write an essay on imperialism in india

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction

The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857

Aftermath of the mutiny, government of india act of 1858, social policy, government organization, economic policy and development, the northwest frontier, the second anglo-afghan war, the incorporation of burma, origins of the nationalist movement, the early congress movement, the first partition of bengal, nationalism in the muslim community, reforms of the british liberals, moderate and militant nationalism, india’s contributions to the war effort, anti-british activity, the postwar years, jallianwala bagh massacre at amritsar.

• Gandhi’s philosophy and strategy

Constitutional reforms

The congress’s ambivalent strategy, muslim separatism, the impact of world war ii, british wartime strategy, the transfer of power and the birth of two countries.

• Who was Mangal Pandey?
• What did Gandhi try to accomplish with his activism?
• What were Gandhi’s religious beliefs?
• What other social movements did Gandhi’s activism inspire?
• What was Gandhi’s personal life like?

British raj

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Humanities LibreTexts - British Raj
• Association for Asian Studies - Education About Asia: Online Archives - The British Impact on India, 1700–1900
• Georgetown University - Berkley Center - The British Raj and the Present
• GlobalSecurity.org - 1858-1947 - British Raj
• Table Of Contents

• What was the British raj?
• Why did Britain take over from the East India Company in 1858?
• What sparked the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857?
• What did the Government of India Act of 1858 do?
• How did the 1905 partition of Bengal affect Indian nationalism?
• Why was the Indian National Congress's first meeting in 1885 important?
• Who was Gandhi, and what was his plan for independence?
• Why did the Muslim League want a separate state?
• What led to the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947?

British raj , period of direct British rule over the Indian subcontinent from 1858 until the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. The raj succeeded management of the subcontinent by the British East India Company , after general distrust and dissatisfaction with company leadership resulted in a widespread mutiny of sepoy troops in 1857, causing the British to reconsider the structure of governance in India. The British government took possession of the company’s assets and imposed direct rule. The raj was intended to increase Indian participation in governance, but the powerlessness of Indians to determine their own future without the consent of the British led to an increasingly adamant national independence movement.

Though trade with India had been highly valued by Europeans since ancient times, the long route between them was subject to many potential obstacles and obfuscations from middlemen, making trade unsafe, unreliable, and expensive. This was especially true after the collapse of the Mongol empire and the rise of the Ottoman Empire all but blocked the ancient Silk Road . As Europeans, led by the Portuguese, began to explore maritime navigation routes to bypass middlemen, the distance of the venture required merchants to set up fortified posts.

The British entrusted this task to the East India Company, which initially established itself in India by obtaining permission from local authorities to own land, fortify its holdings, and conduct trade duty-free in mutually beneficial relationships. The company’s territorial paramountcy began after it became involved in hostilities, sidelining rival European companies and eventually overthrowing the nawab of Bengal and installing a puppet in 1757. The company’s control over Bengal was effectively consolidated in the 1770s when Warren Hastings brought the nawab’s administrative offices to Calcutta (now Kolkata ) under his oversight. About the same time, the British Parliament began regulating the East India Company through successive India Acts , bringing Bengal under the indirect control of the British government. Over the next eight decades, a series of wars, treaties, and annexations extended the dominion of the company across the subcontinent, subjugating most of India to the determination of British governors and merchants.

In late March 1857 a sepoy (Indian soldier) in the employ of the East India Company named Mangal Pandey attacked British officers at the military garrison in Barrackpore . He was arrested and then executed by the British in early April. Later in April sepoy troopers at Meerut , having heard a rumour that they would have to bite cartridges that had been greased with the lard of pigs and cows (forbidden for consumption by Muslims and Hindus, respectively) to ready them for use in their new Enfield rifles, refused the cartridges. As punishment, they were given long prison terms, fettered, and put in jail. This punishment incensed their comrades, who rose on May 10, shot their British officers, and marched to Delhi , where there were no European troops. There the local sepoy garrison joined the Meerut men, and by nightfall the aged pensionary Mughal emperor Bahādur Shah II had been nominally restored to power by a tumultuous soldiery. The seizure of Delhi provided a focus and set the pattern for the whole mutiny, which then spread throughout northern India. With the exception of the Mughal emperor and his sons and Nana Sahib , the adopted son of the deposed Maratha peshwa , none of the important Indian princes joined the mutineers. The mutiny officially came to an end on July 8, 1859.

The immediate result of the mutiny was a general housecleaning of the Indian administration. The East India Company was abolished in favour of the direct rule of India by the British government. In concrete terms, this did not mean much, but it introduced a more personal note into the government and removed the unimaginative commercialism that had lingered in the Court of Directors. The financial crisis caused by the mutiny led to a reorganization of the Indian administration’s finances on a modern basis. The Indian army was also extensively reorganized.

Another significant result of the mutiny was the beginning of the policy of consultation with Indians. The Legislative Council of 1853 had contained only Europeans and had arrogantly behaved as if it were a full-fledged parliament. It was widely felt that a lack of communication with Indian opinion had helped to precipitate the crisis. Accordingly, the new council of 1861 was given an Indian-nominated element. The educational and public works programs (roads, railways, telegraphs, and irrigation) continued with little interruption; in fact, some were stimulated by the thought of their value for the transport of troops in a crisis. But insensitive British-imposed social measures that affected Hindu society came to an abrupt end.

Finally, there was the effect of the mutiny on the people of India themselves. Traditional society had made its protest against the incoming alien influences, and it had failed. The princes and other natural leaders had either held aloof from the mutiny or had proved, for the most part, incompetent. From this time all serious hope of a revival of the past or an exclusion of the West diminished. The traditional structure of Indian society began to break down and was eventually superseded by a Westernized class system, from which emerged a strong middle class with a heightened sense of Indian nationalism .

(For more on the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, see also Indian Mutiny and the discussion of the mutiny in India .)

British rule

Establishment of direct british governance.

Much of the blame for the mutiny fell on the ineptitude of the East India Company. On August 2, 1858, Parliament passed the Government of India Act , transferring British power over India from the company to the crown. The merchant company’s residual powers were vested in the secretary of state for India, a minister of Great Britain’s cabinet, who would preside over the India Office in London and be assisted and advised, especially in financial matters, by a Council of India , which consisted initially of 15 Britons, 7 of whom were elected from among the old company’s court of directors and 8 of whom were appointed by the crown. Though some of Britain’s most powerful political leaders became secretaries of state for India in the latter half of the 19th century, actual control over the government of India remained in the hands of British viceroys—who divided their time between Calcutta ( Kolkata ) and Simla ( Shimla )—and their “steel frame” of approximately 1,500 Indian Civil Service (ICS) officials posted “on the spot” throughout British India.

On November 1, 1858, Lord Canning (governed 1856–62) announced Queen Victoria ’s proclamation to “the Princes, Chiefs and Peoples of India,” which unveiled a new British policy of perpetual support for “native princes” and nonintervention in matters of religious belief or worship within British India. The announcement reversed Lord Dalhousie ’s prewar policy of political unification through princely state annexation, and princes were left free to adopt any heirs they desired so long as they all swore undying allegiance to the British crown. In 1876, at the prompting of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli , Queen Victoria added the title Empress of India to her regality. British fears of another mutiny and consequent determination to bolster Indian states as “natural breakwaters” against any future tidal wave of revolt thus left more than 560 enclaves of autocratic princely rule to survive, interspersed throughout British India, for the entire nine decades of crown rule. The new policy of religious nonintervention was born equally out of fear of recurring mutiny, which many Britons believed had been triggered by orthodox Hindu and Muslim reaction against the secularizing inroads of utilitarian positivism and the proselytizing of Christian missionaries . British liberal socioreligious reform therefore came to a halt for more than three decades—essentially from the East India Company’s Hindu Widow’s Remarriage Act of 1856 to the crown’s timid Age of Consent Act of 1891, which merely raised the age of statutory rape for “consenting” Indian brides from 10 years to 12.

The typical attitude of British officials who went to India during that period was, as the English writer Rudyard Kipling put it, to “take up the white man’s burden.” By and large, throughout the interlude of their Indian service to the crown , Britons lived as super-bureaucrats, “Pukka Sahibs,” remaining as aloof as possible from “native contamination” in their private clubs and well-guarded military cantonments (called camps), which were constructed beyond the walls of the old, crowded “native” cities in that era. The new British military towns were initially erected as secure bases for the reorganized British regiments and were designed with straight roads wide enough for cavalry to gallop through whenever needed. The old company’s three armies (located in Bengal , Bombay [ Mumbai ], and Madras [ Chennai ]), which in 1857 had only 43,000 British to 228,000 native troops, were reorganized by 1867 to a much “safer” mix of 65,000 British to 140,000 Indian soldiers. Selective new British recruitment policies screened out all “nonmartial” (meaning previously disloyal) Indian castes and ethnic groups from armed service and mixed the soldiers in every regiment, thus permitting no single caste or linguistic or religious group to again dominate a British Indian garrison. Indian soldiers were also restricted from handling certain sophisticated weaponry.

After 1869, with the completion of the Suez Canal and the steady expansion of steam transport reducing the sea passage between Britain and India from about three months to only three weeks, British women came to the East with ever greater alacrity , and the British officials they married found it more appealing to return home with their British wives during furloughs than to tour India as their predecessors had done. While the intellectual calibre of British recruits to the ICS in that era was, on the average, probably higher than that of servants recruited under the company’s earlier patronage system, British contacts with Indian society diminished in every respect (fewer British men, for example, openly consorted with Indian women), and British sympathy for and understanding of Indian life and culture were, for the most part, replaced by suspicion, indifference, and fear.

Queen Victoria’s 1858 promise of racial equality of opportunity in the selection of civil servants for the government of India had theoretically thrown the ICS open to qualified Indians, but examinations for the services were given only in Britain and only to male applicants between the ages of 17 and 22 (in 1878 the maximum age was further reduced to 19) who could stay in the saddle over a rigorous series of hurdles. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that by 1869 only one Indian candidate had managed to clear those obstacles to win a coveted admission to the ICS. British royal promises of equality were thus subverted in actual implementation by jealous, fearful bureaucrats posted “on the spot.”

From 1858 to 1909 the government of India was an increasingly centralized paternal despotism and the world’s largest imperial bureaucracy . The Indian Councils Act of 1861 transformed the viceroy’s Executive Council into a miniature cabinet run on the portfolio system, and each of the five ordinary members was placed in charge of a distinct department of Calcutta’s government—home, revenue, military, finance, and law. The military commander in chief sat with that council as an extraordinary member. A sixth ordinary member was assigned to the viceroy’s Executive Council after 1874, initially to preside over the Department of Public Works, which after 1904 came to be called Commerce and Industry. Though the government of India was by statutory definition the “Governor-General-in-Council” ( governor-general remained the viceroy’s alternate title), the viceroy was empowered to overrule his councillors if ever he deemed that necessary. He personally took charge of the Foreign Department, which was mostly concerned with relations with princely states and bordering foreign powers. Few viceroys found it necessary to assert their full despotic authority, since the majority of their councillors usually were in agreement. In 1879, however, Viceroy Lytton (governed 1876–80) felt obliged to overrule his entire council in order to accommodate demands for the elimination of his government’s import duties on British cotton manufactures, despite India’s desperate need for revenue in a year of widespread famine and agricultural disorders.

From 1854 additional members met with the viceroy’s Executive Council for legislative purposes, and by the act of 1861 their permissible number was raised to between 6 and 12, no fewer than half of whom were to be nonofficial. While the viceroy appointed all such legislative councillors and was empowered to veto any bill passed on to him by that body, its debates were to be open to a limited public audience, and several of its nonofficial members were Indian nobility and loyal landowners. For the government of India the legislative council sessions thus served as a crude public-opinion barometer and the beginnings of an advisory “safety valve” that provided the viceroy with early crisis warnings at the minimum possible risk of parliamentary-type opposition. The act of 1892 further expanded the council’s permissible additional membership to 16, of whom 10 could be nonofficial, and increased their powers, though only to the extent of allowing them to ask questions of government and to criticize formally the official budget during one day reserved for that purpose at the very end of each year’s legislative session in Calcutta. The Supreme Council, however, still remained quite remote from any sort of parliament.

Economically, it was an era of increased commercial agricultural production, rapidly expanding trade, early industrial development, and severe famine . The total cost of the mutiny of 1857–59, which was equivalent to a normal year’s revenue, was charged to India and paid off from increased revenue resources in four years. The major source of government income throughout that period remained the land revenue, which, as a percentage of the agricultural yield of India’s soil, continued to be “an annual gamble in monsoon rains.” Usually, however, it provided about half of British India’s gross annual revenue, or roughly the money needed to support the army. The second most lucrative source of revenue at that time was the government’s continued monopoly over the flourishing opium trade to China; the third was the tax on salt, also jealously guarded by the crown as its official monopoly preserve. An individual income tax was introduced for five years to pay off the war deficit, but urban personal income was not added as a regular source of Indian revenue until 1886.

Despite continued British adherence to the doctrine of laissez-faire during that period, a 10 percent customs duty was levied in 1860 to help clear the war debt, though it was reduced to 7 percent in 1864 and to 5 percent in 1875. The above-mentioned cotton import duty, abolished in 1879 by Viceroy Lytton, was not reimposed on British imports of piece goods and yarn until 1894, when the value of silver fell so precipitously on the world market that the government of India was forced to take action, even against the economic interests of the home country (i.e., textiles in Lancashire), by adding enough rupees to its revenue to make ends meet. Bombay’s textile industry had by then developed more than 80 power mills, and the huge Empress Mill owned by Indian industrialist Jamsetji (Jamshedji) N. Tata (1839–1904) was in full operation at Nagpur , competing directly with Lancashire mills for the vast Indian market. Britain’s mill owners again demonstrated their power in Calcutta by forcing the government of India to impose an “equalizing” 5 percent excise tax on all cloth manufactured in India, thereby convincing many Indian mill owners and capitalists that their best interests would be served by contributing financial support to the Indian National Congress .

Britain’s major contribution to India’s economic development throughout the era of crown rule was the railroad network that spread so swiftly across the subcontinent after 1858, when there were barely 200 miles (320 km) of track in all of India. By 1869 more than 5,000 miles (8,000 km) of steel track had been completed by British railroad companies, and by 1900 there were some 25,000 miles (40,000 km) of rail laid. By the start of World War I (1914–18) the total had reached 35,000 miles (56,000 km), almost the full growth of British India’s rail net. Initially, the railroads proved a mixed blessing for most Indians, since, by linking India’s agricultural, village-based heartland to the British imperial port cities of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, they served both to accelerate the pace of raw-material extraction from India and to speed up the transition from subsistence food to commercial agricultural production. Middlemen hired by port-city agency houses rode the trains inland and induced village headmen to convert large tracts of grain-yielding land to commercial crops.

Large sums of silver were offered in payment for raw materials when the British demand was high, as was the case throughout the American Civil War (1861–65), but, after the Civil War ended, restoring raw cotton from the southern United States to Lancashire mills, the Indian market collapsed. Millions of peasants weaned from grain production now found themselves riding the boom-and-bust tiger of a world-market economy. They were unable to convert their commercial agricultural surplus back into food during depression years, and from 1865 through 1900 India experienced a series of protracted famines, which in 1896 was complicated by the introduction of bubonic plague (spread from Bombay, where infected rats were brought from China). As a result, though the population of the subcontinent increased dramatically from about 200 million in 1872 (the year of the first almost universal census) to more than 319 million in 1921, the population may have declined slightly between 1895 and 1905.

The spread of railroads also accelerated the destruction of India’s indigenous handicraft industries, for trains filled with cheap competitive manufactured goods shipped from England now rushed to inland towns for distribution to villages, underselling the rougher products of Indian craftsmen. Entire handicraft villages thus lost their traditional markets of neighbouring agricultural villagers, and craftsmen were forced to abandon their looms and spinning wheels and return to the soil for their livelihood. By the end of the 19th century a larger proportion of India’s population (perhaps more than three-fourths) depended directly on agriculture for support than at the century’s start, and the pressure of population on arable land increased throughout that period. Railroads also provided the military with swift and relatively assured access to all parts of the country in the event of emergency and were eventually used to transport grain for famine relief as well.

The rich coalfields of Bihar began to be mined during that period to help power the imported British locomotives, and coal production jumped from roughly 500,000 tons in 1868 to some 6,000,000 tons in 1900 and more than 20,000,000 tons by 1920. Coal was used for iron smelting in India as early as 1875, but the Tata Iron and Steel Company (now part of the Tata Group ), which received no government aid, did not start production until 1911, when, in Bihar, it launched India’s modern steel industry. Tata grew rapidly after World War I, and by World War II it had become the largest single steel complex in the British Commonwealth . The jute textile industry, Bengal’s counterpart to Bombay’s cotton industry, developed in the wake of the Crimean War (1853–56), which, by cutting off Russia’s supply of raw hemp to the jute mills of Scotland, stimulated the export of raw jute from Calcutta to Dundee. In 1863 there were only two jute mills in Bengal, but by 1882 there were 20, employing more than 20,000 workers.

The most important plantation industries of the era were tea, indigo, and coffee. British tea plantations were started in northern India’s Assam Hills in the 1850s and in southern India’s Nilgiri Hills some 20 years later. By 1871 there were more than 300 tea plantations, covering in excess of 30,000 cultivated acres (12,000 hectares) and producing some 3,000 tons of tea. By 1900 India’s tea crop was large enough to export 68,500 tons to Britain, displacing the tea of China in London. The flourishing indigo industry of Bengal and Bihar was threatened with extinction during the “Blue Mutiny” (violent riots by cultivators in 1859–60), but India continued to export indigo to European markets until the end of the 19th century, when synthetic dyes made that natural product obsolete. Coffee plantations flourished in southern India from 1860 to 1879, after which disease blighted the crop and sent Indian coffee into a decade of decline.

Foreign policy

British India expanded beyond its company borders to both the northwest and the northeast during the initial phase of crown rule. The turbulent tribal frontier to the northwest remained a continuing source of harassment to settled British rule, and Pathan ( Pashtun ) raiders served as a constant lure and justification to champions of the “forward school” of imperialism in the colonial offices of Calcutta and Simla and in the imperial government offices at Whitehall, London. Russian expansion into Central Asia in the 1860s provided even greater anxiety and incentive to British proconsuls in India, as well as at the Foreign Office in London, to advance the frontier of the Indian empire beyond the Hindu Kush mountain range and, indeed, up to Afghanistan ’s northern border along the Amu Darya . Lord Canning, however, was far too preoccupied with trying to restore tranquillity within India to consider embarking on anything more ambitious than the northwest frontier punitive expedition policy (commonly called “butcher and bolt”), which was generally regarded as the simplest, cheapest method of “pacifying” the Pathans. As viceroy, Lord Lawrence (governed 1864–69) continued the same border pacification policy and resolutely refused to be pushed or lured into the ever-simmering cauldron of Afghan politics. In 1863, when the popular old emir Dōst Moḥammad Khan died, Lawrence wisely refrained from attempting to name his successor, leaving Dōst Moḥammad’s 16 sons to fight their own fratricidal battles until 1868, when Shīr ʿAlī Khan finally emerged victorious. Lawrence then recognized and subsidized the new emir. The viceroy, Lord Mayo (governed 1869–72), met to confer with Shīr ʿAlī at Ambala in 1869 and, though reaffirming Anglo-Afghan friendship, resisted all requests by the emir for more permanent and practical support for his still precarious regime. Lord Mayo, the only British viceroy killed in office, was assassinated by an Afghan prisoner on the Andaman Islands in 1872.

Russia’s glacial advance into Turkistan sufficiently alarmed Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his secretary of state for India, Robert Salisbury , that by 1874, when they came to power in London, they pressed the government of India to pursue a more vigorous interventionist line with the Afghan government. The viceroy, Lord Northbrook (governed 1872–76), resisting all such cabinet promptings to reverse Lawrence’s noninterventionist policy and to return to the militant posture of the First Anglo-Afghan War era (1839–42), resigned his office rather than accept orders from ministers whose diplomatic judgment he believed to be disastrously distorted by Russophobia. Lord Lytton, however, who succeeded him as viceroy, was more than eager to act as his prime minister desired, and, soon after he reached Calcutta, he notified Shīr ʿAlī that he was sending a “mission” to Kabul . When the emir refused Lytton permission to enter Afghanistan, the viceroy bellicosely declaimed that Afghanistan was but “an earthen pipkin between two metal pots.” He did not, however, take action against the kingdom until 1878, when Russia’s General Stolyetov was admitted to Kabul while Lytton’s envoy , Sir Neville Chamberlain , was turned back at the border by Afghan troops. The viceroy decided to crush his neighbouring “pipkin” and launched the Second Anglo-Afghan War on November 21, 1878, with a British invasion. Shīr ʿAlī fled his capital and country, dying in exile early in 1879. The British army occupied Kabul, as it had in the first war, and a treaty signed at Gandamak on May 26, 1879, was concluded with the former emir’s son, Yaʿqūb Khan. Yaʿqūb Khan promised, in exchange for British support and protection, to admit to his Kabul court a British resident who would direct Afghan foreign relations , but the resident, Sir Louis Cavagnari, was assassinated on September 3, 1879, just two months after he arrived. British troops trudged back over the passes to Kabul and removed Yaʿqūb from the throne, which remained vacant until July 1880, when ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Khan , nephew of Shīr ʿAlī, became emir. The new emir, one of the shrewdest statesmen in Afghan history, remained secure on the throne until his death in 1901.

