperialism in india

The railway companies purchased most of their hardware and parts in Britain. There were railway maintenance workshops in India, but they were rarely allowed to manufacture or repair locomotives. It later transpired that there was heavy corruption in these investments, on the part of both members of the British Colonial Government in India and companies who supplied machinery and steel in Britain.

This resulted in railway lines and equipment costing nearly double what they should have. India provides an example of the British Empire pouring its money and expertise into a well-built system designed for military purposes after the Rebellion of with the hope that it would stimulate industry.

The system was overbuilt and too expensive for the small amount of freight traffic it carried. However, it did capture the imagination of the Indians, who saw their railways as the symbol of an industrial modernity—but one that was not realized until after Independence.

The result was, on average, no long-term change in income levels. Agriculture was still dominant, with most peasants at the subsistence level. Extensive irrigation systems were built, providing an impetus for growing cash crops for export and for raw materials for Indian industry, especially jute, cotton, sugarcane, coffee, and tea.

Agricultural income imparted the strongest effect on GDP. Historians continue to debate whether the long-term impact of British rule was to accelerate or hinder the economic development of India.

He vehemently attacked the EIC, claiming that Warren Hastings and other top officials had ruined the Indian economy and society. Indian historian Rajat Kanta Ray continues this line of attack, arguing that the new economy brought by the British in the 18th century was a form of plunder and a catastrophe for the traditional economy of the Mughal Empire. Marshall shows that recent scholarship has reinterpreted the view that the prosperity of the formerly benign Mughal rule gave way to poverty and anarchy.

He argues the British takeover did not make any sharp break with the past, which largely delegated control to regional Mughal rulers and sustained a generally prosperous economy for the rest of the 18th century.

Marshall notes the British went into partnership with Indian bankers and raised revenue through local tax administrators, keeping the old Mughal rates of taxation. Many historians agree that the EIC inherited an onerous taxation system that took one-third of the produce of Indian cultivators.

Instead of the Indian nationalist account of the British as alien aggressors, seizing power by brute force and impoverishing all of India, Marshall presents the interpretation supported by many scholars in India and the West that the British were not in full control but instead were players in what was primarily an Indian play and in which their rise to power depended upon excellent cooperation with Indian elites.

Marshall admits that much of his interpretation is still highly controversial among many historians. However, historians agree that the British rule did not change the divisive caste-based hierarchy of the Indian society and thus ordinary Indians remained excluded from the benefits of economic growth. The railway network in , when it was the fourth largest railway network in the world. In , almost all the rail companies were taken over by the government.

The following year, the first electric locomotive made its appearance. With the arrival of World War I, the railways were used to meet the needs of the British outside India.

With the end of the war, the railways were in a state of disrepair and collapse. The Indian National Congress has dominated Indian politics since leading the Indian independence movement. In the post-independence era, it has remained the most influential political party in India under the continuous leadership of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty. Its objective was to obtain a greater share in government for educated Indians and create a platform for civic and political dialogue between educated Indians and the British Raj.

The first session was held in December and attended by 72 delegates. The rest were of Parsi and Jain backgrounds. Within the next few years, the demands of the Congress became more radical in the face of constant opposition from the British government.

The organization decided to advocate in favor of the independence movement because it would allow a new political system in which the Congress could be a major party. In , the Congress was split into two factions. The radicals, led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, advocated civil agitation and direct revolution to overthrow the British Empire and the abandonment of all things British.

The moderates, led by leaders like Dadabhai Naoroji and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, wanted reform within the framework of British rule. Tilak was backed by rising public leaders like Bipin Chandra Pal and Lala Lajpat Rai, who held the same point of view. Gokhale criticized Tilak for encouraging acts of violence and disorder. But the Congress of did not have public membership and thus Tilak and his supporters were forced to leave the party.

Mahatma Gandhi returned from South Africa in With the help of the moderate group led by Ghokhale, Gandhi became president of the Congress and formed an alliance with the Khilafat Movement, a pan-Islamic, political protest campaign launched by Muslims to influence the British government and increase Hindu Muslim unity. In protest, a number of leaders resigned to set up the Swaraj Party. The Khilafat movement soon collapsed and in the years following World War I, the party became associated with Mahatma Gandhi, who remained its unofficial spiritual leader and icon.

