Did India win or lose because of British rule? Some recent research suggests that British rule did little for India in economic terms. Britain has benefited enormously from India`s dominance, but most of the wealth created has not been reinvested in the country. For example, economic growth in India was very slow from 1860 to about 1920 – much slower than in Britain or America. India`s population has only grown by about 1% per year, which also suggests that there hasn`t been much economic growth. India actually began importing food under British rule because Indians cultivated „cash crops“ such as cotton and tea to send to Britain. The 1. In November 1858, Lord Canning (reigned 1856-62) announced Queen Victoria`s proclamation to the „Princes, Chiefs and Peoples of India“, which revealed a new British policy of constant support for „Native princes“ and non-interference in matters of religious belief or worship in British India. The announcement reversed Lord Dalufanie`s pre-war policy of political unification through the annexation of the princely state, and princes were free to adopt any heir as long as they all swore eternal allegiance to the British Crown. In 1876, at the suggestion of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria added the title of Empress of India to her royalty.
British fears of a new mutiny and the resulting determination to strengthen the Indian states as „natural breakwaters“ against any future tidal wave of revolt thus enabled more than 560 enclaves of autocratic princely rule scattered throughout British India to survive during the nine decades of crown rule. The new policy of religious non-interference also arose from the fear of a recurring mutiny, which many Britons believed was triggered by the Orthodox Hindu and Muslim reaction against the secularized advance of utilitarian positivism and the proselytism of Christian missionaries. British liberal socio-religious reform thus stalled for more than three decades – essentially from the East India Company`s Hindu Widows Remarriage Act of 1856 to the timid Crown Age of Consent Act of 1891, which simply raised the age of legal rape for „consenting“ Indian wives from 10 to 12. The British were the first to found newspapers in India, serving first a small English-speaking elite and later a large audience in the vernacular languages. Alarmed by their proliferation, however, the East India Company passed the Press Censorship Act in 1799, which subjected all newspapers to scrutiny before publication. In 1807, all other types of publication were also placed under this rule. India was not only weak at that time; It was also divided among many competing local leaders. The fragmentation of the Mughal Empire meant great instability in large parts of India. Local leaders fought endlessly, Muslims and Hindus fought against each other and their co-religionists. War was endemic to much of the subcontinent in the early decades of the eighteenth century. [9]“. Many Indians praised the stability of the British, especially in the late eighteenth century, although they were annoyed by the various taxes imposed on them by foreigners.
By 1750, however, the Mughal Empire was in decline. Even at the height of their power, they could not directly manage their territories and often delegated powers to appointees. These local leaders were supposed to deliver soldiers and equipment to the Mogularmee and pay taxes. Over time, these local rulers became increasingly powerful and independent of the Mughal court. This weakened the Mughal Empire. The dynasty had also been undermined by the invasion of the empire by an Afghan warlord, who had even plundered Delhi, the capital of the empire. 3️British rule was neither better nor worse than that of the despots of earlier empires Many Indians were willing to accept domination, and they did not try to oppose or rebel against the British presence in their country, because they recognized the benefits of their domination. For decades, war has been endemic to the subcontinent.
[11] During their 200-year reign, they represented no more than 0.05% of the population. And yet, for most of that time, 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, they faced more direct racism. The highest scores in the official exams were accused of fraud, because how could brown men do so well otherwise. The few people who survived the fraud charge were then discriminated against at home by being excluded from gentlemen`s clubs in the districts they ran. The Government of India Act of 1919 (also known as the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms) was based on the Montagu-Chelmsford Report submitted to Parliament in 1918. According to the law, elections were held in 1920, the number of Indian members of the Viceroy`s Executive Council was increased from at least two to no less than three, and the Imperial Legislative Council was transformed into a bicameral legislature consisting of a legislative assembly (lower house) and a council of state (upper house). The 145-member Legislative Assembly is expected to have a majority of 104 elected members, while 33 of the 60 members of the Council of State is also expected to be elected. The right to vote continued to be based on property and education, but under the 1919 Act, the total number of Indians who could vote for representatives on provincial councils was increased to five million; However, only one-fifth of that number was allowed to vote for candidates in the Legislative Assembly, and only about 17,000 elites were allowed to elect members of the Council of State. Dyarchy (dual governance) should be introduced at the provincial level, where executive councils were divided between ministers elected to preside over the „transferred“ departments (education, public health, public works and agriculture) and officials appointed by the governor to rule over the „reserved“ departments (land revenues, justice, police, irrigation and labor). The immediate result of the mutiny was a general clean-up of the house of the Indian administration.
The East India Company was abolished in favor of direct rule of India by the British government. Specifically, it didn`t mean much, but it did introduce a more personal touch into government and eliminate the unimaginative trade that had remained in the Directors` Court. The financial crisis caused by the mutiny led to a modern reorganization of the Indian government`s finances. The Indian Army has also been completely reorganized. The result of the empire, as Tharoor puts it, was that „what had once been one of the richest and most industrialized economies in the world, which, along with China, accounted for nearly 75 percent of world industrial production in 1750, had been reduced to one of the poorest, most backward by the plundering of imperial domination. Illiterate and sick societies on earth at the time of independence in 1947. This included the decline of the Mughal Empire. The country was politically divided, devoid of European rivals and without any sense of national unity. The British were also intelligent in the way of their conquest.
They skillfully used local elites to manage their new domains and took a piecemeal approach to expanding their authority and domination. These factors helped establish British rule in India, which lasted nearly two hundred years until India`s independence after World War II. [19] The Indian National Congress (Congress Party) held its first session in Bombay City in December 1885, while British Indian troops were still fighting in Upper Burma. Thus, as the British Indian Empire approached its extreme limits of expansion, the institutional seed of the greatest of its national successors was sown. However, the provincial roots of Indian nationalism date back to the beginning of the era of crown rule in Bombay, Bengal and Madras. Nationalism emerged in 19th century British India both in imitation and in response to the consolidation of British rule and the spread of Western civilization. In addition, there were two turbulent national mainstreams flowing beneath the falsely calm official surface of the British administration: the largest, led by the Indian National Congress, which eventually led to the birth of India, and the smaller Muslim, which acquired its organizational skeleton with the founding of the Muslim League in 1906 and led to the founding of Pakistan. On the other hand, research suggests that from about 1870 to 1930, Britain absorbed about 1% of India`s wealth per year. It was much less than the French, Dutch and Germans took from their countries. The British invested around £400 million over the same period. They introduced an irrigation program that increased the area available for agriculture by 8 times. They developed a coal industry that had never existed before.
Public health and life expectancy increased under British rule, mainly due to improved water supply and the introduction of quinine treatment for malaria. .