The viceroy, Lord Lansdowne (governed 1888–94), who sought to reassert a more forward policy in Afghanistan, did so on the advice of his military commander in chief, Lord Roberts, who had served as field commander in the Second Anglo-Afghan War. In 1893 Lansdowne sent Sir Mortimer Durand, the government of India’s foreign secretary, on a mission to Kabul to open negotiations on the delimitation of the Indo-Afghan border. The delimitation, known as the Durand Line , was completed in 1896 and added the tribal territory of the Afrīdī s, Maḥsūds, Wazīrīs, and Swātīs, as well as the chieftainships of Chitral and Gilgit, to the domain of British India. The 9th earl of Elgin (governed 1894–99), Lansdowne’s successor, devoted much of his viceregal tenure to sending British Indian armies on punitive expeditions along the new frontier. The viceroy, Lord Curzon (governed 1899–1905), however, recognized the impracticality of trying to administer the turbulent frontier region as part of the large Punjab province. Thus, in 1901 he created a new North-West Frontier Province ( Khyber Pakhtunkhwa ) containing some 40,000 square miles (about 100,000 square km) of trans-Indus and tribal borderland territory under a British chief commissioner responsible directly to the viceroy. By instituting a policy of regular payments to frontier tribes, the new province reduced border conflicts, though for the next decade British troops continued to fight against Maḥsūds, Wazīrīs, and Zakka Khel Afrīdīs.

British India’s conquest of Burma ( Myanmar ) was completed during that period. The Second Anglo-Burmese War (1852) had left the kingdom of Ava (Upper Burma; see Alaungpaya dynasty ) independent of British India, and, under the rule of King Mindon (1853–78), who built his capital at Mandalay , steamers bringing British residents and private traders up the Irrawaddy River from Rangoon ( Yangon ) were welcomed. Mindon, noted for convening the Fifth Buddhist Council at Mandalay in 1871 (the first such council in some 1,900 years), was succeeded by a younger son, Thibaw, who in February 1879 celebrated his ascendancy to the throne by having 80 siblings massacred. Thibaw refused to renew his father’s treaty agreements with Britain, turning instead to seek commercial relations with the French, who were then advancing toward his kingdom from their base in Southeast Asia . Thibaw sent envoys to Paris, and in January 1885 the French signed a treaty of trade with the kingdom of Ava and dispatched a French consul to Mandalay. That envoy hoped to establish a French bank in Upper Burma to finance the construction of a railway and the general commercial development of the kingdom, but his plans were thwarted. The viceroy, Lord Dufferin (governed 1884–88)—impatient with Thibaw for delaying a treaty agreement with British India, goaded to action by British traders in Rangoon, and provoked by fears of French intervention in Britain’s “sphere”—sent an expedition of some 10,000 troops up the Irrawaddy in November 1885. The Third Anglo-Burmese War ended in less than a month with the loss of hardly 20 lives, and on January 1, 1886, Upper Burma, a kingdom having a greater area than Britain and a population of some 4,000,000, was annexed by proclamation to British India.

Indian nationalism and the British response, 1885–1920

The Indian National Congress (Congress Party) held its first meeting in December 1885 in Bombay city while British Indian troops were still fighting in Upper Burma. Thus, just as the British Indian empire approached its outermost limits of expansion, the institutional seed of the largest of its national successors was sown. Provincial roots of Indian nationalism, however, may be traced to the beginning of the era of crown rule in Bombay, Bengal, and Madras. Nationalism emerged in 19th-century British India both in emulation of and as a reaction against the consolidation of British rule and the spread of Western civilization. There were, moreover, two turbulent national mainstreams flowing beneath the deceptively placid official surface of British administration: the larger, headed by the Indian National Congress, which led eventually to the birth of India, and the smaller Muslim one, which acquired its organizational skeleton with the founding of the Muslim League in 1906 and led to the creation of Pakistan.

Many English-educated young Indians of the post-mutiny period emulated their British mentors by seeking employment in the ICS, the legal services, journalism, and education. The universities of Bombay, Bengal, and Madras had been founded in 1857 as the capstone of the East India Company’s modest policy of selectively fostering the introduction of English education in India. At the beginning of crown rule, the first graduates of those universities, reared on the works and ideas of Jeremy Bentham , John Stuart Mill , and Thomas Macaulay , sought positions that would help them improve themselves and society at the same time. They were convinced that, with the education they had received and the proper apprenticeship of hard work, they would eventually inherit the machinery of British Indian government. Few Indians, however, were admitted to the ICS, and, among the first handful who were, one of the brightest, Surendranath Banerjea (1848–1925), was dismissed dishonourably at the earliest pretext and turned from loyal participation within the government to active nationalist agitation against it. Banerjea became a Calcutta college teacher and then editor of The Bengalee and founder of the Indian Association in Calcutta. In 1883 he convened the first Indian National Conference in Bengal, anticipating by two years the birth of the Congress Party on the opposite side of India. After the first partition of Bengal in 1905, Banerjea attained nationwide fame as a leader of the swadeshi (“of our own country”) movement, promoting Indian-made goods, and the movement to boycott British manufactured goods.

During the 1870s young leaders in Bombay also established a number of provincial political associations, such as the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha (Poona Public Society), founded by Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842–1901), who had graduated at the top of the first bachelor of arts class at the University of Bombay (now University of Mumbai ) in 1862. Ranade found employment in the educational department in Bombay, taught at Elphinstone College, edited the Indu Prakash , helped start the Hindu reformist Prarthana Samaj (Prayer Society) in Bombay, wrote historical and other essays, and became a barrister, eventually being appointed to the bench of Bombay’s high court. Ranade was one of the early leaders of India’s emulative school of nationalism, as was his brilliant disciple Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866–1915), later revered by Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869–1948) as a political guru (preceptor). Gokhale , an editor and social reformer, taught at Fergusson College in Poona ( Pune ) and in 1905 was elected president of the Congress Party. Moderation and reform were the keynotes of Gokhale’s life, and, by his use of reasoned argument, patient labour, and unflagging faith in the ultimate equity of British liberalism, he was able to achieve much for India.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920), Gokhale’s colleague at Fergusson College, was the leader of Indian nationalism’s revolutionary reaction against British rule. Tilak was Poona’s most popular Marathi journalist, whose vernacular newspaper, Kesari (“Lion”), became the leading literary thorn in the side of the British. The Lokamanya (“Revered by the People”), as Tilak came to be called after he was jailed for seditious writings in 1897, looked to orthodox Hinduism and Maratha history as his twin sources of nationalist inspiration. Tilak called on his compatriots to take keener interest and pride in the religious, cultural, martial, and political glories of pre-British Hindu India; in Poona, former capital of the Maratha Hindu glory, he helped found and publicize the popular Ganesha (Ganapati) and Shivaji festivals in the 1890s. Tilak had no faith in British justice , and his life was devoted primarily to agitation aimed at ousting the British from India by any means and restoring swaraj (self-rule, or independence) to India’s people. While Tilak brought many non-English-educated Hindus into the nationalist movement, the orthodox Hindu character of his revolutionary revival (which mellowed considerably in the latter part of his political career) alienated many within India’s Muslim minority and exacerbated communal tensions and conflict.

The viceroyalties of Lytton and Lord Ripon (governed 1880–84) prepared the soil of British India for nationalism, the former by internal measures of repression and the futility of an external policy of aggression, the latter indirectly as a result of the European community’s rejection of his liberal humanitarian legislation. One of the key men who helped arrange the first meeting of the Congress was a retired British official, Allan Octavian Hume (1829–1912), Ripon’s radical confidant. After retiring from the ICS in 1882, Hume, a mystic reformer and ornithologist, lived in Simla, where he studied birds and theosophy. Hume had joined the Theosophical Society in 1881, as had many young Indians, who found in theosophy a movement most flattering to Indian civilization.

Helena Blavatsky (1831–91), the Russian-born cofounder of the Theosophical Society, went to India in 1879 to sit at the feet of Swami Dayananda Sarasvati (1824–83), whose “back to the Vedas ” reformist Hindu society, the Arya Samaj , was founded in Bombay in 1875. Dayananda called on Hindus to reject the “corrupting” excrescences of their faith, including idolatry , the caste system , and infant marriage, and to return to the original purity of Vedic life and thought. The Swami insisted that post-Vedic changes in Hindu society had led only to weakness and disunity, which had destroyed India’s capacity to resist foreign invasion and subjugation. His reformist society was to take root most firmly in the Punjab at the start of the 20th century, and it became that province’s leading nationalist organization. Blavatsky soon left Dayananda and established her own “Samaj,” whose Indian headquarters were outside Madras city, at Adyar. Annie Besant (1847–1933), the Theosophical Society’s most famous leader, succeeded Blavatsky and became the first and only British woman to serve as president of the Congress Party (1917).

The first Congress Party session, convened in Bombay city on December 28, 1885, was attended by 73 representatives, as well as 10 more unofficial delegates; virtually every province of British India was represented. Fifty-four of the delegates were Hindu, only two were Muslim, and the remainder were mostly Parsi and Jain . Practically all the Hindu delegates were Brahman s. All of them spoke English. More than half were lawyers, and the remainder consisted of journalists, businessmen, landowners, and professors. Such was the first gathering of the new India, an emerging elite of middle-class intellectuals devoted to peaceful political action and protest on behalf of their nation in the making. On its last day, the Congress passed resolutions, embodying the political and economic demands of its members, that served thereafter as public petitions to government for the redress of grievances. Among those initial resolutions were calls for the addition of elected nonofficial representatives to the supreme and provincial legislative councils and for real equality of opportunity for Indians to enter the ICS by the immediate introduction of simultaneous examinations in India and Britain.

Economic demands by the Congress Party started with a call for the reduction of “home charges”—that part of Indian revenue that went toward the entire India Office budget and the pensions of officials living in Britain in retirement. Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1917), the “grand old man” of the Congress who served three times as its president, was the leading exponent of the popular economic “drain” argument, which offered theoretical support to nationalist politics by insisting that India’s poverty was the product of British exploitation and the annual plunder of gold, silver, and raw materials. Other resolutions called for the reduction of military expenditure, condemned the Third Anglo-Burmese War, demanded retrenchment of administrative expenses, and urged reimposition of import duties on British manufactures.

Hume, who is credited with organizing the Congress Party, attended the first session of the Congress as the only British delegate. Sir William Wedderburn (1838–1918), Gokhale’s closest British adviser and himself later elected twice to serve as president of the Congress, and William Wordsworth , principal of Elphinstone College, both appeared as observers. Most Britons in India, however, either ignored the Congress Party and its resolutions as the action and demands of a “microscopic minority” of India’s diverse millions or considered them the rantings of disloyal extremists. Despite the combination of official disdain and hostility, the Congress quickly won substantial Indian support and within two years had grown to number more than 600 delegates. In 1888, when Viceroy Dufferin on the eve of his departure from India dismissed the Congress Party as “microscopic,” it mustered 1,248 delegates at its annual meeting. Still, British officials continued to dismiss the significance of the Congress, and more than a decade later Viceroy Curzon claimed, perhaps wishfully, that it was “tottering to its fall.” Curzon, however, inadvertently helped to infuse the Congress with unprecedented popularity and militant vitality by his own arrogance and by failing to appreciate the importance of human sympathy in his relentless drive toward greater efficiency .

The first partition of Bengal in 1905 brought that province to the brink of open rebellion. The British recognized that Bengal, with some 85 million people, was much too large for a single province and determined that it merited reorganization and intelligent division. The line drawn by Lord Curzon’s government, however, cut through the heart of the Bengali -speaking “nation,” leaving western Bengal’s bhadralok (“respectable people”), the intellectual Hindu leadership of Calcutta, tied to the much less politically active Bihari - and Oriya -speaking Hindus to their north and south. A new Muslim-majority province of Eastern Bengal and Assam was created with its capital at Dacca (now Dhaka ). The leadership of the Congress Party viewed that partition as an attempt to “divide and rule” and as proof of the government’s vindictive antipathy toward the outspoken bhadralok intellectuals, especially since Curzon and his subordinates had ignored countless pleas and petitions signed by tens of thousands of Calcutta’s leading citizens. Mother-goddess-worshipping Bengali Hindus believed that partition was nothing less than the vivisection of their “mother province,” and mass protest rallies before and after Bengal’s division on October 16, 1905, attracted millions of people theretofore untouched by politics of any variety.

The new tide of national sentiment born in Bengal rose to inundate India in every direction, and “Bande Mataram” (“Hail to Thee Mother”) became the Congress’s national anthem , its words taken from Anandamath , a popular Bengali novel by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee , and its music composed by Bengal’s greatest poet, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). As a reaction against the partition, Bengali Hindus launched an effective boycott of British-made goods and dramatized their resolve to live without foreign cloth by igniting huge bonfires of Lancashire-made textiles. Such bonfires, re-creating ancient Vedic sacrificial altars, aroused Hindus in Poona, Madras, and Bombay to light similar political pyres of protest. Instead of wearing foreign-made cloth, Indians vowed to use only domestic ( swadeshi ) cottons and other clothing made in India. Simple hand-spun and hand-woven sari s became high fashion, first in Calcutta and elsewhere in Bengal and then all across India, and displaced the finest Lancashire garments, which were now viewed as hateful imports. The swadeshi movement soon stimulated indigenous enterprise in many fields, from Indian cotton mills to match factories, glassblowing shops, and iron and steel foundries.

Increased demands for national education also swiftly followed partition. Bengali students and professors extended their boycott of British goods to English schools and college classrooms, and politically active Indians began to emulate the so-called “Indian Jesuits”—Vishnu Krishna Chiplunkar (1850–82), Gopal Ganesh Agarkar (1856–95), Tilak, and Gokhale—who were pioneers in the founding of indigenous educational institutions in the Deccan in the 1880s. The movement for national education spread throughout Bengal, as well as to Varanasi (Banaras), where Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya (1861–1946) founded his private Banaras Hindu University in 1910.

One of the last major demands to be added to the platform of the Congress Party in the wake of Bengal’s first partition was swaraj, soon to become the most popular mantra of Indian nationalism. Swaraj was first articulated , in the presidential address of Dadabhai Naoroji , as the Congress’s goal at its Calcutta session in 1906.

While the Congress Party was calling for swaraj in Calcutta, the Muslim League held its first meeting in Dacca. Though the Muslim minority portion of India’s population lagged behind the Hindu majority in uniting to articulate nationalist political demands, Islam had, since the founding of the Delhi sultanate in 1206, provided Indian Muslims with sufficient doctrinal mortar to unite them as a separate religious community . The era of effective Mughal rule ( c. 1556–1707), moreover, gave India’s Muslims a sense of martial and administrative superiority to, as well as a sense of separation from, the Hindu majority.

In 1857 the last of the Mughal emperors had served as a rallying symbol for many mutineers, and in the wake of the mutiny most Britons placed the burden of blame for its inception on the Muslim community. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98), India’s greatest 19th-century Muslim leader, succeeded, in his Causes of the Indian Revolt (1873), in convincing many British officials that Hindus were primarily to blame for the mutiny. Sayyid had entered the East India Company’s service in 1838 and was the leader of Muslim India’s emulative mainstream of political reform. He visited Oxford in 1874 and returned to found the Anglo-Muhammadan Oriental College (now Aligarh Muslim University) at Aligarh in 1875. It was India’s first centre of Islamic and Western higher education , with instruction given in English and modeled on Oxford. Aligarh became the intellectual cradle of the Muslim League and Pakistan.

Sayyid Mahdi Ali (1837–1907), popularly known by his title Mohsin al-Mulk, had succeeded Sayyid Ahmad as leader and convened a deputation of some 36 Muslim leaders, headed by the Aga Khan III , that in 1906 called on Lord Minto (viceroy from 1905–10) to articulate the special national interests of India’s Muslim community. Minto promised that any reforms enacted by his government would safeguard the separate interests of the Muslim community. Separate Muslim electorates, formally inaugurated by the Indian Councils Act of 1909, were thus vouchsafed by viceregal fiat in 1906. Encouraged by the concession , the Aga Khan’s deputation issued an expanded call during the first meeting of the Muslim League (convened in December 1906 at Dacca) “to protect and advance the political rights and interests of Mussalmans of India.” Other resolutions moved at its first meeting expressed Muslim “loyalty to the British government,” support for the Bengal partition, and condemnation of the boycott movement.

In Great Britain the Liberal Party’s electoral victory of 1906 marked the dawn of a new era of reforms for British India. Hampered though he was by the viceroy, Lord Minto, the new secretary of state for India, John Morley , was able to introduce several important innovations into the legislative and administrative machinery of the British Indian government. First, he acted to implement Queen Victoria’s promise of racial equality of opportunity, which since 1858 had served only to assure Indian nationalists of British hypocrisy. He appointed two Indian members to his council at Whitehall: one a Muslim, Sayyid Husain Bilgrami, who had taken an active role in the founding of the Muslim League; and the other a Hindu, Krishna G. Gupta, the senior Indian in the ICS. Morley also persuaded a reluctant Lord Minto to appoint to the viceroy’s executive council the first Indian member, Satyendra P. Sinha (1864–1928), in 1909. Sinha (later Lord Sinha) had been admitted to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1886 and was advocate general of Bengal before his appointment as the viceroy’s law member, a position he felt obliged to resign in 1910. He was elected president of the Congress Party in 1915 and became parliamentary undersecretary of state for India in 1919 and governor of Bihar and Orissa (now Odisha) in 1920.

Morley’s major reform scheme, the Indian Councils Act of 1909 (popularly called the Morley-Minto Reforms), directly introduced the elective principle to Indian legislative council membership. Though the initial electorate was a minuscule minority of Indians enfranchised by property ownership and education, in 1910 some 135 elected Indian representatives took their seats as members of legislative councils throughout British India. The act of 1909 also increased the maximum additional membership of the supreme council from 16 (to which it had been raised by the Councils Act of 1892) to 60. In the provincial councils of Bombay, Bengal, and Madras, which had been created in 1861, the permissible total membership had been raised to 20 by the act of 1892, and that number was increased in 1909 to 50, a majority of whom were to be nonofficial; the number of council members in other provinces was similarly increased.

In abolishing the official majorities of provincial legislatures, Morley was following the advice of Gokhale and other liberal Congress Party leaders, such as Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848–1909), and overriding the bitter opposition of not only the ICS but also his own viceroy and council. Morley believed, as did many other British Liberal politicians, that the only justification for British rule over India was to bequeath to the government of India Britain’s greatest political institution, parliamentary government. Minto and his officials in Calcutta and Simla did succeed in watering down the reforms by writing stringent regulations for their implementation and insisting upon the retention of executive veto power over all legislation. Elected members of the new councils were empowered, nevertheless, to engage in spontaneous supplementary questioning, as well as in formal debate with the executive concerning the annual budget. Members were also permitted to introduce legislative proposals of their own.

Gokhale took immediate advantage of the vital new parliamentary procedures by introducing a measure for free and compulsory elementary education throughout British India. Although defeated, it was brought back again and again by Gokhale, who used the platform of the government’s highest council of state as a sounding board for nationalist demands. Before the act of 1909, as Gokhale told fellow members of the Congress Party in Madras that year, Indian nationalists had been engaged in agitation “from outside,” but “from now,” he said, they would be “engaged in what might be called responsible association with the administration.”

In 1907 the Congress Party held its annual meeting in Surat , but the assembly, plagued by conflict, never came to order long enough to hear the presidential address of its moderate president-elect, Rash Behari Ghose (1845–1921). The division of the Congress reflected broad tactical differences between the liberal evolutionary and militant revolutionary wings of the national organization and those aspiring to the presidency. Young militants of Tilak’s New Party wanted to extend the boycott movement to the entire British government, while moderate leaders like Gokhale cautioned against such “extreme” action, fearing it might lead to violence. Those moderates were attacked by the militants as “traitors” to the “motherland,” and the Congress split into two parties, which would not reunite for nine years. Tilak demanded swaraj as his “birthright,” and his newspaper encouraged the young militants, whose introduction of the cult of the bomb and the gun in Maharashtra and Bengal led to Tilak’s deportation for “sedition” to prison in Mandalay (Burma) from 1908 to 1914. Political violence in Bengal, in the form of terrorist acts, reached its peak from 1908 through 1910, as did the severity of official repression and the number of “preventive detention” arrests. Although Minto continued to assure Morley that opposition to the partition of Bengal was “dying down,” and although Morley tried to convince his Liberal friends that it was a “settled fact,” the opposite, in fact, was true. Harsher repression seemed only to breed more violent agitation.