The nationalist cause was expanded to include the interests and industries that formed the economy of common Indians. For example, in Champaran, Bihar, Gandhi championed the plight of desperately poor sharecroppers and landless farmers who were forced to pay oppressive taxes and grow cash crops at the expense of the subsistence crops that formed their food supply. The profits from the crops they grew were insufficient to provide for their sustenance.

Proposals aimed at eradicating caste differences, untouchability, poverty, and religious and ethnic divisions made the Congress a forceful group that dominated the Indian independence movement. Although its members were predominantly Hindu, it had members from other religions, economic classes, and ethnic and linguistic groups.

In the winter of , the British government allowed provincial elections in India that were held in eleven provinces. The Congress gained power in eight of the provinces. In protest, the Congress asked all elected representatives to resign from the government. In Azad Hind, an Indian provisional government, was established in Singapore and supported by Japan. In response, the Congress helped to form the INA Defense Committee, which assembled a legal team to defend the case of the soldiers of the Azad Hind government.

Nehru emerged as the paramount leader of the Indian independence movement under the tutelage of Mahatma Gandhi and ruled India from its establishment as an independent nation in until his death in He is considered to be the architect of the modern Indian nation-state: a sovereign, socialist, secular, and democratic republic. After Indian independence in , the Indian National Congress became the dominant political party in the country.

In , in the first general election held after independence, the party swept to power in the national parliament and most state legislatures. It held power nationally until It returned to power in and ruled until , when it was once again defeated. It formed the government in at the head of a coalition as well as in and , when it led the United Progressive Alliance.

During this period, the Congress remained center-left in its social policies while steadily shifting from a socialist to a neoliberal economic outlook. During his tenure, Nehru implemented policies based on import substitution industrialization and advocated a mixed economy, where the government-controlled public sector co-existed with the private sector.

He believed the establishment of basic and heavy industries was fundamental to the development and modernization of the Indian economy. The Nehru government directed investment primarily into key public sector industries — steel, iron, coal, and power — promoting their development with subsidies and protectionist policies. Nehru embraced secularism, socialistic economic practices based on state-driven industrialization, and a non-aligned and non-confrontational foreign policy that became typical of the modern Congress Party.

Shastri died in , reportedly of a heart attack but the circumstances of his death remain mysterious. In the parliamentary elections held in , the Gandhi-led Congress won a landslide victory on a platform of progressive policies such as the elimination of poverty. Gandhi rejected calls to resign and announced plans to appeal to the Supreme Court.

She moved to restore order by ordering the arrest of most of the opposition participating in the unrest. This period of political oppression ended in , when Gandhi released all political prisoners and called fresh elections to the Lok Sabha. The opposition Janata Party won a landslide victory over the Congress. Indira Gandhi, second-longest-serving Prime Minister of India and the only woman to hold the office.

She was elected Congress President in In , Ghandi and her followers seceded and formed a new opposition party, popularly called Congress I —the I signifying Indira. During the next year, her new party attracted enough members of the legislature to become the official opposition.

In the same year, Gandhi regained a parliamentary seat. In , following a landslide victory for the Congress I , she was again elected prime minister. The national election commission declared Congress I to be the real Indian National Congress for general election and the designation I was dropped.

As prime minister, Gandhi became known for her political ruthlessness and unprecedented centralization of power.

After his government became embroiled in several financial scandals, however, his leadership became increasingly ineffectual, although Gandhi was regarded as a non-abrasive person who consulted other party members and refrained from hasty decisions.

In , Gandhi was killed by a bomb concealed in a basket of flowers carried by a woman associated with the Tamil Tigers. Rajiv Gandhi was succeeded as party leader by P. Narasimha Rao, who was elected prime minister in Rao later resigned as prime minister and as party president. In the general election, the Congress did not regain its leading position. To boost its popularity and improve its performance in the forthcoming election, Congress leaders urged Sonia Gandhi — widow of Rajiv Gandhi — to assume the leadership of the party.

