Is there anything good to be said of British rule over India? The verdict of many politicians, museum curators, TV presenters and even journalists in India is clear: the Raj existed only to exploit and oppress. It caused poverty and famine in the east, and made the western world richer. The writer and politician Shashi Tharoor in a best-selling book Inglorious Empire blames the Raj for ‘depredation’, ‘loot’, ‘rapaciousness’, ‘brutality’, and ‘plunder’. He is far from alone in that withering verdict: social media posts spread similar messages with religious zeal.
Oddly though historians have moved away from similar damning verdicts on the Raj. Over the last 40 years, more evidence on colonialism has come to light: much of this suggests that the expeditions of the Raj did not benefit Britain in the way many of their critics think. Britain, and other colonial powers, had too little power to restructure the societies they ruled and their aims were not always clear to the ruling class and seldom achievable. Yet few would dispute that the colonial legacy was profound and long-lasting. So did colonialism benefit India, or was it a uniquely evil and exploitative project?
This year is the 75th anniversary of the end of colonialism in India. Much has changed in that time – but discussion of British rule remains at the forefront of politics in India.
The Raj profoundly influenced the making of modern India
To understand why this is, it’s worth taking a step back to the origins of Britain’s colonial expedition in India. The British Empire in India, or the Raj, emerged from the Europe-Asia trade that the East India Company engaged in. The company created the state, but only with the support of Indian merchants and educated elite groups. After the mutiny of 1857, the state assumed the character that imperialism ordinarily means to most people. There were two sides to that character: authoritarianism, and commitment to an open economy.
From an Indian point of view, authoritarianism meant that the ruling class consisted of nominated officers answerable to the British Parliament and not the Indian people. Indians were scarce in top governmental and advisory positions until the interwar years.
What did the ruling class stand for? Its primary commitment was to maintain peace in a region that had seen frequent wars in the recent past and a rebellion that almost ended British rule. The regime met this aim with an enormous army and navy. The Raj stopped the 550-odd independent kingdoms from building forces. In return, the British Indian army subsidised their protection against each other. And the regime got from the kingdoms the promise to keep their borders open to trade. Barriers to overland trade disappeared, and the government secured that advantage by building railways and the electric telegraph.
Authoritarian rule also made legislation a relatively simple process. The legal members of the club freely borrowed British precedents in law. They did this with penal, contract and company laws while relying on Indian jurisprudence on inheritance and succession of property. Property rights, however, were coded better than before and redefined.
Although the Indian elite demanded representation, Britain did not concede much until World War I. But authoritarian rule faced a challenge from another side. Devastating famines and epidemics in the late nineteenth century led many to question the competence of the class governing India. So great was the embarrassment that a serious search for the causes of famines began. The enquiries concluded that India’s tropical monsoon climate posed a risk of famines and diseases by creating sudden and acute water shortages. The action plan, therefore, included railways, canal-building, collecting weather and crop data, and sanitation. These measures were slow to develop but eventually delivered. Climatic famines disappeared, and epidemic deaths reduced after 1918.
Authoritarianism, in other words, did not necessarily damage India’s well-being. That does not mean that the Raj did its job as well as possible. This was a state with divided heads: a Secretary of State for India in London, and a Viceroy in Calcutta (or Delhi), jointly governed India.
Divided heads sometimes helped governance. London, for example, was good at selling securities in the world’s cheapest capital market. But the London office had no interest in financial innovations for the sake of Indian development. Its ambitions were limited to managing the annual budget. The Viceroy was forever short of money. The British government tried too little to expand the tax base, tax the business elite, or raise loans for development purposes.
That minimalist stance meant spending in India was limited on anything that did not give the British state a direct return. With schools and hospitals, British India’s record was not just poor but worse than some princely states. Partly as a result, politically speaking, authoritarianism became dangerously unstable after 1920. Even as Indian representation grew, the federal state stayed despotic, and Indian nationalists did not accept that.
But a balanced reflection of the Raj should leave room to acknowledge the other characteristic feature of Britain’s rule in India: a commitment to openness, which meant keeping tariffs and transit taxes low and facilitating trade by legislating or building infrastructure.
The economic benefits to Britain of having an Indian empire were plain enough. The empire was a field for British investment, a source of grain, cotton, tea, and textiles, and a recruitment ground for the imperial army. It was not just the rulers who saw these benefits. Cargo carried by the railways and ships increased from five to 140 million tons between 1871 and 1939. Commercialisation on such a scale made many Indian merchants very rich. They saw the benefits of the empire too. Tacit merchant support saved the regime from the 1857 mutiny.