Before the end of 1910, Minto finally returned home, and Morley appointed the liberal Lord Hardinge to succeed him as viceroy (governed 1910–16). Soon after reaching Calcutta, Hardinge recommended the reunification of Bengal, a position accepted by Morley, who also agreed to the new viceroy’s proposal that a separate province of Bihar and Orissa should be carved out of Bengal. King George V journeyed to India for his coronation durbar (audience) in Delhi, and there, on December 12, 1911, were announced the revocation of the partition of Bengal, the creation of a new province, and the plan to shift the capital of British India from Calcutta to Delhi’s distant plain. By shifting their capital to the site of great Mughal glory, the British hoped to placate Bengal’s Muslim minority, now aggrieved at the loss of provincial power in eastern Bengal.

Reunification of Bengal indeed served somewhat to mollify Bengali Hindus, but the downgrading of Calcutta from imperial to mere provincial capital status was simultaneously a blow to bhadralok egos and to Calcutta real estate values. Political unrest continued, now attracting Muslim as well as Hindu acts of terrorist violence, and Lord Hardinge himself was nearly assassinated by a bomb thrown into his howdah on top of his viceregal elephant as he entered Delhi in 1912. The would-be assassin escaped in the crowd. Later that year Edwin Samuel Montagu , Morley’s political protégé, who served as parliamentary undersecretary of state for India from 1910 to 1914, announced that the goal of British policy toward India would be to meet the just demands of Indians for a greater share in government. Britain seemed to be awakening to the urgency of India’s political demands just as more compelling problems of European war preempted Whitehall’s attention.

World War I and its aftermath

In August 1914 Lord Hardinge announced his government’s entry into World War I . India’s contributions to the war became extensive and significant, and the war’s contributions to change within British India proved to be even greater. In many ways—politically, economically, and socially—the impact of the conflict was as pervasive as that of the mutiny of 1857–59.

The initial response throughout India to Lord Hardinge’s announcement was, for the most part, enthusiastic support. Indian princes volunteered their men, money, and personal service, while leaders of the Congress Party—from Tilak, who had just been released from Mandalay and had wired the king-emperor vowing his patriotic support, to Gandhi, who toured Indian villages urging peasants to join the British army—were allied in backing the war effort. Only India’s Muslims, many of whom felt a strong religious allegiance to the Ottoman caliph that had to be weighed against their temporal devotion to British rule, seemed ambivalent from the war’s inception.

Support from the Congress Party was primarily offered on the assumption that Britain would repay such loyal assistance with substantial political concessions—if not immediate independence or at least dominion status following the war, then surely its promise soon after the Allies achieved victory. The government of India’s immediate military support was of vital importance in bolstering the Western Front , and an expeditionary force, including two fully manned infantry divisions and one cavalry division, left India in late August and early September 1914. They were shipped directly to France and moved up to the battered Belgian line just in time for the First Battle of Ypres . The Indian Corps sustained extraordinarily heavy losses during the winter campaigns of 1914–15 on the Western Front. The myth of Indian racial inferiority, especially with respect to courage in battle, was thus dissolved in sepoy blood on Flanders fields. In 1917 Indians were at last admitted to the final bastion of British Indian racial discrimination—the ranks of royal commissioned officers.

In the early months of the war, Indian troops also were rushed to eastern Africa and Egypt, and by the end of 1914 more than 300,000 officers and men of the British Indian Army had been shipped to overseas garrisons and battlefronts. The army’s most ambitious, though ill-managed, campaign was fought in Mesopotamia. In October 1914, before Turkey joined forces with the Central Powers , the government of India launched an army to the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab to further Viceroy Curzon’s policy of control over the Persian Gulf region. Al-Baṣrah (Basra) was taken easily in December 1914, and by October 1915 the British Indian Army had moved as far north as Al-Kūt (Kūt al-ʿAmārah), barely 100 miles (160 km) from Baghdad. The prize of Baghdad seemed within reach of British arms, but, less than two weeks after Gen. Sir Charles Townshend’s doomed army of 12,000 Indians started north in November 1915, they were stopped at Ctesiphon, then forced to fall back to Al-Kūt, which was surrounded by Turks in December and fell in April 1916. That disaster became a national scandal for Britain and led to the immediate resignation of India’s secretary of state, Sir Austen Chamberlain .

Edwin Montagu, Chamberlain’s successor at Whitehall’s India Office, informed the British House of Commons on August 20, 1917, that the policy of the British government toward India was thereafter to be one of “increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration…with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the Empire.” Soon after that stirring promise of political reward for India’s wartime support, Montagu embarked upon a personal tour of India. During his tour, Montagu conferred with his new viceroy, Lord Chelmsford (governed 1916–21), and their lengthy deliberations bore fruit in the Montagu-Chelmsford Report of 1918, the theoretical basis for the Government of India Act of 1919.

Anti-British terrorist activity started soon after the war began, sparked by the return to India of hundreds of embittered Sikh s who had sought to emigrate from their Punjab homes to Canada but who were denied permission to disembark in that country because of their colour. As British subjects, the Sikhs had assumed they would gain entry to underpopulated Canada, but, after wretched months aboard an old Japanese freighter (the Komagata Maru ) in cramped and unsanitary conditions with inadequate food supplies, they returned to India as confirmed revolutionaries. Leaders of the Ghadr (“Revolution”) party, which had been started by Punjabi Sikhs in 1913, journeyed abroad in search of arms and money to support their revolution, and Lala Har Dayal , the party’s foremost leader, went to Berlin to solicit aid from the Central Powers.

Muslim disaffection also grew and acquired revolutionary dimensions as the Mesopotamian campaign dragged on. Many Indian Muslims appealed to Afghanistan for aid and urged the emir to start a holy war against the British and in defense of the caliphate. After the war the Khilafat movement , an offspring of growing pan-Islamic consciousness in India, was started by two fiery orator-journalists, the brothers Shaukat and Muhammad Ali. It lured thousands of Muslim peasants to abandon their village homes and trudge over frozen high passes in a disastrous hijrat (“flight”) from India to Afghanistan. In Bengal, terrorist bombings continued to harass officials, despite numerous “preventive detention” arrests made by Indian Criminal Intelligence Division police under the tough martial-law edicts promulgated at the war’s inception.

The deaths of Gokhale and of the Bombay political leader Sir Pherozeshah Mehta in 1915 removed the most powerful moderate leadership from the Congress Party and cleared the way for Tilak’s return to power in that organization after its reunification in 1916 at Lucknow. That historic session in December 1916 brought even greater unity to India’s nationalist forces, as the Congress and the Muslim League agreed to a pact outlining their joint program of immediate national demands. The Lucknow Pact called first of all for the creation of expanded provincial legislative councils, four-fifths of whose members should be elected directly by the people on as broad a franchise as possible. The league’s readiness to unite with the Congress Party was attributed to the pact’s stipulation that Muslims should receive a far higher proportion of separate electorate seats in all legislative councils than they had enjoyed under the act of 1909. Thanks to such generous concessions of political power by the Congress, Muslim leaders, including Mohammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1949), agreed to set aside doctrinal differences and work with the Congress toward the attainment of national freedom from British rule. That rapprochement between the Congress Party and the Muslim League was short-lived, however, and by 1917 communal tensions and disagreements once again dominated India’s faction-ridden political scene. Tilak and Annie Besant each campaigned for different home-rule leagues, while Muslims worried more about pan-Islamic problems than all-India questions of unity.

By Armistice Day , November 11, 1918, more than a million Indian troops had been shipped overseas to fight or serve as noncombatants behind the Allied lines on every major front from France to Gallipoli in European Turkey. Nearly 150,000 Indian battle casualties , more than 36,000 of them fatal, were sustained during the war. India’s material and financial contributions to the war effort included the shipment of vast amounts of military stores and equipment to various fronts and nearly five million tons of wheat to Great Britain; also supplied by India were raw jute, cotton goods, rough-tanned hides, tungsten (wolfram), manganese, mica, saltpetre, timbers, silk, rubber, and various oils. The government of India paid for all its troops overseas, and, before the war ended, the viceroy presented a gift of £100 million (actually an imperial tax) to the British government. The Tata Iron and Steel Company received Indian government support once the war started and by 1916 was producing 100,000 tons of steel per year. An industrial commission was appointed in 1916 to survey the subcontinent’s industrial resources and potential, and in 1917 a munitions board was created to expedite the production of war matériel. Wartime inflation was immediately followed by one of India’s worst economic depressions, which came in the wake of the devastating influenza epidemic of 1918–19 , a pandemic that took a far heavier toll of Indian life and resources than all of the casualties sustained throughout the war. (Indians accounted for roughly half of the pandemic’s total deaths worldwide.)

Politically, the postwar years proved equally depressing and frustrating to India’s great expectations. British officials, who in the first flush of patriotism had abandoned their ICS posts to rush to the front, returned to oust the Indian subordinates acting in their stead and carried on their prewar jobs as though nothing had changed in British India. Indian soldiers also returned from battlefronts to find that back home they were no longer treated as invaluable allies but reverted immediately to the status of “natives.” Most of the soldiers recruited during the war had come from the Punjab , which, with less than one-tenth of India’s population, had supplied as many as half of the combatant troops shipped abroad. It is thus hardly surprising that the flash point of postwar violence that shook India in the spring of 1919 was Punjab province.

The issue that served to rally millions of Indians, arousing them to a new level of disaffection from British rule, was the government of India’s hasty passage of the Rowlatt Acts early in 1919. Those “black acts,” as they came to be called, were peacetime extensions of the wartime emergency measures passed in 1915 and had been rammed through the Supreme Legislative Council over the unanimous opposition of its Indian members, several of whom, including Jinnah, resigned in protest. Jinnah wrote to Viceroy Lord Chelmsford that the enactment of such autocratic legislation, following the victorious conclusion of a war in which India had so loyally supported Britain, was an unwarranted uprooting of the “fundamental principles of justice” and a gross violation of the “constitutional rights of the people.”

Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi , the Gujarati barrister who had returned from living for many years in South Africa shortly after the war started, was recognized throughout India as one of the most-promising leaders of the Congress Party. He called on all Indians to take sacred vows to disobey the Rowlatt Acts and launched a nationwide movement for the repeal of those repressive measures. Gandhi’s appeal received the strongest popular response in the Punjab, where the nationalist leaders Kichloo and Satyapal addressed mass protest rallies both from the provincial capital of Lahore and from Amritsar , sacred capital of the Sikhs. Gandhi himself had taken a train to the Punjab early in April 1919 to address one of those rallies, but he was arrested at the border station and taken back to Bombay by orders of Punjab’s lieutenant governor, Sir Michael O’Dwyer. On April 10, Kichloo and Satyapal were arrested in Amritsar and deported from the district by Deputy Commissioner Miles Irving. When their followers tried to march to Irving’s bungalow in the camp to demand the release of their leaders, they were fired on by British troops. With several of their number killed and wounded , the enraged mob rioted through Amritsar’s old city, burning British banks, murdering several Britons, and attacking two British women. Gen. Reginald Edward Harry Dyer was sent from Jalandhar (Jullundur) with Gurkha ( Nepalese ) and Balochi troops to restore order.

Soon after Dyer ’s arrival, on the afternoon of April 13, 1919, some 10,000 or more unarmed men, women, and children gathered in Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh ( bagh means “garden” but since before 1919 the site was a public square), despite a ban on public assemblies. It was a Sunday, and many neighbouring village peasants had also come to Amritsar to celebrate the spring Baisakhi festival. Dyer positioned his men at the sole, narrow passageway of the Bagh, which was otherwise entirely enclosed by the backs of abutted brick buildings. Giving no word of warning, he ordered 50 soldiers to fire into the gathering, and for 10 to 15 minutes about 1,650 rounds of ammunition were unloaded into the screaming, terrified crowd, some of whom were trampled by those desperately trying to escape. According to official estimates, nearly 400 civilians were killed, and another 1,200 were left wounded with no medical attention. Dyer, who argued that his action was necessary to produce a “moral and widespread effect,” admitted that the firing would have continued had more ammunition been available.

The governor of the Punjab province supported the massacre and, on April 15, placed the entire province under martial law . Viceroy Chelmsford, however, characterized the action as “an error of judgment,” and, when Secretary of State Montagu learned of the slaughter, he appointed a commission of inquiry, headed by Lord Hunter. Although Dyer was subsequently relieved of his command, he returned a hero to many in Britain, especially conservatives , and in Parliament members of the House of Lords presented him with a jeweled sword inscribed “Saviour of the Punjab.”

The Massacre of Amritsar turned millions of moderate Indians from patient and loyal supporters of the British raj into nationalists who would never again place trust in British “fair play.” It thus marks the turning point for a majority of the Congress’s supporters from moderate cooperation with the raj and its promised reforms to revolutionary noncooperation. Liberal Anglophile leaders, such as Jinnah, were soon to be displaced by the followers of Gandhi, who would launch, a year after that dreadful massacre, the noncooperation movement, his first nationwide satyagraha (“holding on to truth”) nonviolent campaign as India’s revolutionary response.

Gandhi ’s philosophy and strategy

For Gandhi, there was no dichotomy between religion and politics, and his unique political power was in great measure attributable to the spiritual leadership he exerted over India’s masses, who viewed him as a sadhu (holy man) and revered him as a mahatma (which in Sanskrit means “great soul”). He chose satya (“truth”) and ahimsa (nonviolence, or love) as the polar stars of his political movement; the former was the ancient Vedic concept of the real, embodying the very essence of existence itself, while the latter, according to Hindu (as well as Jain) scripture, was the highest religion ( dharma ). With those two weapons, Gandhi assured his followers, unarmed India could bring the mightiest empire known to history to its knees. His mystic faith magnetized millions, and the sacrificial suffering ( tapasya ) that he took upon himself by the purity of his chaste life and prolonged fasting armed him with great powers. Gandhi’s strategy for bringing the giant machine of British rule to a halt was to call upon Indians to boycott all British-made goods, British schools and colleges, British courts of law, British titles and honours, British elections and elective offices, and, should the need arise if all other boycotts failed, British tax collectors as well. The total withdrawal of Indian support would thus stop the machine, and nonviolent noncooperation would achieve the national goal of swaraj.

The Muslim quarter of India’s population could hardly be expected to respond any more enthusiastically to Gandhi’s satyagraha call than they had to Tilak’s revivalism, but Gandhi laboured valiantly to achieve Hindu-Muslim unity by embracing the Ali brothers’ Khilafat movement as the “premier plank” of his national program. Launched in response to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the Khilafat movement coincided with the inception of satyagraha, thus giving the illusion of unity to India’s nationalist agitation. Such unity, however, proved as chimerical as the Khilafat movement’s hope of preserving the caliphate itself, and in December 1920 Mohammed Ali Jinnah , alienated by Gandhi’s mass following of Hindi-speaking Hindus, left the Congress Party session at Nagpur. The days of the Lucknow Pact were over, and by the start of 1921 the antipathetic forces of revivalist Hindu and Muslim agitation, destined to lead to the birth of the independent dominions of India and Pakistan in 1947, were thus clearly set in motion in their separate directions.

Prelude to independence, 1920–47

The last quarter century of the British raj was racked by increasingly violent Hindu-Muslim conflict and intensified agitation demanding Indian independence. British officials in London, as well as in New Delhi (the new capital city of British India) and Simla, tried in vain to stem the rising tide of popular opposition to their raj by offering tidbits of constitutional reform, which proved to be either too little to satisfy both the Congress Party and the Muslim League or too late to avert disaster. More than a century of British technological, institutional, and ideological unification of the South Asian subcontinent thus ended after World War II with communal civil war, mass migration, and partition.

British politicians and bureaucrats tried to cure India’s ailing body politic with periodic infusions of constitutional reform. The separate electorate formula introduced for Muslims in the Government of India Act of 1909 (the Morley-Minto Reforms ) was expanded and applied to other minorities in the Government of India Acts (1919 and 1935). Sikhs and Christians, for example, were given special privileges in voting for their own representatives comparable to those vouchsafed to Muslims. The British raj thus sought to reconcile Indian religious pluralism to representative rule and no doubt hoped, in the process of fashioning such elaborate constitutional formulas, to win undying minority support for themselves and to undermine the arguments of Congress’s radical leadership that they alone spoke for India’s “united nationalist movement.” Earlier official support of, and appeals to, India’s princes and great landowners ( see zamindar ) had proved fruitful, especially since the inception of the crown raj in 1858, and more concerted efforts were made in 1919 and 1935 to wean minorities and India’s educated elite away from revolution and noncooperation.

The Government of India Act of 1919 (also known as the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms) was based on the Montagu-Chelmsford Report that had been submitted to Parliament in 1918. Under the act, elections were held in 1920, the number of Indian members to the viceroy’s Executive Council was increased from at least two to no fewer 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 Legislative Assembly, with 145 members, was to have a majority of 104 elected, while 33 of the Council of State’s 60 members were also to be elected. Enfranchisement continued to be based on property ownership and education, but under the act of 1919 the total number of Indians eligible to vote for representatives to provincial councils was expanded to five million; just one-fifth of that number, however, were permitted to vote for Legislative Assembly candidates, and only about 17,000 elite were allowed to choose Council of State members. Dyarchy (dual governance) was to be introduced at the provincial level, where executive councils were divided between ministers elected to preside over “transferred” departments (education, public health , public works, and agriculture) and officials appointed by the governor to rule over “reserved” departments (land revenue, justice, police, irrigation, and labour).

The Government of India Act of 1935 gave all provinces full representative and elective governments, chosen by franchise extended now to some 30 million Indians, and only the most crucial portfolios—defense, revenue, and foreign affairs—were “reserved” to appointed officials. The viceroy and his governors retained veto powers over any legislation they considered unacceptable, but prior to the 1937 elections they reached a “gentleman’s agreement” with the Congress Party’s high command not to resort to that constitutional option, which was their last vestige of autocracy. The act of 1935 was also to have introduced a federation of British India’s provinces and the still autonomous princely states, but that institutional union of representative and despotic rule was never realized, since the princes were unable to agree among themselves on matters of protocol .

The act of 1935 was itself the product of the three elaborate sessions of the Round Table Conference , held in London, and at least five years of bureaucratic labour, most of which bore little fruit. The first session—attended by 58 delegates from British India, 16 from the British Indian states, and 16 from British political parties—was convened by Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in the City of Westminster , London, in November 1930. While Jinnah and the Aga Khan III led among the British Indian delegation a deputation of 16 Muslims, no Congress Party deputation joined the first session, as Gandhi and his leading lieutenants were all in jail at the time. Without the Congress the Round Table could hardly hope to fashion any popularly meaningful reforms, so Gandhi was released from prison before the second session started in September 1931. At his own insistence, however, he attended it as the Congress’s sole representative. Little was accomplished at the second session, for Hindu-Muslim differences remained unresolved and the princes continued to argue with one another. The third session, which began in November 1932, was more the product of official British inertia than any proof of progress in closing the tragic gaps between so many Indian minds reflected in earlier debate. Two new provinces emerged, however, from those official deliberations. In the east Orissa was established as a province distinct from Bihar , and in the west Sind ( Sindh ) was separated from the Bombay Presidency and became the first Muslim-majority governor’s province of British India since the reunification of Bengal . It was decided that Burma should be a separate colony from British India.

In August 1932 Prime Minister MacDonald announced his Communal Award , Great Britain’s unilateral attempt to resolve the various conflicts among India’s many communal interests. The award, which was later incorporated into the act of 1935, expanded the separate-electorate formula reserved for Muslims to other minorities, including Sikhs, Indian Christians ( see Thomas Christians ), Anglo-Indians, Europeans, distinct regional groups (such as the Marathas in the Bombay Presidency), and special interests (women, organized labour , business, landowners, and universities). The Congress Party was, predictably, unhappy at the extension of communal representation but became particularly outraged at the British offer of separate-electorate seats for “depressed classes,” meaning the so-called “ untouchables .” Gandhi undertook a “fast unto death” against that offer, which he viewed as a nefarious British plot to wean more than 50 million Hindus away from their higher-caste brothers and sisters. Gandhi, who called the untouchables “Children of God” (Harijans), agreed after prolonged personal negotiations with Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), a leader of the untouchables, to reserve many more seats for them than the British had promised, as long as they remained within the “Hindu” majority fold. Thus, the offer of separate-electorate seats for the untouchables was withdrawn.

Gandhi, promising his followers freedom in just one year, launched the noncooperation movement on August 1, 1920, which he believed would bring the British raj to a grinding halt. After more than a year, and even with 60,000 satyagrahis in prison cells across British India, the raj remained firm, and, therefore, Gandhi prepared to unleash his last and most powerful boycott weapon—calling upon the peasants of Bardoli in Gujarat to boycott land taxes. In February 1922, on the eve of that final phase of boycott, word reached Gandhi that in Chauri Chaura , United Provinces (now in Uttar Pradesh state), 22 Indian police were massacred in their police station by a mob of satyagrahis, who set fire to the station and prevented the trapped police from escaping immolation. Gandhi announced that he had committed a “Himalayan blunder” in launching satyagraha without sufficient “soul-cleansing” of India’s masses and, as a result, called a halt to the noncooperation movement campaign. He was subsequently arrested, however, and found guilty of “promoting disaffection” toward the raj, for which he was sentenced to six years in prison.