She had previously declined offers to become actively involved in party affairs and stayed away from politics. After her election as party leader, a section of the party that objected to the choice because of her Italian origins broke away and formed the Nationalist Congress Party NCP , led by Sharad Pawar. Sonia Gandhi remains the leader of the Congress, highlighting the long Indian tradition of politics as a dynastic affair. The Indian independence movement, which achieved its goal in , was one of many independence struggles that intensified after World War II across Asia and Africa.

The decades following the Indian Rebellion of were a period of growing political awareness, manifestation of Indian public opinion, and emergence of Indian leadership at both national and provincial levels. Members of the upwardly mobile and successful western-educated elites, engaged in professions such as law, teaching, and journalism, established organizations to ensure they would gain influence in Indian politics e.

Despite their claims to represent all India, these organizations initially voiced the interests of urban elites, and the number of participants from other social and economic backgrounds remained negligible.

This new middle class of educated professionals, although spread thinly across the country, expressed the growing sense of solidarity, empowerment, and discontent with the British rule, fueled by success in education and accordant benefits, including employment in the Indian Civil Service. Many Indians were especially encouraged when Canada was granted dominion status in and established an autonomous democratic constitution. Discontent, on the other hand, came not just from policies of racial discrimination at the hands of the British in India, but also from specific government actions like the use of Indian troops in imperial campaigns e.

The event contributed to the establishment of the Indian National Congress, the single most influential organization of the Indian independence movement. During its first twenty years, Congress primarily debated British policy toward India. However, its debates created a new outlook that held Great Britain responsible for draining India of its wealth. Britain did this, the nationalists claimed, by unfair trade, restraint on indigenous Indian industry, and using Indian taxes to pay the high salaries of the British civil servants in India.

By , although the Congress had emerged as an all-India political organization, its achievement was undermined by its singular failure to attract Muslims, who felt that their representation in government service was inadequate. In response, the All India Muslim League was founded in Like most of the Congress at the time, Jinnah did not favor outright self-rule, considering British influences on education, law, culture, and industry as beneficial to India.

To secure the interests of the Muslim diaspora in British India, the League eventually played a decisive role during the s in the Indian self-rule movement and developed into the driving nationalist force that led to the creation of Pakistan in the Indian subcontinent.

The nationalistic sentiments among Congress members led the movement to be represented in the bodies of government and the legislation and administration of India.

Congressmen saw themselves as loyalists, but wanted an active role in governing their own country, albeit as part of the Empire. However, the early part of the 20th century saw a more radical approach towards political self-rule swaraj propagated by increasingly influential Mahatma Gandhi.

Swaraj put stress on governance not by a hierarchical government, but by individuals and community building. The focus was on political decentralization. Demonstration against the British rule in India, c. Under the presidency of Jawaharlal Nehru at his historic Lahore session in December , the Indian National Congress adopted a resolution calling for complete self-rule and end of British rule.

Some activists preached armed revolution to achieve self-rule. Poets and writers used literature, poetry, and speech as toolS for political awareness. Feminists promoted the emancipation of Indian women and their participation in national politics.

Others championed the cause of the disadvantaged sections of Indian society within the larger self-rule movement. The work of these movements led ultimately to the Indian Independence Act , which ended the suzerainty in India and the creation of Pakistan. India remained a Dominion of the Crown until , when the Constitution of India came into force, establishing the Republic of India. Pakistan was a dominion until , when it adopted its first republican constitution.

In the aftermath of World War II, European colonies, controlling more than one billion people throughout the world, still ruled most of the Middle East, southeast Asia, Africa, and until the Indian subcontinent. Independence movements applying a number of different strategies, both militant and based on the civil disobedience model, emerged across the African continent and in regions of Asia that remained under the European control.

As a result of colonialism and imperialism, a majority of Africa lost sovereignty and control of precious natural resources. By the s, the colonial powers had cultivated, sometimes inadvertently, a small elite of leaders educated in Western universities and advocated the idea of self-determination.

In the northeast the continued independence of the Empire of Ethiopia remained a beacon of hope to pro-independence activists. However, with the anti-colonial wars of the s barely over, modern forms of African nationalism gained strength in the early 20th-century with the emergence of Pan-Africanism. This worldwide intellectual movement aims to encourage and strengthen bonds of solidarity between all people of African descent.