Was this market system exploitative of Indians? Certainly not legally. Nothing in the law permitted distributing favours to British investors in India. If anything, land ownership law was loaded the other way. Instead, the British ruling class believed that trade, investment, and migration would serve both countries. Until the Great Depression of 1930, Indian merchants accepted that too.
But openness damaged Indian interests in other ways, according to the Bengali writer Romesh Dutt. The charge is that imported textiles from industrialising Britain killed India’s handicrafts. It’s true there were considerable job losses among artisans because of imports. Yet at the end of British rule in 1947, ten million people in India were employed in handicrafts. In 1900-40, market share of handmade cloth rose from 20 to 30 per cent. Craft wages soared in the same period. The survival, even revival, of an apparently inefficient craft had owed partly to the import of cheap machine-made yarn from Britain, which the handloom weavers used.
This example shows that openness brought technologies and cheap materials within easy reach of Indian investors for the first time. In the late nineteenth century, merchants and bankers in the port cities of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, used that advantage to build factories. Thanks to these cities’ cosmopolitan environment, they could easily import the machines and hire people abroad to run them. It was far easier to hire and borrow from abroad under colonial rule than today. The government did this, and so did private businesses and institutions. Europeans who raised capital in Britain joined them.
In this way, the tropical world’s most impressive industrialisation took off in India. In 1928, 48 per cent of the cotton spindles installed outside Europe, North America, and Japan were in India. In 1935, half of the steel produced outside Europe, North America, and Japan was produced in India. There was an Indian monopoly in the world’s universal packaging material, jute sacks, and a near monopoly in tea. The capitalists in the port cities started schools, colleges, and hospitals, hiring doctors and teachers abroad, and compensating for the government’s poor record in public good. The textile-cum-steel magnate, Tatas, set up institutions for scientific research.
Was openness an unmixed blessing, then? Not entirely. It sharpened inequality. Real income created in trade, transport, industry, and finance doubled in the first half of the twentieth century. Productivity and wages in these livelihoods increased substantially. Real income in agriculture grew while there was still land available for use. As land ran out, agricultural income did not grow as fast as the population after 1920. As poverty increased in the countryside, the rural poor joined the nationalist movement. Famines made the rural-urban inequality glaring, with deaths concentrated in villages that were far from the trade routes, grain markets, waterbodies, and hospitals. By contrast, the cities suffered shortages but few deaths. Urban areas also offered more jobs and a richer cultural experience than the villages and small towns. The Indian elite sent their children to the cities to get educated and find positions in business firms or the government.
But city jobs were not accessible to all. Most migrants to these places were men. Women, who married in their early teens, usually stayed at home. The poorest of the rural earners, agricultural workers from the depressed castes, were pushed into low-wage work and had fewer chances to improve their lifestyle by coming to the city. The economic system may have increased caste and gender inequality, which persisted to the present times.
When independence came in 1947, India inherited a weak state (if military power is ignored) and a strong market from the Raj. Its nationalist leaders went the opposite way. The economic development strategy they designed set out to demolish the Raj’s legacy. They created a much larger state, with public control of finance, while restraining foreign trade, foreign investment, migration, and even a lot of domestic trade. These moves delivered a taxpayer-funded green revolution and industrialisation, but destroyed a vast pool of capital accumulated during British rule in cotton textile production, commerce, banking, insurance, and plantations.
In some other ways, the Raj profoundly influenced the making of modern India. Independent India delivered the right to vote to every adult citizen (something the British did not consider), but its parliament was an offspring of the institution known as the Imperial Legislative Council. The army was another inheritance. Thanks to the disparity in military capacity between the kingdoms and British India, incorporating these kingdoms into India and Pakistan was a smooth affair. Company and contract laws designed in the British model helped private investors.
For decades after 1947, India’s port cities were the country’s premier intellectual and cultural hubs, thanks to their cosmopolitan heritage and a lead in higher education modelled after the British counterpart. The continued popularity of the English language in business transactions made South Asians globally competitive despite disengagement from the world. That human capital proved crucial to the re-emergence of India when the economy opened again in the 1990s.
There are, of course, reasons to condemn Britain’s colonisation of India. But there is no doubt that British rule also benefited India. Any account of the rights and wrongs of the Raj must reflect both sides of that coin.
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