While Gandhi was behind bars, Motilal Nehru (1861–1931), one of northern India’s wealthiest lawyers, started within Congress a new politically active “party,” the Swaraj Party . Motilal Nehru shared the lead of the new party with C.R. (Chitta Ranjan) Das (1870–1925) of Bengal. Contesting the elections to the new Central Legislative Assembly in 1923, the party sought by antigovernment agitation within the council chambers to disrupt official policy and derail the raj. Though Gandhian noncooperation remained the Congress Party’s primary strategy, actual partial cooperation in the postwar reforms thus became the alternate tactic of those Congress leaders who were less orthodox Hindu, or more secular-minded, in outlook. The Swarajists won more than 48 out of 105 seats in the Central Legislative Assembly in 1923, but their numbers were never quite enough to prevent the British from passing the legislation they desired or believed was needed to maintain internal “order.”

Gandhi was released from jail in February 1924, four years before his term was finished, after a surgery. Thereafter he focused on what he called his “constructive program” of hand spinning and weaving and overall village “uplift,” as well as on Hindu “purification” in seeking to advance the cause of the Harijans, especially through granting them entry to Hindu temples, from which they had always been banished. Gandhi himself lived in village ashram s (religious retreats), which served more as models for his socioeconomic ideals than as centres of political power, though the leaders of the Congress flocked to his remote rural retreats for periodic consultation on strategy.

In many ways Congress policy remained plagued by ambivalence for the remaining years of the raj. Most members of the high command aligned with Gandhi, but others sought what seemed to them more practical or pragmatic solutions to India’s problems, which so often transcended political or imperial-colonial questions. It was always easier, of course, for Indian leaders to rally the masses behind emotional religious appeals or anti-British rhetoric than to resolve problems that had festered throughout the Indian subcontinent for millennia. Most Hindu-Muslim differences, therefore, remained unresolved, even as the Hindu caste system was never really attacked or dismantled by the Congress.

Imperial economic exploitation, however, did prove to be an excellent nationalist catalyst—as, for example, when Gandhi mobilized the peasant masses of India’s population behind the Congress Party during his famous Salt March against the salt tax in March–April 1930, which was the prelude to his second nationwide satyagraha. The British government’s monopoly on the sale of salt, which was heavily taxed, had long been a major source of revenue to the raj, and, by marching from his ashram at Sabarmati near Ahmadabad (now in Gujarat state) to the sea at Dandi, where he illegally picked up salt from the sands on the shore, Gandhi mobilized millions of Indians to follow him in thus breaking the law. It was an ingeniously simple way to break a British law nonviolently, and before year’s end jail cells throughout India were again filled with satyagrahis.

Many of the younger members of the Congress Party were eager to take up arms against the British, and some considered Gandhi an agent of imperial rule for having called a halt to the first satyagraha in 1922. Most famous and popular of the militant Congress leaders was Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945) of Bengal. Bose was so popular within Congress that he was elected its president twice (in 1938 and 1939) over Gandhi’s opposition and the active opposition of most members of its central working committee. After being forced to resign the office in April 1939, Bose organized with his brother Sarat his own Bengali party, the Forward Bloc, which initially remained within the Congress fold. At the beginning of World War II, Bose was arrested and detained by the British, but in 1941 he escaped their surveillance and fled to Afghanistan, thence to the Soviet Union and Germany, where he remained until 1943.

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), Motilal’s only son, emerged as Gandhi’s designated successor to the Congress Party’s leadership during the 1930s. A Fabian socialist and a barrister, the younger Nehru was educated at Harrow School , London, and at Trinity College , Cambridge, and was drawn into the Congress and the noncooperation movement by his admiration for Gandhi. Though Jawaharlal Nehru personally was more of an Anglophile aristocrat than a Hindu sadhu or mahatma, he devoted his energies and intellect to the nationalist movement and, at age 41, was the youngest elected president of the Congress in December 1929, when it passed its Purna Swaraj (“Complete Self-Rule”) resolution. Jawaharlal’s radical brilliance and energy made him a natural leader of the Congress Party’s youth movement, while his Brahman birth and family fortune overcame many of that party’s more conservative leadership’s misgivings about placing him at the Congress’s helm. The Purna Swaraj resolution—proclaimed on January 26, 1930, later to be celebrated as independent India’s Republic Day—called for “complete freedom from the British” but was later interpreted by Prime Minister Nehru as permitting India to remain within the British Commonwealth , a practical concession young Jawaharlal had often vowed he would never make.

The Muslim quarter of India’s population became increasingly wary of the Congress Party’s promises and restive in the wake of the collapse of the Khilafat movement, which occurred after Kemal Atatürk announced his modernist Turkish reforms in 1923 and disavowed the very title of caliph the following year. Hindu-Muslim riots along the southwestern Malabar Coast claimed hundreds of lives in 1924, and similar religious rioting spread to every major city in northern India, wherever rumours of Muslim “cow slaughter,” the polluting appearance of a dead pig’s carcass in a mosque, or other clashing doctrinal fears ignited the tinder of distrust ever lurking in the poorer sections of India’s towns and villages. At each stage of reform, as the prospects of real devolution of political power by the British seemed more imminent , separate-electorate formulas and leaders of various parties stirred hopes, which proved almost as dangerous in triggering violence as did fears. The older, more conservative leadership of the pre-World War I Congress Party found Gandhian satyagraha too radical—moreover, far too revolutionary—to support, and liberals like Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru (1875–1949) organized their own party (eventually to become the National Liberal Federation), while others, like Jinnah , dropped out of political life entirely. Jinnah, alienated by Gandhi and his illiterate mass of devoutly Hindu disciples , instead devoted himself to his lucrative Bombay law practice, but his energy and ambition lured him back to the leadership of the Muslim League, which he revitalized in the 1930s. Jinnah, who was also instrumental in urging Viceroy Lord Irwin (later 1st Earl Halifax; governed 1926–31) and Prime Minister MacDonald to convene the Round Table Conference in London, was urged by many Muslim compatriots—including Liaquat Ali Khan , Pakistan’s first prime minister (1947–51)—to become the permanent president of the Muslim League.

By 1930 a number of Indian Muslims had begun to think in terms of separate statehood for their minority community, whose population dominated the northwestern provinces of British India and the eastern half of Bengal, as well as important pockets of the United Provinces and the great princely state of Kashmir . (The princely state of Hyderabad in the south was ruled by a Muslim dynasty but was mostly Hindu.) One of Punjab’s greatest Urdu poets, Sir Muḥammad Iqbāl (1877–1938), while presiding over the Muslim League’s annual meeting in Allahabad in 1930, proposed that “the final destiny” of India’s Muslims should be to consolidate a “North-West Indian Muslim state.” Although he did not name it Pakistan, his proposal included what became the major provinces of modern Pakistan—Punjab, Sindh, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (until 2010 North-West Frontier Province), and Balochistan. Jinnah, the Aga Khan, and other important Muslim leaders were at the time in London attending the Round Table Conference, which still envisaged a single federation of all Indian provinces and princely states as the best possible constitutional solution for India in the aftermath of a future British withdrawal. Separate electorate seats, as well as special guarantees of Muslim “autonomy” or “veto powers” in dealing with sensitive religious issues, were hoped to be sufficient to avert civil war or any need for actual partition. As long as the British raj remained in control, such formulas and schemes appeared to suffice , for the British army could always be hurled into the communal fray at the brink of extreme danger, and the army had as yet remained apolitical and—since its post-mutiny reorganization—untainted by communal religious passions.

In 1933 a group of Muslim students at Cambridge, led by Choudhary Rahmat Ali, proposed that the only acceptable solution to Muslim India’s internal conflicts and problems would be the birth of a Muslim “fatherland,” to be called Pakistan (Persian: “Land of the Pure”), out of the Muslim-majority northwestern and northeastern provinces. The Muslim League and its president, Jinnah, did not join in the Pakistan demand until after the league’s famous Lahore meeting in March 1940, as Jinnah, a secular constitutionalist by predilection and training, continued to hope for a reconciliation with the Congress Party. Such hopes virtually disappeared, however, when Nehru refused to permit the league to form coalition ministries with the Congress majority in the United Provinces and elsewhere after the 1937 elections. The Congress had initially entered the elections with the hope of wrecking the act of 1935, but—after it had won so impressive a victory in most provinces and the league had done so poorly, mostly because it had inadequately organized itself for nationwide elections—Nehru agreed to participate in the government and insisted there were but “two parties” in India, the Congress and the British raj.

Jinnah soon proved to Nehru that the Muslims were indeed a formidable “third” party. The years from 1937 to 1939, when the Congress Party actually ran most of British India’s provincial governments, became the seed period for the Muslim League ’s growth in popularity and power within the entire Muslim community, for many Muslims soon viewed the new “Hindu raj” as biased and tyrannical and the Hindu-led Congress ministries and their helpers as insensitive to Muslim demands or appeals for jobs, as well as to their redress of grievances. The Congress’s partiality toward its own members, prejudice toward its majority community, and jobbery for its leadership’s friends and relations all conspired to convince many Muslims that they had become second-class citizens in a land that, while perhaps on the verge of achieving “freedom” for some Indians, would be run by “infidels” and “enemies” to the Muslim minority. The league made the most of the Congress’s errors of judgment in governance; by documenting as many reports as it could gather in papers published during 1939, it hoped to prove how wretched a Muslim’s life would be under any “Hindu raj.” The Congress’s high command insisted, of course, that it was a “secular and national” party, not a sectarian Hindu organization, but Jinnah and the Muslim League responded that they alone could speak for and defend the rights of India’s Muslims. Thus, the lines of battle were drawn by the eve of World War II, which served only to intensify and accelerate the process of communal conflict and irreversible political division that would split British India.

On September 3, 1939, the viceroy Lord Linlithgow (governed 1936–43) informed India’s political leaders and populace that they were at war with Germany. For Nehru and the Congress Party’s high command, such unilateral declarations were viewed as more than insensitive British behaviour, for, in undertaking to run most of British India’s provinces, the Congress thought of itself as the viceroy’s “partner” in administering the raj. What a “betrayal,” therefore, that autocratic declaration of war was judged, and how angry it made Nehru and Gandhi feel. Instead of offering loyal support to the British raj, they demanded a prior forthright statement of Britain’s postwar “goals and ideals.” Neither Linlithgow nor Lord Zetland, his Tory secretary of state, was prepared, however, to pander to the Congress’s wishes at Great Britain’s darkest hour of national danger. Nehru’s outrage helped convince the Congress’s high command to call on all its provincial ministries to resign. Jinnah was overjoyed at that decision and proclaimed Friday, December 22, 1939, a Muslim “Day of Deliverance” from the tyranny of the Congress “raj.” Jinnah met regularly with Linlithgow, moreover, and assured the viceroy that he need not fear a lack of support from India’s Muslims, many of whom were active members of Britain’s armed services. Throughout World War II, as the Congress Party moved farther from the British, with first passive and later active noncooperation, the Muslim League in every possible way quietly supported the war effort.

The first meeting of the league after the outbreak of the war was held in Punjab’s ancient capital of Lahore in March 1940. The famous Lahore Resolution, later known as the Pakistan Resolution, was passed by the largest gathering of league delegates just one day after Jinnah informed his followers that “the problem of India is not of an inter-communal but manifestly of an international character.” The league resolved, therefore, that any future constitutional plan proposed by the British for India would not be “acceptable to the Muslims” unless it was so designed that the Muslim-majority “areas” of India’s “North-Western and Eastern Zones” were “grouped to constitute ‘independent States’ in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.” Pakistan was not mentioned until the next day’s newspapers introduced that word in their headlines, and Jinnah explained that the resolution envisioned the establishment of not two separately administered Muslim countries but rather a single Muslim nation-state—namely, Pakistan.

Gandhi launched his first “individual satyagraha” campaign against the war in October 1940. Vinoba Bhave , Gandhi’s foremost disciple, publicly proclaimed his intent to resist the war effort and was subsequently sentenced to three months in jail. Jawaharlal Nehru , who was the next to openly disobey British law, was sentenced to four years behind bars. By June 1941 more than 20,000 Congress satyagrahis were in prisons.

It was also in 1941 that Bose fled to Germany, where he started broadcasting appeals to India urging the masses to “rise up” against British “tyranny” and to “throw off” their chains. There were, however, few Indians in Germany, and Hitler’s advisers urged Bose to go back to Asia by submarine. He was eventually transported to Japan and then to Singapore , where Japan had captured at least 40,000 Indian troops during its takeover of that strategic island in February 1942. The captured soldiers became Netaji (“Leader”) Bose’s Indian National Army (INA) in 1943 and, a year later, marched behind him to Rangoon. Bose hoped to “liberate” first Manipur and then Bengal from British rule, but the British forces at India’s eastern gateways held until the summer monsoon gave them respite enough to be properly reinforced and drove Bose and his army back down the Malay Peninsula . In August 1945 Bose escaped by air from Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City , Vietnam), but he died of severe burns after his overloaded plane crashed onto the island of Formosa ( Taiwan ).

Lord Linlithgow’s initial refusal to discuss postwar ideals with the Congress Party left India’s premier national party without an opportunity for constructive debate about any political prospects—that is, other than those it could win by noncooperation or through violence. However, after Japan joined the Axis powers in late 1941 and moved with such rapidity into most of Southeast Asia, Britain feared that the Japanese would soon invade India. In March 1942 the war cabinet of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent the socialist Sir Richard Stafford Cripps , a close personal friend of Nehru, to New Delhi with a postwar proposal. The Cripps Mission offered Indian politicians full “dominion status” for India after the war’s end, with the additional stipulation, as a concession primarily to the Muslim League, that any province could vote to “opt out” of such a dominion if it preferred to do so. Gandhi irately called the offer “a post-dated cheque on a bank that was failing,” and Nehru was equally negative and angry at Cripps for his readiness to give so much to the Muslims. Cripps’s hands had been tied by Churchill before he left London, however, as he was ordered by the war cabinet merely to convey the British offer, not to modify it or negotiate a new formula. He flew home empty-handed in less than a month, and soon afterward Gandhi planned his last satyagraha campaign, the Quit India Movement . Declaring that the British presence in India was a provocation to the Japanese, Gandhi called on the British to “quit India” and to leave Indians to deal with the Japanese by nonviolent means, but Gandhi and all members of the Congress Party high command were arrested before the dawn of that movement in August 1942. In a few months at least 60,000 Indians filled British prison cells, and the raj unleashed massive force against Indian underground efforts to disrupt rail transport and to generally subvert the war effort that followed the crackdown on the Quit India campaign. Parts of the United Provinces, Bihar, the North-West Frontier, and Bengal were bombed and strafed by British pilots as the raj resolved to crush all Indian resistance and violent opposition as swiftly as possible. Thousands of Indians were killed and wounded, but wartime resistance continued as more young Indians, women as well as men, were recruited into the Congress’s underground.

Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor , Hawaii, in December 1941 brought the United States into the war as Britain’s most powerful ally. By late 1942 and throughout the rest of the war, U.S. arms and planes steamed and flew into Calcutta (Kolkata) and Bombay (Mumbai), bolstering British India as the major Allied launching pad against Japanese forces in Southeast Asia and China. The British raj thus remained firm despite growing Indian opposition, both violent and nonviolent. Indian industry grew rapidly, moreover, during World War II. Electric power output doubled, and the Tata steel plant at Jamshedpur became the British Empire’s foremost by the war’s end. Indian shipyards and light-manufacturing plants flourished in Bombay, as well as in Bengal and Orissa, and, despite many warnings, the Japanese never launched major air attacks against Calcutta or Madras (Chennai). In mid-1943 Field Marshall Lord Wavell , who replaced Linlithgow as viceroy (1943–47), brought India’s government fully under martial control for the war’s duration. No progress was made in several of the Congress Party’s attempts to resolve Hindu-Muslim differences through talks between Gandhi and Jinnah. Soon after the war’s end in Europe, Wavell convened a political conference in Simla (Shimla) in late June 1945, but there was no meeting of minds, no formula sturdy enough to bridge the gulf between the Congress and the Muslim League.

Two weeks after the Simla talks collapsed in midsummer, Churchill’s Conservative Party government was voted out of power by the Labour Party ’s sweep of British polls, and the new prime minister, Clement Attlee , appointed one of Gandhi’s old admirers, Lord Pethick-Lawrence , to head the India Office. With the dawn of the atomic age in August and Japan’s surrender , London’s primary concern in India was how to find the political solution to the Hindu-Muslim conflict that would most expeditiously permit the British raj to withdraw its forces and to extricate as many of its assets as possible from what seemed to the Labour Party to have become more of an imperial burden and liability than any real advantage for Great Britain.

Elections held in the winter of 1945–46 proved how effective Jinnah’s single-plank strategy for his Muslim League had been, as the league won all 30 seats reserved for Muslims in the Central Legislative Assembly and most of the reserved provincial seats as well. The Congress Party was successful in gathering most of the general electorate seats, but it could no longer effectively insist that it spoke for the entire population of British India.

In 1946 Secretary of State Pethick-Lawrence personally led a three-man cabinet deputation to New Delhi with the hope of resolving the Congress–Muslim League deadlock and, thus, of transferring British power to a single Indian administration. Cripps was responsible primarily for drafting the ingenious Cabinet Mission Plan, which proposed a three-tier federation for India, integrated by a minimal central-union government in Delhi, which would be limited to handling foreign affairs, communications, defense, and only those finances required to care for such unionwide matters. The subcontinent was to be divided into three major groups of provinces: Group A, to include the Hindu-majority provinces of the Bombay Presidency, Madras, the United Provinces, Bihar, Orissa, and the Central Provinces (virtually all of what became independent India a year later); Group B, to contain the Muslim-majority provinces of the Punjab, Sind, the North-West Frontier, and Balochistan (the areas out of which the western part of Pakistan was created); and Group C, to include the Muslim-majority Bengal (a portion of which became the eastern part of Pakistan and in 1971 the country of Bangladesh) and the Hindu-majority Assam. The group governments were to be virtually autonomous in everything but matters reserved to the union centre, and within each group the princely states were to be integrated into their neighbouring provinces. Local provincial governments were to have the choice of opting out of the group in which they found themselves should a majority of their populace vote to do so.

Punjab’s large and powerful Sikh population would have been placed in a particularly difficult and anomalous position, for Punjab as a whole would have belonged to Group B, and much of the Sikh community had become anti-Muslim since the start of the Mughal emperors’ persecution of their Gurus in the 17th century. Sikhs played so important a role in the British Indian Army that many of their leaders hoped that the British would reward them at the war’s end with special assistance in carving out their own country from the rich heart of Punjab’s fertile canal-colony lands, where, in the kingdom once ruled by Ranjit Singh (1780–1839), most Sikhs lived. Since World War I, Sikhs had been equally fierce in opposing the British raj, and, though never more than 2 percent of India’s population, they had as highly disproportionate a number of nationalist “martyrs” as of army officers. A Sikh Akali Dal (“Party of Immortals”), which was started in 1920, led militant marches to liberate gurdwara s (“doorways to the Guru”; the Sikh places of worship) from corrupt Hindu managers. Tara Singh (1885–1967), the most important leader of the vigorous Sikh political movement, first raised the demand for a separate Azad (“Free”) Punjab in 1942. By March 1946 many Sikhs demanded a Sikh nation-state, alternately called Sikhistan or Khalistan (“Land of the Sikhs” or “Land of the Pure”). The Cabinet Mission, however, had no time or energy to focus on Sikh separatist demands and found the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan equally impossible to accept.

As a pragmatist, Jinnah—terminally afflicted with tuberculosis and lung cancer—accepted the Cabinet Mission’s proposal, as did Congress Party leaders. The early summer of 1946, therefore, saw a dawn of hope for India’s future prospects, but that soon proved false when Nehru announced at his first press conference as the reelected president of the Congress that no constituent assembly could be “bound” by any prearranged constitutional formula. Jinnah read Nehru’s remarks as a “complete repudiation” of the plan, which had to be accepted in its entirety in order to work. Jinnah then convened the league’s Working Committee, which withdrew its previous agreement to the federation scheme and instead called upon the “Muslim Nation” to launch “direct action” in mid-August 1946. Thus began India’s bloodiest year of civil war since the mutiny nearly a century earlier. The Hindu-Muslim rioting and killing that started in Calcutta sent deadly sparks of fury, frenzy, and fear to every corner of the subcontinent, as all restraint seemed to disappear.

Lord Mountbatten (served March–August 1947) was sent to replace Wavell as viceroy as Britain prepared to transfer its power over India to some “responsible” hands by no later than June 1948. Shortly after reaching Delhi, where he conferred with the leaders of all parties and with his own officials, Mountbatten decided that the situation was too dangerous to wait even that brief period. Fearing a forced evacuation of British troops still stationed in India, Mountbatten resolved to opt for partition, one that would divide Punjab and Bengal, rather than risk further political negotiations while civil war raged and a new mutiny of Indian troops seemed imminent. Among the major Indian leaders, Gandhi alone refused to reconcile himself to partition and urged Mountbatten to offer Jinnah the premiership of a united India rather than a separate Muslim nation. Nehru, however, would not agree to that, nor would his most powerful Congress deputy, Vallabhbhai Jhaverbhai Patel (1875–1950), as both had become tired of arguing with Jinnah and were eager to get on with the job of running an independent government of India.