Modern Pan-Africanism began around the start of the 20th century. The red, black, and green Pan-African flag designed by the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Variations of the flag have been used in various countries and territories in Africa and the Americas to represent Pan-Africanist ideologies.

Several Pan-African organizations and movements have often employed the emblematic red, black, and green tri-color scheme in variety of contexts. Additionally, the flags of a number of nations in Africa and of Pan-African groups use green, yellow, and red. It was not a treaty and was not submitted to the British Parliament or the Senate of the United States for ratification, but became a very influential document. Among the principal points of the Charter were post-war territorial adjustments to be decided in accord with the wishes of the peoples concerned and the statement that all people had a right to self-determination.

While Churchill rejected its universal applicability when it came to the self-determination of subject nations, after World War II, the U. In Asia, the image of European pre-eminence was shattered by the wartime Japanese occupations of large portions of British, French, and Dutch territories in the Pacific.

The destabilization of European rule led to the rapid growth of nationalist movements—especially in Indonesia, Malaya, Burma, and French Indochina. In the Philippines, the U. However, the Philippines remained under pressure to adopt a political and economic system similar to their old imperial master. A year after India gained its independence, the exhausted British granted independence to Burma and Ceylon.

In the Middle East, Britain granted independence to Jordan in and two years later ended its mandate of Palestine. Following the end of the war, nationalists in Indonesia demanded complete independence from the Netherlands. A brutal conflict ensued and in , through United Nations mediation, the Dutch East Indies achieved independence, becoming the new nation of Indonesia. France granted the State of Vietnam based in Saigon independence in whilst Laos and Cambodia received independence in In Africa, the struggle culminated in , known today as the Year of Africa, when the number of independent countries rose from nine with population 95 million to 26 population million , gaining their independence from Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom.

The Year of Africa altered the symbolic status of Africans worldwide by forcing the world to recognize the existence of African nations on the international arena.

It marked the beginning of a new, more Afrocentric era in African studies and it was a major boost for African Americans, who were engaged in a civil rights strife within their own country. The struggle of independence in Africa, however, did not end but was fueled by the events of as many colonies continued to fight for their independence throughout the s and s.

Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. European Imperialism in East Asia. Search for:. 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.

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.

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.

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? 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. 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 midth 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.

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 , 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 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, 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. 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. It was only much later, in the s, 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. 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.

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. 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.

In , when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1. 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. Once bitten by the bug and with strict adherence to the law not being insisted on over time, Indians continued with the enterprise.

By , there were some newspapers in the subcontinent, mostly owned and edited by Indians. Alarm bells rang again, bringing another round of censorship in the form of the Vernacular Press Act of and the revised Press Act of Under the latter, publishers were required to provide a hefty security deposit, which they would forfeit if the publication carried inflammatory or abusive articles.

The racism of the British-owned press was not subject to the same restrictions. The justice system in India was even more discriminatory. For instance, an Englishman who shot dead his Indian servant got six months in jail and a modest fine. But an Indian convicted of the attempted rape of an Englishwoman was sentenced to 20 years. Worse still, the legacy of the British legal system has left India with an unenviable judicial backlog.

There are still cases pending that were filed during the days of the Raj. Indeed, if a pluralist democracy were a British legacy, how is it that neither Pakistan nor Bangladesh have pulled off a similar feat? Few kings ever rule to benefit their people.

And, yet, what the British did to India was decidedly worse. How can we be sure that the British were to blame for those hunger deaths? Worse still, the British notion at the time was that governmental interference to prevent a famine was a bad idea. On one route, between Kolkata to Trinidad, the proportion of deaths of indentured labourers on ships reached appalling levels: If you were to believe official figures, the British troops fired 1, bullets at innocent civilians, killing and wounding 1, Those who were killed had no idea that suddenly their gathering was suddenly deemed illegal and they received no warning to disperse.

The British built the railways primarily for themselves, using their own technology and forcing Indians to buy British equipment. Each mile of the Indian railway constructed cost nine times as much as the same in the US, and twice that in difficult and less populated Canada and Australia.

The bills were footed by Indian taxpayers and British investors received a guaranteed return on their capital. Freight charges were dirt cheap, and Indians who traveled 3rd class paid for expensive tickets.