Britain’s Parliament passed in July 1947 the Indian Independence Act . It ordered that the dominions of India and Pakistan be demarcated by midnight of August 14–15, 1947, and that the assets of the world’s largest empire—which had been integrated in countless ways for more than a century—be divided within a single month. Racing the deadline, two boundary commissions worked desperately to partition Punjab and Bengal in such a way as to leave the maximum practical number of Muslims to the west of the former’s new boundary and to the east of the latter’s, but, as soon as the new borders were known, roughly 15 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs fled from their homes on one side of the newly demarcated borders to what they thought would be “shelter” on the other. In the course of that tragic exodus of innocents, as many as a million people were slaughtered in communal massacres. Sikhs, settled astride Punjab’s new “line,” suffered the highest proportion of casualties relative to their numbers. Most Sikh refugees relocated in the relatively small area of what is now the Indian border state of Punjab. Tara Singh later asked, “The Muslims got their Pakistan, and the Hindus got their Hindustan, but what did the Sikhs get?”

The transfer of power was completed on August 14 in Pakistan and August 15 in India, held a day apart so that Lord Mountbatten could attend both ceremonies. With the birth of the two independent nations, the British raj formally came to an end on August 15, 1947.

The Impacts of British Imperialism in India Research Paper

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

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.

• China’s Political, Religious, and Ideological Systems Influencing
• The Reasons and Justifications of the ‘Middle East’ Naming
• The Mughal Empire: Culture and Heritage
• The Islamic and Mughal Arts
• The Ottoman and Mughal Empires
• Modern Libya's History
• Changes in the Middle East After the World War I
• The Major Dynasties of China
• The Tang Dynasty Analysis
• The Protest Movement in Egypt
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2018, June 8). The Impacts of British Imperialism in India. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-effects-of-british-imperialism-in-india/

"The Impacts of British Imperialism in India." IvyPanda , 8 June 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/the-effects-of-british-imperialism-in-india/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'The Impacts of British Imperialism in India'. 8 June.

IvyPanda . 2018. "The Impacts of British Imperialism in India." June 8, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-effects-of-british-imperialism-in-india/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Impacts of British Imperialism in India." June 8, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-effects-of-british-imperialism-in-india/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Impacts of British Imperialism in India." June 8, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-effects-of-british-imperialism-in-india/.

Blighted by Empire: What the British Did to India

Omer aziz indicts the western amnesia around colonialism., by omer aziz september 1, 2018.

Around the World

ON THE EVENING of August 14, 1947, as India prepared to declare its independence, the last British Viceroy in India was sitting alone in his study, when, as he recounted later, he thought to himself: “For still a few more minutes I am the most powerful man on earth.” At the midnight hour, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, would rise and make his most celebrated speech, triumphantly announcing that after 200 years, India was reemerging on the world stage. But the Viceroy had ample reason to be glum: his empire was relinquishing its crown jewel, one that had enriched Britain for centuries. Louis Mountbatten was not exaggerating the extent of his power. Nehru had noted in his earlier writings that the power of the British Viceroy was greater than that of any British prime minister or American president. His Majesty’s deputy was India’s colonial master, ruling over 350 million bodies across a continent 20 times larger than Britain, accountable to none of the people he governed. When Nehru, writing from a prison cell in the 1940s, did search for an analogy to the Viceroy’s power, the only name he could think of was that of Adolf Hitler.

After two centuries of imperial rule, the proximate cause of India’s independence was the economic damage Britain suffered after World War II — a war, it should be remembered, in which 2.5 million Indians also fought. When the time came to pack up and return home, Britain tasked a London barrister named Sir Cyril Radcliffe with drawing the lines on the map that would partition the colony into two dominions, India and Pakistan, and settle the fate of hundreds of millions of people. Radcliffe, who had never been to India before, showed little interest in the people living there, and was given just 40 days to complete his work. In a poem titled “Partition,” W. H. Auden memorialized the image of an unprepared lawyer amputating an entire subcontinent:

In seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided A continent for better or worse divided The next day he sailed for England, where he could quickly forget The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.

What followed this irresponsible and careless partition was murder, rape, and mob lynching on a scale never before seen in South Asia. The subcontinent had always prided itself on its syncretic traditions; certainly, there were moments of disharmony, but nothing like what would happen in 1947. Muslims killed Hindus and Sikhs, Hindus and Sikhs killed Muslims, neighbor turned on neighbor — and on their neighbors’ children. As far as the eye could see, bodies lay strewn across roads packed with refugees; pregnant women were targeted and cut open; corpses littered the roads of ancient towns and cities. Between one and two million people were killed in the span of this homicidal fury, and over 15 million people were uprooted. It was one of the most harrowing human migrations in all of recorded history. One person, at least, knew where to lay blame for this violence. Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy and first Governor-General of independent India, would later bluntly tell a BBC reporter: “I fucked it up.”

Last year marked the 70th anniversary of the Partition of India; seven decades have passed, yet the wounds remain far from healed. India and Pakistan are nuclear adversaries. Hundreds of millions of people still live in abject poverty. The intergenerational trauma suffered by the colonized and their descendants is not likely to disappear any time soon; nor, it seems, will the West recover from its amnesia about the true nature of colonialism. Niall Ferguson, the most prominent exponent of imperialism today, has written that there is a “plausible case that Empire enhanced global welfare — in other words, [that it] was a Good Thing.” Ferguson is not alone in this view. Just last year the academic journal  Third World Quarterly  was forced to pull an article entitled “The Case for Colonialism,” in which Professor Bruce Gilley of Portland State University argued that colonialism was “both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate,” the second claim more odious than the first. In England, Oxford professor Nigel Biggar rushed to Gilley’s defense in a piece published in The Times , chastising Brits who felt guilty about their nation’s colonial history. Backlash against Gilley’s imperialism, expressed primarily through social media protests, amounted to nothing: late last year, Oxford announced that Professor Biggar would be heading a new “Ethics and Empire” project, aiming to study a more balanced — and benign — story of colonial plunder.

Curiously, the recent revival of this imperial nostalgia comes not at a time of Western confidence and security, but rather at a time of great anxiety, of looking inward and backward, of nursing old grievances, and of scapegoating immigrants. A time when the West nervously reassures itself of its own greatness — or how it can be made “great” again. The publics for which Gilley and Biggar write, along with the great bulk of the citizenry, do not know the colonial story from the perspective of the colonized. Fifty-nine percent of Britons are proud of British colonialism. Textbooks and television shows routinely suggest that the darker-skinned masses benefited from their civilizing rulers. But this narrative of colonialism, which hinges on the gifts that the master left the colonized, and in this case, that Great Britain bestowed on India, has provoked an intellectual refutation that was long overdue.

When Will Durant, who co-authored, with his wife, Ariel,  The Story of Civilization ,   witnessed what was happening in India in the 1930s, he set aside his work of history to write a short pamphlet called  The Case for India .   In this pamphlet, the ordinarily measured historian does not mince words, lambasting the British for their ongoing actions. “The British conquest of India,” Durant writes, “was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company utterly without scruple or principle […] bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning that career of illegal and legal plunder.” Britain profited enormously from what Durant calls the “rape of a continent,” so much so that on the eve of independence, the vast majority of Indians were living in poverty. It was, as Durant put it, “the most sordid and criminal exploitation of one nation by another in all recorded history.”

Shashi Tharoor’s compelling book  Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India  offers a modern update to Durant’s earlier pamphlet. The book originated from a 2015 speech Tharoor made at the Oxford Union, in which he argued that Britain owed India (and other colonies) reparations for the centuries of looting, violence, and depredation inflicted upon them. In this speech, Tharoor even attempted to circumvent the insoluble question of dollars and cents by arguing that if Britain paid India one pound a year for the next 200 years — a form of moral atonement for two centuries of subjugation — he would be satisfied. When Tharoor finished speaking, his opponents — all but one of them white — seemed at once amazed and repulsed. Soon after, a video of the speech went viral online, making both it and Tharoor the subject of intense discussion.

Tharoor’s biography lends special weight to his arguments. A sitting member of the Indian National Congress party in the Indian parliament, he has authored 13 previous books on India, literature, and foreign affairs. He was formerly the Under-Secretary General of the United Nations, where it was widely presumed he would succeed Kofi Annan in 2006, but the United States vetoed his candidacy. In his memoir, John Bolton — the US ambassador to the United Nations at that time, and President Trump’s current national security advisor — revealed that he received instructions indicating that Washington did not want a strong secretary-general. The neoconservative faction of the Bush White House thought Tharoor would use his considerable platform and oratorical abilities to infuse the UN with a new activist spirit, and so he was promptly blocked. Tharoor subsequently withdrew his candidacy and returned to India to enter national politics.

At the outset of Inglorious Empire , Tharoor admits that he believed the arguments made in his Oxford Union speech were “so basic as to constitute Indian nationalism 101.” Those arguments, which he expands upon in the book, may be well known in India, and their local variant may be common knowledge in the entire post-colonial world, but they lack widespread recognition and understanding in the West. In the 10 years since Tharoor left New York for New Delhi, the rise of historical revisionism and the touting of empire, as well as the pervasive ignorance of the past, have only increased. Western intellectuals have constructed a fantastical balance sheet where the benefits of colonialism outweigh the costs, where some imaginary moral good ultimately exculpates theft and murder. Western publics have hypnotized themselves with historical untruths about their darkest chapters, or else reinterpreted the story as a parable of Western benevolence. That goes for both sides of the Atlantic, and both sides of the English Channel. Accordingly, Inglorious Empire  is neither an academic book, nor a comprehensive one; rather, it is a point-by-point refutation of the idea that colonialism in India was a Good Thing. Tharoor writes with the studious zeal of a prosecutor who knows that the preponderance of evidence is on his side, and he makes his case not by referencing Indian nationalists — that would be too easy — but by quoting the words of the colonizers themselves. “As India must be bled,” remarked Lord Salisbury, secretary of state for India and future prime minister, in 1875, “the lancet should be directed to those parts where the blood is congested.”

Tharoor’s thesis is painfully simple: India was conquered by foreigners for the benefit of foreigners, its wealth and resources plundered to enrich the colonizers and not to improve the lives of Indians. Since evangelists for empire routinely use phrases like “benefit” and “welfare,” Tharoor turns to the financial particulars of how colonialism was waged. India lost its independence not even to a government but to a private company: the notorious British East India Company, which extended its control over a sizable share of the country through both manipulation and brutality — and conducted its theft by taxing the natives and forcibly extracting their resources. When the British East India Company began building the railways that are so often touted today, the Crown guaranteed a five percent return on investment. Such a handsome return could be fixed only because the railways were paid for by Indian , not British, taxes. When the Crown purchased the East India Company in 1858, following the mutiny of Indian sepoys, its purchase price was similarly added to the colony’s public debt. Britain not only plundered India, but literally handed India a bill of enforcement — at gun point. The cumulative theft was so extortionate that Edmund Burke, as early as the late 1700s, predicted the money stolen from India would eventually destroy it.

That is, in fact, exactly what happened. Before the British occupation, India was not a poor backwater, but a culturally and economically prosperous civilization that had existed for millennia. India was home to the oldest university in the world, had originated our numerical system, had produced countless thinkers, philosophers, poets, and scientists. It had given the world Buddhism and Hinduism, and had birthed a more tolerant, pluralistic version of Islam. Yoga and meditation, so common among the overworked professional classes in the West, were born in India thousands of years before there was even a West to speak of. In the 17th century, the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb took in 10 times the revenue of his contemporary, Louis XIV of France. According to economist Angus Maddison, in the 18th century India accounted for 23 percent of the world’s GDP, a percentage greater than all of Europe combined. By the time the British packed up their things and sailed home in 1947, that number had fallen to under three percent.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, India was a wealthy subcontinent while Britain was a poor, feudal-ridden kingdom. By the 20th century, their fortunes had reversed: India was now one of the poorest countries in the world and Britain was the richest. In 1931, 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. Setting the economics of plunder aside, the sheer human consequence of this are such that Angus Deaton found that “the deprivation in childhood of Indians born around mid-century was as severe as any large group in history, all the way back to the Neolithic Revolution.” The deracination and deindustrialization of India was the direct consequence of British policy — duly deliberated, signed, and enacted by the most educated individuals in the world.

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. Later, the Indian independence movement would influence the American Civil Rights movement and in particular Martin Luther King Jr., who looked to Mohandas Gandhi for inspiration.

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 1943 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.

When Winston Churchill was presented with the evidence of mass death known as the Bengal famine, he blamed the victims for “breeding like rabbits” and scribbled “why Gandhi hadn’t died yet” on the telegram. Churchill receives particularly rough treatment in Tharoor’s book. 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). No one can doubt Churchill’s literary brilliance, but when it came to colonialism, the man was an out-and-out racist and extremist. “I hate Indians,” he said, “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” His own doctor noted that “Winston only thinks of the color of their skin.” Tharoor advocates a serious reappraisal of Churchill’s standing, and he indicts the conservative prime minister for having as much blood on his hands as Hitler. While the accuracy of that claim is debatable (I happen to think Hitler was worse), an Anglo-American public accustomed to seeing its own politicians quote Churchill at every turn could use a reminder about the man’s delusions on race.

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. A white Englishman in London could look out to the world — to the Indian crown jewel, to the riches extracted by his ancestors, to the lands conquered by his own generation, to the colored people his government ruled — and see all of it as the result of history’s natural and inevitable plan for the superior race. An American in Jackson, Mississippi, or Birmingham, Alabama, could do the same for his own country.

In turn, Indians were excluded from restaurants marked “European-only,” forced to sit in the back of the trains in their own country and were barred from all British establishments that had “Indians and dogs not allowed” signs outside. They were variously called “coolies,” and the n-word was routinely used against them. There was no legitimate government, certainly no constitution, to which they could turn for remedy. Jawaharlal Nehru writes poignantly about the shame suffered by Indians in his masterful  The Discovery of India , outlining the ideological root of the colonial enterprise:

[W]e in India have known racialism in all its forms ever since the commencement of British rule. The whole ideology of this rule was that of the  herrenvolk  and the master race, and the structure of government was based upon it; indeed the idea of a master race is inherent in imperialism. There was no subterfuge about it; it was proclaimed in unambiguous language by those in authority. More powerful than words was the practice that accompanied them and, generation after generation and year after year, India as a nation and Indians as individuals were subjected to insult, humiliation and contemptuous treatment. The English were an imperial race, we were told, with the God-given right to govern us and keep us in subjection.

It is perhaps unsurprising that the crimes committed by the white dominions of Canada and Australia against their own indigenous populations were an exact replication of the crimes the British Empire committed around the world. Other European empires were no less harsh; in many cases, they were worse. But the British Empire continues to live on as a glorified fantasy, consistently beautified and embossed with the insignia of enlightened civilization, as the one empire that can be respectably defended as altruistic. And when the defense of this Good Thing is challenged, its critics are painted as hysterical.

Those who point to the good done by Britain often do so by erasing the barbarous cost at which it came. The emphasis on the “good” ends up minimizing the crimes committed in the name of racial superiority and profit, emphasizing the charity of the colonizer and deemphasizing his slaughter, and often eliding altogether the perspective of the colonized. When colonial apologists like Biggar, Gilley, Ferguson, and their intellectual kinfolk ask for a more “balanced narrative,” what they really seek is absolution — from memory, from history, from responsibility. Only by defining conquest and plunder as something moral can they reclaim their treasured past and, indeed, their own present identities.

If there really was any good that came from the British conquest, it was the emergence of a new English literature out of the former colonies, a veritable renaissance in letters that produced the most innovative and energetic writing of the postwar era. Names like Achebe, and Naipaul, and Desai, and Roy, and Rushdie, and Said; and among midnight’s grandchildren, contemporary names like Hamid, and Sharma, and Rahman, and Lahiri — not to mention countless others. This was not the intention, of course. Britain originally intended to spread English only to an elite group of native intermediaries who would, in the words of Sir Thomas Macaulay, “form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern.” But the colonized took the master’s language and made it their own, and then used this language to make art.

In the end, the primary reason this book matters so much today is that the British Empire has not ended. It exists in the minds of ordinary citizens, and it is not just the public in Britain that longs for empire. Today, many Americans yearn for a 1950s that may have treated their fathers exceedingly well, but that treated African Americans, and other marginalized groups, with mob justice and racist violence. Emboldened in our own time, white supremacists have also latched on to the myth of empire’s greatness. Dylann Roof, the white American terrorist who gunned down churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, three years ago, wore the flags of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia on his jacket. Online cults continue to profit by selling merchandise with Rhodesia’s symbols. If only colonial nostalgia and its resulting vengefulness were confined to the fringes. For large swaths of the Western public, the colonies have simply been imported home, existing tenuously in the immigrant, the refugee, the nonwhite toiler. The phraseology once used to describe colonial subjects is now used to describe fellow citizens, especially those newcomers from places once plundered. As long as the West, and the Anglo-American West in particular, lacks the courage to deal honestly with the story of their past, the trumpeting of this propagandistic history and its toxic myths will continue. There appears to be a long way to go before the sun fully sets on the Empire.

Banner image published in the U.S. before 1923 and public domain in the U.S.

Omer Aziz is a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times , The Atlantic , New Republic , and elsewhere.

LARB Contributor

Omer Aziz is a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times , The Atlantic , New Republic , and elsewhere. He was most recently a Logan Non-Fiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good, and previously worked as a policy advisor for the Foreign Minister of Canada. He was educated at Queen’s University in Canada, the Paris Institute of Political Studies, Cambridge, and Yale Law School.

LARB Staff Recommendations

Delightful listening: a conversation between viet thanh nguyen with arundhati roy.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose novel “The Sympathizer” won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, speaks to novelist Arundhati Roy.

Viet Thanh Nguyen Jul 31, 2018

Reverse Robin Hood: The Historical Scam of Global Development

When a world system is based on the creation of scarcity, it is the meek that inherit that scarcity.

Levi Vonk Jul 19, 2017

Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit?

LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us continue this work with your tax-deductible donation today!

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

British Imperialism in India: Economics, Politics, and Ideology — A Brief Reading Guide (with supplementary material and links)

Related Papers

Michelguglielmo Torri

This is the second of a three-volume history of India, characterized by three main arguments: (a) Indian history has been crucially conditioned by the manifold and two-way connections linking the Indian subcontinent to the remainder of the world; (b) Indian society was never static, but always crisscrossed by powerful currents of change; (c) colonialism caused both the crystallization of a ‘traditional’ society – which, in that shape, had never really existed before – and, at the same time, the rise of modernity. This volume examines the history of India from the collapse of the Mughal Empire to the end of colonialism in 1947. It analyses the features of the most important pre-colonial Indian states and the role played by the British colonialism in their destruction or reduction to political irrelevance. Second, the volume highlights the contradictory role of the colonial order in freezing a previously evolving society, causing the coming into being of a ‘traditional India’ and, at the same time, somewhat unwittingly, triggering the rise of a new modern India. Furthermore, the volume analyses the role of India in supporting the British Empire both economically and militarily, and how the implementation of the liberal economic policy by the colonial rulers resulted in the loss of millions of Indian lives. Finally, the volume closely examines the rise and evolution of Indian nationalism, the reasons that forced for the British to end their rule, and, last but not least, the causes of partition and the responsibilities of the parties and political leaders involved.

P K Yasser Arafath

National Archives of India, Imperial Records Department, Calendar of Persian Correspondence: Being Letters, referring mainly to Affairs in Bengal, which passed between some of the Company’s Servants and Indian Rulers and Notables, Vols. 1-V, 1759–1780, Five recently reprinted volumes of the Calendar of Persian Correspondence show that both British and local rulers believed that the British were the legitimate successors to the Mughals. The volumes included for review here, especially the first three, show the first phase of indirect rule by the British. But the last two volumes show an increasingly aggressive British intervention in the later part of the eighteenth century, with no aversion to violent methods.

Interventions

Gagan Preet Singh

Sailendra Sethi

KRITARTH SRIVASTAVA

Punyatma Kalyan Dwivedi

Jai Hanuman

The essay reinterprets the British colonial empire in India (the Raj, for short) as a state. Based on that reinterpretation it offers fresh assessments on three issues: how its policies shaped the economy of India, what lessons the postcolonial state drew from history, and the gains and costs of the postcolonial development strategy. T he long-term legacy of the European empires that ruled over large parts of the non-European world is an enduring theme in world history. Although " imperial history " does not mean the same thing in different academic traditions, the economic consequences of the empires form a more or less coherent discourse. Within that discourse, the British Empire occupies a place of special importance, because in some regions of the world, British rule started at the same time that Britain started on a course of rapid modernisation leading to unprecedented rise in productivity in agriculture and manufacturing industry. Some of the ingredients of the modernisa-tion, including new institutions and new technologies, were transferred to the territories ruled by Britain. And yet, the rule expected to serve the interests of the imperialists. Those who take part in the discourse ask, did the Empire, on balance, modernise and develop the regions that it ruled, or left them poorer than before? The present paper revisits this issue with reference to the history of India. I ask two questions in this essay. What were the most important economic consequences and enduring legacies of European rule in India? And how far did postco-lonial India modify or retain these effects? In order to answer these questions, we need to consider fi rst those traditions of analytical history that draw lessons about the prospect of economic development from the history of the European empires. Linking Empire with Development: The Old Theory The debate around these questions is almost as old as the empires themselves. In the last 15 years, however, the debate has taken a new turn. There is an old theory, and a set of new theories about how empires shaped the prospect of economic development in the regions once ruled by them. In part, the motivation to write this paper arises from these intellectual developments and the need to rethink India's place in them. The simplest way to describe the difference between the old and the new theories is that, whereas the old theory focused mainly on trade between the colonist and the colonised economies , the new interpretations are centred on people. People, it is recognised with increasing force in all strands of world history , embody ideas, and ideas change the world. Following up that intuition, some writers see European settlement in the non-European regions to represent channels through which institutions and technologies travelled around the world, and others see the growing scale of international migration of capital and labour in the 19th century, which were enabled and

Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

RELATED PAPERS

Kulke Hermann

SUNEETA VERMA

Journal of Asian Studies

Herman Tull

G. Balachandran

The Journal of Asian Studies

Rochona Majumdar

The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History

Maria Misra

Sotheara Yoeurng

Gunnel Cederlöf

Journal of Economic Perspectives

Tirthankar Roy

Rajat Datta

Indrajeet Kumar

Review of Radical Political Economics

Siavash Saffari

Empire and Progress: Tracing the Beneficial Outcomes of British rule in India

Aijaz Ahmad , Rianka Sarkar

The History of Economic Thought

Alex M. Thomas

Swami Vedatitananda

William and Mary Quarterly

Robert S DuPlessis

Aditya Shekhar18

Robin singh

Past & present

Indivar Kamtekar

A History of India, Vol. I: From the First Human Settlements to the Mughal Empire

Imraan Mohammad

David Curley

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

• AsianStudies.org
• Annual Conference
• EAA Articles
• 2025 Annual Conference March 13-16, 2025
• AAS Community Forum Log In and Participate

Education About Asia: Online Archives

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

Share this:

• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• 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).
• Latest News
• Join or Renew
• Education About Asia
• Education About Asia Articles
• Asia Shorts Book Series
• Asia Past & Present
• Key Issues in Asian Studies
• Journal of Asian Studies
• The Bibliography of Asian Studies
• AAS-Gale Fellowship
• Council Grants
• Book Prizes
• Graduate Student Paper Prizes
• Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies Award
• First Book Subvention Program
• External Grants & Fellowships
• AAS Career Center
• Asian Studies Programs & Centers
• Study Abroad Programs
• Language Database
• Conferences & Events
• #AsiaNow Blog

• New Visions Social Studies Curriculum
• Curriculum Development Team
• Content Contributors
• Getting Started: Baseline Assessments
• Getting Started: Resources to Enhance Instruction
• Getting Started: Instructional Routines
• Unit 9.1: Global 1 Introduction
• Unit 9.2: The First Civilizations
• Unit 9.3: Classical Civilizations
• Unit 9.4: Political Powers and Achievements
• Unit 9.5: Social and Cultural Growth and Conflict
• Unit 9.6: Ottoman and Ming Pre-1600
• Unit 9.7: Transformations in Europe
• Unit 9.8: Africa and the Americas Pre-1600
• Unit 9.9: Interactions and Disruptions
• 10.0: Global 2 Introduction
• 10.01: The World in 1750 C.E.
• 10.02: Enlightenment, Revolution, and Nationalism
• 10.03: Industrial Revolution

10.04: Imperialism

• 10.05: World Wars
• 10.06: Cold War Era
• 10.07: Decolonization & Nationalism
• 10.08: Cultural Traditions and Modernization
• 10.09: Globalization and the Changing Environment
• 10.10: Human Rights Violations
• Unit 11.0: US History Introduction
• Unit 11.1: Colonial Foundations
• Unit 11.2: American Revolution
• Unit 11.3A: Building a Nation
• Unit 11.03B: Sectionalism & the Civil War
• Unit 11.4: Reconstruction
• Unit 11.5: Gilded Age and Progressive Era
• Unit 11.6: Rise of American Power
• Unit 11.7: Prosperity and Depression
• Unit 11.8: World War II
• Unit 11.9: Cold War
• Unit 11.10: Domestic Change
• Resources: Regents Prep: Global 2 Exam
• Regents Prep: Framework USH Exam: Regents Prep: US Exam
• Find Resources

Imperialism

Sq 4. how did the british gain, consolidate, and maintain power in india.

Students will trace how imperial powers politically and economically controlled territories and people, including direct and indirect rule in Africa (South Africa, Congo, and one other territory), India, Indochina, and spheres of influence in China.

Global History II

Imperialism in India: SQ 4. How did the British gain, consolidate, and maintain power in India?

Students will describe the motivations behind British imperialism in India.

Teacher Feedback

Please comment below with questions, feedback, suggestions, or descriptions of your experience using this resource with students.

If you found an error in the resource, please let us know so we can correct it by filling out this form . 

• Search Menu

Sign in through your institution

• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Numismatics
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Social History
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Emotions
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Acquisition
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Religion
• Music and Media
• Music and Culture
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Politics
• Law and Society
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Legal System - Costs and Funding
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Restitution
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Toxicology
• Medical Oncology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Medical Ethics
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Security
• Computer Games
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Strategy
• Business Ethics
• Business History
• Business and Government
• Business and Technology
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Social Issues in Business and Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic Systems
• Economic History
• Economic Methodology
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Social Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Sustainability
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• Ethnic Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Political Theory
• Politics and Law
• Politics of Development
• Public Administration
• Public Policy
• Qualitative Political Methodology
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Disability Studies
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

India and the British Empire

• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

South Asian History has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance over the past thirty years. Its historians are not only producing new ways of thinking about the imperial impact and legacy on South Asia, but also helping to reshape the study of imperial history in general. The chapters here address a number of these important developments, delineating not only the complicated interplay between imperial rulers and their subjects in India, but also illuminating the economic, political, environmental, social, cultural, ideological, and intellectual contexts which informed, and were in turn informed by, these interactions. Particular attention is paid to a cluster of binary oppositions that have hitherto framed South Asian history, namely colonizer/colonized, imperialism/nationalism, and modernity/tradition, and how new analytical frameworks are emerging which enable us to think beyond the constraints imposed by these binaries. Closer attention to regional dynamics as well as to wider global forces has enriched our understanding of the history of South Asia within a wider imperial matrix. Previous impressions of all-powerful imperialism, with the capacity to reshape all before it, for good or ill, are rejected in favour of a much more nuanced image of imperialism in India that acknowledges the impact as well as the intentions of colonialism, but within a much more complicated historical landscape where other processes are at work.

Personal account

• Sign in with email/username & password
• Get email alerts
• Save searches
• Purchase content
• Activate your purchase/trial code
• Add your ORCID iD

Institutional access

Sign in with a library card.

• Sign in with username/password
• Recommend to your librarian
• Institutional account management
• Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic.

• Click Sign in through your institution.
• Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
• When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
• Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see ‘Sign in through society site’ in the sign in pane within a journal:

• Click Sign in through society site.
• When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

• View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
• View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Rights and permissions
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

• The Gold Coast: The Impact of British Imperialism Words: 1391
• British in Hong Kong and the French in Vietnam: Empire and Imperialism Words: 2524
• Impact of British Colonialism on Indian Economy Words: 9235
• The British Empire’s Achievements and Legacies Words: 1146
• The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Words: 1987
• The East India Company: Nature and Character of Revolt Words: 3992
• Conflicts Between the British and the Colonists Words: 649
• America and the British Empire: Relations Review Words: 1479
• British Colonialism Benefits for India Words: 290
• The Unjust British Rule as a Cause of the American Revolution Words: 643
• Comparison of the Babylonian, Mongolian, and British Empires Words: 1117
• British Airways: Business Functions Words: 799
• The British Colonial Rule Impact on Kuwaiti Literature Words: 560
• British vs. American English Differences Words: 575
• Researching of British Abolitionism Words: 2097
• Humanities and Justice in Britain during 18th Century Words: 9153
• The British Petroleum Company: Target Markets Words: 629
• British Airways Company’s Branding Strategy Words: 1383

British Imperialism in India: Literature Review

India, one of the fastest developing countries in the world was under British rule during the period of colonialism. The impact of British imperialism on India has been studied by many scholars from many angles. Each angle gives a different perspective. Some studies show that the contribution of the British towards the growth and development of India through new technology, and government structure is huge whereas there are some studies that conclude that there has been a negative impact of British rule resulting in strong divisions among people based on caste and religion. The present paper is a review of the literature of British Imperialism upon the subcontinent of India and has two very distinct points of view – that British rule instilled positive reinforcement to a primitive society and that the thoughtlessness of the British government lead to inhumane laws and rampant social divisions.

Vishal Mangalwadi in his 1997 article in the London Daily Mail points to the numerous benefits to India that were the outcome of British rule. He firmly believes that “the British rule in India was a blessing. It is something in which Britons should feel pride and for which Indians should be grateful” (Mangalwadi, 10). To strengthen his argument further, he says that the establishment of India as a free democratic country was entirely due to the British. Historically, according to Mangalwadi, good things began to happen to India when Charles grant was made director of the East India Company. It was Grant who chose that India must be governed “as well as the British governed themselves”(Mangalwadi, p. 10). Until that point, Mangalwadi says that the Indians had known only the authoritarian rule of despots and kings. The British gave them their first taste of democracy and also helped India build its institutions systematically – institutions such as schools, universities, Parliament, and a free Press. They also gave India the best of European technology in the form of steam engines, railways, banks, irrigation canals, manufacturing goods, etc. Above all, the British can be credited with giving India a “system of trust in public officials and in the state’. “Under British rule, the Congress gained experience in contesting elections and in governing – at provincial and municipal levels” (Candland, 1997, 19). Mangalwadi elaborates that the problems faced by India in the present are mainly of its own making and not because of the British rule. Gita Subrahmanyam (2006) agrees with Mangalwadi and notes that the British Empire was partial towards India in giving it a good governmental structure and she argues that India would not have been the democracy it is today if it had not inherited the political structures from the British to match its own social systems. Robert Carr (2005) while assessing the impact of British Rule in India during a time of transition claims that India at the time of colonization was a great source of manpower and economic power to the British and therefore was very much valued by the British. As a result of this value placed on India, Carr says the British contributed to the progress of India through “modernization in the form of railways and irrigation projects” (Carr, 28). From the philosophical viewpoint, Mark Tunick (2006) analyses the social and political writings of John Stuart Mill while serving the British East India Company and deduces that Mill is a tolerant imperialist, one who felt that the British rule in India was a perfectly justified one. This is indirect acceptance by Mark Tunick that the British Rule in India was for the benefit of India. Generally, Mill was widely known for his support for toleration, liberty, and experiments in living. Hence when he defended British rule in his writings he was criticized for championing the cause of despotism when the victims were non-Western people. Mark Tunick explains that the tolerant imperialism that Mill defends is one that is based on beneficence and not self-interest. In the case of tolerant imperialism, the intervention is not for commercial advantage but for moral purposes. Mill defended British rule in India because he felt that the British were in India not only for some self-interests but also to civilize the native peoples. By civilizing the natives, Mill meant helping them overcome threats of nature in two ways: establishing the rule of law and developing cooperative ventures. Despite the numerous contributions of the British rule to India, Gita Subrahmanyam (2006) says that the British helped India to progress with technology and other benefits only because they considered India valuable to them. Subrahmanyam thus accuses the British Empire of being very calculative.

Whatever be the motive, British rule in India was not without its drawbacks. Though the British system of education was given to India, Ravi Kalia (2006) points to the fact that British India had focused more on educating its citizens in Liberal Arts and Law while other disciplines such as architecture and engineering were not as strongly emphasized. This created a problem when there was a need for urban expansion. Frank DeZwart (2000) makes a more serious accusation against the British. He holds the British Colonial Regime responsible for the construction of the caste system that is found till today to be the cause of several internal uprisings and the basis of political manipulations. He says that during the British Colonial system, the government specified social categories for individuals to register in order to be qualified for jobs, education, or other benefits. This measure served to reinforce the caste system deeper according to DeZwart. The evils of the caste system are now becoming more and more apparent, especially in the educational and political circles. Sudipta Kaviraj’s research also leads to this same conclusion. Conducting research in a similar vein, Sudipta Kaviraj (1997) also finds that during Colonial rule, the Western style of governance strengthened the divisions among people along caste and religious lines. Moreover, Kaviraj says that it was this reinforcement of traditional identities along with the practices of the colonial state structures that are responsible for the partition between India and Pakistan. This is a more serious accusation against the British rule in India than that of introducing casteism and neglecting the sciences. Peter Harnetty (2001) says that the present-day community clashes in India originated with the conversions carried out by the missionaries during the British rule: “Outright proselytization gave way to indirect methods of attracting converts, especially through educational work and medical care” (Harnetty, p. 555). Though these activities involved service, they had the underlying objective of converting people to Christianity. Such activities lead to a widespread belief that missionaries took advantage of the weak, especially in times of famine, to win them to Christianity. As a result of such conflicts, there were clashes between Christian missionary organizations and Hindus who oppose their activities, which are continuing even today. Communal clashes are then, according to Peter Harnetty, one of the sadder legacies of British rule in India. Peter Heehs (1993) points to another negative impact of British rule in India – the birth of terrorism within its borders. He says that when the British aimed to disarm the population by means of the Arms Act of 1878, they “made it impossible for Indian revolutionaries to organize large-scale operations” (Heehs, p. 469). As a result, those who favored violent resistance were drawn into terrorism as a way of protest against British rule. Though it was initially called “militant nationalism” there was no armed uprising throughout the country as implied by the phrase. Instead, there were “small-scale acts of covert violence such as armed robberies and assassinations of officials and collaborators” (Heehs, p. 469). Since 1970, it has been accepted that what happened during the Indian freedom was “revolutionary terrorism” or simply “terrorism”.

Taking a more neutral view on the issue, Robert Carr suggests that while the British rule did bring some benefits to India, there were some measures that created a feeling that “Indian interests were being subordinated to those of Britain”. However, things took a turn for the worse with the accession of George Curzon as Viceroy. Two measures that he took were considered detrimental to the growth of India – the 1904 Universities Act that increased British controls over private colleges and university bodies and the partition of Bengal which resulted in a largely Muslim province of East Bengal and Assam. The British showed oppression through the Rowlatt Acts and “utter barbarism” through the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Thus, Carr concludes that there were both positive and negative impacts of British imperialism in India. Carr concludes that the time of British rule in India “can be seen as one of concession and repression”.

The paper examines the existing literature on British imperialism in India in terms of its impact on India. Vishal Mangalwadi (1997) stresses the positive aspects of British Imperialism on India in a very strong manner whereas Mark Tunick (2006) indirectly holds that British imperialism helped India to become civilized. Gita Subrahmanyam says that all these gifts of British rule were based on the profit motives of the British. Ravi Kalia (2006) finds fault with the educational system left behind by the British imperialism while Frank DeZwart (2000) and Sudipta Kaviraj (1997) hold the same responsible for the caste and regional divisions. Peter Harnetty (2001) suggests that British imperialism leads to communal clashes whereas Peter Heehs seems to think that it leads to the birth of domestic terrorism in India. Robert Carr (2005) however takes a neutral view and suggests that while British rule in India was beneficial in some ways, it was also detrimental in some other ways. British imperialism brought India its railroads, irrigational canals, structured government, and democratic setup but it also fortified caste divisions and regional divisions and contributed towards the partition of Bengal and the Partition of India-Pakistan. Moreover, communal clashes and domestic terrorism are considered to have been created by British rule. A study of these sources gives me a fresh insight into colonial rule in India. I agree with Gita Subrahmanyam’s view that India was definitely treated differently from other colonies and was given new technological and political advantages by the British government. I had earlier been aware of only the benefits of British rule. However, studies by Ravi Kalia, Sudipta Kaviraj, Peter Heehs, and Peter Harnetty have shown me that there is a darker side to the issue. The British, under the pretext of civilizing the country, have exploited the manpower and money power of the country and tried to rule by dividing. These studies point to the issue of casteism, Partition of Bengal, and Partition of Pakistan as major setbacks to India due to colonial rule. I believe that all of these issues are rooted in the basic British philosophy of ruling by dividing. This philosophy of ruling by dividing has hurt the country deeply as it faces troubled relations with both Pakistan and Bangladesh in present-day circumstances. Thus, it is true as Robert Carr says, that the results of British imperialism in India are mixed.

Works Cited

Candland, Christopher (1997). Congress Decline and Party Pluralism in India. Journal of International Affairs, 1997, Volume 51, Issue 1, 19

Carr, Robert (2005). Concession & Repression: British Rule in India 1857-1919 Robert Carr Assesses the Nature of British Rule in India during a Key, Transitional Phase. History Review, 2005, Issue 52, 28+

DeZwart, Frank (2000). The Logic of Affirmative Action: Caste, Class, and Quotas in India. Acta Sociologica, 2000, Vol. 43, Issue 3, 235-249

Harnetty, Peter (2001). The Famine That Never Was: Christian Missionaries in India, 1918-1919. The Historian, 2001, Volume 63, Issue 3, 555

Heehs, Peter (1993). Terrorism in India during the Freedom Struggle. The Historian, 1993, Volume 55, Issue 3, 469+.

Kalia, Ravi (2006). Modernism, Modernization and Post-Colonial India: A Reflective Essay. Planning Perspectives. 2006, Vol. 21, Issue 2, p. 133-156

Kaviraj, Sudipta (1997). Religion and Identity in India. Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 20, Issue 2. p. 325-344.

Mangalwadi, Vishal (1997). The debt my country still owes Britain. Daily Mail, 1997, 10-11

Subrahmanyam, Gita (2006). Ruling Continuities: Colonial Rule, Social Forces and Path Dependence in British India and Africa. Commonwealth and Comparative Politics. 2006, Vol. 44, Issue 1, 66-92

Tunick, Mark. Tolerant Imperialism: John Stuart Mill’s Defense of British Rule in India. The Review of Politics, 2006, Volume 68, 586-611.

Cite this paper

• Chicago (N-B)
• Chicago (A-D)

StudyCorgi. (2021, October 14). British Imperialism in India: Literature Review. https://studycorgi.com/british-imperialism-in-india-literature-review/

"British Imperialism in India: Literature Review." StudyCorgi , 14 Oct. 2021, studycorgi.com/british-imperialism-in-india-literature-review/.

StudyCorgi . (2021) 'British Imperialism in India: Literature Review'. 14 October.

1. StudyCorgi . "British Imperialism in India: Literature Review." October 14, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/british-imperialism-in-india-literature-review/.

Bibliography

StudyCorgi . "British Imperialism in India: Literature Review." October 14, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/british-imperialism-in-india-literature-review/.

StudyCorgi . 2021. "British Imperialism in India: Literature Review." October 14, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/british-imperialism-in-india-literature-review/.

This paper, “British Imperialism in India: Literature Review”, was written and voluntary submitted to our free essay database by a straight-A student. Please ensure you properly reference the paper if you're using it to write your assignment.

Before publication, the StudyCorgi editorial team proofread and checked the paper to make sure it meets the highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, fact accuracy, copyright issues, and inclusive language. Last updated: January 24, 2022 .

If you are the author of this paper and no longer wish to have it published on StudyCorgi, request the removal . Please use the “ Donate your paper ” form to submit an essay.

Colonialism in India was traumatic – including for some of the British officials who ruled the Raj

Principal Lecturer in Political Communications, Nottingham Trent University

Disclosure statement

Colin Alexander does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Nottingham Trent University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

View all partners

When India gained independence from Britain on August 15 1947, the majority of Anglo-Indians had either left or would leave soon after. Many within the Indian Civil Service would write of the trauma that they experienced from witnessing the violence of the years leading up to the end of British rule and the bloodbath that would follow as the lines of partition were revealed.

Colonialism was certainly a far more traumatising experience for colonial subjects than their colonisers. They suffered poverty, malnutrition, disease, cultural upheaval, economic exploitation, political disadvantage, and systematic programmes aimed at creating a sense of social and racial inferiority. While some may argue that any suffering on the part of the British colonialists ought to be met with little sympathy, this is not a reason to obscure it from history.

It was the very notion that Indian civil service servicemen were usurpers, full of privilege, in a foreign land that led to the sapped sense of humanity that many wrestled with – both during and after their India careers.

As my own forthcoming book details, some shut themselves off from the day-to-day lives of Indians, unless forced to engage for work purposes. Others escaped through drowning themselves in alcohol, opium or other drugs. Some convinced themselves of the intellectual superiority of the white man and his right to rule over “lesser races”, while a number found solace in Christianity. Several came to see their role as being a peacekeeper between various ethnic and religious groups, despite the irony of the British having encouraged and exploited the categorisation of colonial subjects on these grounds in the first place.

Underneath all of this sits a trauma that the coloniser had to either deal with – or resign their post and go home.

Serving the Raj

One serviceman of the late Raj who I have focused on in my research is an example of the coping mechanisms that British officials deployed. Andrew Clow entered the Indian Civil Service in 1912 at the age of 22 and would remain a civil servant until 1947 when he reached the mandatory retirement ceiling of 35 years. His most notable portfolios were as secretary of the Indian Labour Bureau in the late 1930s, followed by minister for communications and then governor of Assam from 1942 to 1947.

Clow, and his one thousand or so colleagues at any one time, effectively ruled India during the late Raj. This was a time of declining British prestige, and declining public and political opinion of colonialism as an acceptable social, economic and political practice. The rise of the Indian independence movement with Mohandas Gandhi as its nominal leader, coincided with the anti-British international propaganda concerning its empire that came from the Soviet Union and its sympathisers.

Doubt and self-loathing

In the early 1920s, the Indian independence movement grew in prominence and received a significant level of sympathy at home and abroad. In 1919, the Amritsar Massacre of unarmed protesters by British and Gurka troops received much public criticism. A year later, two of Clow’s civil service intake year group were assassinated in a market in Midnapore, West Bengal. From letters Clow wrote to a friend, we know he considered resigning on several occasions during the early 1920s. This period of reflection led him to fundamentally question his role within the colonial system, but he ultimately decided to continue his career.

Clow was a devout Christian and his life in India would develop into a religious cocoon of sorts where he used his relationship with God to suppress his trauma at being a colonial usurper.

As he became more senior within the administration he increasingly distanced himself from Indians, Indian culture and expressed little sympathy for the plight of people who suffered from British exploitation. He spent the vast majority of his time with other Europeans and his holidays at his house at the British hill station of Simla. His diaries throughout the 1930s and 1940s became almost entirely written prayers requesting salvation punctuated by private comments of self-loathing, written in confidence between himself and God.

Defender of British colonialism

Upon his retirement from the Indian Civil Service in 1947, Clow returned to Scotland and became chairman of the newly-created Scottish Gas Board. His private time was spent largely in the pursuit of the preservation of the legacy of British India. He voraciously read memoirs and other reflections by his former colleagues, and would lambast any critique of the British, even if those criticisms were rather sparse.

Clow’s failure to concede publicly that colonialism was an exploitative practice is indicative of a complex reaction to his trauma at being a key part of a system of suppression. His heightened religiosity was a key part of his way of dealing with this. In many ways he “used” God to negate his discomfort at being one of the main figures of the British colonial enterprise.

Clow was typical of many within the Indian Civil Service who became troubled by their roles facilitating the exploitation of the Indian subcontinent for the British Empire. Yet, rather than resign his post and become a critic of colonial practices, Clow built a number of internal mechanisms so that he could carry on. Reactions like Clow’s go some way to explain the romance that many within British society have had for the age of empire. But today, 70 years on from the end of the Raj, public bodies and the British media are willing to engage in a much more robust critique.

• Colonialism
• Colonisation
• British Empire
• Colonialist
• Indian Independence Anniversary
• British Raj
• India partition

Administration and Events Assistant

Head of Evidence to Action

Supply Chain - Assistant/Associate Professor (Tenure-Track)

OzGrav Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Casual Facilitator: GERRIC Student Programs - Arts, Design and Architecture

Sample details

• Imperialism,
• Jawaharlal Nehru
• Views: 1,236

Related Topics

• Factors of production
• Protectionism
• Economic Inequality
• Economic Growth
• Microeconomics
• Comparative advantage
• Supply and Demand
• Mercantilism
• Interest rate

Imperialism in India

The author discusses the benefits of imperialism for both the colonizer and the colony. The colonizers were able to help build a civilization and control garden spots, while the colony gained access to schools, newspapers, and modern science. British imperialism had both positive and negative effects on India, providing peace and modernization while also causing unemployment and poverty. The author lists multiple benefits of imperialism, including improved communication and transportation, higher standards of living, and improved sanitation. Gandhi criticized imperialism for taking control of the government and causing people to become unable to react. Overall, imperialism had both positive and negative effects on both Britain and India.

According to this author, what are the benefits of imperialism to the colony? Imperialism profited the colony because the colonizers helped built a civilization, the progressive nations can establish schools and newspapers for the people of the colonies What are the benefits of imperialism to the colonizer? They were able to help the colony built a civilization and they them self’s were able to control garden spots and built roads and transportation for the travel.

How is British imperialism both positive and negative for India? The British were able to provide a politically peaceful and orders place. They helped them materially. The negative parts were that, the British/Europeans always took up the higher places in every department of government and they lived off the Indians work.

ready to help you now

Without paying upfront

What benefits did India gain during British imperialism? British imperialism provided many benefits towards India one of them was they provided peace to the country, as well and a western education, new thoughts and modern science an a better life more civilized and established courts of justice and mad wise laws.

List at least five benefits of imperialism cited by this author:

• they have made and developed means of communication
• they have built many bridges
• they have made 40,000 miles of railroads, and 70,000 miles of paved roads. 4 improved higher standard of living 5 and improved sanitation

What are the benefits of imperialism identified by this author? The British helped rise the trade of Indians products, and stopped the killing of babies (infanticide) and ended slavery and forbid the ownership of slaves.

What negative effects of imperialism does Nehru point out? India Supplied raw materials and provided markets for England’s industrial goods, yet destruction of industry lead to unemployment on a vast Scale and poverty of the country grew. The standard of living fell to terribly low levels.

What is Gandhi’s criticism of imperialism? The English people have taken charge of there government and made them do all the work and now hey can’t react towards the government.

What were the positive and negative effects of imperialism for the British, the mother country, and for India, the colony? Imperialism in India had a lot of positives effects towards the colony and county. Imperialism also bought many negative effects towards India. You can say that India improved a lot from when the imperialism started. Britain as well prospered because of there imperialism. Imperialism affects India and its country and colony in a positive way. This was done because the way British came and started helping the colony because the colonizers helped built a civilization.

Cite this page

https://graduateway.com/imperialism-in-india/

You can get a custom paper by one of our expert writers

• Economic System
• Entrepreneur
• Economy of India
• Macroeconomics
• Balance sheet
• Market economy
• Price elasticity of demand
• Luxury goods

Check more samples on your topics

Old imperialism vs. new imperialism compare and contrast.

Imperialism

Imperialism is the expansion of dominion over territories worldwide. The Industrial Revolution and interests in nationalism sparked a fresh era of imperialism around 1750. Although old imperialism persisted from 1450-1750, imperialism itself continued until 1914. Both old and new imperialism shared the fundamental idea of governing and exploiting foreign nations. Old imperialism primarily centered on

Effects of imperialism of the west on Africa and India Sample

Jules Ferry one time said “In order for a state to be great. she must demo her influence throughout the universe and carry everyplace she can her linguistic communication. her imposts. her flag. her weaponries. and her mastermind. ” This quotation mark is the perfect illustration of the positions of an imperialist state. From 1750-1914

Impact of Imperialism on India

Introduction The ageing of population is an obvious consequence of the process of demographic transition. While the countries of the west have already experienced and have planned for their elderly population, it is only in the last one and half decades that countries in Asia too are facing a steady growth of the elderly, as a

Effect of imperialism AP DBQ

Imperialism is the act of a mother nation taking over another nation to become its colony for political, social, and economic reasons. This occurred predominantly during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was considered a progressive force for both the oppressors (mother country) and oppressed (colony). However, it had more negative than positive

Imperialism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Heart Of Darkness

 Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness is a detailed examination of the imperialistic movement of European civilization to invade the blank spaces of the global maps and stamp their culture and economic dominance over the colonized region as seen through the travels and travails of the sea-man narrator Marlow in the heart of the Congo

Fast Food and Cultural Imperialism

Cultural imperialism is the process of promoting the culture or language of one country into another country (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_imperialism>).  The United States is an ethnocentric country.  Throughout history, the American people have tried to impose their culture, religion, values and beliefs on other nations.  The fast food industry is a major part of the culture of

Cultural Imperialism – Cartoon analysis

The given cartoon "Globalization Invading Markets" was published In 2005. It displays a coastline, Including the sea and a beach, with people holding up their hands and running away. Moreover there are battleships, firing artillery onto the land and carrier boats are transporting further people ashore. Also fighter aircrafts, dropping more artillery onto the land

An Overview of the Causes of World War One and the Battle for the Freedom From Imperialism

Nationalism

World War I

World War I, like many events in history. occurred in the wake of numerous and equally Influential events that led to a single outcome Yet, there are still Ideas that there was one major cause, and other smaller, less important causes. Some historians have argued that imperialism should bear the responsibility, while others claim that

The Causes of the 19th Century European Imperialism in Africa

The search for the feeling of superiority often leads people to do brutal things to get what they want; this is also true in the case of many nations. In the 19‘“ century, Europeans were bloodthirsty for power and fortune and began the sweeping policy of imperialism, when a stronger country forcibly takes control of

Hi, my name is Amy 👋

In case you can't find a relevant example, our professional writers are ready to help you write a unique paper. Just talk to our smart assistant Amy and she'll connect you with the best match.

From Imperialism to Postcolonialism: Key Concepts

An introduction to the histories of imperialism and the writings of those who grappled with its oppressions and legacies in the twentieth century.

Imperialism, the domination of one country over another country’s political, economic, and cultural systems, remains one of the most significant global phenomena of the last six centuries. Amongst historical topics, Western imperialism is unique because it spans two different broadly conceived temporal frames: “Old Imperialism,” dated between 1450 and 1650, and “New Imperialism,” dated between 1870 and 1919, although both periods were known for Western exploitation of Indigenous cultures and the extraction of natural resources to benefit imperial economies. Apart from India, which came under British influence through the rapacious actions of the East India Company , European conquest between 1650 and the 1870s remained (mostly) dormant. However, following the 1884–85 Berlin Conference, European powers began the “ Scramble for Africa ,” dividing the continent into new colonial territories. Thus, the age of New Imperialism is demarcated by establishment of vast colonies throughout Africa, as well as parts of Asia, by European nations.

These European colonizing efforts often came at the expense of other older, non-European imperial powers, such as the so-called gunpowder empires—the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires that flourished across South Asia and the Middle East. In the case of the Ottomans , their rise coincided with that of the Old Imperialism(s) of the West and lasted until after World War I. These were not the only imperial powers, however; Japan signaled its interest in creating a pan-Asian empire with the establishment of a colony in Korea in 1910 and expanded its colonial holdings rapidly during the interwar years. The United States, too, engaged in various forms of imperialism, from the conquest of the tribes of the First Nation Peoples, through filibustering in Central America during the mid-1800s, to accepting the imperialist call of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden,” which the poet wrote for President Theodore Roosevelt on the occasion of Philippine-American War. While claiming to reject naked imperialism, Roosevelt still embraced expansionism, promoting the creation of a strong US Navy and advocating for expansion into Alaska, Hawaiʻi, and the Philippines to exert American influence .

The Great War is often considered the end of the new age of imperialism, marked by the rise of decolonization movements throughout the various colonial holdings. The writings of these emergent Indigenous elites, and the often-violent repression they would face from the colonial elite, would not only profoundly shape the independence struggles on the ground but would contribute to new forms of political and philosophical thought. Scholarship from this period forces us to reckon not only with colonial legacies and the Eurocentric categories created by imperialism but also with the continuing exploitation of the former colonies via neo-colonial controls imposed on post-independence countries.

The non-exhaustive reading list below aims to provide readers with both histories of imperialism and introduces readers to the writings of those who grappled with colonialism in real time to show how their thinking created tools we still use to understand our world.

Eduardo Galeano, “ Introduction: 120 Million Children in the Eye of the Hurricane ,” Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (NYU Press, 1997): 1 –8.

Taken from the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of this classic text, Eduardo Galeano’s introduction argues that pillaging of Latin America continued for centuries past the Old Imperialism of the Spanish Crown. This work is highly readable and informative, with equal parts of impassioned activism and historical scholarship.

Nancy Rose Hunt, “ ‘Le Bebe En Brousse’: European Women, African Birth Spacing and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo ,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies  21, no. 3 (1988): 401–32.

Colonialism affected every aspect of life for colonized peoples. This intrusion into the intimate lives of indigenous peoples is most evident in Nancy Rose Hunt’s examination of Belgian efforts to modify birthing processes in the Belgian Congo. To increase birth rates in the colony, Belgian officials initiated a mass network of health programs focused on both infant and maternal health. Hunt provides clear examples of the underlying scientific racism that underpinned these efforts and acknowledges the effects they had on European women’s conception of motherhood.

Chima J. Korieh, “ The Invisible Farmer? Women, Gender, and Colonial Agricultural Policy in the Igbo Region of Nigeria, c. 1913–1954 ,” African Economic History No. 29 (2001): 117– 62

In this consideration of Colonial Nigeria, Chima Korieh explains how British Colonial officials imposed British conceptions of gender norms on traditional Igbo society; in particular, a rigid notion of farming as a male occupation, an idea that clashed with the fluidity of agricultural production roles of the Igbo. This paper also shows how colonial officials encouraged palm oil production, an export product, at the expense of sustainable farming practices—leading to changes in the economy that further stressed gender relations.

Colin Walter Newbury & Alexander Sydney Kanya-Forstner, “ French Policy and the Origins of the Scramble for West Africa ,” The Journal of African History  10, no. 2 (1969): 253–76.

Newbury and Kanya-Foster explain why the French decided to engage in imperialism in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. First, they point to mid-century French engagement with Africa—limited political commitment on the African coast between Senegal and Congo, with a plan for the creation of plantations within the Senegalese interior. This plan was emboldened by their military success in Algeria, which laid the foundation of a new conception of Empire that, despite complications (Britain’s expansion of their empire and revolt in Algeria, for instance) that forced the French to abandon their initial plans, would take hold later in the century.

Mark D. Van Ells, “ Assuming the White Man’s Burden: The Seizure of the Philippines, 1898–1902 ,” Philippine Studies 43, no. 4 (1995): 607–22.

Mark D. Van Ells’s work acts as an “exploratory and interpretive” rendering of American racial attitudes toward their colonial endeavors in the Philippines. Of particular use to those wishing to understand imperialism is Van Ells’s explication of American attempts to fit Filipinos into an already-constructed racist thought system regarding formerly enslaved individuals, Latinos, and First Nation Peoples. He also shows how these racial attitudes fueled the debate between American imperialists and anti-imperialists.

Aditya Mukherjee, “ Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain,” Economic and Political Weekly  45, no. 50 (2010): 73–82. 

Aditya Mukherjee first provides an overview of early Indian intellectuals and Karl Marx’s thoughts on the subject to answer the question of how colonialism impacted the colonizer and the colonized. From there, he uses economic data to show the structural advantages that led to Great Britain’s ride through the “age of capitalism” through its relative decline after World War II.

Frederick Cooper, “ French Africa, 1947–48: Reform, Violence, and Uncertainty in a Colonial Situation ,” Critical Inquiry  40, no. 4 (2014): 466–78. 

It can be tempting to write the history of decolonization as a given. However, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the colonial powers would not easily give up their territories. Nor is it safe to assume that every colonized person, especially those who had invested in the colonial bureaucratic systems, necessarily wanted complete independence from the colonial metropole. In this article, Frederick Cooper shows how conflicting interests navigated revolution and citizenship questions during this moment.

Hồ Chí Minh & Kareem James Abu-Zeid, “ Unpublished Letter by Hồ Chí Minh to a French Pastor ,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies  7, no. 2 (2012): 1–7.

Written by Nguyễn Ái Quốc (the future Hồ Chí Minh) while living in Paris, this letter to a pastor planning a pioneering mission to Vietnam not only shows the young revolutionary’s commitment to the struggle against colonialism, but also his willingness to work with colonial elites to solve the system’s inherent contradictions.

Aimé Césaire, “ Discurso sobre el Colonialismo ,” Guaraguao 9, no. 20, La negritud en America Latina (Summer 2005): 157–93; Available in English as “From Discourse on Colonialism (1955),” in  I Am Because We Are: Readings in Africana Philosophy , ed. by Fred Lee Hord, Mzee Lasana Okpara, and Jonathan Scott Lee, 2nd ed. (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 196–205.

This excerpt from Aimé Césaire’s essay directly challenges European claims of moral superiority and the concept of imperialism’s civilizing mission. He uses examples from the Spanish conquest of Latin America and ties them together with the horrors of Nazism within Europe. Césaire claims that through pursuing imperialism, Europeans had embraced the very savagery of which they accused their colonial subjects.

Frantz Fanon, “ The Wretched of the Earth ,” in Princeton Readings in Political Thought: Essential Texts since Plato , ed. Mitchell Cohen, 2nd ed. (Princeton University Press, 2018), 614–20.

Having served as a psychiatrist in a French hospital in Algeria, Frantz Fanon experienced firsthand the violence of the Algerian War. As a result, he would ultimately resign and join the Algerian National Liberation Front. In this excerpt from his longer work, Fanon writes on the need for personal liberation as a precursor to the political awaking of oppressed peoples and advocates for worldwide revolution.

Quỳnh N. Phạm & María José Méndez, “ Decolonial Designs: José Martí, Hồ Chí Minh, and Global Entanglements ,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political  40, no. 2 (2015): 156–73.

Phạm and Méndez examine the writing of José Martí and Hồ Chí Minh to show that both spoke of anticolonialism in their local contexts (Cuba and Vietnam, respectively). However, their language also reflected an awareness of a more significant global anticolonial movement. This is important as it shows that the connections were intellectual and practical.

Edward Said, “ Orientalism ,” The Georgia Review 31, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 162–206; and “ Orientalism Reconsidered ,” Cultural Critique no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 89–107.

As a Palestinian-born academic trained in British-run schools in Egypt and Jerusalem, Edward Said created a cultural theory that named the discourse nineteenth-century Europeans had about the peoples and places of the Greater Islamic World: Orientalism. The work of academics, colonial officials, and writers of various stripes contributed to a literary corpus that came to represent the “truth” of the Orient, a truth that Said argues reflects the imagination of the “West” more than it does the realities of the “Orient.” Said’s framework applies to many geographic and temporal lenses, often dispelling the false truths that centuries of Western interactions with the global South have encoded in popular culture.

Sara Danius, Stefan Jonsson, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “ An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ,” boundary 20, No. 2 (Summer 1993), 24–50.

Gayatri Spivak’s 1988 essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” shifted the postcolonial discussion to a focus on agency and “the other.” Explicating Western discourse surrounding the practice of sati in India, Spivak asks if the oppressed and the marginalized can make themselves heard from within a colonial system. Can the subordinated, dispossessed indigenous subject be retrieved from the silence spaces of imperial history, or would that be yet another act of epistemological violence? Spivak argues that Western historians (i.e., white men speaking to white men about the colonized), in trying to squeeze out the subaltern voice, reproduce the hegemonic structures of colonialism and imperialism.

Antoinette Burton, “ Thinking beyond the Boundaries: Empire, Feminism and the Domains of History ,” Social History 26, no. 1 (January 2001): 60–71.

In this article, Antoinette Burton considers the controversies around using the social and cultural theory as a site of analysis within the field of imperial history; specifically, concerns of those who saw political and economic history as “outside the realm” of culture. Burton deftly merges the historiographies of anthropology and gender studies to argue for a more nuanced understanding of New Imperial history.

Michelle Moyd, “ Making the Household, Making the State: Colonial Military Communities and Labor in German East Africa ,” International Labor and Working-Class History , no. 80 (2011): 53–76.

Michelle Moyd’s work focuses on an often-overlooked part of the imperial machine, the indigenous soldiers who served the colonial powers. Using German East Africa as her case study, she discusses how these “violent intermediaries” negotiated new household and community structures within the context of colonialism.

Caroline Elkins, “ The Struggle for Mau Mau Rehabilitation in Late Colonial Kenya ,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies  33, no. 1 (2000): 25–57.

Caroline Elkins looks at the both the official rehabilitation policy enacted toward Mau Mau rebels and the realities of what took place “behind the wire.” She argues that in this late colonial period, the colonial government in Nairobi was never truly able to recover from the brutality it used to suppress the Mau Mau movement and maintain colonial control.

Jan C. Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel, “Decolonization as Moment and Process,” in  Decolonization: A Short History , trans. Jeremiah Riemer (Princeton University Press, 2017): 1–34.

In this opening chapter of their book, Decolonization: A Short History , Jansen and Osterhammel lay out an ambitious plan for merging multiple perspectives on the phenomena of decolonization to explain how European colonial rule became de-legitimized. Their discussion of decolonization as both a structural and a normative process is of particular interest.

Cheikh Anta Babou, “ Decolonization or National Liberation: Debating the End of British Colonial Rule in Africa ,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science  632 (2010): 41–54.

Cheikh Anta Babou challenges decolonization narratives that focus on colonial policy-makers or Cold War competition, especially in Africa, where the consensus of colonial elites was that African colonial holdings would remain under dominion for the foreseeable future even if the empire might be rolled back in South Asia or the Middle East. Babou emphasizes the liberation efforts of colonized people in winning their independence while also noting the difficulties faced by newly independent countries due to years of imperialism that had depleted the economic and political viability of the new nation. This view supports Babou’s claim that continued study of imperialism and colonialism is essential.

Mahmood Mamdani, “ Settler Colonialism: Then and Now ,” Critical Inquiry  41, no. 3 (2015): 596–614.

Mahmood Mamdani begins with the premise that “Africa is the continent where settler colonialism has been defeated; America is where settler colonialism triumphed.” Then, he seeks to turn this paradigm on its head by looking at America from an African perspective. What emerges is an evaluation of American history as a settler colonial state—further placing the United States rightfully in the discourse on imperialism.

Antoinette Burton, “S Is for SCORPION,” in  Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times , ed. Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani (Duke University Press, 2020): 163–70.

In their edited volume, Animalia, Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani use the form of a bestiary to critically examine British constructions of imperial knowledge that sought to classify animals in addition to their colonial human subjects. As they rightly point out, animals often “interrupted” imperial projects, thus impacting the physical and psychological realities of those living in the colonies. The selected chapter focuses on the scorpion, a “recurrent figure in the modern British imperial imagination” and the various ways it was used as a “biopolitical symbol,” especially in Afghanistan.

Editor’s Note: The details of Edward Said’s education have been corrected.

Weekly Newsletter

Get your fix of JSTOR Daily’s best stories in your inbox each Thursday.

Privacy Policy   Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message.

Support JSTOR Daily! Join our new membership program on Patreon today.

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

Get Our Newsletter

More stories.

• Policing the Holocaust in Paris

• Hi, Jai Alai

• Biking While Black in DC

• When French Citrus Colonized Algeria

Recent Posts

• Writing Online Fiction in China

Support JSTOR Daily

Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

• Skip to main content
• Skip to secondary menu
• Skip to primary sidebar
• Skip to footer

A Plus Topper

Improve your Grades

Imperialism Essay | Essay on Imperialism for Students and Children in English

February 13, 2024 by Prasanna

Imperialism Essay:  Imperialism is a policy where a country extends the rule over peoples and other nations by employing hard power, especially military forces for extending political and economic access, power, and control.

Imperialism is a distinct concept while related to colonialism and empire; that can apply to different forms of expansion and government. Even India was ruled as a colony by the British government for years.

You can also find more  Essay Writing  articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more.

Long and Short Essays on Imperialism for Students and Kids in English

We provide students with essay samples on a long essay of 500 words and a short essay of 150 words on the topic Imperialism for reference.

Long Essay on Imperialism 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Imperialism is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

A policy or an ideology where one extends the rule over peoples and other countries by employing hard power, especially military forces, and soft power to extend political and economic access, power, and control, is called imperialism. Imperialism is a distinct concept while related to the concepts of colonialism and empire.

The Latin word “Imperium” is the origin of the word “Imperialism. Imperium means supreme power, sovereignty, or you can say just “rule.” During the 1870s, imperialism became so common in Great Britain in today’s sense when it was used in a negative connotation. Previously, Napoleon III’s attempts to obtain political support through the foreign military’s interventions were described as imperialism.

This term “Imperialism” is highly used in countries like Japan and Western countries to dominate politics and economy, especially in Asia and Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. May scholars and researchers have different opinions on the meaning of the word “Imperialism.” Edward Said, a writer, used this term widely to describe any system of domination.

During the beginning of the 1760s, when many developing and industrializing countries from Europe started colonizing, influencing and annexing various other parts of the world, is known as the Age of Imperialism.

There are several theories based on imperialism made by Anglophone academic studies. In the later part of the 18th century, the term “Imperialism” was brought into recognition to England’s present sense by opponents of allegedly aggressive imperial policies of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Joseph Chamberlin was a supporter of imperialism, and thus he appropriated the concept of it.

Now let’s come to British imperialism in India. If we study our country before in-depth, we will get a better vision of India’s imperialism. India was the most valuable colony by far of the most powerful empire, the British Empire. The East India Company, a small global trading company, grew and grew gradually and later conquered a huge part of South Asia.

In the early 1600s, when small European ships landed first on South Asia’s shores in search of spices, they encountered merchants of the Mughal Empire. The Mughal Empire was a far larger and more powerful kingdom than all other countries in Europe at that time. Mughal emperors often shared power with India’s regional leaders at that time to rule this diverse and rich country.

The British came to India to use their land and products for business to make a profit. But, many conflicts were caused due to the numerous economic and ethical issues. The East India Company won its first battle against Nawab Siraj-Ud-Doula and gradually owned the whole of India. The British Empire imperialized India until 1947.

Imperialism in India is a very important topic as it is very important to understand every country’s culture. British people never looked at India as a culture. They took advantage of India for its benefits. India was the colony of the British Empire for about two hundred years.

Short Essay on Imperialism 150 Words in English

Short Essay on Imperialism is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

“Imperialism” came from the Latin word “Imperium,” which means supreme power, sovereignty. This term “Imperialism” is highly used in countries like Japan and Western countries to dominate politics and economy, especially in Asia and Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries.

There are several theories based on imperialism made by Anglophone academic studies. In the ending years of the 18th century, the term “Imperialism” was introduced to England in its present sense by opponents of allegedly aggressive imperial policies of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Joseph Chamberlin was a supporter of imperialism, and thus he appropriated the concept.

10 Lines on Imperialism Essay in English

1. The Latin word “Imperium” is the origin of the word “Imperialism.” 2. During the 1870s, imperialism became so common in Great Britain in today’s sense when it was used in a negative connotation. 3. Edward Said, a writer, used the term “Imperialism” widely to describe any system of domination. 4. The term “Imperialism” was introduced to England in its present sense by British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. 5. Joseph Chamberlin was a supporter of imperialism, and thus he appropriated the concept. 6. The East India Company, a small global trading company, grew and grew gradually and later conquered a huge part of South Asia. 7. The Mughal Empire was a far larger and more powerful kingdom than all other countries in Europe at that time. 8. Mughal emperors often shared power with India’s regional leaders at that time to rule this diverse and rich country. 9. The British came to India to use their land and products for business to make a profit. 10. India was the colony of the British Empire for about two hundred years.

FAQ’s on Imperialism Essay

Question 1. What is Imperialism?

Answer: Imperialism is a policy where a country extends the rule over peoples and other countries by employing hard power, especially military forces for extending political and economic access, power, and control.

Question 2.  What is the source of the word “Imperialism”?

Answer: Latin word “Imperium” is the origin of the word “Imperialism.”

Question 3.  What is the East India Company?

Answer: The East India Company was a small trading company.

Question 4.  Why did the British come to India?

Answer: The British came to India with the thoughts of using their land and products for business to make a profit.

• Picture Dictionary
• English Speech
• English Slogans
• English Letter Writing
• English Essay Writing
• English Textbook Answers
• Types of Certificates
• ICSE Solutions
• Selina ICSE Solutions
• ML Aggarwal Solutions
• HSSLive Plus One
• HSSLive Plus Two
• Kerala SSLC
• Distance Education

• IAS Preparation
• UPSC Preparation Strategy
• Impact Of British Rule

Impact of British Rule - UPSC Modern Indian History Notes

With the advent of British rule in India, there had come several changes in the socio-economic-political spheres if the Indian society. It is important to know the impact of British Rule in India for the IAS Exam aspirants and it will help them in both Prelims (History) and Mains (GS-I, Essay.)  

Impact of British Rule in India

Economic Impact:

• India became an economic colony of industrial England.
• Indian handicrafts lost both domestic and foreign market.
• Lord Cornwallis’s Permanent Settlement System
• Ryotwari & Mahalwari Systems
• This led to the birth of new money-lending class where peasants were exploited as they had to borrow money from the money-lenders

Social and Cultural Impact:

• Amid social issues like Sati, Child Marriages, Infanticides; ideas like Liberty, Equality, Freedom, and Human Rights were brought by the British.
• To improve the condition of women in society, various legal measures were introduced.
• The vernacular languages were ignored
• The British Parliament issued the Charter Act of 1813 by which a sum of Rupees One lakh was sanctioned for promoting western sciences in India.

Positive and Negative Impacts of British Rule in India

Broadly, the impact of British rule can be divided into negative and positive aspects.

Impact of British Rule – Positive Aspects

• New Job Opportunities: The British introduce new job opportunities that were especially beneficial to the members of the lower caste. With these opportunities, there was a better chance of upward social mobility for them
• Rise of the modern middle class in India: British rule led to the rise of an influential middle-class who would become pioneers of Indian industrialization in the post-independent era.
• Development of Infrastructure: The British authorities built many important infrastructures such as hospital schools and the most important of all, railways. Of course, this was done not to enhance the lives of the local Indians but rather to facilitate their exploitation. Regardless these infrastructures laid the foundation of India becoming a major economic powerhouse
• Introduction of new technology and ideas: The introduction of new technology like steamships, telegraphs and trains completely changed the economic landscape of the Indian subcontinent. Culturally, the British put an end to social evils such as Sati (with the passing of the Bengal Sati Regulation Act on  December 4 , 1829) and weakened the caste system to an extent.
• Protection from external enemies: India was known as the “jewel in the crown of the British Empire”. Thus the British provided protection against like Persia and Afghanistan. Even other western nations like France were deterred from being too involved with India. Though a boon, it turned out to be a bane in the long run as it made India too heavily dependent on the British. 

You can find out more about the Legislations in British India , by visiting the linked article.

Impact of British Rule – Negative Aspects

• Destruction of Indian Industry : When Britain took over, they forced the governments to import goods from the British Isles rather than create their own products. This led to the local cloth, metal and carpentry industries to fall into disarray. It made India a virtual hostage of Britains economic machinations which meant breaking away from it would destroy India’s economy.
• British mismanagement led to famines: The British rule placed more emphasis on the cultivation of cash crops rather than growing crops that would feed India’s huge population. They imported food from other parts of the empire to feed its citizens. This policy, combined with the unequal distribution of food, led to 24 famines killing millions between 1850 and 1899 alone. The first and if not the worst of this lot was the Bengal Famine of 1770.
• The Divide and Rule Policy: The British realised that they could never rule a vast territory like India without breaking up strong kingdoms into small easily conquerable segments. The British Empire also made it a policy to pay religious leaders to speak out against each other, slowly poisoning relations between different faiths. The hostile relationship between India and Pakistan can be attributed as a direct result of this policy.
• Britain plundered the Indian Economy: Due in no small part to the unethical business practices of the East India Company it can be estimated that trillions were siphoned off by Britain. Such practices even destroyed the Indian industries and ensured that money flowing through the Indian economy ended up in the hands of London. 

Impact of British Rule – Conclusion

On the surface, it may seem that the British rule in India that transformed its society for the better. But upon closer examination, these benefits were purely coincidental, if not self-serving. Economic improvements were only enacted in order to better plunder the Indian economy. Even societal changes would have come out on their own without the need for British intervention. In the end, the negative effects of British Imperialism far outweigh the benefits.

It is important for Civil Services aspirants to have a good understanding of the impact of British rule in India. Questions on this topic can be asked in both the Civil Services ( Prelims ) and (Mains) Examination. British rule in India had a deep imprint on India’s history, culture and people.

Impact of British Rule in India – UPSC Notes:- Download PDF Here

To practice History questions for UPSC Mains GS 1 , candidates can check the linked article.

Candidates reading the topic, ‘Impact of British Rule’ can also read about other Modern History articles linked in the table below:

Frequently Asked Questions on Impact of British Rule

Q 1. what were the positive impacts of british rule in india.

Ans. Though colonisation left a major negative impact on the country, there were a few positive outcomes also. These include:

Q 2. What was the negative impact of British Rule in India?

Ans. British rule in India left a negative impact on the people of the country:

• Famines due to British mismanagement
• Divided the country into two parts and followed the divide and rule policy
• Unfair Tax practices
• Plundered the Indian Economy
• Indian industries were impacted severely

Candidates must familiarise themselves with the exam pattern by visiting the UPSC Syllabus page. For more preparation materials and related articles refer to the links given in the table below:

UPSC Preparation:

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Your Mobile number and Email id will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Request OTP on Voice Call

Post My Comment

IAS 2024 - Your dream can come true!

Download the ultimate guide to upsc cse preparation, register with byju's & download free pdfs, register with byju's & watch live videos.

Imperialism Vs Colonialism - Modern India History Notes

Amruta Patil

Aug 9, 2024

IAS Exam Latest Updates

• 09 August, 2024 : UPSC Mains Schedule 2024 Out; Exam from September 20

Colonialism and Imperialism are frequently used interchangeably, yet they are two distinct concepts with distinct meanings. Colonialism and Imperialism both imply political and economic dominance over the other. The primary distinction between Colonialism and Imperialism is that Colonialism is a physical act of establishing territory or colonies in countries other than the native one. While the word imperialism refers to a country's policy of acquiring territory by force or diplomacy. This article explains Imperialism vs Colonialism that is important for UPSC IAS exam preparation.

Imperialism - Concept

• Imperialism is the policy of a country to take over the territories of another country via force or negotiation.
• To seize such regions, they begin to establish their own colonies within the country. However, colonies are merely one sort of imperialist policy.
• Protectorate : Although a country has its own government, a stronger foreign authority makes decisions for it.
• Sphere of Influence: It happens when a foreign authority asserts certain rights and advantages, such as trade and investment privileges, through its power.
• Economic imperialism: It occurs when private enterprises dominate and influence the economy of a country.
• Imperialism is the act of a stronger state invading or governing the lands of a weaker power.
• Imperialism can be achieved by the use of military power, economic methods, or a mixture of the two.
• Imperialism is demonstrated by the United States' desire to become a world power.

Colonialism - Concept

• Colonialism is a primary kind of imperialism in which states establish colonies or dependents within another country.
• This is common when a major nation takes over smaller, less established ones. Some of the most noteworthy episodes of colonialism were perpetrated by powerful European countries such as Spain and England.
• Colonialism extends authority over a foreign location through the establishment of colonies or dependents. It is exercised for the economic exploitation of the host country.
• Colonisers frequently spread their culture, language, and religion to their colonies.
• Colonialism can be seen in India from 1858 till the country's independence in 1947.
• Settler colonialism: It is the practice of one country settling over another in order to supplant the local people of that territory.
• Exploitation Colonialism: When a powerful country uses force to exploit the natural riches and labour of a weaker one.
• Surrogate colonialism: It occurs when a governing power encourages and supports one nation's overthrow and rule of another.
• Internal colonialism: It is the dominance of a dominant group in society over a weaker group inside that culture.

Imperialism vs Colonialism

So colonialism and imperialism are distinct concepts. Colonialism is the formation of a colony in a foreign territory, whereas imperialism is the power or compulsion of one government over another country or region. There are numerous examples of colonialism throughout history, but modern-day imperialism is relatively rare. However, understanding the distinctions between these two concepts is still vital in order to better comprehend world events and how they have influenced our modern civilization.

Question: What is Surrogate colonialism?

Surrogate colonialism refers to a settlement project funded by a colonial authority in which the majority of the settlers are not of the same ethnic group as the governing power.

Question: What is Colonialism?

Colonialism is the most common kind of imperialism in which governments create colonies or dependents within another country. This is frequent when a larger country acquires a smaller, less established one. Powerful European powers such as Spain and England were responsible for some of the most notable incidents of colonialism.

Question: What is Imperialism?

Imperialism is a country's policy of taking over the territory of another country by force or diplomacy. They begin to construct their own colonies within the country in order to take such places. Colonies, on the other hand, are only one type of imperialist policy.

Question: Which of the following statements is/are correct?

• Colonialism is defined as a country's policy of exerting influence over other countries or regions by military force and other tools of power.

Choose the correct answer from the options given below

(c) Both 1 and 2

(d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer: (b) See the Explanation

• Imperialism is defined as a country's policy of influencing other nations or territories by military force as well as other forms of power. Hence statement 1 is incorrect
• Colonialism is defined as the practice of a power establishing colonies or settlements elsewhere (in other nations or territories) for the advantage of the colonial country's political and economic interests.
• Colonialism was prevalent in India from 1858 to 1947, when the country attained independence. Hence statement 2 is correct
• Therefore option (b) is the correct answer.

Question: Consider the following statements:

• Imperialism may completely transform a region's social structure, physical structure, and economics.
• Imperialism refers to the colonisation of areas such as India, Australia, and North America.

Which of the following statements given above is/are correct?

Answer: (d) See the Explanation

• Colonialism is the practice of a country conquering and ruling over other countries. It entails utilising the conquered country's resources for the benefit of the conqueror. Imperialism entails establishing an empire, spreading into neighbouring territories, and extending one's power far and wide.
• Colonialism may completely alter a region's social structure, physical structure, and economic structure. Hence statement 1 is incorrect.
• It is natural for the defeated to inherit the features of the conqueror in the long term.
• Colonialism is a phrase used to characterise the European colonisation of locations such as India, Australia, North America, Algeria, New Zealand, and Brazil. Hence statement 2 is incorrect.
• Imperialism, on the other hand, is defined as a foreign authority governing an area with little or no settlement.
• Therefore option (d) is the correct answer.

UPSC : Polity - Parliamentary Offices

Upsc : art & culture - awards, administration and travellers, upsc : geography - mineral and energy resources, upsc : economy - external sector, upsc : environment - climate change, upsc cse : polity - fundamental rights - 01, daily quiz: up police: mental ability (direction sense), daily quiz: rrb ntpc: (series), daily quiz: ctet: science (science around us), daily quiz: ctet: social studies (human geography), daily quiz: ctet: history (gupta period), daily quiz: delhi police: problem solving (direction & distance), daily quiz: ctet: physics (electricity and magnetism), daily quiz: upsc cse (ias): national movement (1905-1919) - ii, 5 oct daily ca quiz for upsc & state pscs, upsc cse (ias) prelims (gs) live test (aug 22 - 25).

UPSC CDS General Knowledge All India Mock Test

Upsc civil services prelims csat full test 7, upsc civil services prelims csat full test 6, upsc civil services prelims csat full test 5, upsc civil services prelims csat full test 4, upsc civil services prelims csat full test 3, upsc civil services prelims csat full test 2, upsc civil services prelims csat full test 1, upsc civil services prelims general studies full test 11, upsc civil services prelims general studies full test 10, upsc civil services prelims 2023: general studies (set - a - held on 28 may), upsc cse 2023 (prelims paper-1: general studies) previous year paper (28-may-2023), upsc civil services prelims 2022: csat official paper, upsc civil services prelims 2022: general studies official paper, upsc cse 2022 (prelims paper-2: csat) previous year paper (05-jun-2022), upsc cse 2022 (prelims paper-1: general studies) previous year paper (5-june-2022), upsc civil services exam (prelims) csat official paper-ii (held on: 2021), upsc civil services exam (prelims) general studies official paper-i (held on: 10 oct 2021), upsc cse 2021 (prelims paper-2: csat) previous year paper (10-oct-2021), upsc cse 2021 (prelims paper-1: general studies) previous year paper (10-oct-2021).

23 August 2024 Daily Current Affairs Analysis

22 August 2024 Daily Current Affairs Analysis

21 August 2024 Daily Current Affairs Analysis

20 August 2024 Daily Current Affairs Analysis

17 August 2024 Daily Current Affairs Analysis

16 August 2024 Daily Current Affairs Analysis

14 August 2024 Daily Current Affairs Analysis

13 August 2024 Daily Current Affairs Analysis

12 August 2024 Daily Current Affairs Analysis

10 August 2024 Daily Current Affairs Analysis

Advertisement

Full Transcript of Kamala Harris’s Democratic Convention Speech

The vice president’s remarks lasted roughly 35 minutes on the final night of the convention in Chicago.

• Share full article

By The New York Times

• Aug. 23, 2024

This is a transcript of Vice President Kamala Harris’s speech on Thursday night in which she formally accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency.

OK, let’s get to business. Let’s get to business. All right.

So, let me start by thanking my most incredible husband, Doug. For being an incredible partner to me, an incredible father to Cole and Ella, and happy anniversary, Dougie. I love you so very much.

To our president, Joe Biden. When I think about the path that we have traveled together, Joe, I am filled with gratitude. Your record is extraordinary, as history will show, and your character is inspiring. And Doug and I love you and Jill, and are forever thankful to you both.

And to Coach Tim Walz. You are going to be an incredible vice president. And to the delegates and everyone who has put your faith in our campaign, your support is humbling.

So, America, the path that led me here in recent weeks was, no doubt, unexpected. But I’m no stranger to unlikely journeys. So, my mother, our mother, Shyamala Harris, had one of her own. And I miss her every day, and especially right now. And I know she’s looking down smiling. I know that.

So, my mother was 19 when she crossed the world alone, traveling from India to California with an unshakable dream to be the scientist who would cure breast cancer.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .